On This Republic of Suffering

This one has blown me away—Faust’s sensitivity towards his subjects and topic is exceptional.

Faust argues here that—although the transformation of the American state, the liberation of enslaved peoples, and the emergence of the New South are critically important consequences of the American Civil War—historians have so far neglected to give much attention to the lived experience of soldiers and (white) civilians who experienced the Civil War. Above all, their experience was shaped by death. 2% of all Americans died in the American Civil War, and this was a significantly higher number in the South. More than just the 2% dead, even more were maimed, injured, and disfigured. More still saw their comrades in arms die in front of them. Scarcely a single Southern home endured the war without losing somebody important to them.

Because of this tragedy, the American nation was forced to come together to mourn, to grieve. The whole psychology of the United States was transformed by the Civil War, which forced everyone to think closely about their preconceptions of death. Death was something to be experienced by the youngest people, or the oldest people. If an American reached adolescence, it was remarkably likely that they would live until middle age, or even what we would call today “old age.” Accidental deaths and disease took place frequently but, by the 1860s, the United States was in a place where death tolls were declining tremendously. Then, like one of Zeus’s lightning bolts, the Civil War seemed to appear from the heavens. Suddenly, young men who were only 17, 18, 19 years old were killed. Attempting to come to terms with the death around them, those who survived retreated into religion, or at the very least they framed their friends as people who died “in peace” in order to avoid questions about the meaningless of it all.

At the same time, they came to question the structures around them. Given that the vast majority of Americans were Christians, they could accept the reality of death. This is something that was preordained by God himself, but killing? That was a direct violation of the 6th Commandment, a violation of human dignity, and a violation of God’s will. By the end of the war, scarcely an American had avoided deep, difficult religious questions. This was made all harder by the inability of Americans to account for the dead (“UNKNOWN” was the name given to literally countless dead), the abandonment of funeral rites and rituals (for both soldiers and their families), and the fact that religious orthodoxy seemed to now contradict lived realities—“How could everyone’s bodies literally rise from the dead during the End Times when there is little left of their bodies?” Soldiers were hardly the only ones killed in the war, tens of thousands of civilians died as well.

Americans’ reckoning with death, in many ways, brought about the transformation of the American state. The federal government began propping up cemeteries near all battlefields and monuments and memorials became widespread in the years and decades following the war. Monuments, nearly by definition, praise the dead (although, some do recognize the living). The very nature of monuments should force us to think about those who died, as well as those who killed, although they rarely have this effect many decades after the fact. The vast number of Civil War monuments in the United States ought to tell us something about the Civil War’s nature with death, yet it’s something that I’ve never stopped to question before. They are like an unending elegy to the most bloody war in the history of North America, and one of the bloodiest wars in the history of the world. Thinking about this now, the whole subject is so powerful, so magnetic that it seems impossible to pull away from.

This should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the “past,” even if not history as such. Given the universal nature of death, there is something here that will resonate with everyone. Faust’s somber tone adds to his investigation, and the whole thing is so bleak. Really great stuff.