Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Civil War 20160702

Carmichael, a history professor here at gettysburg college. Im also the director of the civil war institute, and it is my privilege and pleasure to introduce the speakers for our conversation or panel on the return of the confederate veteran. For those of you in the audience, and also for those of you who are part of our live cspan audience, you can actually be part of this conversation, twitter, get your ens ready, it is cwi2016. Let me go ahead and introduce our panelists, first, to my far right, david who is currently a lecturer in American History, at the university of edinburgh in scotland. He teaches range of courses on civil war and southern history, reconstruction and civil war memory, and his first book, it is an excellent one, published by the university of North Carolina press, and entitled moment of despair, suicide, divorce, and debt in civil war era North Carolina. Next to david is james brumar. He recently assumed the directorship of shepherd universitys george tyler center for the study of civil war. Shepherd university, as many of you know, is just across the potomac river, and, of course, just in West Virginia. He also is an assistant professor of history in the University History epartment. Hes published a number of articles. Hes done field studies for the National Parks service and hes just on the cusp of submitting his first book manuscript for publication at the university of North Carolina press. Next to him is james jason phillips. The professor of civil war studies at West Virginia university. His first book published by the university of Georgia Press entitled diehard rebels, the confederate culture of sensibility. This book looks at how confederates came to view the south as invincible, hes currently working on a new project entitled looming. A history of the future. This book explores how the years of anticipating a civil war ultimately influenced the very ways that it was remembered. Next to jason is brian craig miller. Brian craig miller is a professor of history at Emporia State University in wichita, kansas. Hes the author of John Bell Hood and the fight for civil war memory. He also served as the editor for one of the premier scholarly journals in our field, Civil War History, which is published by kent state university. His latest book entitled empty sleeves, amputation in the civil war style. And that book is published by the university of Georgia Press. Finally, diane somerville. Dine somerville is an associate rofessor of history at Binghamton University in new york. He teaches courses in 19th century u. S. History, the american south, womens history and the history of sexuality. Shes recently published great grace in the 19th century south, and that was released by the university of North Carolina press. Shes also authored numerous scholarly articles, most recently, a burden too heavy to bear, the trauma, suicide, and confederate soldiers. This piece earned the john t. Hubble prize for the best article in the journals Civil War History. So well begin with diane, presenting a paper on her work, and then, of course, we have our panelists who will comment. Diane. [applause] diane well, thank you, everyone, for coming out this muggy summer gettysburg afternoon. The panelists and i are, what were going to try to do is to open up ways that we can have conversations with you yall about the experience of confederate veterans returning home and to that end what im going to do is talk for maybe 15 or so minutes about generally the work that im doing. But then also pivot each of the anelists who will spend 45 four to five minutes talking about a different topic that we can then have questions about and take it to you and have a really lively conversation that will take us through our allotted hour. I want to begin with a very famous quote by a historian, a social historian by the name of who wrote 25 years ago, that we needed to see some history being done on the lives of ordinary soldiers. Despite the many, many other books and articles published on Civil War History, surprisingly, little has been written about the personal experiences of ordinary soldiers. Most of the work to that point, of course, had dealt with generals and battles, with high politics and with strategy, but the experiences of ordinary men and women emerged as a focus only relatively eventually, and study of veterans even later. Books by jim martin, jeff mcclurken, brian jordan and paul, all published since 2009, recreates the steps of the civil war soldiers as they return home to their families and communities. Only one of these books, case studies veterans out of one virginia county is the only book devoted to just confederate veterans. So two of the books cover both northern and southern veterans. In these treatments we view the myriad experiences of veterans after they return home, from the mundane to the heroics. They return to their plows and scour for employment. They collected pensions and ended up in veterans homes or in insane asylums. They ran for political office. A few became University President s. Others became alcoholics. Although i dont think mutually exclusive. Quite a few struggled with disability. Physical and mental, visible and invisible. Historians ask questions like, what did soldiers do after demobilization . How did they live . How did their service affect them . How did war change them . How were they treated when they returned home . Weve only just begun relatively speaking to answer these questions but we know the experiences were varied. Were not even sure what a typical veterans experience looked like. We also know much more about Union Veterans largely because of the availability of sources. Union veterans, of course, were eligible for federal pensions, so those records, which are a real treasure trove of information about soldiers lives after the war yield rich details about the veterans and their families. But former confederates were not eligible for federal pension so we lack that same space, although many Southern States did offer pensions, those records are spotty and certainly disperse. So working on confederate veterans poses some challenges. That said, we do have some examples of historians working in a variety of areas on confederate veterans. Some of them sitting to my right this afternoon. One of the Big Questions that we will address, either implicitly or explicitly is how did the experiences of confederate veterans differ from Union Veterans . After all, all veterans, north and south, shared similar experiences. They fought on the same field, they missed their families and acquired the same diseases but southern soldiers returning home after the war faced a different set of circumstances and conditions that made their post war lives in certain ways very different from that of Union Veterans. First and obviously, they lost. Their fledgling nation was destroyed. They faced defeat unlike Union Solders who returned home victorious. By contrast, southern soldiers