Civil War In Faust's This Republic Of Suffering

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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 created a “republic of suffering.” “Death had created the modern American Union, not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments.” (p. xiv) The book is structured in eight chapters with the addition of a preface and an epilogue. Faust covers the Civil War by moving through in different chapters how topics of how soldiers died, the…show more content…
In Frederick Douglass’s, The Mission of War, Douglass “insists that in the war his purpose was freedom, but this would prove an unrealized ideal in a nation unwilling to guarantee the equal citizenship on which true liberty must rest. Slaver divided the nation but assumptions of racial hierarchy would unite whites North and South in a century-long abandonment of the emancipationist legacy.”(p. 268) Frederick Douglass idea that granting all slaves freedom would have provided the “sacred significance” of all that have died and been lost. Faust says, “The Dead became what their survivors chose to make them,” (p.269) and as the time passes and memories of stories pasted down from generation to generation, “assumptions of racial hierarchy would unite whites North and South in a century-long abandonment of the emancipationist legacy.” By the end most Americans will have common memories to share of suffering to “establish sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite.”
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  • Civil War In Faust's This Republic Of Suffering

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    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

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