The Civil War’s Challenge to Perceptions of Death

Every casualty in the Civil War was an American casualty. As a result, the estimated 620,000 soldiers who died during the Civil War is approximately equal to the combined total of American military deaths in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. Although the Confederacy suffered from the death toll disproportionately, both sides together constituted a “republic of suffering” whose shared anguish was so profound that it

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“would override persisting differences about the meanings of race, citizenship, and nationhood to establish sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would eventually reunite” (xii).

Reviewers who have criticized This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008). ISBN 978-0-375-

40404-7, xviii, 346 pages, $27.95 (cloth), for not incorporating to a larger degree the goals and political impact of that war have simply missed the point of Drew Gilpin Faust’s brilliant book. Faust, president of Harvard University, is a prolific historian of the American South who has demonstrated a sophisticated grasp of the political and racial meanings of the Civil War in groundbreaking works that include Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. But in this volume she strives to do something quite different than examine the worthiness of the war’s aims or accomplishments. Faust uses the Civil War to illustrate how “Men and women approach death in ways shaped by history, by culture, by conditions that vary over time and across space” (xi).

One of Faust’s powerful themes is the work of death: the work involved in the bringing of death, in actually dying, in identifying and disposing of bodies, and in mourning, as the bereaved work to separate themselves from their dead in order to carry on with their lives. Her first chapter, “Dying,” reveals how profoundly the war challenged the concept of the Good Death that had previously prevailed. Predicated on the belief that the moment of death offered a glimpse into the future, Good Deaths involved peaceful deathbed scenes in which the dying made peace with God and accepted their fate, a process that survivors took as evidence of salvation. Even though more Civil War soldiers died of wounds rather than succumbing immediately on the battlefield, the sheer numbers of the dying made Good Deaths difficult. Although reassuring accounts of Good Deaths were sent by doctors, nurses, and fellow soldiers to grieving relatives, the overwhelming number of deaths, frequently from gruesome wounds, made the necessarily detailed descriptions difficult, and often times, impossible, to write. Nevertheless, even as the death toll continued to mount, the nation rejected the notion of meaningless, almost unbearable slaughter, and continued to seek reassurance in narratives of Good Deaths, in which the dying affirmed assumptions about the meaning and purpose of individual lives as well as of the war.

Faust’s emphasis on the work of death is particularly vivid. She describes, for example, pre-battle preparations in which soldiers dictated wills, surgeons sharpened instruments, nurses readied bandages, and men scattered sand so that artillery emplacements would not become slick with blood. In the chapter “Killing,” taking into account the war’s technologies, tactics, and logistics, she details the intellectual and psychological work necessary to resolve emotional and religious constraints before killing fellow human beings. Although Faust’s focus is on the unique role of death in the Civil War, in which soldiers were often able to see the faces of the men they killed, she sharpens its meaning by placing those killings and that war within the context of other killings and other wars. As in other wars, vengeance and dehumanizing the enemy were added to the principles of duty and self-defense to legitimize violence. The unique role of race in the Civil War, however, is revealed in the particularly horrifying logic that African American soldiers could not be treated as Confederate prisoners of war without violating a major premise for the war and must therefore be

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killed, a policy only somewhat mitigated by the threat of Union reprisals. In turn, many African-American soldiers, the product of generations of the cruelty of slavery, were particularly eager to fight and kill for “God, race, and country” as a show of their manhood and of the personal empowerment that had been for so long denied them.

