41 pages • 1 hour read
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
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Preface-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
In the Preface, Faust frames her book as one that is all about death—its many faces and causes, and its inevitability. The book is also, the author says, about how the American Civil War created ways of speeding up that inevitability.
In a blizzard of figures, Faust lists the number of American dead in the Civil War and then compares it with the death toll of all other American wars. The difference in this war was that the death was so much greater and so much more widespread; it amounted to shared suffering on an epic scale. Faust notes that this shared suffering translated to a shared responsibility of being ready to embrace death, no matter what form it took or the speed with which it came. She writes,
Human beings are rarely simply passive victims of death. They are actors even if they are the diers; they prepare for death, imagine it, risk it, endure it, seek to understand it. And if they are survivors, they must assume new identities established by their persistence in face of others’ annihilation (155).
In the closing argument of the Preface, the author challenges readers to consider how those who survived the Civil War had to re-examine their ideals in the face of so much death and grief.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Dying”
Chapter 1 begins with a series of supposed impossibilities: the Civil War would be over soon, one way or the other; it would not involve the entire country; it would not result in glory so much as in the success of men who signed on to give up their lives for their country. Faust then turns to the theme of this chapter, summarizing it in one sentence: “This was the initial work of death” (228).
Faust quotes the famous World War II General George Patton who reportedly told the men who served under him that he didn’t want them to die for their country but rather for the enemy troops to die for theirs. That was not the calculus for many soldiers who went off to preserve the Union or fight on behalf of the Confederacy. They expected to give up their own lives so that others might live on, pursuing the noble goals to which they all subscribed; it was a messianic, sacrificial sentiment that formed the core of Christian belief for more than a century. If a person would not find death unexpected, then he or she would also quite often be prepared for it, or at least greet it with determination rather than despair. With the religious element of society so interwoven with many other parts of life, it was only natural that individuals conflated the war cause and the religious cause. Faust writes, “The rhetoric of service—to nation, to God, to comrades—rationalized the violence of this devastating war by casting it as the instrument of both nationalist and Christian imperatives: soldiers would die for God and Country” (241-42).
Faust doesn’t let her subjects get away with this absolution, however. She points out that “focusing on dying rather than on killing enabled soldiers to mitigate their terrible responsibility for the slaughter of others” (243-44). It’s one thing to take the life of others at the expense of defending your own; it’s quite another to be weighed down by the consequences of such actions. Faust suggests that morbid thoughts of causing another person’s death were not a preoccupation, but a rarity; far more common was the concern for a dying soldier, doctor, nurse, or civilian to have his or her spiritual affairs in order. Faust includes examples of soldiers’ concerns for their enemies’ last wishes as an example of how this Christian ideal urged people to prepare for a good afterlife by dying what they called a Good Death.
The death of a soldier in the arms of an enemy was a metaphor for the larger idea that a dying soldier was, in all likelihood, nowhere near his home, farm, family, or livelihood; this, too, was a change, the author notes, one that led to nurses, doctors, and even other soldiers assuming the role of wife, mother, sister, or parent to whom the dying soldier could breathe his last wish: if he wasn’t able to be at home, then maybe home could come to him, the thinking went. Assuming this role in a different way was the condolence letter, written by someone who served with the dead soldier and addressed to that soldier’s home and kin. Here, too, the heroic ideal crept back in, as widows and other survivors were told of their dead loved ones’ bravery in the face of enemy fire. Such letters were often accompanied by a soldier’s mementoes and other personal effects. These effects were sometimes all that remained of the soldier, as many were buried where they fell, with a proper burial at home an impossibility.
Chapter 1 Analysis
The first chapter concerns 19th century American attitudes toward dying. Repeatedly, the author references the idea of “the Good Death,” one that is planned for, prepared for, and met with as much dignity and grace as possible. This ritual–focusing on the Christian ideal of preparing to meet one’s Maker in Heaven–would have been overwhelmingly familiar to Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In one of many juxtapositions of aspiration with reality, the author contrasts this genteel, Heaven-focused idea with the hell-on-earth reality of the Civil War. To borrow a quote from Thomas Hobbes, life in the time of the American Civil War was often “nasty, brutish, and short.”
This quote was a common refrain of historians examining the wars of the 19th century. The guns, cannons, and other weapons used by the North and the South in the Civil War were all too efficient at mowing down men. The same was true of disease in hospitals and homes where cleanliness was often poor.
Even in the face of death and dying, a soldier sometimes had time to write a letter to his spouse, imploring her not to worry because he was a hero who gave his life for his country. Those soldiers whose mortal wounds deprived them of the ability to write had time to tell someone else what he wanted his family to know about his last days–that he was at peace with his decision to go to war because he believed in a calling he heard from a higher power.
Plenty of instruments of death during the Civil War caused soldiers to pass relatively slowly, allowing them time to compose last words and thoughts and to perform final actions. That was expected. What was not expected was the virulence of disease and the efficacy with which the Gatling gun and other high-powered weapons brought death to thousands of soldiers, all of whom died too quickly put their earthly affairs in order.
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