Review: "This Republic of Suffering"
BY JOE MYSAK | Bloomberg News
THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust. Alfred A. Knopf, 346 pp., $27.95.
Of all the phrases used to describe the fate of soldiers at the front, surely the most unsatisfactory must be Missing in Action, which translates to: We don't know.
As Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust writes in her new book, "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War," those were the words heard perhaps most often by the wives, parents and siblings of the soldiers who served during the Civil War.
"From the length of time since the battle of Antietam and you not having heard from your son during all this time, I am very sorry to say that the presumption is that he fell a victim to that battle," Gen. E.A. Hitchcock wrote to one disconsolate mother. "If he were still living I cannot understand why he should not have found means of making the fact known to you."
Antietam was fought in September 1862. Hitchcock was writing in July 1865.
More than 620,000 soldiers died during the Civil War, about 2 percent of the population, Faust writes; the same rate of casualties today would mean the almost unthinkable 6 million fatalities. This bloodletting ran smack into a period when most Americans were embracing, if not celebrating, the high-Victorian era art of dying, and the cult of the Good Death.
Something had to give.
Reading Faust's very original book, I could not help thinking again and again of the beginning of the 1953 novel "The Go-Between," by L.P. Hartley: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
Certainly it is impossible today to imagine a similar state of affairs, of almost criminal unpreparedness. The Union and Confederate armies went to war without enough ambulances to carry the wounded, let alone with any organized way to keep track of the dead.
Bodies were buried in churchyards, by the side of the road, outside hospitals, on the battlefield, sometimes not at all - the victors often left the enemy dead where they fell. Burial was, Faust says, an "act of improvisation."
Those who wanted the consolation of their loved one's body usually had to travel to the battlefield themselves and engage the services of embalmers and other agents to ship it home, if they could find it.
Such communication as there was with those back home usually came in the form of a kind of stylized correspondence - quoted at length by Faust - from the deceased's officers or friends. Sometimes word never came at all.
The story has a (relatively) happy ending. Survivors found undocumented, unconfirmed and unrecognized loss "intolerable." At war's end both sides, using muster rolls, letters and lists compiled by concerned colleagues, and interviews with survivors, went out to reclaim the army of the dead, identifying the fallen, where possible, and interring them in national cemeteries.
"Nearly half the dead remained unknown, the fact of their deaths supposed but undocumented, the circumstances of their passage from life entirely unrecorded," Faust writes. Never again would a U.S. Army take the field with such a casual attitude toward its own losses.
"This Republic of Suffering" tells a story that most Civil War buffs, those who have read the standard works on the subject by Allan Nevins and James McPherson, among others, probably don't know or don't appreciate.
Most narrative history of the war ends up in those horror shows known as field hospitals with their piles of amputated limbs. We hardly ever get to the bivouac of the dead. And that whole after-story, if you will, the gathering of the dead after the war, has scarcely been told at all, even though it entailed the reburial of hundreds of thousands, took years and hardened feelings on both sides for decades to come.
"This Republic of Suffering" is a disturbing book, history profane and profound.
ŠNewsday