When the Civil War began so blithely and blindly on April 12, 1861, no one had any idea of the slaughter that lay ahead, that what escalated into a horrendous four-year war of attrition would turn the Eastern Seaboard into a charnal house. The statistics are still staggering. It is estimated that 620,000 soldiers died in the Civil War, more deaths than all the fatalities of the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War combined. Confederates, outpowered and outmanned, died at three times the rate of Yankee soldiers. The scale of the carnage, says Drew Gilpin Faust in her poignant and elegiac new book, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95), changed the way that Americans perceived the relationship between life and death, the comforts of religion, the duty of the living to the dead, the notions of nationhood and shared suffering. “Sacrifice and the state,” Faust writes, “became inextricably intertwined.”

Faust first discusses the factors that led to such wholesale slaughter. The armies were huge, especially after the North instituted the draft, and battle lines were much broader than they had ever been in the history of warfare; even experienced officers were unable to control their men once battle was engaged. Armies of hastily trained men often lacked discipline or the knowledge of fighting techniques. Advances in weaponry meant that by the final year of the Civil War the Northern forces particularly were capable of immense firepower; the American Civil War was the first war in which men could be not just wounded or killed but obliterated. Finally, the manner in which the North and the South and the armies that represented the sundered sections of the young nation regarded each other, again especially in the war’s last horrific year, contributed to an atmosphere of relentless savagery and vengeance.

Neither civilians nor the military nor the government was prepared to deal with the consequences of the death tolls that mounted week by week as the war continued. The dead often lay unburied on battlefields for months or years. Families could often get no news of their sons, brothers and husbands. The 19th century ideal of the Good Death, borne with Christian dignity, fortitude and anticipation of heavenly reward, began to dissolve as people questioned God’s purpose in the face of the magnitude of the butchery and the uncertainty of the fate of their loved ones. In her meticulous research, Faust seems to have read every available diary, every letter and contemporary newespaper article, and she notes again and again the sorrow and heartbreak of ordinary citizens searching not only for records, news and rumors, as well as for bodies that might never be found, but for meaning in a situation where old beliefs were being severely tested.

Faust chronicles how the scope of suffering and dying, the sheer weight of public and private mourning, the large numbers of bodies affected the logistics of transportation, funerals and burial. The culture of death not only permeated the language of newspaper editorials and sermons, poems and novels but warped the nature of language itself, which seemed incapable of surviving the strain of adequate description and metaphor. Immediately after the war, the federal and state governments began the arduous process of enumerating the dead, sending teams, including one led by Clara Barton, to battlefields all over the South to exhume individual and mass graves, to search forests and ravines and farms (and the infamous prison camps), in an attempt to do justice to the sacrifice of common soldiers and their officers, to make certain that their deaths became a part of the official heritage of the nation. These efforts led to the establishment of national cemetaries, those strict burying grounds that function as the nexus where individual heroism melds with collective feeling in the awesome service of democracy. 

It’s gratifying to know that Faust, the president of Harvard University, is not only a tireless reseacher but a fine writer whose fluent and fluid prose perfectly captures a dark and defining period in American history. One feels in every sentence her command and compassion.