This Republic of Suffering

Peter:  If hindsight is 20/20, then foresight can often be flat-out blind.  Such was the case in the years, months and weeks leading up to the American Civil War.  One South Carolina senator was so confident that war would not break out, that he promised to drink all the blood that might be shed as a result of secession.

Ed:  Four years and more than 600,000 deaths later, that war finally came to an end.  More Americans had been killed than had died in all the nations’ wars combined, from the Revolution to the early years of Vietnam.  The dead had amounted to nearly 2% of the nation’s population, the equivalent of 6 million people today.  Last year, historian Drew Gilpin Faust published a devastating book about the consequences of all that dying, called “This Republic of Suffering, Death in the American Civil War.”  She begins her book with that vignette about the South Carolina senator, and goes on to talk about how death on that scale not only created many of our modern funeral practices, but also altered fundamental notions about group and national identity.  I recently had a chance to speak with her about her book.

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Ed:  Drew, welcome to BackStory.

Drew Faust: Thank you Ed, for inviting me, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Ed:  Now you talk about the idea of the good death, which is the way that people in mid-19^th century America imagined the way the things were supposed to be.  Could you tell us about that a little bit?

Drew Faust: The idea of the good death was not a new one in the 19^th century.  There were books as early as the 1500s about good dying, holy dying, the good death; how to learn to die was something you could find advice books about.  By the 19^th century, by the time of the early days of the war, this had evolved into a widely-shared set of cultural assumptions that I found very similar North and South, across different religious denominations, and really, across the United States, as a whole.  What it consisted of, by the mid-19^th century, was a set of precepts about what it took to die well.  One precept was you needed well was to be ready to die, and willing to die, because how you acted in your last moments would, in many ways, reflect what your afterlife might be like.  You prepared for that moment for your whole existence.  Another aspect of the good death, is that your good death was a witnessed death.  It was a death among loved ones, it was a death at a home.  I think the Victorian domesticity of the 19th century had invaded this notion of the good death.  I’m sure you’ve seen many portraits or drawings of someone dying with all kinds of people standing around them, and that was so that your loved ones could be certain that you had died a good death, and therefore, they would know that they’d be reunited with you in heaven, but also, you could give them important last words, important messages as you parted from them.

Ed:  It sounds like the Civil War was bound to challenge all those things as people died so often alone, so often instantly, so often without time for preparation, so I can see why the war would be a crises in the notion of the good death.

Drew Faust: That’s absolutely right.

Ed:  Could you have a good death on the battlefield?

Drew Faust: I found many instances of soldiers trying to have good deaths on the battlefield, trying to replicate some of the precepts of the good death.  One of the most striking and poignant was soldiers who surrounded themselves with photographs of their family as they were dying.  That, to me, represented an effort to replicate the death bed at home with the loved ones standing around.  Soldiers also talked about anticipating death the night before battles, they would right into their diaries or in letters to loved ones, that they were ready, that they were prepared.  I also found many instances of military hospitals where soldiers turned to nurses or doctors to try to set up a version of the good death at home, and nurses and doctors were often willing participants, even to the point of, in the case of a delirious soldier, for example, letting him think that a nurse was his sister or mother, because they too shared this common attitude about the importance of the good death and what a good death comprised.

Ed:  Now, of course, only a very small portion of soldiers’ bodies would have been shipped back home, so whose job was it to bury Civil War soldiers on the battlefield?

Drew Faust: One of the most extraordinary things I discovered, and maybe other people took it for granted, but I did not until I started this project, was that there was no formal identification procedure for soldiers. They didn’t wear dog tags and there was no formal notification of next of kin when soldiers were killed or wounded.  This all happened more or less informally through your comrades writing to your wife or mother to say, “I stood by so and so as he died, and this is how it happened,” and often trying to communicate to the mother or the wife or the sister, whoever you were writing to, that this soldier had indeed died a good death, trying to put the circumstances of the soldier’s death into the framework of the ideas of the good death.  So that was an important part of the whole communication system, this series of condolence letters that were really letters informing as much as consoling families.

Ed:  Well there must have been enormous numbers of men who were just lost, that no one ever really knew when and where they died.

Drew Faust: Probably about half of the Civil War dead remained unidentified.

Ed:  So how did the people back home live with that lack of knowledge?

