Lincoln's Birthday

Abraham Lincoln was born 200 years ago today, and I thought I'd take that anniversary as an opportunity to make a book recommendation. Everyone here should read Harvard President Drew Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. I know a book about American's understanding of death is a pretty grim thing to recommend around Valentine's Day. But while This Republic of Suffering is partially a cultural history, addressing things like the American conception of a "good death," and the war's influence on Walt Whitman. But it's also an extremely important book about how the federal government came to operate like it did, and how the war shaped public expectations of the government.

Going into the civil war, the federal government (and the Confederate government for that matter) didn't have a formal system for cataloging casualties or informing families of deaths or injuries. There were no government cemeteries, something that contributed to mass burials or abandonment of bodies, and in the South, widespread mutilation of the Union dead, especially after Appomattax Courthouse. Families who wanted to know if their loved ones were dead had to go to battlefields themselves, or rely on a number of mutual aid societies. A whole industry rose up around selling soldiers means of identifying themselves in case they were killed--there were no dog tags.

The mass scale of death during the Civil War meant that the informal structures set up to deal with wartime death were no longer remotely adequate. At one newly established federal cemetery, the War Department Quartermaster estimated that 54 percent of the bodies in it had been identified, and that was a fairly good rate. But the government got involved because citizens demanded that there be an official response to their anguish, that something more be done to confirm that their loved ones were dead. The Civil War is a turning point for many reasons--lethality of combat, the cultural differences between North and South, etc. But Faust does a terrific job of explaining how it also changed how citizens view their government. It's well worth a read.