I work under the assumption that bodies matter to the Civil War—they just matter differently from what is traditionally thought to be the case. As Judith Butler suggests in her exploration of the discursive limits of “sex,” such “unsettling of ‘matter’ can be understood as initiating new possibilities, new ways for bodies to matter.” As I will explain at length, the unsettling of bodily matters during the Civil War created a liberatory climate for many. However, to “problematize the matter of bodies may entail an initial loss of epistemological certainty.”17 And the rehabilitative disciplines of history and medicine emerged precisely to comfort in the face of such loss. The prefix re in rehabilitation presumes an originary state of bodily habiliment that marks the epistemological solidity of health and of history. That crucial re ensures a preceding authenticity, promising that we can get back to an essential wholeness. Thus the disciplines of health and history assume that the bodies/documents that mark the existence of a disordering event are incontrovertible, entities merely awaiting retrieval. As one recent defender of history against the encroachment of postmodern theory insists, historians have always known that they can “see the past only ‘through a glass, darkly.’” However, such accessions do not challenge the basic notion of scientific discovery, which relies upon the belief that knowledge is preexisting, that historical bodies are “entirely independent of the historian,” waiting for him or her to simply stumble upon them.18 I find that those who write of the Civil War during the nineteenth century—indeed, those transcribing their reactions even as they stand in its midst and suffer its pains—find the Civil War just as elusive as those who still seek to know it now. These Civil War writers have no sure sense of the real that seemingly materializes before them or of the accuracy of the documents they produce while the war is raging. A history founded on the expressions of bodies is by some definitions an “ambulant form,” for “the body is at best like something, but it never is that something.”19 Complete recoveries of health or history seem impossible in such Civil War texts—even to those who believe they are fully engaged in acts of recovery.
To illustrate, let me briefly turn to two rehabilitative texts: one historical, the other imaginative, but both intent upon the Civil War’s fundamental relationship to invisible ills and dead bodies. Attempting to document regimental losses three decades after the cessation of hostilities in his military history, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War (1889), Civil War veteran William F. Fox writes, “The bloody laurels for which a regiment contends will always be awarded to the one with the longest role honor. Scars are the true evidence of wounds and the regimental scars can be seen only in the records of its casualties.”20 Here Fox links the number of dead sustained in battle to the “bloody laurels” of victory. Thus, intangible characteristics such as “honor” are made perceptible through the list of dead bodies. But bodies are integral not only to the Civil War’s accountability—its status as a verifiable event—but also to the war’s basic knowability: the distinction between wounds and scars. In this passage, the “regimental scars” attest to the invisible wounds. As this book will demonstrate, Civil War doctors were stymied by the number and variety of invisible wounds suffered by their patients. Yet even if initially visible, physical wounds are a transitory phenomenon. With the passage of time they usually heal enough, or kill. It is significant that Fox is careful to differentiate scars from wounds, electing the former to stand in for the unrecoverable individual pains and historical reality of the Civil War. He enacts his own form of rehabilitation, as the scars cover over the wounds that persist metaphorically beneath the surface in many bodies and minds. In a well-known passage, Scarry writes of pain that it is “at once something that cannot be denied and something that cannot be confirmed … to have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.”21 Thus the “regimental scars,” that is, the number of dead bodies, foreclose any efforts to revivify or authenticate the pain of individual wounds. Indeed, Fox insists that those scars are sufficient evidence for the sacrifices of the living and the dead and for the bloody laurels deserved by badly decimated regiments. But of course others’ pain is always unknowable, though its effects cannot be ignored. Fox demonstrates that although postbellum Americans knew that bodies mattered, they also knew that their comrades’ pain could not be resurrected, that surviving bodies didn’t feel the same after the war, and that such feeling could not be conveyed. I contend contra Scarry that Civil War pain provided no certainty, even to those in its grips.
Fox’s rhetorical strategies were typical in the postbellum period, and they shaped the parameters of subsequent study of the Civil War and of American history more generally. Fox asserts, for example, that it is only through accurately recovering the number of dead in each battle that scholars of the Civil War can know “where the points of contact really were; where the pressure was the greatest; where the scenes of valor and heroism occurred” (574). Here he uses terms such as contact and pressure to insist that the Civil War matters; his sensory language suggests that we must somehow feel its reality in our individual and national bodies. And yet those bodies are unreliable. He concludes his meticulous tally of the thousands killed during the war:
In a conversation with the late Col. Robert N. Scott, USA concerning [counting the dead and wounded] that officer remarked “We will do these things better in the next war.” The question arises, will the “we” of the future do these things any better? In the turmoil and excitement will not “these things” be again overlooked?, and gallant regiments be again disbanded without leaving scarcely a trace to show how well they fought? Will not History be again neglected and despoiled? (574)
Interestingly, Fox and his contemporaries were not concerned with better war-making or with avoiding such deadly military engagements altogether. Rather, they were interested in better representational strategies. Without bodies, there is no proof of wartime activities and feelings. More important, Fox suggests that there is no history without bodies. History is personified and done a grave wrong by the military’s inability to provide the statistics it needs to substantiate its raison d’être. Yet Fox’s forceful and questioning tone suggests that he is aware that those bodies and the intangible states he argues they represent will continue to elude him. Without history, bodies leave “scarcely a trace.” Just as Whitman darkly predicts, the Civil War will produce “no history ever—no poem sings, no music sounds, those bravest men of all” for their bodies “crumble [] in mother earth, unburied and unknown.”22 Bodies become universal signifiers, their mere existence needed to guarantee nineteenth-century Americans the possibility of knowledge. Thus the inability to (ac) count for bodies—and the subsequent dissolution of history—signal more than lack of knowledge about the Civil War. The impossibility of bodies means the impossibility of knowledge itself.
Whitman’s poem “The Wound-Dresser” (1865), excerpted at the outset of this chapter, plumbs the depths of the instability Fox delineates. Whitman invokes the Civil War as the imaginative repository of inner life, a surreal yet bounded place whose “doors” writers will traverse again and again, bringing their readers with them. He abandons the notion that the Civil War is an accountable, verifiable event and asserts instead that war experiences are “dreams’ projections,” an iteration of the American subconscious writ large. In Whitman’s poem, the Civil War is