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.
Themes
Death and Sacrifice as a New Part of the American Identity
Multitudes gave up their time, money, livelihoods, and lives for the American Civil war. They thought that it was their duty to do so–their duty to their God, their duty to themselves, their duty to their friends and families, and their duty to their country and way of life.
At the outset of the war, men were all too happy to take up arms in the name of the North or the South. Expectations were high on both sides that the war would be short and, therefore, not so full of bloodshed. The confidence of so many in this illusion led to the sacrifice of many more.
Faust focuses on the sacrifice of individual soldiers who gave their lives or, in other cases, their time and effort both during and after the Civil War. Also in focus are those on the home front, who let their loved ones go off to war, in many cases encouraging them because of the shared belief in a just cause. Somewhere in between were the nurses, the doctors, the chaplains, and other caregivers, who wanted to help but often found themselves ill-equipped to do anything other than comfort. The sheer numbers of war dead created a culture of shared sacrifice; this idea of shared fate carries throughout the book.
There was also the notion of what Faust calls “the all-important message of Christian sacrifice, an emulation of the Savior himself” (2555). So many people at this time viewed ultimate sacrifice–the loss of life–as a model to follow. Many families who lost loved ones celebrated because their father, husband, or son had, because of his good life, gone on to a good afterlife.
Faust adds that the unprecedented sacrifices of the Civil War forged a new national identity for Americans. She writes that this could have taken the form of a newfound sanctity granted to the emancipation of slaves, the cause for which the war was fought. Yet rather than enshrine racial equality, the aftermath of the Civil War led to a new apparatus of White supremacy in the South, built first on the Black Codes and later on Jim Crow laws. In time, sacrifice became the shared ideal between North and South that helped foster reconciliation between the two sides—a noble goal, yet one that erased slavery and Black struggle from the Civil War narrative and helped perpetuate White supremacy for decades.
Profiteering During the Civil War
One of the most disturbing elements of Faust’s book is the preponderance of unethical individuals more than willing to take advantage of the horrors and hardships of the Civil War to make a profit. These individuals include embalmers who extorted money from war widows and other family members of the fallen who begin the embalming process without advance warning then threaten to reverse the process if they are not paid, Others include so-called agents who prey on the uncertainty of the families of missing soldiers by promising to locate them are rarely delivering results. Even if the soldier was never found, many agents still collected percentages from widows’ pensions. Meanwhile, spiritualists took advantage of those who lost loved ones in the war by conducting strange rituals purported to open a line of communication to the dead.
Other profiteers relied less on broken promises or deception and more on sheer market principles. The mourning-garment industry made huge profits off the social custom of expecting war widows to wear black clothes for months or years after their husbands’ deaths. Insurance companies, meanwhile, made onerous and often unrealistic demands for death certificates and other items of proof before paying war benefits to widows. The author’s exploration of the various profiteers during the Civil War highlights the extent to which the conflict led to a multitude of unexpected consequences across the economy and culture of mid-19th century America.
Ill-preparedness for the Horrors of the Civil War
Faust writes that “[n]o one expected what the Civil War was to become” (201-02). In many ways, the people who did the fighting, dying, healing, and grieving were at a loss when it came to processing, making sense of, working through, and getting past the tremendous loss of life and sense of despair that the four-year war wrought. On the battlefield, many commanders were surprised by the ferocity of the fighting, or the number of dead or captured. On the medical front, many hospitals had no idea how to treat the injured and diseased with which they were routinely confronted. On the home front, a great many people were forced to re-examine their beliefs, ideals, and expectations in the face of an amorphous new reality. The same was true in the wake of battles as armies, towns, and governments struggled to track the dead and dying, both often left forgotten as their armies moved on to the next deadly encounter. Further, Southerners were reluctant to accept defeat and ill-prepared to cooperate with the federal government.
Related Titles
By Drew Gilpin Faust
