This republic of suffering : death and the American Civil War Drew Gilpin Faust.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [273]-322) and index.

Preface : the work of death -- 1. Dying : "to lay down my life" -- 2. Killing : "the harder courage" -- 3. Burying : "new lessons caring for the dead" -- 4. Naming : "the significant word UNKNOWN" -- 5. Realizing : civilians and the work of mourning -- 6. Believing and doubting : "what means this carnage?" -- 7. Accounting : "our obligations to the dead" -- 8. Numbering : "how many? how many?" -- Epilogue : surviving.

"During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, pondered who should die and under what circumstances, and reconceived its understanding of life after death." "Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, and nurses, of northerners and southerners, slaveholders and freedpeople, of the most exalted and the most humble are brought together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality."--BOOK JACKET.