limped home in humiliation. It also meant loss of suffrage and political rights. They were subjugated. Second, war was fought almost entirely in their homeland, so as the south sustained extensive physical ruin and economic devastation, many soldiers returned home to find their dwellings demolished or in ashes. Their fields in ruins. Third, slavery was abolished. Slavery was, of course, a chief form of wealth and labor in the region but its abolition posed questions about the very essence of southern identity. Who were white southerners now without slaves . As confederate soldiers made their way home in 1865 and sought to reintegrate into civilian life these three critical differences from northern soldiers experiences fundamentally shaped how Southern Households and communities developed during reconstruction. These posed challenges, defeat, devastation, and emancipation, cut to the quick of masculine identities of southern men and greatly influenced the homecoming of confederate veterans. Humiliation and shame from military loss and submission to the enemy, loss of political independence and rights, shattered confidence, financialnd business failures. Reliance on on women for emotional and sometimes financial support, and diminished status in family and state. Regional recovery hinged on the ability of men to return to the support to support their family and Community Networks at a time when those very networks were damaged and estabilized. Former confederate soldiers returned home, in some cases, to unimaginable burdens and hurdles recovery. Psychological distress brought on by combat experience exacerbated issues, leaving veterans suffering psychological harm that impeded readjustment to civilian life and compounded their emotional and psychological distress. A southerner, like susan bradford, witness add witnessed the bittersweet homecoming of relatives and commented on the demoralized demeanor of soldiers returning to the neighborhood. I sit here and wonder, if all the dear men in gray feel as crushed and as disconsolate as these. Will they ever be able to orget . This observation, that many confederate veterans were crushed at wars end is borne out in a variety of historical sources. The most seriously afflicted veterans ended up in southern, what was called at the time lunatic asylums. Which welcomed hordes of former soldiers after the war. They presented with a history of violence. Often committed against family members and sometimes themselves. Over3 4 of the veterans admitted to the Georgia State asylum from 1865 to 1872 were described as violent, very violent, had in the past had attacked or assaulted persons, many of them family members. Trauma afflicted veterans directed much of their menacing rage toward relatives making reintegration challenges. Confederate veterans in a state of Emotional Turmoil recently frequently turned on themselves and responded to their emotional agony by resorting to selfinjury. Suicidal behavior, of course, is an indicator of warrelated trauma like ptsd and occurs at a higher rate among veterans than the civilian population. Of the veterans admitted to the milledgeville georgia asylum about1 3 were suicidal. The case of snelton epitomizes the suicidal spiral of a former soldier after the war. His demise began during the war. Fter the teen enlisted and earned his distress, his psychological demise earned him an early discharge from the war, and then later entry into the milledgeville insane asylum. He made clear his intention to destroy himself and while in the asylum tried to burn himself and several times attempted to throw himself out of windows. After years of a recovery and relapse cycle, peppered with multiple suicide attempts, he finally succeeded in ending his life in august of 1871, by ingesting strychnine. Another form of selfdestructive behavior among confederate veterans was alcohol and drug abuse in the postwar years. Today, we understand drug and alcohol use by soldiers and veterans as an attempt to selfmedicate, to numb one self from the traumatic experiences of warfare but in the 19th century substance abuse, especially alcohol, was viewed not as a symptom of Mental Illness as we know today but rather as a cause of Mental Illness. Post war southerners noted the rise of alcohol abuse after the war, which they attributed to the suffering associated with the war. Excessive drinking by southern men had been welldocumented in the antebellum period, but after the war southerners believed it was on the rise and as a consequence of the civil war and its aftermath. Exconfederate soldiers and civilians alike turned to alcohol to escape an array of societal and permanent problems personal problems after the war. Whether alcohol abuse in the postbellum south can be attributed to post combat disorder or to the depressive malaise that engulfed the region during reconstruction for southerners, especially men, imbyebyed excessively. Imbibed excessively. Less commonly than alcohol, but just as addictive and destructive, confederate veterans sometimes abused opium. After the civil war many believed that the war had contributed to the recent uptake in opium users. Whether or not the civil war triggered increased opium use, opium addiction became more visible in the 1870s. With the increased visibility of opium addiction the demographics of the users shifted from women to men, in the antebellum period opium addiction was mostly opium users, opium eaters, they were called, were almost always believed to be women. Wounded veterans like a. G. Were among those who sought physical relief from opium. For a decade he relied on opium to relieve the pain following the amputation of a leg in 1862. A reliance that led to that addiction and eventually killed ewing. Transitioning back to civilian life proved even more difficult for southern men who, in the years after the war, already weighted down by defeat and war trauma faced financial ruin. Unlike the north, south experienced extensive physical damage that made rebuilding difficult. Financial difficulties or to use the phrase of the day, pecuniary embarrassment. Underscore the failure of men to fulfill one of the basic responsibilities of manhood, providing for ones family. Moreover, southerners experienced pervasive indebtedness which singled dependency, undermining the very basis of masculine identity. On top of anguish from combat memories proved too much for some exconfederates. As joyous as homecomings were, the defeated warriors could not deny the massive work that lay ahead to rebuild. The physical reconstruction of homes, barns, fields and infrastructure awaited. He economy in shambles offered few opportunities for men who were desperate to resume their statuses as heads of household and as bread winners for their families. With little or no money, sharply diminished wealth, and dim job prospects, southern men faced abysmal outlook with little hope for a quick turnaround. The failures and unemployment plagued postbellum south. Tin ability to provide for ones family in an environment of Economic