This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

This Republic of Suffering Death and the American Civil War. By Drew Gilpin Faust. 346 pages. $27.95. Alfred A. Knopf.

Americans had never endured anything like the losses they suffered between 1861 and 1865 and have experienced nothing like them since. Two percent of the United States population died in uniform – 620,000 men, North and South, roughly the same number as those lost in all of America’s other wars from the Revolution through Korea combined. The equivalent toll today would be six million.

Drew Gilpin Faust’s study of death and its impact on American society and culture is the second female authored book I’ve read, and the second I have been very pleased with.

All facets concerning how Americans dealt with death is covered in this very interesting work. Death’s impact on the soldier and society cannot be understated. Everything from the removal of millions of pounds of carcasses after each battle to shifting public opinion about the value of death is dealt with in Faust’s work.

Soldiers had to come to terms with the death of comrades and back home civilians had to do the same when it came to the loss of a loved one. In the words of the author, the war “victimized civilians as well as soldiers, and uncounted numbers of noncombatants perished as a direct result of the conflict.” [137]

If I have one complaint, and that is Faust, like virtually every other Civil War historian, fails to address how many civilian deaths were caused by the war. There are countless ways the war ravaged the South: disease, hunger, bushwhackers, atrocities, accidents, and numerous other “minor” events that were a direct result of the fighting. Perhaps such a study would be impossible. Nonetheless, Faust only offers James McPherson’s estimate of 50,000 civilian deaths, and nothing more.

Somehow, we need a better study or understanding of the loss of civilian life during the Civil War. I mean, how can we even discuss how total or hard the war was on civilians if we cannot even estimate (beyond a guess) how many civilians died?