This republic of suffering - Drew Gilpin Faust

More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent
proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering,
Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual
lives but the life of the nation, describing how the survivors managed on a practical
level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented
carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and
their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners
and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's
most fundamental and widely shared reality.