Uncertainty beleaguered many white men of the region. Who had devoted entire lives to building businesses and then cultivating the reputations and the networks and relationships that were attendant to those crumbled in the face of business failures white men business failure in the post war south eviscerated ones sense of elf. Becauseeconomic opportunities evaporated after the war. Southern men were unable to cattle their motional suffering from productive outworks like work. Consumed by failure at home, on the military front and at work, southern men, many of them, collapsed psychologically. Some committed suicide while others ended up in asylums. A watch maker from richmond, who served in the infantry during the civil war made good on a threat to kill himself february, 1871, despite his wifes pleadings. He replied to her, i am done. It is too late. And then shot himself. His wife reported suffered from pecuniary troubles. Financial calamity and material deprivation awaited confederate en returning home. The dire situation bred despair and pessimism about the future. Money worries and loss of property paralyzed numerous exconfederates. Women, too, worried about their familys financial wellbeing. Ut men experienced economic misfortune personally. Debt and financial ruin signaled dependency as well as an inability to fulfill one of the chief responsibilities as head of household. That of providers. In addition to diminished prospects for work southern white men experienced reversals of fortune and evaporation of wealth and property that also contributed to their mental decline. Southern white men beset by pecuniary difficulties after the war were embarrassed by their inability to provide for their families. Many equated financial failure with poor character, a holdover from the antebellum times even though intellectually most understood that the war and its aftermath was to blame. Emancipation, of course, wiped out the wealth of many slave holding families. Take, for instance, virginia family of charles berry. In 1860 he supposed over possessed over 10,000 worth of personal property. Largely slaves. When the war came, he enlisted and served in a calvary unit and he survived. But in 1870, the extent of his loss and personal property was registered in the census records showing personal wealth worth a mere 250. He drowned himself in a Virginia Creek in 1871. Indebtedness, unemployment, loss of wealth, and livelihoods scourged reconstruction south and plagued nearly all southerners. But it was experienced in a very gendered way the financial and material ruin nation of the former confederacy set the stage for an inhospitable homecoming for soldiers, many that brought with them the baggage of emotional nd psychological damage. So with that, as a bit of a springboard i would like to pivot to our panelists, each of whom today will speak a little bit about one aspect of the confederate homecoming experience and im going to begin with jason phillips, who will start us off this afternoon, by talking a little bit about the process of surrendering. Making the point, that the familiar story of surrender at appomatox was experienced very differently for most confederate soldiers. Jason . Jason thank you. Uleis esss. Grant said ars produce many foors shall stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true. Popular stories about concludes Civil War History with peace and reconciliation. This romance of reunion showcases robert e. Lee offering his sword to grant who returns to blade and shared military honors. Were told Union Soldiers affirmed the sentiment by saluting confederates while they stacked arms and unfurled and furled flags. In the end, southerners go home with the federal promise not to be disturbed as long as they maintain peace and uphold the union. For confederate veterans, surrendering and returning home was more emotional and more complicated than fiction suggests. They coped with defeat by viewing the enemy as barbarians, by honoring themselves as the heroic remnants of a legendary army. The victors hoped that mercy would ease reunion by displaying their moral superiority. Instead, leniency emboldened diehard rebels to resist change. The only union superiority the confederates would admit after the war was numerical superiority. Diehard rebels cherished their parole certificate not as signs of reunion, but as proof that they personally had never abandoned the cause. Returning home presented new challenges for these veterans, during the long journey troops vented, raged, a sense of entitlement. They stole what they needed, from storehouses and even from civilians along their path. A new orleans reporter noted xconfederate soldiers have fought for four years without pay and now they propose to pay themselves. Ragged men, walking home, presented a stark contrast to how they rode to war on trains and horses four years ago. Defeat literally brought white men down to earth. Horseback riding was a sign of white mastery in the old south. Now those masters shuffled along in the dust, along with everyone else. Tattered clothing and empty stomachs did not distinguish veterans from thousands of freed people who walked the same roads in search of family members and as an expression of freedom. While heading home, many veterans encountered encountered the wars destructive campaign for the first time. In the Shenandoah Valley veterans followed the tracks of philip sheridans campaign. For three days, we were refreshed by the sight and smell of dead horses, one rebel noted. When he saw the burnt district of richmond, he blamed the destruction on northern immigrants and southern blacks. Retreating confederates had burned their own capitol, but this diehard rebel was already rewriting history. Thousands of defiant confederate veterans presented one of the Biggest Challenges to reconstruction. They even vented having to resented having to swear an oath of allegiance to the united states. As one veteran put it, they thrust their i oath of allegiance down our throats with bayonets. The presence of black troops in the south infuriated diehard rebels. Colored regiments formed a larger percentage of occupation forces, because they enlisted later in the war. Exconfederates ignored this fact, and assumed that the enemy imposed black garrisons on the south to humiliate white men. For diehard rebels, diane suggested, reconstruction meant one word. Ubjugation, a permanent that a term that encompassed martial law, confiscation, exile and maaming a gamation thesome say the war is settled and some say the difficulty has hardly begun. For foster, surrendering meant submission, reunion, and free negroes, and weve been fighting too long for that. If confederate veterans accepted reunion and emancipation, thousands of their comrades had died for nothing. Think about that. George mercer thought, we must continue the good fight and leave the rest to heaven. Veterans avoided defeat and humiliation by keeping quiet, by biding their time until the federal occupation ended, and they once again returned