THIS REPUBLIC of SUFFERING: DEATH and the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (audiobook) by Drew Gilpin Faust
Published by Blackstone Audio in 2008.
Read by Lorna Raver.
Duration: 10 hours, 54 minutes.
Unabridged.
This unique Civil War history isn't driven by the timeline of the Civil War, the strategies, or the personalities. Instead, it is a look at how the soldiers, the government, the families on the home front and post-war politics were affected by the massive amount of death that the war created as it ground on.
In all previous wars, the U.S. government did not worry too much about how to bury the dead because there just weren't that many when compared to the Civil War. Soldiers were properly buried, but there wasn't much thought given to keeping records about where they were buried, marking their graves or even keeping track of who had died.
The sheer quantity of death in the Civil War made the government change its approach. The book starts with a look at how dying a glorious death was all everyone wrote about. But, once the reality of the war was apparent, the talk shifted from glory to the value of sacrifice and that shift helped change the attitude of the government towards dead soldiers. More Union soldiers died in combat in the Battle of Shiloh than died in combat in the entire Mexican War and if mother's sons were being sacrificed that meant that the sacrifice needed to be respected. A sign of that respect would be a proper burial spot in a proper cemetery.
A series of proper cemeteries was out of the scope of federal power before the Civil War. The bureaucracy to track down every single improvised grave, disinter every soldier and rebury them in a federal cemetery had to be created.
The bureaucracy had to be created to track every soldier that entered into service and keep track how they left (death, injury, end of their time in service, mustered out at the end of the war) and how to deal with the pensions for the widows and fatherless children. All of that paperwork needed a bureaucracy. The government had to grow in order to print, send out, sort through, file and store and access the paperwork. The national government had to become much more centralized to do things like that so that is what it did because the sacrifices had to be honored.
The book also delves into the racial component of death in the Civil War and into how literature changed by looking at several key authors. The literature section delved too much into interpretation and was, quite frankly, boring. Cutting it down by 2/3 would have only helped.
The last section looked at how the presence of Union cemeteries in the South helped Southern women contribute to the Lost Cause mythology. The theme of sacrifice existed in the South as well and Confederate widows didn't appreciate the way that Confederate war dead were sometimes left to rot in the fields while Union war dead were placed in special cemeteries with individual grave markers at public expense. This helped contribute to the monument culture we are dealing with now.
I read a lot of Civil War-related books (this is my 146th according to the tags on my blog) and this one showed me there was an angle I had never thought of before. It wasn't a perfect book - the language was often stilted and formal and the literature portion was tedious, but what else would you expect when the author was a former president of Harvard University?
I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. A must-read for Civil War enthusiasts, people with a casual interest in the Civil War probably won't enjoy it much.
This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THIS REPUBLIC of SUFFERING: DEATH and the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (audiobook) by Drew Gilpin Faust.
Read by Lorna Raver.
Duration: 10 hours, 54 minutes.
Unabridged.
This unique Civil War history isn't driven by the timeline of the Civil War, the strategies, or the personalities. Instead, it is a look at how the soldiers, the government, the families on the home front and post-war politics were affected by the massive amount of death that the war created as it ground on.
In all previous wars, the U.S. government did not worry too much about how to bury the dead because there just weren't that many when compared to the Civil War. Soldiers were properly buried, but there wasn't much thought given to keeping records about where they were buried, marking their graves or even keeping track of who had died.
The sheer quantity of death in the Civil War made the government change its approach. The book starts with a look at how dying a glorious death was all everyone wrote about. But, once the reality of the war was apparent, the talk shifted from glory to the value of sacrifice and that shift helped change the attitude of the government towards dead soldiers. More Union soldiers died in combat in the Battle of Shiloh than died in combat in the entire Mexican War and if mother's sons were being sacrificed that meant that the sacrifice needed to be respected. A sign of that respect would be a proper burial spot in a proper cemetery.
The bureaucracy had to be created to track every soldier that entered into service and keep track how they left (death, injury, end of their time in service, mustered out at the end of the war) and how to deal with the pensions for the widows and fatherless children. All of that paperwork needed a bureaucracy. The government had to grow in order to print, send out, sort through, file and store and access the paperwork. The national government had to become much more centralized to do things like that so that is what it did because the sacrifices had to be honored.
The book also delves into the racial component of death in the Civil War and into how literature changed by looking at several key authors. The literature section delved too much into interpretation and was, quite frankly, boring. Cutting it down by 2/3 would have only helped.
The last section looked at how the presence of Union cemeteries in the South helped Southern women contribute to the Lost Cause mythology. The theme of sacrifice existed in the South as well and Confederate widows didn't appreciate the way that Confederate war dead were sometimes left to rot in the fields while Union war dead were placed in special cemeteries with individual grave markers at public expense. This helped contribute to the monument culture we are dealing with now.
I read a lot of Civil War-related books (this is my 146th according to the tags on my blog) and this one showed me there was an angle I had never thought of before. It wasn't a perfect book - the language was often stilted and formal and the literature portion was tedious, but what else would you expect when the author was a former president of Harvard University?
I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. A must-read for Civil War enthusiasts, people with a casual interest in the Civil War probably won't enjoy it much.
This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THIS REPUBLIC of SUFFERING: DEATH and the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (audiobook) by Drew Gilpin Faust.
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