Civil War In Faust's This Republic Of Suffering

1123 Words5 Pages
Nothing changes the overall landscape of a country more than the atrocities of war. War and its aftermath are a part of any country’s history, particularly in the United States. One of the more defining and altering moments in the United States’ history occurs between 1861 and 1865 in the Civil War. In This Republic of Suffering, author Drew Gilpin Faust analyzes the war and its immediate and long-term effects after the war’s conclusion. The Civil War changes social customs, family lifestyles, and America’s politics, which are portrayed by the motif of death, harsh imagery, and mournful tones. One reason that America drastically changed after the war is the constant motif of death. Before the war, volunteers for the North and the South lined up willing to sacrifice their lives for their respective causes. They also grew up in an atmosphere that possessed few rules regarding how human life on earth should end. This philosophy was called “the Good Death” (Faust, 7). The Good Death stated that the dying man should be close to his family, settle all affairs on earth, and…show more content…
The sorrow they experienced even made a woman of Mississippi named Kate Foster “afraid to love too dearly to anyone now” (145). Despair made women unhappy and angry, because they could not understand how the men they had loved and cherished for years could suddenly be taken away from them. Harsh resentments toward the North and the South were only increased after the war, in part because of the disproportion of burials. Many burial programs were created in the North to relocate and lay their soldiers to rest. However, many Confederate soldiers were left to rot, which they assumed the South would handle with their own resources (225). The gap between the two sections only grew wider, and a mournful tone showed their relationship got even
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    This Republic Of Suffering Drew Gilpin Faust’s book, This Republic Of Suffering purpose is to inform the readers how the death toll from the Civil war effected the soldiers and nation as a whole. The authors claim to take away from is how “between 1861 and 1865 and into the decades that followed Americans undertook a kind of work that history has not adequately understood or recognized.”(p.xv) What Faust thesis is that during the time period of the Civil War death has transformed the nation and

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