DREW GILPIN FAUST is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Research Professor at Harvard, where she served as president from 2007 to 2018. She is the author of seven books, including This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a National Book Award finalist. This essay is adapted from an anniversary reissue of that book.
Adecade and a half ago, I published This Republic of Suffering, a book about death and the American Civil War. I had been moved to write it after encountering the diaries and letters of southern women, whose voices rang clear and strong across the century and a half that separated us. What concerned them most about the conflict that their husbands, fathers, and brothers had launched was not southern independence or the future of slavery, subjects that have preoccupied historians for more than a century. Nor was it visions of honor and glory. What mattered most to them was death—the loss of relatives, neighbors, and friends. As the war ground on, an unan ticipated and mounting death toll heightened their anxiety and made their fears realities. Death, its proximity and actuality, became the war's most widely shared experience, and not just for the South's slaveholding women, but for all Americans.
Since 2008, an outpouring of new scholarship has elaborated on my book's findings and revised a few of its assumptions. Even our understanding of something as seemingly fundamental as the war's death toll has significantly altered. The effort to capture the meaning of Civil War death by attaching it to a number has persisted since the time of the war itself, as if an accurate statistic could somehow grasp the complexity of otherwise unfathomable loss. Yet given the incompleteness of our sources, the irregularity of recordkeeping on both sides, and
