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This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
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A Poignant Assessment of Our Ugly Civil War Toll
A Review by Karen Long

Drew Gilpin Faust grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, visiting the cairns and killing fields of the Civil War. She is 60 now, the president of Harvard University, and still makes time to go to the graves of individual soldiers who died for the Union and Confederate causes.

A respected historian of the South, Faust put 10 years into the making of her sixth book, This Republic of Suffering, an examination of how the annihilation of more than half a million Americans in the Civil War transformed survivors, civic institutions and the nation.

It's a remarkable work -- poised, moving, irrigated with the flowing voices of mid-19th-century Americans. Their journals, letters, accounts, songs, sermons and scribblings have the gravitas to reach us across 14 decades, to touch upon our own preoccupations with an unexpectedly long war and the nature of national sacrifice.

Then, as now, "the blow seems heaviest when it strikes down those who are in the morning of life," as...
 
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