This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

Faust includes statistics about the numbers of dead, dying, and diseased throughout the narrative. Here, in the last chapter, this data gets more attention. She writes, “In face of the inadequacy of words, counting seemed a way to grasp the magnitude of sorrow, to transcend individual bereavement in order to grapple with the larger meaning of loss for society and nation” (3949-51).

One of the difficulties involved in this counting was that arithmetic was not yet commonplace nor necessary for much of the population. Once the idea of statistics and the possibility of reporting those numbers caught on, it offered a modicum of control amid chaos, a life raft in a sea of despair. Counting—of anything—gave people something to do to try to make sense of the senseless deaths and killing. Yet in Walt Whitman’s words, the dead were “countless.” This was true for a variety of reasons. One was the sheer enormity of the task at hand. The number of dead that had to be identified, tracked, and dispatched to parts known or unknown was overwhelming. Another reason was that armies didn’t exactly prioritize such things. Faust writes, “At the end of an engagement, commanders usually had more compelling concerns than compiling lists of casualties” (3972-73).