Figure 1. “Retreat of Our Troops from Bull Run by Moonlight, Colonel Blenker’s Brigade Covering.” Harper’s Weekly, August 10, 1861. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Special Collections Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In order to dramatize the incoherence of individual and social bodies, Civil War writers turn again and again to the conflict’s appalling carnage. In this way, Civil War texts keep readers continuously and painfully alert to the vexed nature of the corporeal knowledge so soon embodied in the trope of the war. In yet another version of the fallout from the First Battle of Bull Run, Harper’s Weekly correspondent Henry J. Raymond encounters one retreating soldier, Quartermaster Stetson, a member “of the Fire Zouaves, who told [him], bursting into tears, that his regiment had been utterly cut to pieces, that the Colonel and Lieutenant-Colonel were both killed, and that our troops had actually been repulsed.”3 Although Stetson does not relate the details of the battle, he does bear witness to its aftermath, most notably the dismembered corps of his regimental body. The image of the butchered corps, like the promiscuous, fleeing rabble, allies the business of Civil War with an essential lack of corporeal integrity: both social bodies are volatile and discontinuous, always in the process of vanishing before the viewer’s eyes. Significantly, Raymond turns his reader’s attention toward Stetson’s individual body, solidifying a connection between emotional and corporeal pain. The Zouave’s surprising storm of tears is meant to register the incommunicable trauma of his corps’ physical destruction. Yet Stetson’s overpowering, wordless emotion does not make his or his fellows’ pain communicable; rather, it makes the teller’s body and his narrative as unreliable as the dead bodies his tears are meant to indicate.
Subsequent Civil War writers affirmed that physical and emotional explosions of the sort that overwhelmed this one soldier and galvanized the fleeing crowd of which he was a member produced aftershocks that reverberated through representations of the war. Much like these Harper’s Weekly correspondents, many who wrote about the Civil War strove above all to understand and convey the material changes the war wrought in individual and national lives, to simply state “what happened.” Indeed, Civil War writers repeatedly employ a meticulous and scientific accounting of those changes in efforts to make sense of the broken bodies and emotional outbursts that defy reason. In this way the Civil War has emerged as a powerful cultural hermeneutic that expresses not only altered social, political, and economic relationships but also an emergent self-consciousness, an impression of metaphysical distortion that lingers long after the war. Writers have attempted to convey the era’s essence through complex and ultimately indeterminate investigations of the proximities and distances between disciplined troops and panting rabble, between the Zouave’s butchered corps and his emotional outburst—between stolid corporeality and unnerving incorporeality.
The texts I have gathered in this project insist on the intimate relationship between the Civil War and a variety of invisible wounds, illnesses, and infirmities that beset modern Americans throughout the nineteenth century: nerve injury, neurasthenia, hysteria, hyperaesthesia, phantom limb pain, and degeneracy are just a few. Twentieth-century additions to this list would include post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, and stress. Such disorders strained, and continue to strain, the boundaries between organic and environmental illness, and physical and mental well-being. They are inextricable from the social diseases—malignant racism and sexism, for example—which, most scholars agree, constituted nineteenth-century medical discourse and infected the culture-at-large. Because whites and African Americans, both men and women, were situated in drastically different ways in biological, historical, and medical discourses of health before the war, their relationships to the already existing corporeal rifts the Civil War magnified were not the same. For example, although African American writers were as enmeshed in the discourses of health and history as their white counterparts, their texts rarely explore battlefield injuries in much depth. Instead, they focus on the war’s power to both express and mitigate the racial “degeneracy” that supposedly made African Americans fractions of men and women. Yet in all cases the Civil War has been written as a cataclysmic event felt in, displayed by, and accounted for with mysteriously ailing bodies. As the Harper’s Weekly articles exemplify, narrative anxiety stems from consistent unease with writers’ and protagonists’ bodies, demonstrating how neither the modern protocols of health nor history are able to capture the constantly moving and multiple dimensions of aberrant forms. To be human and hurting is, nominally, to be diseased in these texts. And diseased, unstable bodies—bodies traumatized not only by postwar injury, illness, and grief but also by newly racialized and gendered political and biological truisms—provided at best a shifting foundation for American history and identity.
In efforts to materialize and communicate the illusory and idiosyncratic nature of a reality founded on the perceptions of diseased human bodies, many writers analogized the war as a volcano or earthquake. As my subtitle from Walt Whitman’s 1865 paean to the war, Drum Taps, implies, the Civil War was a time that “trembled and reel’d beneath” many Americans.4 Whitman was not the only writer to employ tectonic imagery to convey the instability the war experience epitomized. In perhaps the nineteenth century’s best-known Civil War novel, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), John William De Forest writes, “No volcanic eruption rends a mountain without stirring the existence of the mountain’s mice.” Writing in 1904, Rebecca Harding Davis still noted that “to the easy-going millions, busied with their farms or shops, the onrushing disaster was as inexplicable as an earthquake.”5 Tectonic imagery was useful because volcanoes and earthquakes were foreign to most Americans’ experiences during the war era.6 At the same time, these representations made the cataclysm of the war a natural, enduring phenomenon. The trauma of war revealed the fault lines that always lay beneath the substratum of American culture and identity. Thus the quaking imagery usefully absolved individuals of responsibility for the slaughters of the Civil War, for such seismic events are beyond anyone’s control. Most important, volcanoes and earthquakes kept readers ever mindful of the fully physical disorientation of the war. No one near the site of a quake or eruption is exempt from feeling its effects. Even those quite far off from the event feel the ground shake or find their view obscured by smoke and ash.
Yet volcanic eruptions do not merely shake the ground, but they also force fissures in Earth’s crust. The Civil War is not only the trembling terra firma beneath our feet, but also the gap left behind; it is the silent space between health and disease, freedom and slavery, past and future, reality and perception. The long-standing belief that the “real” war remains untold, first penned by Whitman in 1882 and reiterated in Daniel Aaron’s influential The Unwritten War (1973), reflects the fact that the regional conflict was surreal for so many.7 Mountains made up of volcanic detritus may form over the site of such bewildering eruptions; indeed, this book argues that the asserted coherence of the Civil War and the mountain of scholarly and artistic attention it has elicited have made the war into a remarkably stable and powerful cultural trope. But I am also compelled by the bizarre chasms beneath the volcano, the hollow chambers that we have worked so hard to habile—to clothe, to cover over. These hollowed spaces have become hallowed ground, venerated and protected because of their supposedly sacred nature. And the timeless “abysms of New World humanity” beneath (to borrow Whitman’s language) hold not only a calamitous past but also the promise of an equally earth-shattering future.8 These past, present, and future moments