Whereas Crane and Dunbar turned their attentions to the invisible ills that constituted postbellum white masculinity, many marginalized Americans reclaimed the rehabilitative power of the Civil War as their own. White women and African Americans were initially hopeful following the war’s revolutionary political pronouncements. However, though the war remained an exciting, emancipatory moment for many Americans, its promise of equality and enlarged opportunity remained unfulfilled. Few achieved the full citizenship, financial viability, and physical autonomy that they hoped would follow close on the heels of this propitious national upheaval. As one postbellum Republican senator recognized, “There are many social disorders which it is very difficult to cure by laws.”47 The escalating racial violence and hardening of gender roles that occurred as the nineteenth century drew to a close were in some part a reaction against the Civil War and its unrehabilitated bodies. Yet many writers returned to the Civil War precisely because of the change those stubbornly unrehabilitated bodies promised.
I argue in Chapter 6 that Civil War nursing was remembered not only as a heroic way for women to participate in the war effort but also as a powerful cultural trope that both exploited and transformed the gender proscriptions inherent in the nursing role. The nursing bodies of these Civil War narratives evoke women’s generative powers, rather than the weakness thought to emanate from their female reproductive organs. Although Alcott’s initially empowered Tribulation Periwinkle succumbs to disease by the end of Hospital Sketches (1863), a generation later Mary Gardner Holland and Mary Livermore claimed that the Civil War did not reveal the disease of unfit mothers (the focus of contemporaneous eugenical theories) but that of impotent white men. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) and Taylor’s 1902 memoirs invoke female nursing as a legacy of the Civil War and of slavery which is useful to contemporaneous uplift movements focused on countering degenerate stereotypes of African Americans. Prohibited from the domestic realms of true womanhood, their nursing takes a more holistic and activist cast, for only by claiming the regenerative powers of their presumably unstable bodies could African American women assume their proper place in the national family.
In Chapter 7, Negro Civil War historians (as they were called at the time) George Washington Williams and Joseph Wilson use Civil War service to negotiate dangerous stereotypes about male, African American licentiousness in their respective texts, The Negro Troops in the War of Rebellion, 1861–1865 (1888) and The Black Phalanx (1890). Historical method was increasingly ascribed permanence and stability by the emerging professional class of white historians, whereas the Civil War was reclaimed as the proving ground of individual fortitude and of a firm national identity. Thus, in writing themselves into Civil War history, African American writers were also able to delineate legitimate, rehabilitated selves. Historical visibility proved crucial in efforts to solidify the integrity of bodies that were perceived still as inherently diminished or underdeveloped. At the same time, the discipline of history-writing, embedded as it was in scientific notions of objectivity and verifiable human truths, placed impossible demands upon African American writers who wished to make scientific history serve their own ends. The racial identity of African American historians dictated the textual strategies they employed as they sought to write history and also highlighted the fact that all Civil War texts were founded on particularized bodily experiences and were impossible to verify.
The exciting and bewildering plurality of the war, as well as the instabilities such plurality evoked, have persisted into our own time. I end this project by briefly examining how the Civil War is still constituted through corporeal and historical discourse in late twentieth-century juvenile Civil War fictions and histories and in reenactments. The awkward, volatile, naïve protagonists of contemporary juvenile Civil War texts aptly dramatize Civil War rehabilitation: the movement from immaturity to full fitness, from plurality to consensus. For these white boy-soldiers the war becomes not only the seriously disturbing site of cultural and personal crisis but also an imaginative space where callow youths learn to become reliable men through the bloodless gauntlet of the Civil War. By the end of the twentieth century, a full-fledged reenacting culture had recast the Civil War as the mythic site of corporeal and social authenticity and of the racial integrity of white folks. “Living historians,” the majority of whom are white, seek to claim the rehabilitative power of the Civil War by conjuring historical experience in their own bodies. Divested of its deadly consequences and the divisiveness that proved so disturbing to many Americans, the trope of the Civil War gained heroic proportions in twentieth-century national symbology. Yet the yearning for real suffering and for actual time travel to the Civil War that characterizes both fictional and reenacting odysseys points both to the reality of Civil War bodies in daily lives and to the unrecoverable nature of Civil War experience. The reliability of Civil War bodies and the authenticity of the stories that account for them can only remain a matter of faith.
We are still drawn to the Civil War for the cogency with which it encompasses issues demanding our current national attention: race relations, equal opportunity between the sexes, crises in masculinity, and general epistemological skepticism. Historically, the Civil War has provided images that are deeply wrought into the framework of our national identity. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Northern veterans and their Southern brothers marched side by side in commemorative parades; African American veterans proudly recounted their exploits; former nurses congratulated themselves in print. In an age of economic turmoil, ethnic and racial divisiveness, and corrupt political leaders, the war became a cherished memory of self-sacrifice and cooperation, citizenship and patriotism, and meaningful political action. These are ideals to which the United States, as a culture, continues to aspire.
And so regional reconciliation, a solidified national identity, and notions of modern selfhood covered the very shaky ground on which they were founded. Like the hastily buried bodies left behind at the Battle of Gettysburg—decaying, half-buried bodies that made perceptible rises on the field of battle—the invisible ills of the Civil War, though renamed as they have been rewritten, continue to dot the American landscape. A reassessment of the modern basis of these diseases in the Civil War literature of the 1860s and the turn of the century is long overdue, for we are still engaged in the great project of bodily rehabilitation.
Chapter 1
Doctors’ Bodies: Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and Patient Malingering
I like a look of Agony,Because I know it’s true—Men do not sham Convulsion,Nor simulate, a Throe—
—Emily Dickinson, # 241
In 1863, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell wrote to his sister of his increasing