to power. The southern insurgency during reconstruction was more than a response to post war challenges. It was a continuation of the civil war by other means. If i could just ask one question here. It sounds like youre arguing for accepting surrender as rather than as the onset of reconstruction rather than the final act of the civil war so if we accept that, then how will that change how we look at that period . Thats a good question. I think obviously, the surrender closed military conflicts, but they opened political debate about the future. One of the first challenges of reconstruction was securing federal oversight in the south. And only war time powers could justify this control, and only an army could enforce it. Diehard rebels hoped that the surrenders meant more than this. They hoped the surrenders meant peace. The end of federal control in the south. So that they could rule their region again. Instead, the surrenders meant the end of confederate authority in the south. Okay . Its a very different thing. And therefore, the spread of federal power in the south, and we see this debate even between grant and lee, about the terms of surrender before it takes place, i think first step of reconstruction really happens at the appomattox courthouse and other is surrender ceremonies. Quick sleep half to reclaiming th masculine prerogative and returning control was a bumpy one. David will tell us a little bit about how these challenges shaped the reentry of confederate veterans into their households as well as the relationships with wives, children, and other family members. David . David thank you. One of the things you raised in your talk was the ways in which we could we could highlight the ways in which the confederate experience is different from the Union Homecoming experience and one of the ways in which i think they are fundamentally different is that, in the north, there is this issue of the vacant chair. The soldier has gone off to war and the family remains at home and tries to sustain themselves until they can hopefully, with any luck, return to have the veteran return to the family and resume some kind of normalcy after the war. And im not sure if the vacant chair works as well for confederate veterans, because the home front and battlefront are blurred and that makes it difficult sometimes to think about confederate families at home trying to sustain their prewar lives unhindered. This happens in lots of different ways. Thousands of confederate families are forced to become refugees, they are driven away from home during the war. We think in large part to the confederacy of confederate civilians on the move trying to find some place where they will be safe for the conflict. So when we think about soldiers coming home, in april of 1865, their families are coming home, too. And so, in some cases the scenes we have are not the family waiting patiently for these soldiers to return home but both groups coming home and sometimes the soldier gets home first and he greets the family coming home months later. Which i think is a very different kind of experience. Other confederate families are really, in some ways, very much on the front lines, that the union army, of course, is marching through the south, think about shermans march and what have you, so families are coming facetoface with the enemy just as the soldiers are coming facetoface with the enemy. And even if they are not refugees and they are not on the front line i think families, white families in the south, are facing huge financial problems, especially in the latter half of the war. They have been deprived of their major form of agricultural labor, the man of the household, who has gone off to fight, there are food shortages, as we all know, across the confederacy, rampant inflation, bread riots, all which puts families in a very precarious financial position for the last few years of the war. And then the end of the war, confederate currency is worthless, and they have lost their slaves. And so the moment in which soldiers are coming home, families have been suffering for a number of years. All of which is to say that sold soldiers are coming back, many of the soldiers are coming back in pretty bad shape. Coming back with missing limbs, coming back with the psychological trauma thats inherent to warfare. But their families are also in pretty bad shape. And i think this complicates the reunion between soldiers and their families in 1865. In many ways you have across the south white families in crisis. And one of the ways that you can look at this and one of the ways you can gauge the extent of trauma of the wars on families is look at divorce records. Divorce is very rare in the south throughout the 19th century, but one of the things you find in 1866, many southern counties, you have more people filing for divorce that year than the previous 20 years. When i look at the divorce petitions you will see it happens whether the petition is filed by the husband or by the wife. I think, you know, the trauma thats happened in these families which resulted in marriages breaking up is a product of the ways in which the soldiers had their experience, but the families were suffering during the war itself. I think its interesting to note that these problems that white families are having and the problems white families are falling apart, its the same moment that africanamericans are trying to encode their families with legal protections, that they are getting married, that they are trying to find children that have been sold away and trying to rebuild their families, so the falling apart of many white families is happening you simultaneously with the rebuilding of lots of families that have been broken in slavery. The final point i want to make is thinking about the veterans experience and the families experience. There is a huge diversity, i think, of veterans experience. Lots of veterans are coming back with the trauma of war, missing limbs, but other veterans are coming back, i think, relatively intact both physically and mentally. The same is true for families and geography is playing a huge part in. Some parts of the south, they are facing destruction of their farms and near starving conditions and in other parts of the south they are able to sustain themselves with a fairly similar standard of living that they had before the war, and so i think when you mix these two variables, diversity of the soldiers experience versus the family experience, means the ways in which families are able to receive their soldiers back is going to very tremendously. Followup question. I wonder if there is much difference between divorce records in northern communities and northern states compared to the south . What do you think difference would be because certainly southern men and women struggled to get back together again just Like Northern men did. What do you think major difference would be . War is traumatic for families. I think we know for more recent conflicts of soldiers coming home that families are suffering in different