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Suzanna Melendez
Blog #4
10/17/2016
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is a powerful academic scholarship which focuses on nineteenth century American’s attitude toward death, grief and mourning. Drew Gilpin Faust examines and provides readers with extraordinary statistics that prove that the Civil War was as one of the bloodiest wars in American history. The theoretical framework of the book not only provides a voice for the thousands of men who perished during the war, but Faust skillfully incorporated mothers, wives, and sisters personal experiences on how they mourned their loved ones death.
Faust thesis suggested that the high number of casualties incorporated with a violent death transformed Americans understanding of death. As dshanebeck emphasized in his blog entry for Pasley, Robertson, and Waldstreichers’ Beyond the Founders “…editors of this massive collection of essays attempted to weave an argument that expounds the ideas of American political history beyond that of powerful white men who shaped the early institutions of American political structures and theory.” As a result, Faust’s study highlights the bloodshed and sacrifices Americans endured in order to preserve those political ideologies. This bottom-up history highlights the deaths of union and confederate soldiers. Her work suggested that family members wanted to mourn the corpse of a soldier. On the contrary, Americans faced the physical dilemma of rotting corpses on the battlefield and pieces of bodies as a result of explosive weaponry of the industrial era. The Civil War changed the circumstances of a soldier’s death and proper Christian burial. America in the nineteenth century was a nation of strict religious beliefs and assumed that a person’s death was a certain indication about one’s afterlife. In order to be eternally saved “… family members needed to witness a death in order to assess the state of the dying person’s soul, for these critical last moments of life would epitomize his or hers spiritual condition.” (10). Faust did a remarkable job of explaining the importance of the “good death,” and its dramatic change during the Civil War. The four year war transformed America’s Christians notions of the proper way to die. A dying man was no longer surrounded by his family who they hoped to reunite in heaven. On the battlefield, majority of men died alone, anonymous, and without comfort, their families unaware of their fate.
Faust does an exceptional job describing a families’ effort to recover a body from the battle field. The family fallen soldiers went to the battle field to recover the bodies and escorted them home. On the contrary, “in northern cities entrepreneurs also established themselves as agents who would seek missing soldiers for a fee.” (117) If there was no physical body or letters to inform a comrade’s whereabouts, spiritualism was a means to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Toward the end of her book, Faust highlights the importance of fashion during the stage of mourning in both the North and South. Different colored garnets displayed a stage of mourning, while showing respect to a loved one’s memory. Economics and a woman’s location also played an important role in the way they mourned. Women in the South endured shortages of clothing and money compared to women in the North. Mourning was not a private matter but was displayed in the fashion worn by women.
The Civil War nearly divided the United States, but its aftermath traumatized every citizen. Women along with men mourned the sheer numbers of deaths during the conflict. Faust’s accounts claim that in order to rebuild and move forward as a nation, Americans had to grieve the deaths of their fathers, uncles, brothers, sons and friends. Over several decades, mourning developed into different traditions and rituals, which helped family members cope with the death of a loved one. One suggestion given to Faust would be to include African Americans in her scholarship. Thousands of black soldiers joined the war effort and died in combat. It would be interesting to see how African American families mourned the death of their fathers, sons, or relatives.