Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and The American Civil War is an ambitious and thought provoking read. Faust tackles a subject that has not been widely written about: the “death ways” of the American Civil War generation.2
Faust divides her study of the newly transformed ars moriendi into nine areas in the chapters that follow her preface entitled the Work of Death. The actual process of an individual soldier’s death is explained in Dying. The war’s destructive force on its participants and the conditioning of soldiers to kill is retold in Killing; the struggle to provide the dead with acceptable burial in Burying; the challenges in identifying the dead in Naming; the process of mourning and its transformative powers on …show more content…
In their wartime experience, dying became a central preoccupation; for the soldier it “assumed clear preeminence over killing” in his “emotional and moral universe.”6 The soldier needed to be both ready and willing to die; turning to culture, codes of masculinity, patriotism, and religion to fortify himself for that possibility of death.7
War challenged rites and practices that were not to be quickly undertaken, and as many soldiers were killed suddenly in the intense action of battle, their comrades made pains to write condolence letters to the deceased’s loved ones. Seeking to make absent loved ones “virtual witnesses to the dying moments they had been denied,” these soldiers attempted to “mend the fissures war had introduced into the fabric of the Good Death” for the families of the slain.8
Condolence letters usually addressed the deceased’s professions of religion; sudden death robbed many soldiers the opportunity to have “life-defining” deathbed experiences, in which they would otherwise reveal the status of their souls in their last earthly utterances.9 To reassure theses families on the home front that their loved ones would indeed live on in spirit, comrades
Faust divides her study of the newly transformed ars moriendi into nine areas in the chapters that follow her preface entitled the Work of Death. The actual process of an individual soldier’s death is explained in Dying. The war’s destructive force on its participants and the conditioning of soldiers to kill is retold in Killing; the struggle to provide the dead with acceptable burial in Burying; the challenges in identifying the dead in Naming; the process of mourning and its transformative powers on …show more content…
In their wartime experience, dying became a central preoccupation; for the soldier it “assumed clear preeminence over killing” in his “emotional and moral universe.”6 The soldier needed to be both ready and willing to die; turning to culture, codes of masculinity, patriotism, and religion to fortify himself for that possibility of death.7
War challenged rites and practices that were not to be quickly undertaken, and as many soldiers were killed suddenly in the intense action of battle, their comrades made pains to write condolence letters to the deceased’s loved ones. Seeking to make absent loved ones “virtual witnesses to the dying moments they had been denied,” these soldiers attempted to “mend the fissures war had introduced into the fabric of the Good Death” for the families of the slain.8
Condolence letters usually addressed the deceased’s professions of religion; sudden death robbed many soldiers the opportunity to have “life-defining” deathbed experiences, in which they would otherwise reveal the status of their souls in their last earthly utterances.9 To reassure theses families on the home front that their loved ones would indeed live on in spirit, comrades