Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North by Sarah Handley-Cousins

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North by Sarah Handley-Cousins Peter C. Luebke (bio) Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North. By Sarah Handley-Cousins. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. 186. Cloth, $39.95.) When one thinks about Civil War casualties, one inevitably thinks about the piles of limbs outside of battlefield hospitals. The amputee with the empty sleeve draws attention as the epitome of the horror of war. But the amputee also presents an unambiguous figure, one whose broken body [End Page 292] self-evidently displays dedication to the cause. What about the thousands of soldiers who experienced other wounds? With Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North, Sarah Handley-Cousins takes an expansive view of wartime injuries and disabilities, charting a variety of harms. Soldiers, veterans, and the government struggled to define disability. They also grappled with who was worthy of government assistance and how much of it they should receive. In Bodies in Blue, “disability” serves as a concept that overlaps with masculinity. American masculinity in the nineteenth century meant “the ability to command one’s body and use it in labor to maintain independence” (3). Injury and illness threatened the ability of soldiers to control their bodies, which in turn undermined their ability to maintain independence through labor. Thus, during the war and after, the idea of disability remained imbricated with ideas of masculinity and who properly counted as a man. Handley-Cousins traces these struggles in six chapters. The first two chapters consider who possessed the authority to determine disability. The first chapter charts how the War Department, facing a manpower crisis, conceived of “disability as a continuum of degrees” and created the Invalid Corps, renamed the Veteran Reserve Corps in 1864 (18). The Veteran Reserve Corps, besides keeping bodies in uniform, aimed to give injured soldiers productive work, thereby keeping them off the pension rolls. The next chapter uses court-martial records to show how the men contested that officers had the “power to legitimize disability” (44). Unsurprisingly, officers and surgeons prevailed, with decisions often hinging on the perceived moral character of the enlisted soldier. How Union authorities sought to understand injury and illness through the creation of the Army Medical Museum provides the topic for the third chapter. Here, Handley-Cousins looks less at disability and more at how Union doctors appropriated bodies to serve their ends. Doctors claimed soldiers’ bodies in order to expand medical knowledge of war wounds, with specimens on display at the Army Medical Museum. Handley-Cousins maintains that the museum demonstrated how “Union doctors turned the bodies of soldiers into government property” (69). The fourth and fifth chapters look at disability after the war. The fourth chapter considers Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who suffered a grievous wound during the siege of Petersburg. The injuries to his hip, bladder, and penis afflicted him until they ultimately took his life in 1914. Unlike the missing limbs of amputees, Chamberlain’s wound remained private, which in turn made it difficult for him to receive a disability pension. The example of Chamberlain challenges notions that disability had to be visible. The fifth chapter appraises how the Pension Bureau judged soldiers against [End Page 293] an idea of masculinity and penalized those who failed to fit that ideal. As in the war, government authorities’ views of what disability looked like trumped those of the soldiers themselves. Finally, Handley-Cousins examines, in her sixth chapter, the invisible disability of wartime-related psychological trauma. Using case studies of several soldiers, Handley-Cousins demonstrates that suffering extended beyond the veterans themselves to their families. She also shows how psychiatric care often centered on restoring productivity to disabled veterans, which in turn rehabilitated their manhood and could facilitate their release. Indeed, “war trauma was not simple or static” (123). The chapters open interpretive space, but they also raise important questions about the scope of the book itself. Handley-Cousins focuses her discussion on white male soldiers, although brief references to African American soldiers and other people of color hover around the margins. Observations such as “Blackness itself was a kind of disability in ante-bellum America” and...