This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust

This Republic of Suffering is totally fascinating reading on many levels. For those Civil War devotees, this is a must read for it details the gristly horrors the Civil War brought to the United States with its astoundingly high death toll of 620,000 Americans killed in action. Drew Gilpin Faust also digs deeper below the statistics as she writes about how the soldiers felt about killing their enemies, who were their fellow citizens. The readers are placed alongside soldiers as they face death by injury, disease and possible wounding and worse in approaching battles as Faust quotes from dozens of letters written by the combatants. The huge emotional damage done to families and friends of those killed is brilliantly related by Faust's use of primary sources from the war years. Perhaps one of the most interesting sections of the book is concerned with the very-real task of identifying burying the dead before and after battles. This process took years in some cases and led to the rise of predominantly female organizations in the South dedicated to ensuring Confederate soldiers received a burial that was deemed proper for a fallen hero of the Confederacy. This is a wonderfully written and brilliantly researched book by a noted scholar of the Civil War. Reading this book is a very moving experience and made this reviewer want to read other books written by this wonderfully interesting author...
-Roy