This Repubilc of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

How do you teach the American Civil War? Memorizing years (1861-1865) or statistics (22,000 wounded at Gettysburg, 23,000 dead at Antietam, 40% of the Union dead are unknown) tells you nothing. Looking at Matthew Brady’s photographs or visiting battlefields are slightly better reality checks. The songs and poems (particularly those by Walt Whitman) of that era do say much about the feelings of participants, witnesses, and survivors. Movies are trickier: at one end of the spectrum is Glory (1989), depicting the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry’s creation and destruction, while at the other is Gone With the Wind (1939) and, much more infamously, Birth of a Nation (1912) crystallizing attitudes rather than history. A more-balanced attempt at mass information is Ken Burns’ nine-part television documentary The Civil War (1990), a thoroughly researched treatment of a situation that intersects race, politics, gender, and the creation of “modern” warfare – that is, dying at enemy hands not seen in hand-to-hand combat, but from those firing weaponry killing many instead of one.

Then there is reading about it. Drew Gilpin Faust is a Civil War historian and as of July 2007, the first female President of Harvard University. Dr. Faust has brought this complicated and bloody war to life in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. Self-appointed cultural prophets sounding yet again the death knell of the written word should buy or borrow this book to discover the powerful communication between a writer/teacher/historian and her readers. What gifted historians such as Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton explained in volumes Dr. Faust accomplishes in less than 400 pages.

This Republic of Suffering concentrates solely on the estimated 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who died in the conflict. (There is no actual death toll because enlisted and conscripted soldiers were buried in makeshift mass graves. Civilians were never accounted for.) Dr. Faust divides her history into three sections regarding the notification, identification, and internment of the dead. This factual yet matter-of-fact approach is valuable in understanding the Civil War and its aftermath. For example, the Victorian notion of a “Good Death” does not seem overtly sentimental. While Civil War participants (Stephen Crane, for one) and historians were the first to openly question whether dying for any cause was just, excerpts of letters soldiers wrote to families informing them of the death of a loved one are tributes far more meaningful than a public memorial. Dr. Faust also includes accounts of family members who went to battlefields and hospitals searching for sons, husbands, and brothers – not to gain reader sentiment, but to point out that government and social service agencies on both sides were either nonexistent or reliable. A different kind of war began after the Civil War’s end when former enemies vandalized each other’s gravesites.

Other half-taught history is clarified. Clara Barton earned her nickname “Angel of the Battlefield” not only because of her service as a Union nurse and founder of the American Red Cross, but for tracing information on dead soldiers decades after the war. Ms. Barton and former POW Dorence Atwater’s identification efforts at Andersonville (Georgia) prison is the most interesting part of the book. An early supporter of the Red Cross was a former Union general, President James Garfield. Garfield may well remain a trivia question (Name all the assassinated presidents!), but Dr. Faust’s inclusion of a quote by William Dean Howells describing Garfield’s wartime experience humanizes him.

Drew Gilpin Faust must be a gifted teacher, and I hope President Faust finds time to continue her research. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is a valuable, non-morbid history lesson that should easily join required high school and college reading lists. Even readers not particularly interested in history will be impressed by Dr. Faust’s writing ability. There is another reason why this book is so crucial – it was written during the Iraq War when dead and severely wounded soldiers are disregarded and ignored by the Administration that sent them there. The one thing the Bush presidency has succeeded in is making Iraq an “invisible” war. Sadly, This Republic of Suffering couldn’t be timelier.