Civil War History

In this thought-provoking monograph, Sarah Handley-Cousins frames the Civil War as a social and cultural contest over bodies—and what military service was capable of doing to them. The war’s seemingly inexhaustible capacity for human destruction has not been lost on scholars, but our histories too often imitate the skeptical gaze of regimental surgeons, pension examiners, and nineteenth-century newspaper editors. Taking cues from histories of disability—and noting the ways pension files, case histories, and asylum records are polluted by power dynamics—Handley-Cousins places sick and disabled men at the center of her narrative, recovering a range of lived experiences that mocked assumptions about disability, gender, and war. She challenges us to ponder how Union soldiers and veterans (especially those whose injuries and ailments were not perceptible and who were thus subject to a more intense scrutiny and skepticism) toggled between pride and pain, narratives of sacrifice and dependence, and notions of martial masculinity and maladjustment. In a short compass, she tallies several important arguments that should point the field in some promising new directions.

Across six thematic chapters, Handley-Cousins maps the liminal space occupied by disabled Union soldiers during the Civil War and its long aftermath (74). The first chapter recalls the Veteran Reserve Corps (VRC). Civil War Americans “associated disability with dependency”; as such, the VRC provided an important venue in which disabled men could toil behind the lines, in hospitals, and remedy federal manpower woes (12). Yet service in the VRC often compelled men to take up domestic tasks deemed the province of women and African Americans; further, it labeled them as “simultaneously . . . able and unable” (12). Though cultural productions and public speeches announced that physical injuries were [End Page 56] “patriotic sacrifices,” such work “failed to exorcise the anxiety” the men felt about their injuries (30).

This anxiety was amplified for men without empty sleeves or missing legs. Handley-Cousins reminds that despite the ubiquity of amputation in the war’s visual culture and popular memory, “disability from illness” and chronic disease “was a far more common experience” among Union soldiers (34). Probing court-martial records and building on historian Kathryn Shively Meier’s notion of “self-care,” the author recovers the wartime struggles of the “walking sick,” whose “perceptions of their own bodies” often failed to align with their officers’ orders and the dictates of “martial masculinity” (37). That conflict also manifested itself in the creation of the Army Medical Museum. Shauna Devine and other previous scholars have looked to the wartime project as a key endeavor in the professionalization of medical science, but Handley-Cousins argues that it betrays “medical authorities’ power over vulnerable bodies” (61). Such authority, however, was subject to the sharp protest of veterans’ and their loved ones, who publicly questioned the propriety of harvesting bits of bone from battlefields (69).

The agency of veterans is key to the next two chapters. The first superbly demonstrates how Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain “lived as both a war hero and an emasculated cripple” (75). Responding to recent scholarly debates about how successfully veterans readjusted to civilian life, Handley-Cousins appeals for “a more nuanced interpretation of Civil War disability, one that . . . allows soldiers and veterans to feel contradictory emotions” (93). Her claim may paint recent scholarship with too broad of a brush, but her important point stands. Chamberlain’s wound rendered him restive and chronically sick and very likely contributed to his marital difficulties and workaholism; nonetheless, he “worked hard to craft a public persona” that aligned with the “standards of able-bodied manhood” (78, 92). Veterans who appealed for government aid certainly understood the power of those cultural precepts, as “notions of manhood and disability” were used to curtail the pension rolls (97). “Those who failed to adhere to the expectations of idealized manhood or who lived with ailments outside the Pension Bureau’s definition of disability,” Handley-Cousins contends...