This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“How one died thus epitomized a life already led and predicted the quality of life everlasting.” 

This quotes focuses on the Christian ideal of leading a good life in order to ensure a good afterlife. Faust cites some people whose beliefs echoed this idea: that what happened to them after they died was an immediate continuation of how they were living in the period leading up to when they died. The Civil War greatly complicated this notion of the so-called Good Death, given that most of the deaths on the battlefield were fast and horrific.

“Civil War battlefields and hospitals could have provided the material for an exemplary text on how not to die.” 

Battlefields were highly unsanitary places, and contemporary society’s understanding of what caused disease and infection did not exist in the era of the Civil War. Further, armies often left injured troops behind, and their injuries grew worse in the interim between being hurt and getting to a hospital. Because of this, many experienced gruesome injuries and/or deaths. From a broader societal standpoint, Civil War battlefields forced Americans to undergo a paradigm shift in how they thought about death and sacrifice. 

“Spiritual wounds demanded attention as powerfully as did those of the flesh.”

The horrendous events before, during, and after the Civil War made many people doubt their faith. It was the task of chaplains, pastors, and preachers—when they weren’t counting the dead and comforting the grieving—to grant solace to soldiers and their families as they came to think of their relationship with their Creator in different terms. Given the unprecedented nature of the Civil War, those spiritual wounds were also equally difficult to heal as bodily wounds.

“Killing is battle’s fundamental instrument and purpose.” 

A military battle stems from a need to control: to control territory, to control government, to spread an ideal. Soldiers lay their lives on the line under the premise that those fighting against them do the same, in a dispute between intractable foes that must necessarily result in bloodshed and, often, in death. While the number of people killed or injured during the Civil War is staggering, Faust proposes that in some ways it should not be, as killing and war are synonymous. Thus what initially reads as a tautology is a telling reflection of some of the author’s broader theses.

“While southerners most often appealed to self-defense against invasion as the source of the war’s justness, they invoked as well the notion of divine sanction for a holy war in which they served as Confederate crusaders. Northerners just as avidly claimed God for their side as they fought to save a nation that represented ’the last best hope of earth.’”

This is a central theme of the book, and to the war itself: both North and South believed their respective sides to be divinely supported. In this manner, when the South lost, there was the idea that the Christian God had forsaken them. Unable to accept this, many Southerners continued to believe their cause, though lost, was a righteous one. This attitude hampered reconciliation efforts and led to disastrous, generation-spanning consequences for African Americans living in the South.

“The desire for retribution could be almost elemental in its passion, overcoming reason and releasing the restraints of fear and moral inhibition for soldiers who had witnessed the slaughter of their comrades.” 

Many soldiers thought of themselves as doing God’s work in exacting punishment for those who had perpetrated wrongs. These avenging soldiers were filled with righteous indignation; revenge killings helped to grow the war’s overall number of dead. The desire for vengeance also led to the desecration of enemy soldiers’ bodies, making the already difficult task of identification even more challenging.

“Black soldiers entered battle not just deeply invested in the war’s outcome but strongly motivated to kill in service of their cause. Already victims of generations of cruelty in slavery, they saw themselves to be simply balancing accounts as they struggled for the freedom that would equalize their condition.” 

For many Black soldiers, it was fitting that those who were so aggrieved should have a hand in the punishment of those who aggrieved them. This more personal motivation differed somewhat from the attitudes held by many White soldiers, who justified their cause by attributing it to God’s will. Moreover, it plays into the author’s broader motif of accounting, as Black soldiers sought to settle the bill for two centuries of slavery.

“At the end of the war, a former Union hospital steward remembered ruefully the failure to maintain careful records of the dead.” 

Faust dedicates a large portion of her book to the discussion of how difficult it was for civilians and the military to keep track of the whereabouts of the war’s dead. This occurred for several reasons, including the inability to identify bodies and the leaving behind of the dead and injured by armies that needed to move on to the next battle. Thus, as staggering as the Civil War’s losses were, they may be an underestimation.

“The needs of the living increasingly trumped the dignity of the departed.” 

One symbol of the depths of depravity to which some descended during the Civil War was the inability of a hospital party to secure a slain soldier from the battlefield without being fired on by the enemy. This kind of behavior was perceived to be a desecration of honor, yet both sides practiced it during the war. After enough such episodes, commanders on both sides were reluctant to order any of their men to risk their lives to retrieve fallen comrades.

“No longer simply the responsibility of their families, they, and their loss, now belonged to the nation.” 

One way the federal government helped ease the burden on the families of the war dead was to establish procedures for burial, including funding assistance and even new resting places for those who fought and died. Gettysburg became the most famous of these newly established cemeteries. Moreover, it established the state as stewards of fallen soldiers, a novel concept in the 19th century.

“Even when information was accurate and available—through newspaper casualty lists or the offices of a charitable organization or from a paid agent—it was often not delivered until long after the event.” 

Because of the length of the Civil War, the high number of dead, and inefficient lines of communication, many next of kin did not learn of a loved one’s death until a long time after that person died. This left families on both side of the conflict in a grim state of suspense, as many would have been aware of this lag time between the death of a solider and the reporting of that death. The author repeatedly explores the tension between certainty and uncertainty as they pertain to missing soldiers.

“Killing enemy soldiers was the goal of both generals and both armies, yet bereavement could unite them in common purpose.” 