After the work of killing came the work of caring for the dead. But first soldiers had to come face to face with the horror of battlefields and hospital tents littered with bodies, a task so difficult many consciously sought to separate themselves from their emotions and to become callous or indifferent to such large-scale suffering and destruction. Faust cites the long-term costs to soldiers who must numb basic human feeling, specifically noting veterans of more recent conflicts, including those in Vietnam and Iraq. In a time and culture in which burial, not cremation, was required for respectful, proper, and spiritually satisfying caring of bodies, removal and disposal of bodies was shockingly improvisational. As detailed in the chapter “Burying,” sheer volume made the task particularly daunting: some six million pounds of human and animal remains lay on the field of Gettysburg alone. Civil War soldiers recorded their fears that the logistical difficulties posed by such huge numbers of bodies might one day leave their own remains to be desecrated by enemies or animals. Although enemy dead were more likely to be placed in communal pits, even comrades could often not be afforded the dignity of a single grave. However, burial details, even those resorting to mass graves, almost universally privileged officers, separating them from the rank and file before interment.

As families sought to bring home the remains of their loved ones, the emphasis on proper burial gave a huge boost to the embalming, coffin making, and shipping industries and to the professionalization of the undertaker. Burying a loved one in home soil and in a sleeplike repose, according to Faust, “offered a way of blurring the boundary between life and death” (p. 93). Increasingly the federal government assumed responsibility for the Union war dead, leaving rebel remains to become part of the privately administrated Confederate Dead, a constituency whose appellation provided important political and cultural meaning throughout the South as part of the cult of the Lost Cause.

One of the many impediments to bringing a body home for proper burial was the lack of a system of identification. The confusion and agony caused by the number of unidentified bodies buried during the Civil War contributed to the current practice that the military account for and return, dead or alive, every soldier. Dog tags became standard issue in the U.S. Army in World War I. Civil War civilians who took pains to identify dead soldiers and to notify their families included Walt Whitman, a man who, for his copious war-related prose, especially his tireless letter-writing on behalf of the dying and the dead, plays a large role in Faust’s account. (Other notables in This Republic of Suffering include Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Ambrose Bierce, Clara Barton, and Emily Dickenson.) The anguish caused to loved ones “who found undocumented, unconfirmed, and unrecognized loss intolerable” gave way at war’s end to a “program of identification and reburial that redefined the nation’s obligation to its fallen, as well as the meaning of both names and bodies as enduring repositories of the human self” (pp. 135-36).

In “Realizing,” one of the most heartrending chapters in a book full of heartrending chapters, Faust explores “the work of mourning” explicitly as it was later described by Freud. She notes that the bulk of the official trappings of mourning fell to women, giving rise to new fashions and to entire mourning departments in stores like New York’s Lord & Taylor. Overpowering grief gave way to questions of faith detailed in the chapter “Believing and Doubting,” as post-war “evangelicalism [with its emphasis on death as a transition rather than an end] made the afterlife the focus of American religious belief and practice” (pp. 172). Evangelicalism’s promise that the living would one day be reunited with their lost loved ones contributed to the popularity of spiritualism, most famously practiced by Mary Todd Lincoln, in which the living sought communication with the dead.

The chapter “Accounting” describes the development and meanings of post-war cemeteries and memorials. Of particular interest is the power exercised by southern women as they perpetuated southern resistance to northern domination by their memorializing of the Confederate dead. The final

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chapter, “Numbering,” details the intensity and significance of the bureaucracy that developed to provide a final accounting of the Civil War dead. The epilogue, “Surviving,” lists some of the mysteries that linger into the present day: who were the Civil War dead (nearly half) who remain undocumented? What was the role of God in that war; in any war? What does it mean for a nation to survive such a trial by fire? The Civil War “introduced a level of carnage that foreshadowed the wars of the century to come,” and new ways of managing death were institutionalized in its aftermath. But, Faust concludes, “we still struggle to understand how to preserve our humanity and our selves in such a world” (pp. 271).

Even historians specializing in this period will learn a great deal about the Civil War from This Republic of Suffering. Far more important and wide-reaching, however, are Faust’s contributions to a more general understanding of the pain and suffering inherent in all wars, of how people learn to kill, to die, to mourn, and to grapple with devastating loss on a personal and national scale. This is a soul-searching book, richly illustrated with disturbing photographs, and one that asks important questions about the nature of war, memory, sacrifice, mourning, life…and death.

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