Drew Faust: I find that stunning.  I’ve never been able, since I began doing the research on this book, to think about the late-19^th century in the same way, because if you do think about it in the context of this information, it means that the United States was a nation of mourners, it was a nation of people who were left with incomplete stories about the lives of people who mattered enormously to them.  We’ve seen in our own lifetimes the strength of the MIA movement after Vietnam and the inability of individuals to grapple with not knowing, of not being able to find out information and even recover the bodies of their loves ones.  But hundreds of thousands of families were in that situation after the Civil War.

Ed:  Did they devise means to live with that lack of knowledge?

Drew Faust: There were a number of ways that people tried to cope.  One was religion, and the consolation that eventually you would know what had happened to this person because you would be reunited with them in heaven.  Another dimension of coping with this very difficult situation was the growth and interest in spiritualism, which said you didn’t have to wait until an afterlife, indeed, you could, under certain circumstances, actually communicate with the dead loved person, and he was not gone, he was just around a corner or behind a veil.  So I think belief was a very important way of coping.  I think another way of coping was memorials, and those memorials were often tangible, physical embodiments of memory that in many cases took the place of an actual body that you might be able to bury. Instead you could erect a monument or in some other way have a physical remembrance of the person whose body you were unable to reclaim and inter.

Ed:  Now, it strikes me that maybe by the 1880s and 1890s, people seemed to have been forgetting how terrible the Civil War was, that the memorialization seems to take on more of an abstract quality as people passed on.  Does it seem to you that Americans seemed to want to forget about the suffering of the war?

Drew Faust: I think that was probably true. When I started my project, one of the questions that was foremost in my mind was how is it that we have seen WWI as the turning point in the introductions of the real horror of modern warfare and mass loss into human existence, and yet if you go back and look at the Civil War, for the South certainly where the loss was enormous because of the smaller scale of the southern population, and because so much of the war took place on southern soil, and arguably for the United States as a whole, the Civil War should have been that moment of the horror of mass killing and the horror of such a level of loss, and so I’ve been puzzled by how, in many ways, this experience of war was something we shied away from, that we didn’t entirely metabolize into our understanding of what it means to be human, of what it means to be able to kill others with the instruments of technology on a mass scale.  And so questions, issues were raised by the Civil War, but they weren’t fully engaged, I think, until we had another mass killing in the early years of the 20^th century.

Ed:  Well, thank you so much, Drew, for joining us and helping us understand this really intractable and, yet, enduring problem in human life.

Drew Faust: Thanks, Ed.

Ed:  Drew Gilpin Faust is the author of “This Republic of Suffering, Death in the American Civil War.”  She’s a Professor of History, and in her spare time, also the President of Harvard University.  We’ll post an extended version of our interview on our website, www.BackStoryRadio.org.

Brian:  I got to tell you guys, that interview has changed the way I think about what we’ve been saying about death, you know, a lot of what we’ve had to say is American’s deny it, we ignore it, we hide it, but half the people not identified and all those family members for a lifetime living with that unresolved issue.  That means they’re living with death just about every day, and that really changes my conception of the 30 years after the Civil War.

Peter:  But Brian, I’d suggest that the notion of the good death that Drew introduced early on is very important.  There’s an element of denial in that notion of the good death, and I think it culminates in reunion and reconciliation in the years after the war between northerners and southerners, and it does involve extraordinary denial, because what you’re bring to the fore is not the senseless slaughter, but rather the heroic lives of the brothers who destroyed each other and ravaged the land, and in a way, that’s not the same thing as modern mass wars.

Brian:  Nor is building these stone monuments the same thing as standing around your relatives’ bed.

Ed: I wouldn’t want to say that things are abstracted is somehow wrong, I don’t think that people can live with . . .

Peter:  It’s a way of dealing.

Ed: In the same way as people try to live with loss by letting it slowly fade away, I guess, so do cultures, and ours is no exception.

Brian:  Well, there’s nothing abstract about my producer telling me we have to take another break.  But don’t go away.  When we get back, we’ll be hearing from some of you listeners.

Peter:  If you’d like to be a caller on a future episode of BackStory, have a look at our website to see the topics we’re working on.  We’re at BackStoryRadio.org.  We’ll be back on a minute.

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