Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North

Abstract

Soldiers have always worked. And, like others engaged in “high-risk” occupations (e.g., hard rock miners, oil derrick operators, medical care workers), they routinely get hurt on the job. This was certainly the case during the American Civil War (1861 – 65), which until the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic held the dubious distinction of being the deadliest event in US history. Underpaid and often treated with disregard by higher-ups, the average infantryman faced a host of workplace hazards, from poor rations and inadequate sanitation to rampant disease and enemy munitions. Although historians and popular writers have made a cottage industry of detailing the Civil War's production of injury—in all its “patriot gore,” to borrow Edmund Wilson's phrase—relatively few devote much energy exploring what happened to the hundreds of thousands of disabled vets who survived the conflict. Those who do tend to share the public's fascination with the most spectacular forms of war injury, especially limb amputations (so-called empty sleeves), relegating more common forms of war trauma to the margins of Civil War memory.Accessibly written and nuanced in its analysis, Sarah Handley-Cousins's slim volume Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North offers an important corrective to these tendencies. Drawing on a range of sources (pension files, soldiers’ letters, asylum records, popular poetry), Handley-Cousins shows how many disabled Union veterans faced a precarious future, caught between ideals of martial masculinity—which stressed the stoic acceptance of wartime trauma—and the need to demonstrate their physical impairments in order to secure government support. Especially vulnerable were men with nonvisible injuries whose experiences of disability “did not easily fit into existing cultural narratives of manhood and sacrifice” (2 – 3). During the war, troops who “insisted on accommodations for their ailing bodies” faced accusations of cowardice and malingering, suspicions that persisted for decades after the conflict's end (34). By the late 1880s, “pension fraud” conspiracists such as President Grover Cleveland increasingly dismissed Union veterans’ claims for greater relief; instead, both Cleveland and many within the Pension Bureau pushed the idea that “only certain disabilities had long-lasting or permanent symptoms, and that other ailments could, and perhaps should, be overcome” (105). Ultimately, Bodies in Blue urges us to look beyond the amputee to consider the “complicated and sometimes contradictory ways that state, society, and soldier interpreted wartime disability” (12).In making her case, Handley-Cousins does not offer a sweeping survey of Union veterans’ diverse ailments. Nor does she attempt to make a systematic comparison of federal disabled policies to those in the secessionist South. Instead, she takes a more selective approach, using individual chapters to highlight key institutions, debates, and ideas that shaped the experiences of war-disabled Union vets. In one early chapter, Handley-Cousins details anxieties about the “walking sick,” the author's term for troops who occupied an uncomfortable middle ground between verifiable disability and “the expectations of able-bodiedness military service demanded” (34). Later she profiles the “disability double consciousness” of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlin, the famed Union general who was wounded by a minié ball at the Battle of Petersburg in 1864 (75). Although Chamberlin tried to hide his disabilities in public (he eventually served as the governor of Maine and president of Bowdoin College), the wound never fully healed, leaving him with excruciating pain in the genitals for the rest of his life. According to the author, “Chamberlain's example shows us that rather than falling into two opposing camps, disabled veterans actually occupied a liminal space, moving closer to one pole and then the other as their health, luck, and emotional state changed” (74). Throughout the book, Handley-Cousins argues that ideas about Civil War disability were inextricably bound up in gendered expectations about work and self-reliance. The federal Pension Bureau in particular “defined disability strictly by the degree to which a [male] veteran was able to earn a living by manual labor” (104).My only critique of Bodies in Blue—and here I could be speaking about nearly all histories of disabled veterans, including my own—is that Handley-Cousins does not address the role her “bodies in blue” played in damaging the bodies of others. Although she notes, on the book's final page, that the Civil War “centered—as all wars do—on the destruction of the human body,” she spends little time reflecting on Union vets’ complicity in that destruction (135). Did Union veterans’ experiences of disability and impairment make them question the violence dished out by their side? Did figures like Joshua Chamberlin experience any sleepless nights thinking about all of the genital wounds produced by the forces under his command? Or—as would be the case in later wars—did Union vets show little interest in the disabled bodies of their former enemies? Handley-Cousins doesn't tell us, which is understandable given the limitations of her project. But if historians hope to understand war disability in all its complexity, we need to move beyond individual soldiers’ bodies to examine the institutions and ideologies that make it possible for military forces to mass-produce trauma in the first place.In the book's final pages, Handley-Cousins draws a striking parallel between Civil War veterans’ efforts to secure pensions and the struggles of “modern-day” workers injured on the job (134). Much like the nineteenth-century Pension Bureau, she observes, “today's workers’ compensation system particularly emphasizes rejecting claimants’ requests by using legal and medical authorities’ definitions of disability, definitions which are still linked to labor capacity” (135). Just as Civil War veterans bristled at the attempts of authority figures—physicians, asylum wardens, pension boards, stingy politicians, among others—to evaluate the veracity of their wartime traumas, twenty-first-century American workers continue to struggle against narrow, morally sanctimonious, and often discriminatory ideas about who counts as (truly) disabled. Viewed through this lens, Sarah Handley-Cousins's Bodies in Blue is more than a welcome addition to the growing historiography of American war disability; it is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the roots of contemporary struggles for disability justice in the workplace and beyond.