A soldier’s resolution might fail in one episode but not in others. During an advance, Captain Crawford, 85th Illinois, saw a boy start for the rear. Asked if hit, he replied with tears in his eyes: “no, but I’m just scared to death, can’t I go back.” With unusual compassion, Crawford gave him a message to take back, and the next day the soldier looked right as rain. In the 1864 campaigns, when the butchery achieved unparalleled proportions, whole divisions could not step out. By June, said General Patrick, Union troops in Virginia failed to heed the charge and officers would not expose themselves to encourage the men.22
Fearful carnage left whole battalions emotionally drained. Contemporaries frequently used words like “dazed” and “despondent” to describe behavior after Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and Franklin. Numbed soldiers wandered around in a trance, temporarily deranged by horror. After Sharpsburg, Lee himself begged his stunned soldiers to get back in line. In a sampling of feelings expressed by soldiers of both sides in the aftermath of Shiloh, their first bloodbath, 75 percent felt “in despair.”23
Many were undergoing what psychologist Pierre Janet calls “dissociation.” That occurs when the mind shelters itself by temporarily blocking out the injurious source of trauma in the surrounding reality. According to Lieutenant Henry Livermore Abbott, 20th Massachusetts, his colonel, Raymond Lee, became “very much shaken in his intellects” by Antietam. The day after battle, he mounted his horse and, without leave of absence or explaining his purpose, apparently meandered off some ten miles. His men found the colonel “without a cent in his pocket, without having changed his clothes for 4 weeks, during all which time he had this horrible diarrhea.”24
Disoriented soldiers might be suffering neurological damage from traumatic head injuries. Some healed over time, while others did not. Captain Frederick William Stowe, Harriet’s son and an aide to General Adolph von Steinwehr, got hit in the head by shrapnel at Gettysburg. He never fully recovered his senses. Invalided out, Fred endured depression and headaches. In 1867, he went through an alcohol recovery program. In 1871, he simply wandered off into oblivion. Private James Melton of the 7th Ohio, hit over the left ear, also became deranged. He disappeared from hospital. A shell burst overhead stunned Lieutenant Colonel John B. Estes, 44th Georgia, engaged at Ellison’s Mill, Virginia, on June 26, 1862. The blast addled his brains, although he showed signs of recovery over time. Surgeons hospitalized the men discussed above, while others remained in the ranks despite being “lost in character.” John Bumgardner, 26th Indiana Light Artillery, got knocked down by concussion from a shell blast. The medical officer diagnosed him as fit to carry on, yet he had lost his reason, crying out, “There they come men,” when no enemy was in sight, and “run boys run they are after us.”25
Astounding numbers left the ranks during heavy campaigning. After Fredericksburg, the woods filled with Union stragglers; a little later, during the infamous Mud March, a contemporary estimate put the AWOL at 3,000 officers and 82,000 other ranks. On the Rebel side, Lee blamed straggling for the curtailment of his 1862 Maryland campaign, telling Charles Squires, commanding the Washington Artillery: “The infantry, sir, are straggling, they are straggling,” adding, “Captain, our men are acting badly.” The government in Richmond calculated 40,000 men had left the line. Lee again charged that absenteeism thwarted his Pennsylvania offensive, asserting, “The number of desertions from the army is so great and still continues to such an extent that unless some cessation of them can be caused I fear success in the field will be severely endangered.” In the Union camp, provost marshal General Patrick opined that, unless Meade “does something to keep better discipline in his command, there will be few troops to put into action.” He complained that “the whole country is full of stragglers.”26
Senior officers generally shared Patrick’s severe attitude to dereliction of duty. After Malvern Hill, Colonel Francis Bartow berated soldiers as misfits and cowards who reported unfit, although physically unharmed. When a man asked permission to drop out, Bartow “cursed and swore at him,” then “began to punch him with his fist,” and finally ordered him out of sight as “not fit to be with my brave men.” Confederate General William Dorsey Pender called men in nervous collapse a “filthy unprincipled set of villains.” Many temporarily stunned by combat returned to their units, but not all. A Confederate surgeon wrote after Gettysburg that ten North Carolinians, previously of good report, had lit out for home. A pursuing police patrol captured seven, subsequently sentenced to be court-martialed and shot.27
