An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the carnage of the Civil War. During the war, 620,000 soldiers lost their lives; an equivalent proportion of today¿s population would be six million. Explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. Faust describes how a religious culture struggled to reconcile 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, from the north and south, slaveholders and freedpeople are brought together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War¿s most widely shared reality. Illus.