Book tells story often forgotten
Lynn Bonney, Special to The Gazette
Friday, May 8, 2009
In history books, name recognition is generally reserved for the leaders. Presidents, generals, kings and queens, the exceptionally good and the extraordinarily bad find their places. Ordinary men and women, those who live the history their leaders seem to make, are too often forgotten.
Historian Drew Gilpin Faust has made it her business to focus on everyday people. In “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” Faust looks behind the horrifying numbers of wartime deaths between 1861 and 1865. North and South, combined, lost 620,000 men in uniform, about the same as the total number of dead in this nation’s other wars from the Revolution through Korea.
Gilpin’s proposition is that the war’s massive toll shaped the culture and politics that shaped the era and the decades that followed it. Americans had developed the concept of “the Good Death,” dying peacefully at home. Family and friends needed to be certain that, Gilpin writes, “The deceased had been conscious of his fate, had demonstrated willingness to accept it, had shown signs of belief in God and in his own salvation” and had communicated messages to those left behind.
In the chaos of war, such assurances were not possible. Bereaved families made their way to battlefields, hoping to retrieve the bodies of their sons, fathers and husbands. Fellow soldiers and volunteers composed letters to bereaved families, recounting soldiers’ deaths, reassuring them that their loved ones’ passage had been serene, shielding them from the brutal truth
Early in the war, the Union had no provisions for notifying next of kin, none for transporting bodies for burial, not even for keeping track of the dead and their battlefield graves. Undertakers traveled with the troops, providing good metal coffins for officers, wooden boxes for regular troops. Most of the fallen were buried in hastily dug holes, after survivors had stripped them of boots, weapons and anything else more useful to the living than to the dead. Spiritualism became a thriving industry, bringing soothing messages from the “Other Side.”
Although Congress authorized the purchase of land for a national cemetery in 1862, lawmakers budgeted no money for the project. Cemeteries at Gettysburg and Antietam were financed by the states that were home to most of the dead in those battles. The impetus for national cemeteries came amid postwar reports that Southerners were desecrating Union graves. Northerners were no better to their Confederate cousins. Bodies of rebel soldiers often went unburied, as did the old enmities that had created the conflict.
Survivors came to questions their beliefs — religious and political — as Americans on both sides were left to wonder if their sacrifice had meaning in the face of such loss. Modern readers can feel their anguish and hear the echoes of their pain as successive generations struggle with death in wartime.
“This Republic of Suffering,” an American Library Association Notable Book for 2009, was a finalist for the recent Pulitzer Prize in history. Gilpin, now president of Harvard University, has written other books about the era, including “Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War.” She is a master of telling the stories that history books too often forget.
F Emporia Public Library staff and volunteers write “On the Shelf.”