This Republic of Suffering

The Civil War was America's holocaust; it was its Iliad. The political ramifications of the war ripped the fabric of American history, but the cost in human life was staggering. Two percent of the American population died as a direct result of the war--that was equal to the population of Maine in 1860. The equivalent today would be six million people. Drew Gilpin Faust writes about the effect of these statistics in her book, The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, which is book eight in the New York Times Ten Best of 2008.

Civil War books are very popular for history buffs, but this book doesn't dwell on battle strategy. Instead it is more a social history. Faust divides her subject into simple chapters: Dying, Killing, Burying, etc. She covers the subject exhaustively, and in ways that a Civil War buff might not have thought about, such as the innovations in embalming, the rise of spiritualism (this tends to happen during times of great death, as it would again during the double-whammy of World War I and the Swine flu), and the great lengths that organizations made to find soldiers' graves, identify their bodies, and reinter them close to home. All of it is fascinating.

There are some things we may have heard before, but bear repeating, such as that two-thirds of the soldiers that died fell from disease, not battle wounds. The technological advances in war had exceeded those in medicine, so infection was rampant, as was diarrhea due to unclean water.

While those in mid-nineteenth-century America were not unused to death, due to infant mortality, this was something new, as if a person reached adulthood they were usually safe. The loss of men was staggering, with the adult male population of some towns completely wiped out. And of course in those days identification of bodies was difficult, as dog tags weren't standard issue until World War I. Many soldiers, before going into battle, pinned a scrap of cloth or paper to themselves with their names and home town, while others, already dead, might be buried with a bottle containing the same information, in case they were to be dug up. That was also a huge problem, as many times there wasn't enough time to properly inter all the fallen. Many battlefields were left looking like charnelhouses, with bodies lying to rot before they could be buried. As late as 1996 remains were being found on the field at Gettysburg.

Faust touches on the effects of death on other aspects of American life, such as literature, discussing the works of Emily Dickinson and especially Walt Whitman, who tended to wounded soldiers in hospitals in Washington, D.C. She also mentions that what we today call Memorial Day was started after the Civil War, when it was then called Decoration Day.

Perhaps the best part of the book are the many personal stories she includes, of the relatives of soldiers frantically searching for their loved ones, or trying to find out how they died or where they were buried, or the case of the man who was wrongly thought to be dead. He actually had a grave with his name on it, and for the rest of his life he brought flowers to it, no doubt thinking "there but for the grace of God go I."