Recovering Disabled Veterans in Civil War Newspapers: Creating Heroic Disability

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article recovers the largely untold story of newspaper coverage of disabled veterans during the American Civil War, through the case of Massachusetts sergeant Thomas Plunkett, who lost both arms in Dec. 1862 at Fredericksburg, Virginia. News clips about him, along with comparative evidence of earlier coverage of people called “armless” or having “lost both arms,” are drawn from 528 relevant articles appearing in the United States between 1830 and 1865, with supplementary information regarding the postbellum years. We argue that Northern newspaper editors’ desire to make Plunkett a symbol of the Union cause led them to create the persona of the Armless Hero, a then-singular construction in the divided nation. In so doing, they forged a new discourse of heroic disability scarcely seen in prior coverage. That new discourse, through its eventual application to similarly disabled veterans, altered newspapers’ representations of disability in the war’s remaining years and afterward.