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The storm of death and destruction unleashed by the Civil War is not a new discovery, however much it tends to recede in our current age of real and potential exterminisms. There were more than a million casualties and more than six hundred thousand deaths (we will never know the precise numbers) sustained by both sides during the Civil War. These numbers far overshadow any other war in which Americans have participated and roughly approximate the human costs of all other American wars combined. Yet for all that has been written about the Civil War, about its politics, battles, strategies, and consequences, we know almost nothing about the problems of death that the war forced upon North and South alike.
If for nothing else, Faust's book would be immensely valuable for taking us to this hallowed and wrenching ground; but there is much more as well. This Republic of Suffering--Faust takes these words from Frederick Law Olmsted, as he looked, aghast, over the sea of wounded and dying Union soldiers on the Virginia Peninsula in 1862--asks us to consider how soldiers and civilians, families and friends, military commanders and state officials confronted both the prospects and the logistics of what was in many respects a new type of death, and how everyone may have been changed by it. Quietly but forcefully, Faust shows that Civil War death had a social, cultural, and political history, and one that may have played a signal role in creating modern American society.