Authorities failed to appreciate that most troops, if kept in a combat zone for long enough, continuing on without rest, inevitably reach the end of their mental and physical tethers. Military doctors identified this condition in World War II as combat exhaustion. Field studies of the 1940s showed that initially a soldier’s experience and competence rose over time to a peak of efficiency, but then dropped off quickly to final breakdown unless positive intervention occurred, such as a furlough. Physical deprivation and repeated exposure to trauma downgrade bodily strength and mental resilience. New York Private David L. Thompson recalled struggling with himself to stay in line at Antietam. He explained, with admirable understatement, that “Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of going back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness.”28
Endocrinologist Robert Sapolsky provides a scientific context: under stress, all animals secrete hormones. This helps in weathering a crisis, but ultimately leads to a kind of “emotional suicide” when the immune system becomes degraded. The deterioration appears in physical symptoms like blood thickening and clots, resulting in heart attack and stroke, along with a steady loss of brain function, possibly ending in dementia. In lay terms, British psychiatrist and combat veteran Lord Moran notes in Anatomy of Courage (1987) that each soldier owns moral capital in a personal bank deposit. Combat makes withdrawals on that account until it is empty.29
The results may be seen in repeated descriptions of combat-exhausted soldiers as listless, lethargic, vacant. Edward Wightman, 9th New York, described the multitude of army stragglers as “miserably worn. Their countenances are sunken and melancholy and indifferent almost to stolidity.” During the vicious fighting around Spotsylvania, Virginia, spring 1864, when many men bankrupted psychologically, a lieutenant in the 15th New Jersey wrote that the troops, “are listless and feel doomed,” adding that “day after day we stupidly and drearily wait the order that summons us to the dreadful work.” A senior officer, Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, chief of artillery for the Army of the Potomac’s 5th Corps, recorded he had never seen such lethargic, sleepy men.30
High rank gave no immunity to the degenerative effects of repeated combat exposure. Libbie Custer recalled meeting, in Fall 1864, “a tired General [Alfred A.] Torbet,” who seemed without “life and animation.” Basil Duke, Confederate General John Hunt Morgan’s right-hand man, described his chief in 1864 as depleted by command responsibility, imprisonment, and longing for his wife Mattie. He appeared, said Duke, “greatly changed. His face wore a weary, careworn expression and his manner was destitute of its former ardor and enthusiasm.” Part of Morgan’s problem lay in the perennial soldier’s dilemma of divided loyalties: a grinding tension between the obligation to die for the cause and responsibility to live for loved ones.31
We often most clearly see the progress of combat fatigue in generals’ lives because their careers have been relatively well documented. When the war began, Confederate General Richard S. Ewell at times agonized over his share of responsibility for the killing. After Malvern Hill, staff officer Moxley Sorrel found him in a shed piled with bodies. The general sat doubled up on the floor, hands clasped to his head, sobbing, and beside himself at the result of Lee’s frontal attack. He asked: “Can you tell me why we had five hundred men [from his command alone] killed dead on the field yesterday?” (Of the same engagement, D. H. Hill commented bitterly: “It was not war. It was murder.”) Nevertheless, Ewell continued to serve
effectively until badly wounded in the Second Manassas campaign, where he lost his left leg below the thigh. Thereafter, the general became increasingly unhappy about the war’s human costs. This possibly affected his command performance. Although he had his defenders, detractors accused him of lacking the aggressiveness that might have crushed Meade on July 1 at Gettysburg.32
