41 pages • 1 hour read
Drew Gilpin FaustThis Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Cemeteries
The many cemeteries–particularly the newly-created national cemeteries–were a symbol of the long and bloody Civil War. Given that so many gave their lives in aid of a cause framed in the popular imagination as something worth fighting and dying for, a cemetery filled with headstones bearing names of those who died was a reminder of the power and “rightness” of that cause. That the federal government created a network of these final resting places only elevated the importance of the sacrifice of those interred there.
In the same way, the cemetery was a physical representation of one stage in the journey of a person who believed that a good life would lead to a good afterlife. This idea gave survivors hope that the people they knew who died during the war didn’t do so in vain.
Naming
“Naming” is the title of Chapter 4, which describes so many different kinds of struggles to quantify or otherwise cope with the tremendous amounts of adversity thrown at soldiers and civilians during the Civil War. Giving a name to a thing makes it something distinct, understood, and categorized. It was often a struggle to put a name to a soldier, dead or alive. Those injured on the field of battle often ended up in hospitals or prisons, devoid of identifying information. Those killed in the line of defense never had any kind of “dog tags,” as modern soldiers would term them, and so could not be properly looked after, buried, or mourned. An even more grim reality was that the weapons of war efficiently eliminated any means of identifying—and, therefore, naming—many of the leaving them without an identity and, as the Christian belief would have it, a means to progress to Heaven.
The Good Death
A common social construction of 19th century America was the notion of the Good Death. Christians anticipated a death that came on slowly enough to allow for time to reiterate in the presence of friends and family one’s faith in God and to re-acknowledge Christ as humanity’s Lord and Savior. The realities of the battlefield, however, upended any expectation of a Good Death in the traditional sense. Instead, soldiers and their families justified such speedy and brutal demises by framing their fights on the battlefield as God’s work. Thus, many hoped that a death suffering on the battlefield, even one in which the departed had no time to make peace with God, would still lead to that soldier’s salvation.
The end of the war, however, complicated matters. Given that both the North and the South viewed their cause as holy and righteous, the losing side was forced to confront the reality that God allowed them to lose. Many White southerners tried to reconcile this by continuing to frame their cause as righteous, despite their loss. The consequences of this narrative—known as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy—were dire for African Americans in the South, who suddenly faced new forms of personal and institutionalized racism buttressed by the White supremacist notion that God wanted White people to subjugate them.
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By Drew Gilpin Faust