ways than soldiers its difficult with the soldiers being away for long periods of time. Confederate soldiers are away from their families for a longer period of time than most Union Soldiers. And they are coming back in worst shape and their families are in worst shape and all of that is reflected in the ways in which the divorce petitions are coming through. Husbands accuse their wives of infidelity. Wives are doing the same things. Thats probably because the only legal basis for divorce in the 19th century was adultery. But they also tie it to saying this only started to happen when i went off to war. Thank you. Pivoting from family ties to bonds among former confederates, jim will share thoughts on what he calls the brotherhood of veterans. Jim . Jim thank you. ,istorians had, for a long time thought that the war was quickly forgotten, or quickly soldiers turned away from it after its conclusion. The current scholarship suggest otherwise. What you are hearing today and throughout the conference is that the dichotomy that once existed between the hibernation and revival is too schematic. There is a lot of fluidity we are discovering. Soldiers and veterans thought a great deal about their wartime experiences throughout the postwar era. In 1865, veterans started to sort out a simple meeting to this conflict in sundry ways. For me, there are two ways to look at it. Southern spirit thrives in the press. Regimental histories are turned out in great numbers, and survivors associations begin to flourish. Eventually, in great numbers. That is a public discussion that exists. So too did veterans look to the war and private waste as they private ways as they had done throughout the conflict. Many people who had not written in the antebellum era became quite prolific in the wartime era. Some wrote hundreds of letters. They continued in the postwar period. Not in the same numbers, which is unfortunate for us the scholars, but it is certainly there. In these unpublished letters, veterans had clearly changed in some fundamental way. They sought to make connections to the wartime experiences with other veterans. For me, the way where we can understand this best is through the lens of emotions history. These are individuals who experienced deprivation, trials, and combat, and had a very similar set of emotional reactions. An outpouring to these experiences. Many of these men in the antebellum era had been very disinclined to talk to other men, and indeed, anybody but their wives about these inner feelings. But what we see in these slivers of evidence is that veterans are talking to each other in the postwar period through these letters. Its not as vibrant. Those that survived or extremely suggestive. They are turning back to their wartime experiences. I shared earlier several examples of the severe trauma that soldiers had adored. We see these threads ticked up in the postwar era. One north carolinian, walter clark, says no one can imagine anything like it, referring to battle, unless he has been in one. Suggesting to their family that essentially they can fully understand whether this is right or wrong. We know as scholars that civilians and your horrible traumas during the conflict. They thought that their families could not extend not understand their wartime experiences. The same men that they had in many cases fought and slept with throughout years of combat. One example, an individual is writing to his friend in this evocative language. He says sometimes in my sleep, my mind wanders to the sad battlefield. I lie down in the lines, have frightened, expecting at any moment the command of forward smith experienced these night terrors, and thought out others to see if they too had similar experiences. Indeed, as he found, some suggested that they had similar experiences. In the process 40 and era the postfreudian era we might say, ptsd. The way you do with this is through respondents with the correspondence with the Commanding Officer and with other soldiers. You see this very rigid strange rich exchange throughout the late 1960s, early 1870s in which smith is trying to seek out anyone possible to talk about these experiences. Just to parse out these feelings and see if he can somehow make sense of it. If he can lend meaning to it. In some cases he is successful. What this suggests is that there is a profound transformation to his experience, the southern men experience. Theyre looking at other southern men in unique ways. They are disclosing themselves in very unique ways that i would say are not probable or even possible in the antebellum era. These socalled emotional communities that exist among veterans are a means by which many of these men begin to make sense of the war and tried to navigate the postbellum era. It has a host of trials for these veterans. This forbidding the near of the closed forbidding the near forbidding veneer of this closed southern culture. Southern men sought out veterans to express and examine their new emotions. In many instances, the men that were the most acceptable, the ones that would understand best are other confederate veterans. Did you find any ways in which those expressions changed over time . I think that many men, by the 1880s, discontinue their private writings and are more apt to publish memoirs, regimental histories that we see today. For me that period between 1865 and the late 1870s is the most interesting, or the emotions are most raw, where the reactions are most visceral. Whereas by the 1880s, you still see the remnants of that trauma, but the language has been tempered, it is a period in which the lost cause is flourishing. Theres a lot more political motivation behind the public discourse. As a private one, not as interested that private discussion more or less is discontinued by the 1880s. They are just getting quite old or not willing to correspond. Brian is going to take us in a different direction. He is going to talk about the question, what does it mean to historians when we focus our attention on those that are disabled and damaged . In 1883, new orleans decided to hold an event that was advertised in the local newspapers as a corralling of the cripples. City officials would move through the streets of the French Quarter and pick up all the disabled bakers, including beggars, including dozens of disabled veterans that had no economic choice but to beg. They then placed them all in the shakespeare alms house. The wealthy residents and those tourists who had visited the city on regular basis had become shocked, disgusted, and second sickend by the sight of men exposing their wounds, their deformities, their empty sleeves in order to secure a few nickels. New orleans was not alone in beggarg these tagger laws. Cities across the south removed physically damaged men from public view that had few financial opportunities. For thousands of confederate veterans who lost a limb or suffered from a severe injury, a corralling marked only one of the arduous tasks that emerged in the transition from the military encampment to the