The American Spectator

p>That quote illustrates one strength of the book — its extensive use of passages from letters and diaries of those who lived, on and off the battlefields, during the Civil War. Susannah Hampton wrote to a Hospital Directory in Philadelphia two months after Gettysburg, br> /p>

will you please to inform me at your earliest convenience whether my son Joseph H. Hampton a member of company A 72 regiment N. Y. State vols Excelsior is alive or dead if alive and wounded please be so kind as to state what his wounds are and where he lies and if cared for and if Dead Oh pray let me know it and relieve my anxiety…I have heard all kinds of rumors about him and his miseries until they have left me in a state bordering on phrensy.

br> The postwar attempt to account for and bury all the Union dead, including the establishment of national military cemeteries, changed the nation. Faust explains that just executing America’s obligations “to the dead and their mourners required a vast expansion of the federal budget and bureaucracy and a reconceptualization of the government’s role.”

In This Republic of Suffering (the phrase is Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmstead’s) the author reminds us of the terrible uniqueness of the Civil War. If she at times seems incredulous at the fervor of the religious faith of our Civil War ancestors (while assuming that her readers are not believers in an afterlife), at least she respects their views of their own lives and many, many deaths.