Sunday, January 27, 2008

This Republic of Suffering - Drew Gilpin Faust - Book Review - New York Times

A fascinating take on the spiritual reconstruction of America, and its cultural repercussions:

This Republic of Suffering - Drew Gilpin Faust - Book Review - New York Times: "“The war’s staggering human cost demanded a new sense of national destiny,” Faust, now the president of Harvard University, writes, “one designed to ensure that lives had been sacrificed for appropriately lofty ends.” Frederick Douglass thought freeing the slaves should have provided the “sacred significance” of all that loss. But, Faust continues, “the Dead became what their survivors chose to make them,” and as the decades passed and memories blurred, “assumptions of racial hierarchy would unite whites North and South in a century-long abandonment of the emancipationist legacy.” In the end most Americans of my great-great-grandfather’s generation — and their successors — allowed their shared memories of suffering to “establish sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite.” We might wish, with Frederick Douglass, that they had decided otherwise, but Drew Gilpin Faust’s profoundly moving book helps us understand why they did not."

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