During the Civil War 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. The equivalent proportion of today’s population would be six million. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of the enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual.

Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture reconciled the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, and nurses, of Northerners and Southerners, slaveholders and freed people, of the most exalted and the most humble are brought together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War’s most fundamental and widely shared reality.

DREW GILPIN FAUST is president of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in this role. She is the author of five previous books, including Mothers of Invention. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.