Culling hospital records, the letters of physicians, and soldiers’ diaries, as well as accounts of wartime insanity, “battlefield anxiety,” malingering, self-wounding, vagabondage, and suicide, scholars have found clear expressions of acute, war-induced mental and nervous suffering among Civil War soldiers and veterans. The symptom profiles described by members of the protopsychiatric community in the court files, local newspapers, and medical records bear considerable resemblance to the posttraumatic psychopathologies of a century later and include severe and persistent psychological problems, such as anxiety, depression, and flashbacks. These were often accompanied by suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence. Patient diaries unearthed by Dean,22 which often stretch across many years, are particularly moving.
One Confederate soldier recalled the scene at Gettysburg of thousands of his comrades “about to face death and the awful shock of battle.” Another Union soldier, Pvt. Wilbur Fisk, registered in a letter dated May 9, 1864, “the terrible nervous exhaustion of fighting.” Officers were not exempt from these experiences. The future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr was a member of the 20th Massachusetts Regiment, which had engaged in much hand-to-hand fighting after the autumn of 1861, and Holmes himself was wounded 3 times. Near his breaking point on June 24, 1864, a young Holmes, wrote from the killing fields of northern Virginia to his parents back home: “These last few days have been very bad. Many a man has gone crazy since this campaign begun [sic] from the terrible pressures on mind and body… I hope to pull through but I don’t know. Doubt demoralizes me as it does any nervous man. I cannot now endure the labors and hardships of the line.”29
Interestingly, the most common diagnosis assigned to patients at this time was “nostalgia,” a nontechnical term that can be traced back to the Napoleonic Wars. A kind of acute homesickness, nostalgia encompassed a variety of symptoms—from memory disorders and disorientation to a pathological longing to return home.30 This “diagnosis” was most often applied to younger soldiers from agrarian America, many of whom had never traveled beyond their own state or township before the outbreak of hostilities.
In the Civil War era, doctors, victims, and their families lacked the all-important concept of psychosomatic causation and a workable diagnostic vocabulary to comprehend these symptoms or the knowledge to treat them. The specter of a loss of willpower—that quintessential Victorian faculty reinforced by fears of unmanliness—further complicated the situation.28 As a consequence, those affected were considered to be a social problem and as such have largely been lost to medical history until 20th-century American wars attuned a later generation of observers to their existence.
New studies focus on male and female trauma
Historians’ recent documentations about trauma in wartime situations have necessarily focused on male psychiatric victims. One benefit of this is its elucidation of male sex as an operative factor in psychiatric history, which is a welcome counterbalance to the customary overemphasis on the past “female maladies” of hysteria and neurasthenia.11,28 But what role do women play in the new studies of historical trauma?
To date, the most powerful application of trauma theory to women’s history may be a brilliant doctoral dissertation by lawyer-historian Lisa Cardyn. Following closely on 2 densely documented articles, in 2003 Cardyn completed a 500-page dissertation at Yale University, “Sexualized Racism/Gendered Violence: Trauma and the Body Politic in the Reconstruction South.”31-34 Following the Civil War, former Confederate white supremacists founded numerous terrorist organizations, of which the Klu Klux Klan was the most notorious. These organizations sought to reverse the progressive goals of the Emancipation Proclamation. Cardyn discovered the sexualized character of countless acts of violence that were inflicted by these groups on freed African Americans and at times on their white allies. Klan sexual violence included stripping, whipping, gang rape, lynching, genital torture and mutilation, and the castration of women and men. Sexual trauma, both its threat and practice, became a widespread facet of terror and intimidation that was intended to prevent the attainment of legally mandated equality in the post–Civil War South.
