Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS139 compile a list (located in an appendix) of Hughes's reading that will be of use to all students of Southern intellectual life. The core of the study, however, is an extended investigation of Hughes's Treatise on Sociology of 1 854 and a handful of his later writings, all of which Ambrose subjects to a searching analysis owing much to the work of Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. In the final chapter, Ambrose argues that even though Hughes became a casualty of sectional conflict in 1862, his "statist" program was realized by the unlikely agent of the Confederate States of America. This is the most original and provocative (ifnot the most convincing) part ofthe study and is the one likely to be of most interest to students of the Civil War. That this volume does not rank among the best studies of proslavery polemicists is as much a tribute to the achievements of Drew Faust, Neal Gillespie, and others as it is an indication of any serious flaws of its own. That said, however, there remains the lurking sense that in its admirable attempt to be evenhanded about its subject; the book does not adequately convey Hughes's "fine sense of the ludicrous," as his eulogist aptly put it, and his Fitzhughian delight in shocking and, at times, "putting on" his audiences. The book also bypasses opportunities to link Hughes's career to broader themes, as it makes only minimal note, for instance, of how the overheated world of Mississippi politics in the 1850s shaped his output. It neglects other issues, such as the relation between Hughes's critique of free society and the quite similar earlier arguments crafted during the depression of 1837, or the likelihood that the authoritarian programs of Napoleon III provide a more useful parallel for understanding Hughes's reactionary vision of state power than they do Jefferson Davis's wartime government in Richmond. That such topics receive little consideration has much to do with the limitations of the biographical approach itself. Whatever their inherent contributions, studies of individual proponents of slavery should help scholars pursuing other, perhaps more productive, means of understanding the slave South's justification of the unjustifiable. It seems safe to predict that this body of polemical writing, including the authoritarian variant of Hughes, will continue to draw students interested in proslavery's intellectual substance, its cultural and political context, and its profoundly troubling agenda. Robert Bonner University of Southern Maine Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War. By Eric T Dean, Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. xi, 384. $35.00.) The American Civil War is the most scrutinized incident in the whole ofAmerican history. It is the focus of more publications annually than any other subject —including the assassination ofJohn F. Kennedy. Moreover, this analysis is not limited to monographs and journal articles; no less than three television documentaries, one of which continues to air new material, continually find new and appreciative audiences. 140CIVIL WAR HISTORY The War Between the States is central to a multifaceted inspection from the tactically analytical to the numerous aspects of what constitutes the New Military History. Furthermore, despite this exhaustive appraisal, each year produces at least one work that unearths new evidence or examines the tried and new in such an innovative manner as to constitute something exceptional. Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress Vietnam and the Civil War is such a work. It must be stated at the outset that, save for a concluding chapter, the impact of theVietnam War on itsAmerican participants serves only to frame Eric Dean's discussion. In the course of two concise, but nonetheless informative chapters, Dean examines the changing interpretation ofthe effects of the Vietnam War on those who survived and the history of military psychiatry from the GreatWar to Vietnam. Upon this foundation he proceeds to establish the parameters of that special hell created by a close formation and the rifled musket. A time of suffering and tribulation which found focus in such works as Gerald Linderman's Embattled Courage, "Seeing the Elephant," by Frank and Reaves, or The Union Soldier in Battle, by Earl J. Hess...