Rehabilitating the Civil War
Unable to still the shaking ground or subsequently to reverse the damage done by the cataclysmic event, Civil War writers increasingly turned their attentions toward the unbalanced bodies that occupied this martial landscape. Indeed, upon closer inspection, tectonic imagery is disturbingly equivocal, for the difference between the foundational reformations of the war (evident in my study in evolving medical, historical, and psychological notions of selfhood and citizenship) and individual diseases became confused: Did the natural calamity of the Civil War produce diseased individuals, or did inherently diseased individuals produce the Civil War? Unwilling to address this chicken and egg conundrum—insisting in their volcanic imagery that the former was true, even as their texts subtly suggested that the latter was the case—writers and thinkers set their sights on the seemingly possible task of fixing bodies.
I use the term rehabilitate in this study because it suggests the many ways that Civil War writers attempt to fix the unnerving changes of the Civil War. In modern parlance, we use the term rehabilitate most often to connote a physical or psychological return to good health. Following the lead of medical writers, novelists, historians, journalists, and memoirists sought not only to stabilize a martial citizenry disturbingly out of kilter but also to sustain the revolutionary changes (i.e., emancipation) that filled the breach. Rehabilitate also means “to reestablish on a firm or solid basis.” Thus Civil War writers and thinkers sought to secure bodies by making individuals and the events in which they participated predictable, unalterable, and static. As coverage of the First Battle of Bull Run postulated, fixed bodies could ensure definite stories, and rehabilitative Civil War texts offered the promise of the converse as well: fixed stories might produce definite bodies.
It is on this front that the disciplines of medicine and history—both emerging as discrete, scientific professions in the war-era and postbellum periods—colluded, as their practitioners developed strategies to narrate and organize radically particular bodily experiences. Disciplining the bodies and behaviors of both the professionals and the subjects of their study, history and medicine offered the possibility of Civil War rehabilitation. Let me clarify that although I invoke medicine and history here, I do not intend to chart their disciplinary developments per se. Rather, I contend that the basic questions of corporeality, narratability, and knowledge that generally troubled nineteenth-century representations of the Civil War simultaneously dictated the evolving disciplinary practices and narrative strategies of historians and doctors. Both history and medicine are premised on the existence of a corporeal and often critical reality that their practitioners cannot know fully. Yet the professional’s disciplinary mission remains to access what he or she can and to contribute to totalizing, restorative narratives of human experience crafted from fragmentary knowledge of individual bodies and behaviors. History and medicine gained power in the war-era and postbellum periods precisely because they were compelled by the epistemological limits of unstable bodies.
War writers precede Michel Foucault in their keen awareness of the volcanic nature of the epistemes that serve to stabilize modern Western disciplinary culture.9 At the heart of the scientific method crucial to both professions is a pose of stability and objectivity gained through adherence to regulated protocols of study. Both physical bodies and historical artifacts became objects to be scrutinized, tested, and then interpreted by the trained professional. Indeed, this project charts how physical bodies became historical artifacts for writers of the Civil War, making healing narratives contingent on stable, rehabilitated bodies and vice versa. However, investigations of the Civil War reveal not only how bodies are bound by disciplines such as medicine and history but also how the internal features and forces of bodies and psyches might be theorized.10 Civil War texts so thoroughly enmeshed in the politics of these emerging disciplines assume that although knowledge of bodies, historical or not, cannot be comprehensive, those bodies are comprehensible.
The practice of professional historians in the postbellum era speaks to the correspondence between the two disciplines and their essential connection to matters of the Civil War. As one Gilded Age historian contended, historical seminars functioned like “laborator[ies] of scientific truth” where specimens were passed about to be examined. Another scholar of the era hoped that the scientific historian of the future would work “like the anatomist, who cuts through this sensual beauty to find beyond, in the secrets of its interior organization, beauty a thousand times superior.”11 Here the male historian believes in the existence of conventionally feminized, sublime knowledge; after all, the ultimate end of scientific pursuit is complete knowledge and, consequently, complete stability. It is not surprising that Civil War writers and thinkers would exploit this emerging scientific rhetoric in hopes of settling unsettled historical bodies. If one followed strict rules regarding the handling and interpretation of specimens (whether material remnants of people’s lives or bodies themselves), these new scientists believed one would be able to reproduce results, and it is that reproducability that ensured accurate history, healed bodies, and secure self-knowledge.
Yet as I’ve begun to suggest, Civil War bodies seemed adamantly diseased, that is, unreceptive to disciplinary regimes of soma or text. Given that medical discourse revealed the pathologies of the bodies producing historical and medical narratives, Civil War texts concomitantly promote and undermine the scientific basis of such textual productions. Concern with fixing biological origins became the bailiwick of both professions, as identifying a more rational and dispassionate—in short, a healthier—race of historians and doctors seemed the most expedient means of ensuring the validity of both history and medicine. Just as scientific method galvanized the modern historical profession, history was crucial to the development of biological and medical sciences in that it provided a narrative template that chronologically organized human bodies, actions, and responses that were so spectacularly disordered.12 In medical science, postbellum doctors transformed evolutionary history into genetic immutability: for example, white women were forever weak because of their wombs; African American men and women were perpetually childlike because of their small skulls and brains.13 Scientific historians of the nineteenth century were similarly obsessed with national origins, a preoccupation that led to racist and nativist efforts to imagine the most eugenically fit American pedigree. It is widely accepted that white postbellum Civil War historians, Northern and Southern, predicated national reconciliation on the regions’ shared acceptance of new evolutionary theories of racism.14 Thus, for many, historical rehabilitation of the Civil War was founded on the unchanging degeneracy of African American bodies.15
Given the primacy of war-era and postbellum corporeal scientific praxis, it is no surprise that the discourse of bodies proves foundational in renderings of the Civil War. After all, bodies matter in that real people lived and died during the Civil War, and their bodies bore the wounds of the sectional conflict. As Elaine Scarry explains, “What matters (what signifies, what has standing, what counts) has substance: mattering is the impingement of a thing’s substance on whatever surrounds it.” 16 Though the trauma may be incommunicable, the matter of those bodies makes the war real on some basic level. This insistence on the legibility of bodily matters is at the core of Civil War rehabilitation. At the same time, Civil War writers insist that bodies don’t matter, although such a claim may seem counterintuitive. After all, their texts are full of bodies: nervous bodies, hungry bodies, enslaved bodies, grief-riven bodies, mutilated bodies, dead bodies. The writers I treat here are obsessed with the matter of bodies, minutely detailing their physical afflictions and their emotional responses to the conflict. And yet they despair of ever being able to firmly fix how others or even they themselves feel or to determine