In the Preface, Faust frames her book as one that is all about death—its many faces and causes, and its inevitability. The book is also, the author says, about how the American Civil War created ways of speeding up that inevitability.

In a blizzard of figures, Faust lists the number of American dead in the Civil War and then compares it with the death toll of all other American wars. The difference in this war was that the death was so much greater and so much more widespread; it amounted to shared suffering on an epic scale. Faust notes that this shared suffering translated to a shared responsibility of being ready to embrace death, no matter what form it took or the speed with which it came. She writes,

Human beings are rarely simply passive victims of death. They are actors even if they are the diers; they prepare for death, imagine it, risk it, endure it, seek to understand it. And if they are survivors, they must assume new identities established by their persistence in face of others’ annihilation (155).

In the closing argument of the Preface, the author challenges readers to consider how those who survived the Civil War had to re-examine their ideals in the face of so much death and grief.