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Books > Humanities > History > American history > 1800 to 1900
Dillon J. Carroll's Invisible Wounds examines the effects of
military service, particularly combat, on the psyches and emotional
well-being of Civil War soldiers-Black and white, North and South.
Soldiers faced harsh military discipline, arduous marches, poor
rations, debilitating diseases, and the terror of battle, all of
which took a severe psychological toll. While mental collapses
sometimes occurred during the war, the emotional damage soldiers
incurred more often became apparent in the postwar years, when it
manifested itself in disturbing and self-destructive behavior.
Carroll explores the dynamic between the families of mentally ill
veterans and the superintendents of insane asylums, as well as
between those superintendents and doctors in the nascent field of
neurology, who increasingly believed the central nervous system or
cultural and social factors caused mental illness. Invisible Wounds
is a sweeping reevaluation of the mental damage inflicted by the
nation's most tragic conflict.
During the American Civil War, thousands of citizens in the Deep
South remained loyal to the United States. Though often overlooked,
they possessed broad symbolic importance and occupied an outsized
place in the strategic thinking and public discourse of both the
Union and the Confederacy. In True Blue, Clayton J. Butler
investigates the lives of white Unionists in three Confederate
states, revealing who they were, why and how they took their
Unionist stand, and what happened to them as a result. He focuses
on three Union regiments recruited from among the white residents
of the Deep South-individuals who passed the highest bar of
Unionism by enlisting in the United States Army to fight with the
First Louisiana Cavalry, First Alabama Cavalry, and Thirteenth
Tennessee Union Cavalry. Northerners and southerners alike thought
a considerable amount about Deep South Unionism throughout the war,
often projecting their hopes and apprehensions onto these embattled
dissenters. For both, the significance of these Unionists hinged on
the role they would play in the postwar future. To northerners,
they represented the tangible nucleus of national loyalty within
the rebelling states on which to build Reconstruction policies. To
Confederates, they represented traitors to the political ideals of
their would-be nation and, as the war went on, to the white race,
making them at times a target for vicious reprisal. Unionists'
wartime allegiance proved a touchstone during the political chaos
and realignment of Reconstruction, a period when many of these
veterans played a key role both as elected officials and as a
pivotal voting bloc. In the end, white Unionists proved willing to
ally with African Americans during the war to save the Union but
unwilling to protect or advance Black civil rights afterward,
revealing the character of Unionism during the era as a whole.
John T. Farnham, a sharpshooter in the Union Army, wrote a
substantial diary entry nearly every day during his three-year
enlistment, sent over 50 long articles to his hometown newspaper,
and mailed some 600 letters home. He described training, battles,
skirmishes, encampments, furloughs, marches, hospital life, and
clerkships at the Iron Brigade headquarters and the War Department.
He met Lincoln and acquired a blood-stained cuff taken from his
assassinated body. He befriended freed slaves, teaching them to
read and write and built them a school. He campaigned for Lincoln's
re-election. He subscribed to three newspapers and several
magazines and devoured 22 books. He attended 23 plays and six
concerts during his service. He was gregarious and popular, naming
in his diaries 108 friends in the service and 156 at home. Frail
and sickly, he died of tuberculosis four years after his discharge.
He paints a detailed portrait of the lives of ordinary soldiers in
the Union Army, their food, living conditions, relations among
officers and men, ordeals, triumphs, and tragedies. Nominated for
the Gilder Lehrman Prize
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