Rehabilitating Bodies
Rehabilitating Bodies
Health, History, and the American Civil War
LISA A. LONG
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2004 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Long, Lisa A.
Rehabilitating bodies : health, history, and the American Civil War / Lisa A. Long.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8122-3748-X (cloth : alk. paper)
1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Historiography. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Health aspects. 3. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Psychological aspects. 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Literature and the war. 5. Ontology. 6. Ontology in literature. 7. Knowledge, Theory of. 8. Knowledge, Theory of, in literature. 9. Body, Human (Philosophy) 10. Body, Human, in literature. I. Title.
| E468.5.L66 2004 | 2003060200 |
973.7—dc22
Contents
Introduction: Year That Trembled and Reel’d beneath Me
1. Doctors’ Bodies: Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and Patient Malingering
2. Dead Bodies: Mourning Fictions and the Corporeity of Heaven
3. Sanitized Bodies: The United States Sanitary Commission and Soul Sickness
4. Experimental Bodies: African American Writers and the Rehabilitation of War Work
5. Soldiers’ Bodies: Historical Fictions and the Sickness of Battle
6. Nursing Bodies: Civil War Women and Postbellum Regeneration
7. Historical Bodies: African American Scholars and the Discipline of History
Epilogue: Conjuring Civil War Bodies
Introduction
Year That Trembled and Reel’d beneath Me
But in silence, in dreams’ projections,While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on,So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand,With hinged knees returning I enter the doors (while for you up there,Whoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart).
—Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser”
On July 21, 1861, hundreds of Washington, D.C., residents packed picnic lunches and headed to a country hillside to watch the first large-scale battle of the Civil War. Able to see little but smoke, spectators soon panicked as the performance on the field threatened those in the audience; shells began to explode around them, and in the hazy stampede of equally frightened, inexperienced Union forces retreating to Washington, soldiers became indistinguishable from civilians. As one agitated Harper’s Weekly observer later explained to shaken Northern readers:
It is impossible yet to tell the story of the day. The newspapers have teemed with differing accounts. Apparently there was victory at hand, if not in possession, when a sudden order to retreat dismayed the triumphant line. The soldiers, who from exhaustion or whatever cause had been sent to the rear, and the teamsters and civilians who hovered along the base of our active line, were struck with terror by a sudden dash of cavalry from the flank. They fled, panic-stricken, in a promiscuous crowd: while the soldiers who were really engaged fell back quietly and in good order. It was the crowd of disengaged soldiers, teamsters, and civilians in the rear who rushed, a panting rabble, to Washington, and who told the disheartening story that flashed over the country at noon on Monday.1
This relatively brief but telling account of the first battle of the Civil War reveals much about the war, though it conveys little information about the details of the military engagement—conventionally thought to be the stuff of Civil War narrative. Rather, the anonymous author introduces the concern that I argue compels subsequent rewritings of the Civil War and that motivates this study: the violently aroused, disordered condition of those who both populate and attempt to tell the “story of the day.” The Harper’s Weekly correspondent (writing under the nom de plume “The Lounger”) insists that it is “impossible” to determine what happened at Bull Run, even as he or she remarks upon the many stories carried in newspapers across the country. Thus, authoritative Civil War narratives are revealed as relative and elusive objects, both engendered and imperiled by the outbreak of hostilities. The qualifier “yet” implies that Civil War writers would eventually recover from the shock of battle and agree upon an accurate outline of the day’s events. However, the journalistic community’s initial inability to agree upon the facts and, then, the distant observer’s difficulty in discerning the “real” story signal the narrative predicament realized in successive tellings of the Civil War. Walt Whitman would later reflect that this battle was lost by “a fiction, or series of fictions” rather than by cowardice or military weakness. It is Whitman’s insistence on the crucial role of the imaginative in propagating Civil War histories, as well as his realization that “battles, and their results, are far more matters of accident than is generally thought,” that makes the Civil War shockingly unreal, unpredictable, and ultimately untellable.2
As much a matter of concern to the Harper’s Weekly observer as fellow journalists’ inability to get their stories straight is the “panting rabble” of impassioned amateurs who scooped the professionals with their “disheartening” tales of the battle. The stories originating in such a throng would surely be as “promiscuous” as the population that produced them: indiscriminate, idiosyncratic, and confused. The proliferation of these personal and supposedly limited experiences of the war would serve only to fragment and muddle, not standardize, war narratives. “The Lounger” promotes the notion that these Civil War stories are unreliable by implying that the tellers clearly are not in their right minds: they are “panic-stricken” and “panting” with “terror” and excitement. This scene of war reveals not only soldiers “disengaged” from the battle at hand but