The maxim “the only good enemy is a dead one” certainly applied during a firefight. Yet even though the new technologies turned many battlefields into slaughterhouses, the genteel notion of a proper burial done in the proper way was still on the minds of many up and down the chain of command. Examples of Lee’s and Grant’s generosity in the tracking down or retrieval of dead soldiers of any rank, North or South, abound, despite actions such as firing on hospital parties working counter to these actions.

“Neither side had anticipated the need to hold so many men in captivity, and neither side had made adequate provision for supplying food, shelter, or medical care.”

This was yet another way in which the events of the Civil War overtook expectations. Many battles in the war did not so much unfold as blitz through to conclusion, leaving many more dead and many more captured than anticipated. Prisoner exchanges were few and far between, so the two sides were stuck with their prisoners—unless they killed them, which happened in some cases. The story of the atrocities at Fort Pillow are an example of the latter. A prominent example of the former, the inadequacy of provisioning, was the notorious Andersonville prison, which had a very high death rate.

“The Civil War generated significant movements of peoples that served as deadly disease vectors.” 

Disease spread quickly and efficiently among the tightly-packed soldiers, prisoners, and corpses; in many cases, diseases shot through hospitals and other parts of civilian society. The stories are many of an army’s wounded descending on a town’s resources, bringing disease with them, and leaving behind even more death among civilians who volunteered to help ease the suffering of ill and dying soldiers. Throughout the book, Faust is careful to consider the death toll of civilians, which inflates the already staggering losses of the Civil War.

“In an environment where information about deaths was often wrong or entirely unavailable, survivors found themselves both literally and figuratively unable to ’see clearly what…has been lost’ and instead encouraged to deny it. In such conditions the temptation to distrust and resist bad news was all too alluring and the capacity for the genuine consolations of mourning severely compromised.” 

The high amount of misinformation in regard to whether or not a given soldier died caused the families of soldiers to distrust the grim news presented to them. In turn, this led to next of kin disallowing the start of the grieving process and forestalling the eventual acceptance of their loss. This is one of many examples where Faust explores the Civil War through the psychological attitudes of its participants. 

“The southern death toll produced a uniformed sorority of grief.”

The tremendous scale of the war dead created an equally large number of war widows and others in mourning. The other element of this was the wearing of black, as the color of mourning, to conform to what society expected. An entire mourning-attire industry grew out of this in one of many examples of how some individuals and corporations profited from the Civil War. 

“With its concerted attention to salvation, evangelicalism made the afterlife the focus of American religious belief and practice.” 

A continuum of faith-based beliefs and activity put a person’s life and death in perspective when viewed with an eye toward heavenly reward. This kind of belief led to next of kin needing to retrieve the body of a dead loved one so that person could reach the afterlife. Given that this was frequently impossible, widows and their families reformulated some of their attitudes around death and the Christian afterlife.

“The possibility and plausibility of scientific explanation strengthened the claims of the rational and worldly against the force of the transcendent.” 

At the same time that a large part of the population pursued the path to an afterlife, another group re-examined their beliefs and, in some cases, replaced them with new ones. Faust introduces the ideas of empiricism and skepticism here; in a later chapter, she discusses the scientific methods used to count and track the dead and to counter diseases that killed the remaining living. The author’s focus on science here contributes to her holistic approach to examining contemporary attitudes toward the Civil War.

“Heaven is reconceived as a more perfect Earth: Victorian family and domesticity are immortalized, and death all but disappears.” 

This re-conception of Heaven allowed for those injured and killed during the war to return to their ideal state. This was especially important for the many soldiers who had limbs amputated. and lived the rest of their days with an incomplete body. In the afterlife, their selves would again be made whole. 

“The end of combat offered an opportunity to attend to the dead in ways war had made impossible.” 

The scale of the Civil War’s conflict was so large that many who lost their lives on battlefields, in army hospitals, or in prisons did not journey any farther, their bodies left behind as the army moved on out of necessity. Alternately, with battles like Gettysburg that lasted multiple days or with armies that, for whatever reason, didn’t move for a time, the compiling of corpses wasn’t a priority. The end of the war thus led to a major shift in the national agenda in regard to fallen soldiers.

“The transcendent ideals of citizenship, sacrifice, and national obligation united with highly practical and ever-growing concerns about southern mistreatment of gravesites and bodies [resulted] in what was arguably the most elaborate federal program undertaken in nearly a century of American nationhood.” 

The creation of the national cemeteries was one of the consequences of the Civil War; they were symbols of the people’s changing attitudes toward life and death. Just as importantly, national cemeteries reflected a unprecedented role for the federal government in the grieving process. Some Southerners, their side having lost the war, were keen for revenge, and they exacted it through the desecration of gravesites.

“Encouraged by President Andrew Johnson’s sympathy, former Confederates tested the limits of northern will, challenging Yankee claims to the fruits of victory.” 

For some Reconstruction-era Southerners, there was the notion that while they lost the war, the ways of life in the antebellum South. The initial “soft” handling of the southern recalcitrance only put off the inevitable, much like the series of compromises that did little but further encourage southern claims of superiority over both the federal government and African Americans. This reflects a common refrain among historians that while the North won the war, the South won the peace.

“[I]t seemed unimaginable that those who had tried to destroy the Union should be accorded the same respect as those who had saved it.” 

It was perhaps understandable that Northern veterans and citizens would view their enemy dead with vehemence. This has been the case in and after conflicts for as long as people have chronicled them. It is perhaps all the more remarkable, then, that so many in the North became part of the movement to give the Southern dead proper burials. However, by reconciling over shared sacrifice rather than over the ideals of racial equality often cited as central to the Northern cause, it allowed institutionalized White supremacy to persist and evolve for decades after the end of slavery.