This Republic of Suffering - Death and the American Civil War

Zusatztext 50708731 Informationen zum Autor DREW GILPIN FAUST was president of Harvard University, where she also holds the Lincoln Professorship in History. Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007, she came to Harvard after twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of five previous books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War , which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery Craven Prize. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Klappentext More than 600!000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering ! Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation! describing how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout! the voices of soldiers and their families! of statesmen! generals! preachers! poets! surgeons! nurses! northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. Preface: The work of death Mortality defines the human condition. “We all have our dead–we all have our Graves,” a Confederate Episcopal bishop observed in an 1862 sermon. Every era, he explained, must confront “like miseries”; every age must search for “like consolation.” Yet death has its discontinuities as well. Men and women approach death in ways shaped by history, by culture, by conditions that vary over time and across space. Even though “we all have our dead,” and even though we all die, we do so differently from generation to generation and from place to place.[1]In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I’s Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century. 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. 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. As the new southern nation struggled for survival against a wealthier and more populous enemy, its death toll reflected the disproportionate strains on its human capital. 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.[2]But these military statistics tell only a part of the story. The war killed civilians as well, as battles raged across farm and field, as encampments of troops spread epidemic disease, as guerrillas ensnared women and even children in violence and reprisals, as draft rioters targeted innocent citizens, as shortages of food in parts of the South brought starvation. No one sought to document these deaths systematically, and no one has devised a method of undertaking a retrospective count. The distinguished Civil War historian James McPherson has estimated that there were fifty thousand civilian deaths during the war, and he has concluded that the overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II. The American Civil War produced carnage that has often been ...

Product details

• Authors: Drew Gilpin Faust
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 06.01.2009
• EAN: 9780375703836
• ISBN: 978-0-375-70383-6
• No. of pages: 368
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 205 mm x 18 mm
• Series: Vintage Civil War Library; Vintage Civil War Library
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Modern era up to 1918; Non-fiction book