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Yet just as the black experience of Civil War fighting encapsulated the social direction that the war was taking, so too did the black experience with Civil War death. African Americans risked their lives on many more fronts than did white Yankees or Rebels. They took flight from plantations in the face of double-barreled shotguns, and they could be hunted down in the woods and the swamps by armed Home Guards. They entered Union lines and contraband camps--men, women, and children among them--in the many hundreds, and lived in conditions that bred life-threatening illnesses. Those who enlisted in the Union Army died in dramatic numbers, overwhelmingly of disease. Of the 180,000 who served at some point in the war, one in five would perish.
Among the riskiest activities in which black soldiers engaged was retrieving and burying the Union war dead. When the war ended, they were heavily involved not only in the army of occupation that began to "reconstruct" the former Confederate South, but also in a massive reburial program that the federal government undertook. That program, Faust remarks, like Reconstruction more broadly, "represented an extraordinary departure" and "an indication of the very different sort of nation that had emerged as a result of civil war."
Although This Republic of Suffering would seem to be focused chiefly on wartime death, many of its most arresting and brilliantly conceived interventions illuminate the ways in which the Civil War dead reshaped the consciousness, the practices, and the structures of postwar America. With great insight and subtlety, Faust demonstrates how mass death raised profound spiritual and intellectual questions for many Americans, the pursuit of which led in a number of directions: to serious doubts about God's benevolence and agency; to new ideas of the relation of heaven and earth; to crises of belief that pointed, in the writings of Emily Dickinson, Ambrose Bierce, and Herman Melville, to modernist disillusionment; and, especially among defeated white southerners, to religious and political energies that simultaneously anticipated the emergence of the Bible Belt and promoted the Cult of the Lost Cause.
