Volume 55, Number 6 · April 17, 2008
Dark Victories
By James M. McPherson
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust
Knopf, 346 pp., $27.95
Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death
by Mark S. Schantz
Cornell University Press, 245 pp., $24.95
Americans on the eve of the Civil War were no strangers to death. Life expectancy at birth was forty years, largely because of an infant and child mortality rate nearly ten times as great as today. Most parents had buried at least one child; few young people reached adulthood without the loss of siblings or cousins. Many husbands grieved for wives who had died in childbirth. Fearful epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and other diseases periodically carried off thousands in the antebellum era. The scourge of 'consumption'—tuberculosis—blighted the existence of many in middle age as well as those who had managed to live beyond it.
Review, 3071 words
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