This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

(Paperback)

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER .NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST. An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War thatreveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality.

Reviews

Extraordinary ... profoundly moving. Geoffrey C. Ward, The New York Times Book Review

This Republic of Suffering is one of those groundbreaking histories in which a crucial piece of the past, previously overlooked or misunderstood, suddenly clicks into focus. Newsweek

A shattering history of the war, focusing exclusively on death and dyinghow Americans prepared for death, imagined it, risked it, endured it and worked to understand it. Los Angeles Times Book Review

Faust yanks aside the usual veil of history to look narrowly at life's intimate level for new perspectives from the past. She focuses on ordinary lives under extreme duress, which makes for compelling reading. USA Today

Faust is particularly qualified to identify and explain the complex social and political implications of the changing nature of death as Americas internecine conflict attained its full dimensions. Ian Garrick Mason, San Francisco Chronicle

Faust excels in explaining the eras violent rhetoric and what went on in peoples heads. David Waldstreicher, The Boston Globe

The beauty and originality of Fausts book is that it shows how thoroughly the work of mourning became the business of capitalism, merchandised throughout a society. Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Fascinating, innovative ... Faust returns to the task of stripping from war any lingering romanticism, nobility or social purpose. Eric Foner, The Nation

Eloquent and imaginative, Ms. Fausts book takes a grim topichow America coped with the massive death toll from the Civil Warand makes it fresh and exciting.... [A] widely and justly praised scholarly history. Adam Begley, New York Observer

This Republic of Suffering is a harrowing but fascinating read. Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor

If you read only one book on the Civil War this year, make it this one. Kevin M. Levin, American History

Having always kept the war in her own scholarly sights, Faust offers a compelling reassertion of its basic importance in society and politics alike. Richard Wrightman Fox, Slate

[An] astonishing new book. Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun

A moving work of social history, detailing how the Civil War changed perceptions and behaviors about death.... An illuminating study. Kirkus Reviews

Penetrating ... Faust exhumes a wealth of material ... to flesh out her lucid account. The result is an insightful, often moving portrait of a people torn by grief. Publishers Weekly

No other generation of Americans has encountered death on the scale of the Civil War generation. This Republic of Suffering is the first study of how people in both North and South coped with this uniquely devastating experience. How did they mourn the dead, honor their sacrifice, commemorate their memory, and help their families Drew Gilpin Fausts powerful and moving answers to these questions provide an important new dimension to our understanding of the Civil War.

James M. McPherson, author of This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War

During the Civil War, death reached into the world of the living in ways unknown to Americans before or since. Drew Gilpin Faust follows the carnage in all its aspects, on and off the battlefield. Timely, poignant, and profound, This Republic of Suffering does the real work of history, taking us beyond the statistics until we see the faces of the fallen and understand what it was to live amid such loss and pain.

Tony Horowitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

Drew Gilpin Faust has used her analytical and descriptive gifts to explore how men and women of the Civil War generation came to terms with the conflicts staggering human toll. Everyone who reads this book will come away with a far better understanding of why the war profoundly affected those who lived through it.

Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Confederate War

Drew Fausts brilliant new book, This Republic of Suffering, builds profoundly from the opening discussion of the Christian ideal of the good death to the last harrowing chapters on the exhumation, partial identification, reburial and counting of the Union dead. In the end one can only conclude, as the author does, that the meaning of the Civil War lies in death itself: in its scale, relentlessness, and enduring cultural effects. This is a powerful and moving book about our nations defining historical encounter with the universal human experience of death.

Stephanie McCurry, author of Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the political culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country

Whitman was wrong; the real war did get into the books. This is a wise, informed, troubling book. This Republic of Suffering demolishes sentimentalism for the Civil War in a masterpiece of research, realism, and originality.

David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Author Bio

DREW GILPIN FAUST was president of Harvard University, where she also holds the Lincoln Professorship in History. Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007, she came to Harvard after twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of five previous books, including Mothers of Invention- Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery Craven Prize. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.