homestead. Injured confederate veterans returned to a society that had been accustomed to judging the disabled as unmanly, as the pristine mill physiques had mail physiques had mark southern masculinity. Male physique had marked southern masculinity. Americans upheld the beauty of the healthy white body and for bore witness to what they would define as they gawked in horror at the side shows, fat ladies, conjoined twins, and those who had been born without arms or legs. For years prior to the american civil war, damaged and disabled bodies had been relegated to hidden spaces, hospitals, prisons, and sideshow attraction pens all across the south. But now the end of the war meant that for numerous communities, they would now view these amputated man on a daily basis. , asade them in many ways the singer Natalie Imbruglia once noted, torn. A cloud of defeat hung over the minds who asked if the physical sacrifice exhibited by the heart hard hand of war had been worth it. Disabled men found few economic gratuities in a world rooted in physical labor. One man noted after months seeking work, he felt like the entire south had a giant sign hanging up that said no maimed veteran need apply. The struggles i described here, and as i go into greater detail the clash starts with our perceived understanding of veterans. The lost cause and the movements that crystallized for veterans did their darndest to accentuate the manly honor that all that fought had been worth it. Monuments proclaimed that this was a group of honorable men, not broken men, and that these are very real challenges in terms of understanding the entire experience of all veterans. But even some historians have been uncomfortable in recognizing the place of damage and disillusioned veterans. We are not here to tell you that every single confederate veteran returned home damaged in some way. Some lives very normal lives. At the same time, we cannot discount or discredit the existence of these men in society. Their plight would dictate how the south deals with the price of defeat. The pensions filed across the former confederacy reveal an entire generation of men physically and economically suffering. Even if you dig one level deeper and go to the governors papers of many Southern States, you will find numerous letters from amputated and physically suffering men begging for help. Give me something, because i have served this state during the war. These soldiers who came home bearing this phenomenon of a missing limb will create a permanent class of disabled and diseased men. Such veterans faced chronic and hindered mobility. They were citizens who now had to process their place in a society so long rooted in the physical and mental body. Disabled men were thrown back to their families to deal with the emotional rigors of life. Damaged veterans remained dependent on society to accept them once again has honorable men, even if labor was no longer in the cards for supporting a family with diminished economic prospects. The limbless would turn to the government, who haphazardly and in some cases very reluctantly agreed to extend the aid in the form of pensions prosthetic , limbs, land grants, educational opportunities, and even a spot in veterans homes. The very existence of these disabled man in the south forces a cultural reconstruction. One in which the broken body would eventually be honored, and one in which the physical and psychological sacrifices of a veteran population demanded a reconsideration of a government that would now allow for a class of dependent citizens who could even still be seen as manly in their dependence, even one that could give a pound of flesh in the cause of the american civil war. One question that i have, as someone that also writes about damaged men returning home, how do you navigate that tricky word, victim . How do you write about these men empathetically, but also recognizing that they are deserving of all the humanity and dignity that we can give them . That is difficult thread, or needle to thread here. These stories are difficult to digest. This was a difficult project, and im sure you experienced the same thing. Its hard not to read a pension file filled with a long paragraph of a man explaining his graphic injury in details. And hes doing it just so he can prove that he can get some money for a prosthetic limb. It was on the burden of the individual to prove that he had lost that limb in battle rather than in an industrial accident, or had been born with a deformity. As you gather these tales, you have to step back to look at the larger picture. There is a reason that disabled history isnt at the forefront of our historical studies. Its difficult to comprehend. It doesnt always neatly fit the narrative of the return home of the veteran. In many ways, it is a necessary one. One that enriches and deepens our understanding of the war. Without uplifting panel with the fact uplifting panel [laughter] i think i would like to turn it over to you all to ask questions of these interesting oh boy, lots of questions. Okay. Gary. Weve learned about empty sleeves, suicide alcoholism and drug abuse. , i know some military historians have even criticized the socalled dark turn in Civil War History. Im wondering how do you respond to that . What do you think is the place of this in civil war historiography . David . Ok, fine. [laughter] we are not all that dark, we are lively and fun guys, display what we read about. Despite what we write about. We have received some criticism focusing on the morbid aspects of the veteran experience. On the other hand if we end the , soldiers story in 1855 and 1865 and dont look afterwards, we are distorting the experiences of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Came back some with fairly minor consequences of war, and some with a normas consequences that they lived with enormous consequences they lived with the rest of their lives. In order to respect their experience we have to explore these narratives. The other thing we are doing is, there is a narrative embedded in the lost cause of the confederate soldier who comes back almost triumphant and unbroken. We need to recognize that that myth of the lost cause is only hiding the large part of the truth. I would add to that, one thing to keep in mind, and why this doctrine has happened is why this dark turn has happened because of the digitization of records. They have become much easier to access for historians. In some cases, states have medical holds or psychological holes on records starting to lift because so much time has passed. These records are enormously rich. They are detailing a level of suffering decades after the war. Kentuckys Pension Program does not come into place until 1912. Youre talking about several decades where these men are still writing about the constant physical pain they are having from their amputated limbs, from their feet that have been damaged from marching during the war, that they no longer can work. Their life has been consumed by a deeper level of suffering. The economic