Challenging History

Right now she's talking about a letter she came across while researching "This Republic of Suffering." In it, a soldier who knows death is near tells his father the news.

Holding it, Faust felt as if she were time-traveling.

"You can see the bloodstains," she says. "To have James Montgomery telling me that he's dying, and to see part of his body essentially in that letter -- it was very moving." But Montgomery's choice of words was an intellectual revelation as well.

"I know you would be delighted to read a word from your dying son," he wrote.

Today, we recoil at that "delighted." But as Faust explains, the 19th-century notion of the "good death" emphasized the importance of the dying person's last words. Because Civil War soldiers couldn't die at home, surrounded by family -- perhaps half of those killed never even had their bodies identified -- Montgomery assumed his letter would be seen as a rare blessing.

In the 21st century, we "shy away from death," she says, and we tend to think of a good death as a sudden one. Not so in the 19th century. Dying well meant having time to assess your spiritual state and say goodbye -- which is difficult to do if you're killed in battle.

What's more, there were so many dying: some 620,000 soldiers in four years. As a percentage of population, Faust says, that's "the equivalent of 6 million Americans today."

How could the culture not be changed?

Looking at the war through this seemingly simple frame -- death -- Faust writes about how soldiers rationalized killing and coped with the need to bury the slain. By the time the fighting stopped at Gettysburg, she reports, "an estimated six million pounds of human and animal carcasses lay strewn across the field in the summer heat."

She describes the desperate attempts of families to track down their dead, and the trouble they had working through their grief when bodies were not found. She tells of the entrepreneurial rapacity of embalmers, who'd collect unidentified corpses from battlefields and display them in store windows to advertise their booming trade.

"It's impossible to read this book and hang on to romantic assumptions about the Civil War," says University of Virginia historian Gary Gallagher.

Columbia's Eric Foner has reservations about the way Faust downplays political meaning. But framing the war as she does "is quite original," Foner says. "And given that there are X number of thousands of books on the Civil War, that's an accomplishment."