British military observer Colonel Arthur Fremantle met Ewell before the battle. He described the general as exhibiting “a haggard, sickly face: having so lately lost a leg above the knee, he is still a complete cripple, and falls off his horse occasionally.” Fremantle noted Ewell employed the classic military method of coping with stress, being a “great swearer.” The general performed unevenly in the Spring 1864 campaign, shock at the loss of Stuart and Longstreet’s wounding adding to his nervous strain. Lee observed his subordinate beating runners at Spotsylvania with the flat of his sword, swearing fearfully, his composure blown. Appalled by any man’s loss of character, Lee chided Ewell: “How can you expect to control these men when you have lost control of yourself? If you cannot repress your excitement, you had better retire.” Seven days later, Ewell lost all presence of mind and lay prostrate on the ground. Lee removed him from command.33
George B. McClellan’s chronic over-caution and habitual overestimation of the odds against him to excuse inaction have been well documented. Even though we cannot precisely gauge how far these traits constituted defense mechanisms against committing troops to the slaughter, command stress appears in the mix. “I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield, with its mangled corpses & poor suffering wounded!” McClellan wrote to his wife, Ellen, during heavy Peninsula fighting, June 1862. “Victory has no charms for me when purchased at such cost.” In a later letter he declared: “Every poor fellow that is killed or wounded almost haunts me.” The stress became so unbearable that he apparently retreated into dissociation. On June 30, as Lee launched an all-out attack at Glendale Crossroads to crack the Union army, McClellan and his staff boarded the gunboat Galena and sailed off up the James. They stayed away all day, inspecting river defenses, no job for the commanding general. In the Fall campaign, McClellan suffered painful neuralgia attacks from South Mountain through Antietam. He wrote Ellen that “the want of rest and anxiety” wore him down. On the key morning of battle, September 17, he kept to his tent until 7 a.m., leaving his generals to pace. Suffering severe neuralgia, he failed to renew hostilities on the 18th. Lincoln’s removal of McClellan may have precluded a breakdown.34
Two heroes of Gettysburg proved less fortunate. George Pickett fell in love with a young belle, LaSalle Corbell, in September 1861. Their relationship deepened his wish for peace, adding to the pain felt by a West Pointer over a classmates’ war. “Oh, my darling,” he wrote, “war and its results did not seem so awful till the love for you came. Now—now I want to love and bless and help everything, and there are no foes—no enemies—just love and longing for you.” After the attack on Cemetery Ridge shattered his division, several officers observed the general staring into the distance, weeping uncontrollably. In September, with Pickett’s performance faltering, Lee replaced him in field command.
General Gouverneur Kemble Warren, a Northern hero of Gettysburg, who commanded the Army of the Potomac’s artillery train, was the first to grasp the tactical importance of putting troops on Little Round Top, key to the Union left flank. Rushing units forward, he secured the position, preventing potential disaster. But mounting losses as the fighting ground on made Warren irascible and unpredictable, his condition made worse by heavy drinking, all symptoms of combat exhaustion. Colonel Wainwright described him thus at Cold Harbor, June 6, 1864: “He appears to have sunk into a sort of lethargic sulk, sleeps a great part of the time, and says nothing to anyone. I think at times that these fits of his must be the result of a sort of insanity.” Meade felt obliged to replace Warren.35
Even vehement exponents of the spirited offense suffered guilt over their part in the killing. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain became famous for his madcap bayonet charge down the slope of Little Round Top. Nevertheless, he agonized over the fate of men he had sent to die, and two months after Gettysburg went home to recover from nervous prostration. Returning to his command for the last Virginia campaigns, the general precipitately ordered the 18th Pennsylvania to assault a strong Rebel position at Five Forks in January 1865. As a stretcher party carried the 18th’s dying leader to the rear, the colonel cried out accusingly: “General, I have carried out your wishes.” This imputation of his personal accountability struck Chamberlain to the core with horror: “What dark misgivings searched me as I took the import of these words!”36