commitment that Southern State governments will have to put forward to take care of these men and widows, and orphaned children i think demands an exploration of these studies. It has a profound impact, at least in terms of southern culture. Moving forward. If i could add, one of the criticisms is that by overemphasizing, and i think that is the way it has been characterized, the dark side, that we run the risk of blurring atypical experiences suicide, trumpet, amputation, that we dashed from a, amputation, that we somehow blur the typical experiences from the normative ones the atypical experiences from the normative ones. We dont know what the atypical experience is. I read this fascinating essay on chamberlain. If ever there was a hero, somebody to hold up this is the , guy, hes normal, hes great. He came back and was president of the college. But if you read the article, you realize the rest of his life, he suffered physically and mentally. It affected his family and almost cost him his marriage. That would be my response. Any comments on confederate deserters, of which there were many . Deserters. Any comments about deserters . How they were treated when they came home . I think it depends on when you deserted. If were talking about the end of the war, is interesting to note, i focus on the formal ceremonies. Not every confederate soldier ended at appomattox. Those whose units were dispersed in other places; in order to not appear like they were deserting, they left in military order together. In a way that almost anticipates what you are finding, that they are using their Community Experience in wartime as a martial host to handle this transformation into peacetime. If you left camp alone, you are a deserter. If you left camp with your company, you are not. I would add that desertion comes to a price. When you apply for a pension or prosthetic limb, you had to prove that you left the army and an honorable fashion. If you left because of an injury and if you do not have the paperwork, your pension application would be denied. I am from ohio, the descendent of two confederate veterans wounded in the war. , theost his left hand other lived for 45 years. Limped for 45 years. Prior to the war, both were farmers. My question to you, has there been another study about returning veteran farmers . In those years, farming was such a difficult thing to do physically when you were whole and healthy. Many were expected to be farmers when they were not whole and healthy. That seems like a special subgroup. I wonder if anyone has looked at that. You have done a little bit with farmers, right . One anecdote i can tell you, there was a case of a farmer that returns home and is missing two limbs. His wife takes him out every morning and ties into the ties him to the bow, and uses that to guide him forward. Most accounts are for those amputees that try to form in some capacity. Most are unsuccessful. This is why they were demanding prosthetic limbs, just to move around the field. There were studies on agriculture in the south. I am not sure how deep they have gone in postwar veteran issues. In a book referenced earlier, take care of the living, jeff deals with economic retirement from 18601870 in pennsylvania county, virginia. It could give you an indepth view of one countys experience with agriculture and farming. Jeffs book would be able to answer that in some capacity at least. Thank you. Hi, im from oxford, ohio. Probably a psychological and medical question. You undoubtedly looked at the same group, or a large group of returning northern soldiers facing the same circumstances. Do you have any percentages that southern soldiers were worse off psychologically or better off, or somewhere in between than those from the north . And two, what was the result of amputations in terms of what both governments did for both sides, in that medical situation . Jim martin will be here tomorrow, i believe. Can talk about the union side. Hecan talk about the union side. The postbellum south is not a great place to gather statistical data for lots of reasons. But they did not tend to keep Vital Statistics into the 20th century. Lots of records did not survive the war. Its impossible to answer that question from a statistical point of view. But as i was trying to implicitly argue, the conditions after the war were so far worse in the south. And the support was not there for southerners. Although brian might take issue with that, because he makes the argument that things were not great for the northerners either. What about the medical treatment for both, and how those horribly disfigured people were handled from one end of the country to the other . There are a variety of experiences. The northern government has a prosthetic limb structure in place. Southern states have to rely on benevolent care. Organizations use private donations to gather funds to collect prosthetic limbs. Then it is up to the individual states because private soldiers are barred from federal benefits confederate soldiers are barred from federal benefits by the 14th amendment. They had to document that they had lost a limb in service . Or they just walk in and have one replaced . That would be a good question for jim at 9 00 a. M. [laughter] can he shout that out from the audience . I think you had to establish. There were questions about how the wound was affected. From the standpoint of suicide and substance abuse, do you have a rough ballpark estimate of the percentages. More than half, less than half, the number of those that were affected . A rough estimate . No. [laughter] you just cant. Its just too difficult. The sources just turned there. The northern records anybody who has worked in the official records, there is no analog for the confederacy. Unfortunately, it is a lot more anecdotal. They dont identify a silent asylum dwellers as veterans. You have to go through a second and third layer to try to identify a veteran. It is very cumbersome. With suicide data today, even now its bad. Trying to get good numbers and do comparisons between different states in Different Countries the data isnt as good as we , think it is. Doing this in the 19th century makes it 10 times harder. The data isnt good. But those in the north and south recognize that something is happening. Mania, suicide epidemics. It was new. They are aware that something is happening with veterans and entire communities in the postwar period. Questions about robert e lee. A couple of years ago a book was written, the lee family found a chest full of letters that lee had written after the war. So the author put a lot of stuff in the book, took it to the lee family, and they wanted them to take it out. He survived the war are any battle injuries. But without any battle injuries. But the question is, somebody like him who is welleducated, who had a lot of responsibility versus a lowly private was there any way to tell if the education of the person or responsibility they had i lee asked the author if suffered from ptsd, and you said and she said she was not a