Rehabilitating Bodies. Lisa A. Long

though his actions are ultimately ineffective in healing those who perish around him, the wound-dresser is validated by the crucial work he has undertaken. Consequently, a defining characteristic of Civil War literature is that the war accrues therapeutic value. Though physical and mental health were so often ruined in the volcanic cataclysm, the war also became the metaphoric site of rehabilitation, where socially stigmatized Americans presumably were able to refashion themselves by assuming practically powerful roles. Like the wound-dresser, many postbellum writers were compelled to return to the Civil War in order to reclaim the promise of cultural authority and subjectivity that their contemporaneous culture of anomie, even antimodernism, vehemently denied.

      But this lesson in history is achieved only when the wound-dresser imagines his body literally walking into the cataclysmic past. When asked by young men and maidens to “be witness again” to the Civil War, Whitman’s aged wound-dresser must lead his listeners into the Civil War hospital (3, 9). “With hinged knees returning I enter the doors,” he tells us, traversing the threshold of time to become a Civil War nurse once again (23). His sensual imagery evokes the physical dimensions of this psychic journey. The wound-dresser faces a pair of “appealing eyes,” moves on to the next bed to dress a “crush’d head,” examines “the neck of a cavalry-man with the bullet through and through” (31, 40, 41). The poem progresses through the fragmented body parts of different, anonymous men, moving down to the “stump of the arm, the amputated hand,” “a wound in the side,” and “the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound” (45, 50, 53). In disregarding an individual soldier in favor of the many parts of many anonymous men, the wound-dresser depicts a national body and tells a national story. However, although his listeners clamor for him to “paint the mightiest armies of earth,” to depict “hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous,” these silent bodies are the “deepest remains” of the war for him (9, 12, 11). I argue that the wound-dresser represents the Civil War doctor-historian as he attempts to re-member the national body through his ministrations. The wound-dresser’s archive is the Civil War hospital, his documents the dismembered bodies of the patients.²³

      Even the undeniable, gut-wrenching force of infected, suffering, dying bodies cannot substantiate this history. Though his own body is unwounded, his memories remain mediated and surreal, “dreams’ projections” suggesting his double distance from the events: this poem is not even a dream, but a projection of a dream. The anonymity of the dying soldiers who people the wound-dresser’s memory distance him and us from the events. In looking into the eyes of a dying boy he claims, “I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you” (38). But of course he cannot die for the boy; and though he may be powerfully empathic, his clinical description of the soldiers’ wounds do not provide access to how they feel. Interestingly, Whitman published “The Wound-Dresser” the year the war ended. Yet he already imagines the war through the distance of age and time and memory loss, as an “old man bending” toward the past that he imagines as obscured, as “imprints” in “sand” that the “waves” continually “wash … off” (1, 22). Whitman suggests that the war is an experience alien and transient even to those living through it.

      The Rewritten Civil War

      And yet the war experience continues to grip his psyche as Whitman’s wound-dresser revisits the Civil War hospital again and again. It is not just Civil War writings themselves that interest me here, but also the dynamics of this incessant rewriting. Scholars have produced tens of thousands of books on the war, the vast majority concerned with “the quest to understand.”²⁴ Dominated still by military and political history, this body of scholarship is largely interested in causes and effects: What caused the Civil War? Why did it take place when it did? Why did the North win and the South lose? What were the decisive military engagements of the conflict? Which men were heroes, and which were cowards? New social histories have expanded the set of questions and the narratives that answer, looking beyond the great men to examine how civilians in general, white women, African Americans, and others experienced the Civil War.²⁵ Although such work questions the presumed objectivity of historical praxis, it does not challenge the premise that historical experience is a verifiable, knowable place, though we may not be able to get to it.

      In their assessment of Civil War historiography, James McPherson and William J. Cooper Jr. liken their profession’s progress to “several blind men who tried to describe an elephant—each historian seems to have run his hands over a different part of the evidence … so each one has described a different animal.”²⁶ This story (common in scientific circles) acknowledges the particularity of perspective; moreover, it suggests how one’s proximity to the Civil War evokes bodily disability, or at least forces one to reconsider the nature of one’s sensory relationship to the objects of study, to the bodies of the past. However, the story also relies on the material reality of the elephant—one could not choose a larger and more weighty body to stand in for the presumed coherence and undeniable knowability of the Civil War. It is not the elephant’s fault that no one gets it right. Yet in endowing this historical project with life, McPherson and Cooper suggest that the past is not dead and insentient. Elephant bodies—just as human bodies—are mutable and mortal; perhaps each historian has described a different animal.

      We are a culture obsessed with rehabilitating the Civil War, trying to embody it and make it comprehensible. The piecework recovery of the Civil War is not left to only the professionals, but also a hobbyist industry.²⁷ This is a national community invested also in minutiae, helping to gauge the elephant through an infinite series of small observations. Unit files strive to account for every single individual who fought in the conflict. The descendants of Civil War veterans lovingly edit their family members’ diaries. Civil War sabers, guns, paper ephemera, and so forth fetch top dollar on the collectibles market. Reenactors painstakingly reconstruct uniforms and weaponry, as well as mimic the actions of their national ancestors, in efforts to conjure the elusive bodies of the Civil War. There are Civil War magazines and e-mail groups, Civil War Round-tables and Lincoln Associations, and even children’s toys such as Civil War Barbie. Hobbyists attempt to access the war’s reality through a variety of means, but these means are most often geared toward capturing the war’s materiality, whether through (re)collecting material traces of the era or tying one’s own body to the event through genealogy or reenactment. Like trained scholars, Civil War hobbyists seek to fix the Civil War and the bodily states it still grounds. They want to know how those who lived through the Civil War really felt.

      Yet a century and a half of hobbyist, scholarly, and artistic activity leaves us no closer to articulating the war, or to definitively answering impossible questions, than the writers who people my study, individuals who lived during the war and into the next generation. This book turns to the Civil War’s diseased bodies to address the following questions: Why is the Civil War so important to us still? How does the depth of its grip on the national psyche reflect the larger, structural role it plays in postbellum society even today? Essentially, how did this nasty, bloody, four-year series of skirmishes and battles become “The Civil War,” an event accorded almost religious reverence by subsequent generations? George M. Frederickson has recently suggested that the Civil War compels us because it “provides a persuasive argument for the uniqueness of American history” in the nineteenth century.²⁸ Although I find such national exceptionalism too sweeping, I do argue that in its incessant movement and in its reliance upon the power of bodily vagaries, the Civil War authorizes modern American history. Our consistent desire to claim the Civil War as historical truth, as national proving ground, is also our need to resist its shifting, representational nature and the profound consequences such instability has for national, disciplinary, and individual identities. The constant, intense attention given to the Civil War attests not only to its stability and coherence, but also to its essential slipperiness and, consequently, the instability of the identities founded upon its volcanic grounds.

      Yet treatments of the Civil War do not founder on such uncertainties, but thrive despite—or rather, because of—them. I want to suggest briefly here that the incessant rewriting the Civil War elicits derives from its power as a historicizing trope. The deference we accord it, the concomitant breadth and detail we pursue in our study of it, and the comprehensiveness it seemingly requires of its devotees are what lends it its weight. Ironically,