John Bell Hood, a vigorous proponent of offense as the decisive tactical weapon, still grieved at times over the human cost. By 1865, he appeared quite physically and mentally threadbare. Mary Boykin Chesnut described him at a social gathering in Richmond as “perfectly abstracted, was gazing in the fire—his face livid, spots of perspiration on his head. He was back evidently in some moment of his bitter trial. Willie Preston’s death—the fields of dead at Franklin—the panic at Nashville. Who can tell—but the agony of his face was fearful.” Officers she knew said they had seen Hood on previous occasions staring into the flames with the same tortured expression. The general probably had PTSD brought on by the weight of fatigue, death, and defeat. (After the war, when rested and partially restored, Hood would strongly reassert his faith in the offense at all costs.) Less well-known generals whose mental resources failed included Confederate William Ward, whose troops called him “Old Shaky” because of his tremors. General Philip St. George Cocke, C.S.A., made sickly and despondent by the burden of brigade command, killed himself during Christmas 1861. General Francis E. Patterson, Army of the Potomac, faced court-martial for cowardice after he begged off sick before battle; disgraced, he shot himself in November 1862. Confederate General G. W. Smith suffered a nervous breakdown after Seven Pines.37
Even seeming monuments to stoicism such as Grant and Meade could approach the edge of sanity. In the 1864 fighting, both showed vile temper and skewed judgment. Historian Fletcher Pratt concluded: “The ceaseless vigilance, the strain of daily battles, was beginning to tell at Union headquarters, everyone’s nerves were frayed. Grant gruffed at the adjutants; Meade took a perverse pleasure in making his staff uncomfortable, colonels hardly dared to speak to him.” As a result of one snarling exchange, Grant testily ordered Meade to assault on June 3, a blunder costing 7,000 casualties in ten minutes. By August 18, General Marsena Patrick concluded ruefully: “Grant is not at all well, & there are fears that he is breaking down.” Grant and Meade held on. General James Ledlie could not. While his troops fought over the bloody Crater at Petersburg, July 30, 1864, Ledlie, his resolution shattered, stayed in his bombproof drinking medicinal alcohol.38
Extreme emotional stress resulted in sleep deprivation. Nightmares, particularly common after major actions, wrecked the restorative value of rest. “Even when I sleep,” moaned Major Charles Harvey Brewster, 10th Massachusetts, “I hear the whistling of the shells and the shouts and groans, and to sum it up in two words it is horrible.” A friend noted that Private Heber Wells, 13th New Jersey, had endured “a very bad attack of nightmare” in September 1862. “All who had taken part in the battle of Antietam were still thinking of the horrible sights during the day and dreaming of it at night,” he added. Today, we tend to focus on the psychological roots of trauma, but Victorians too often looked for a more tangible, physical root cause. Nurse Hannah Ropes, working at a Union hospital in Georgetown, near D.C., recorded a patient enduring habitual nightmares. She recorded that “as they all are, he was on the battlefield, struggling to get away from the enemy.” But she did not diagnose the condition as originating in emotional trauma, citing instead a lung wound that she thought had lessened blood circulation to the brain. In fact, the soldier’s intellect even more than his body had been wounded. Future explorer and Confederate soldier Henry Morton Stanley wrote of
Shiloh’s butcher’s bill: “I can never forget the impression that those wide-open dead eyes made on me.” It became for Stanley a haunting common to many veterans.39
The descent into combat exhaustion could be gradual, akin to clockwork winding down. On the other hand, one traumatic event might trigger total collapse, like a tight spring snapping. One Union soldier served well until he saw his father killed in the ranks beside him at Fredericksburg. Then, his nerve failed. Although sentenced to die, the soldier received a pardon from the president. In another episode, Union Private Albert Frank had just offered his canteen to a friend when a shell splattered the man’s brains everywhere. In shock, Frank ran about, screaming. Comrades calmed him, but by evening he was making whining shell sounds and repeating, “Frank is killed.” When he showed no improvement, the surgeon declared him insane, and commitment to a government asylum followed. We cannot say why another man might manage to hold onto his sanity under such conditions. Private Sam Watkins, 1st Tennessee (C.S.A.), breakfasting when a shell hit Lieutenant Whittacker, standing nearby, retained self-control. Watkins later wrote of Whittacker’s horrid death: “His brains fell in the plate from which we were sopping, and his head fell in my lap, deluging my face and clothes with his blood.”40
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