Behind the Book: Death and the Civil War

Last October, Drew Gilpin Faust was installed as the 28th president of Harvard, becoming the first woman to lead the university and the first of its presidents since 1672 to do so without possessing one of its degrees (hers are from Bryn Mawr and the University of Pennsylvania).

From the beginning of Faust's academic career, the American South has figured strongly in her scholarship; thus, too, the Civil War has been there, sometimes as boundary (e.g., The Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860) and sometimes as foundation (e.g., Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War). The Civil War holds dominion in her new book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (LJ 11/15/07), but, as before, Faust is not writing the usual history. "In the 20th and 21st centuries," she tells LJ, "the writing about the Civil War has focused on battle—often from the point of view of glory and heroism—on politics, on emancipation and the elimination of slavery. Yet for the individuals who experienced it, the most common impact of the war was the loss of a loved one or of their own life."

In her book, Faust reminds us that the war's 620,000 casualties would be equivalent to six million of us dying over the same period now, a fact that astonishes. Faust explores the many ways in which such slaughter imposed new reckonings with death upon the war's constituents, on and off the battlefields, and served as catalyst for building mechanisms, actual, practical, and metaphysical, for coping with death's realities.

"The Civil War," she explains, "is a moment that generated an extraordinary amount of historical material because individuals were separated from one another." Thus, ordinary men and women who, when living together, were unlikely to communicate on paper, produced Civil War archives rich with layers of information less available in such form in the years before or after—materials Faust plumbed in libraries, archives, and special collections around the country. In peacetime, Faust continues, these ordinary people "weren't leaving a written record; in most circumstances, what a historian has is the product of fairly privileged classes. One of the things about the diaries and letters of the Civil War is that you often have individuals who are close to illiterate, and sometimes actually illiterate, because they would dictate their letters, and that's unusual for a written record."

One kind of letter critical to Faust's research was almost a genre in itself because there were no formal notification procedures regarding death. "Instead," explains Faust, "there was a general expectation that someone in your unit, someone who was close to you when you were shot, would take it as his responsibility to inform the family."

"In the 19th century," she continues "a person's presence at bedside, at the death of a loved one, was a very important part of the understanding of family obligation. So these letters from a soldier telling of a comrade's death were meant to compensate. The letter described the person's last minutes, his religious state at the time of his death, his willingness to die, his belief in God. And it would often describe where he had been buried, in the expectation that the family might want to come and either reclaim or visit the body." Such letters offered Faust "a vivid set of detailed descriptions of the circumstances of death and of the values that surrounded it."

Faust often felt that she was in the presence of family members when reading these letters. "In one striking instance, the man himself wrote the letter," she marvels, "knowing that his father would be, as he put it, 'delighted' to hear from his son. It sounds so strange: why would there be this sense of pleasure? Because it was so much better to know what had happened to your child than not to know, and in about half of Civil War deaths, the families never had any firm information. Something as simple as the 'dog tag,' which did not exist during the Civil War, grew out of the public's recognition that it would no longer tolerate so many anonymous deaths and missing in action."

Even more strikingly, the letter in question is stained with the soldier's own blood. "I sat in the archive, looking at this letter, with a physical part of this man still there before me, and it seemed like a letter that was still living in some sense," Faust remembers.

But dying is only the first of Faust's explorations in the book. "They're all ings—gerunds," she explains. "Dying is first. Killing is second. Burying is third, and on it goes. The logic of this organization is that death requires work. As they looked at a battlefield scattered with dead, soldiers and civilians would say, 'There death has done its work.' But in another sense, they meant the work that death required of them. And so I organized the book around different parts of that work: learning how to die, coming to terms with needing to kill, figuring out how to bury everyone, explaining the meaning of the war—all were at the heart of how I conceptualized this project."

And what about the current U.S. war overseas? "I think there are instructive comparisons, but I would like to leave it to others to think about, about the level of death in the Civil War—620,000 men—and the impact that had for generations afterwards, as compared with the relatively small number of people we're losing in war today—and yet, how torn apart our nation is about it. The book is about the humanity of all of us."