This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

Description

Author: Faust, Drew Gilpin  (1947-)

Publisher: Knopf

Pub Date: 2008

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Book: Good.  Binding tight.  No marks, tears, bends or folds.  Appears unused.  Dust Jacket: Good.  NOT price clipped.  Very light edge and corner wear.

Notes: Winner of the Bancroft Prize for History, and the American History Book Prize from the New York Historical Society.  “The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War COMBINED (emphasis mine).  The Civil War’s rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II.  A similar rate, about 2 percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities….Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War.”  (From the Preface).  “…the disposition of the Civil War dead made an accurate accounting of the fallen impossible.  In the absence of arrangements for interring and recording overwhelming numbers, hundreds of thousands of men–more than 40 percent of deceased Yankees and a far greater proportion of Confederate–perished without names, identified only, as Walt Whitman put it, ‘by the significant word UNKNOWN.'” (page 102, quoted from Whitmans’s Specimen Days, David Godine, 1971).    Not just who and how and why they died, but how the number of deaths affected both the North and South.  The Civil War was the impetus for the establishment of the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as military cemeteries.