psychiatrist. Can education make a difference . In my own work of suicide, i found suicides taking place among common soldiers all the way to officers. I think there were a variety of triggers that are different, right . I have the one story of a virginia cavalry officer who basically had a breakdown before a battle. He basically became incapacitated. He realized that as a military officer he was leading his men letting his men down. His company realized that he was ill and started leaving him back leading him back home to petersburg, when an route, he got a hold of a sidearm and killed himself. I think is motivation was different from an ordinary soldier who would have taken his life. David i think trying to figure out which soldiers end up with ptsd is difficult today. We can always tell which soldier will respond differently to the trauma of war, and complex ways that we cant figure out. Let alone figure out for someone that is been dead for 150 years. War tended to be associated with trauma. Being a prisoner of war was particularly dramatic, traumatic particularly in the the conflict. Losing a limb is extraordinarily traumatic. The other thing important to recognize his the communities after the war, their ability to have fellow soldiers to talk about experiences with, their families, those that seems to be most likely to gravitate toward Suicidal Ideation tend to be those who are isolated. And have traumatic war experience. Those work in conjunction with each other. I have a question about alcoholism. Can it be cured . Are there a number of alcoholics who left it aside and continued on with their lives . Alcoholics . Anyone want to tackle that . My own read, medical caregivers in the 19th century conflated causes and symptoms. More often than not, if somebodys behavior was aberrational or erratic, it would be associated with alcoholism. It would go no further. They would not look at service in the military as an excellent nation. As a explanation. Quite a few were abusing alcohol or opium. The psychological framework that they work in is a freudian prefreudian one. If we look at somebody that is struggling with alcoholism or Suicidal Ideation or depression or what have you, we tend to think, what happened to this person earlier in their lives that led them to this place . In the 19thcentury, they asked, what happened to them that morning that led them to that place . The idea that something could affect somebody 2030 years later that idea did not exist yet. Their remedy for on kinds of all kinds of mental issues, the asylum model was to put somebody in a bucolic setting and hope that made them better. Treatment was very limited. The only treatment they really had was the extent to which you restrain patients and asylums. In an asylum. Is it better for them to kill killelves or to want to themselves because they are strapped to a chair all day . Those are not good choices, but those were the kinds of debates they were having. With the panel can pair and what the panel compare and contrast the experience of white veterans in the south africanamericans that came back from war service with the union army . There is an interesting thing that happens with suicide in the 19th century. Before the civil war in the south, suicide is associated with slavery. It was thought to be something that slaves do. Its something that white people dont do. What happened in some ways after the war is that that flips. Suicide becomes associated with whiteness and not associated with africanamericans. The best piece of evidence i have of this is in North Carolina. There were 2 white asylums and 1 black asylum. The black asylums, if you read the records, they say year after year, we have lots of patience, s, but none are suicidal. They have pretty racist ideas about why that is. One africanamerican patient finally commits suicide. The explanation in the annual , he was in a black asylum, but he was very white skinned, so he doesnt count. It actually read, hung himself before daybreak, looked almost white. That is cultural perception rather than reality. The ways in those traumas are processed by communities are different. We have time for one more question. I to not want a question. I just want to commend the question was raised about the dark turn. I really find these panels, the work being done, so and lightning. As so enlightening. We now have records that are being opened up. We can tell the stories of those forgotten people. Just like in the earlier days we looked at the records that were moldering in a Warehouse Facility in maryland. I think the way you simulated the field means that maybe in 10 years, the questions i dont know, in the south the , recordkeeping is so difficult. But nonetheless, you are turning up stories. And these stories are not meant to take away or rob the honor of those who fought returned, and , restored the nation. It is nevertheless their stories that deserve an equal voice. Maybe we can reconstruct their lives. So thank you all. [applause] one more question. Fight it out. Rock, paper, scissors. All these injuries or amputations are chronic. You can see chronic illness and an amputated vet. Iat we forget and published a paper in 2000 on the history of sexually transmitted united statese military from 1860. Had an injurylain from a urologic cause. Andad developed gonorrhea suffered from the rest of his life. He was killed at petersburg. The effects were very longlasting. Last question . Were out of time. When i looked into the descriptions of the degree of social reform during the civil social pathology that existed during the civil war, related to traumatic experiences, if i came in in the middle of the conference and didnt know what war you were talking about, i would think you were talking about vietnam or iraq. My feeling generally that there is a great similarity in terms of the results any solider weve any soldier in any war weve been in than differences. There is a uniqueness going on. I think there is a great degree people who resemble those on shelters on the streets right now. Suicide, all of that. Bureau is looking to the unique this we are always looking to the uniqueness of the experience. I think there is a lot more similarity. Right, i think that is what a lot or people see. There are a lot more similarities than people saw at one point. But thank you for your comment. We appreciate that. Thanks to all of our panelists. We will see you after dinner. [applause] announcer on American History tv on cspan3 this july 4 weekend, tonight at 8 00, a lecture on history. Julia ward howe increasingly focused on her position as a women aresay that different than men and women can really do Society Better than men have done. Boston College Professor on the new role of women in the workforce and in politics in the century, looking at political organizations that focused on womens issues and suffrage. 10 00, the 1968 republican and Democratic National conventions. Bellicose ing resolute without being bellicose, strong without being arrogant. That is the kind of america that