Living Hell

by Michael C. C. Adams

  26. William L. Barney, The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir’s Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 93; John D. Imboden, “The Confederate Retreat from Gettysburg,” in Johnson and Buel, eds., Battles, vol. 3, p. 424.

  27. Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches (1863, repr. Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1993), pp. 27–29; Richard Barksdale Harwell, ed., Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), pp. 14–16, 36.

  28. Gerald Schwartz, ed., A Woman Doctor’s Civil War: Esther Hill Hawk’s Diary (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 50–51; John H. Brinton, Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton: Civil War Surgeon, 1861–1865 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 328; Stephen B. Oates, A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 176; Bollet, Civil War Medicine, pp. 4, 217.

  29. Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp. 219–25; Whitman, Memoranda during the War, pp. 10–11; F. H. Hamilton, A Treatise on Military Surgery and Hygiene (New York: Belliere Brothers, 1865), p. 80.

  30. Mills Lane, ed., “Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve about Me; If I Get Killed I’ll Only Be Dead”; Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War (Savannah, GA: Beehive, 1977), p. 331.

  31. Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1870–1888), vol. 2, pt. 3, case 1106, p. 767.

  32. C. Vann Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 668; Joseph T. Durkin, ed., John Dooley, Confederate Soldier: His War Journal (1945, repr. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), p. 114.

  33. Mitchell, Injuries of Nerves, pp. 200–201.

  34. Mitchell, Injuries of Nerves, pp. 207–8.

  35. Mitchell, Injuries of Nerves, pp. 230–31, 268–70, 273–74.

  36. Mitchell, Injuries of Nerves, pp. 292–94, 298–300.

  37. Mitchell, Injuries of Nerves, pp. 302–7, 319–20, 331–33.

  38. Richard Barksdale Harwell, ed., Kate a Confederate Nurse (1866, repr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), pp. 99, 20–21.

  39. Burr, Thomas, pp. 229–30; John R. Brumgardt, ed., Civil War Nurse: The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), p. 119; Jane Stuart Woolsey, Hospital Days (New York: Van Nostrand, 1870), p. 27; Schwartz, Woman Doctor’s Civil War, pp. 51, 71.

  40. Cecil D. Eby Jr., ed., A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War: The Diaries of David Hunter Strother (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), p. 113.

  41. David H. Strother, “Personal Recollections of the War,” Harper’s Magazine 35 (August 1867): p. 289.

  42. Carol Reardon, Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 28; Sherman R. Norris, “Ohio at Gettysburg: The Regiments That Participated in the Great Battle,” National Tribune, June 9, 1887; O.R., vol. 24, pt. 1, p. 715.

  43. William C. Davis, The Battle of New Market (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), p. 43.

  44. Russell Duncan, ed., Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 231; Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaign of the Army of the Potomac, Based upon Personal Reminiscences of the Fifth Army Corps (1915, repr. New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 233.

  45. William Martin, Out and Forward, or Recollections of the War of 1861–1865 (n.p., 1941), p. 39; T. F. Dornblaser, Sabre Strokes of the Pennsylvania Dragoons in the War of 1861–1865 (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1864), p. 164.

  46. Richard Wheeler, Voices of the Civil War (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), p. 395. Steven R. Stotelmyer, The Bivouacs of the Dead: The Story of Those Who Died at Antietam and South Mountain (Baltimore: Toomey, 1992), p. 5.

  47. John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), p. 35. Guy R. Everson and Edward W. Simpson Jr., eds., “Far, Far from Home”: The Wartime Letters of Dick and Tally Simpson, Third South Carolina Volunteers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 49.

  48. Susan William Benson, ed., Berry Benson’s Civil War Book: Memoirs of a Confederate Scout and Sharpshooter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 13–14. Ernest B. Furgurson, Chancellorsville 1863: The Souls of the Brave (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 75.

  49. K. Jack Bauer, ed., Soldiering: The Civil War Diary of Rice C. Bull, 123rd New York Volunteer Infantry (San Rafael, CA: Presidio, 1977), p. 244; David Herbert Donald, ed., Gone for a Soldier: The Civil War Memoirs of Private Alfred Bellard (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), p. 86.

  50. J. W. Ames, “In Front of the Stone Wall at Fredericksburg,” in Johnson and Buel, eds., Battles, vol. 3, p. 122.

  51. Robert Hunt Rhodes, ed., All for the Union: The Civil War Diary of Elisha Hunt Rhodes (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 73; William W. Blackford, War Years with Jeb Stuart (New York: Scribner’s, 1945), pp. 150–51.

  52. J. S. C. Abbott, The History of the Civil War in America (New York: Ledyard Bill, 1865), vol. 2, p. 494.

  53. Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South (New York: Warner, 2005), pp. 407, 409–10; Charles Carleton Coffin, The Boys of ’61, or Four Years of Fighting, rev. ed. (Boston: Dana Estes, 1896), pp. 91–92. Coff in worked for the Boston Journal.

  54. S. A. Putnam, Richmond during the War (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1867), p. 389; Fannie A. Beers, Memories: A Record of Personal Experiences and Adventures during Four Years of War (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), pp. 152–55.

  55. Sneden, Eye of the Storm, p. 54.

  56. Sneden, Eye of the Storm, pp. 121–22; Stotelmyer, Bivouacs of the Dead, p. 10.

  57. Edward E. Leslie, The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 289; Svenson, Battlefield, pp. 157–58; Louis N. Chapin, A Brief History of the Thirty-Fourth Regiment N.Y.S.V. (New York, 1903), p. 80.

  58. Charles East, ed., Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman (New York: Touchstone, 1992), p. 238; Clifton Johnson, Battlefield Adventures: The Story of the Dwellers on the Scenes of Conflict in Some of the Most Notable Battles of the Civil War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), p. 101.

  59. Hicks, Widow of the South, p. 415.

  CHAPTER FIVE. THE EDGE OF SANITY

  1. Richard A. Gabriel, No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), pp. 61, 67–68; Arthur M. Smith, “Fear, Courage, and Cohesion,” Naval Institute Proceedings, 120/11/1, 101 (November 1994): p. 65.

  2. C. G. Moore-Smith, The Life of John Colborne: Field Marshal Lord Seaton (1903), in Richard Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (London: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 260; Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: The Years of the Sword (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 400.

  3. John Talbott, “Combat Trauma in the American Civil War,” History Today, March 1996, pp. 41–47, repr. in Annual Editions: American History, 14th ed. (Guilford, CT: Dushkin, 1997), vol. 1, pp. 208–12. McEntire is quoted on p. 208. In December 1864, Leeds was committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital, a government insane asylum in D.C. Susan Leigh Blackford, Letters from Lee’s Army (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1962), pp. 261–62.

  4. S. Weir Mitchell, W. W. Keen, and George R. Morehouse, “On Malingering, Especially in Regard to Simulation of Diseases of the Nervous System,” American Journal of Medical Science 48 (1864): pp. 367–94; Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), p. 82. On somatic indicators of combat stress, Larry H. Ingraham and Frederick J. Manning, “Psychiatric Battle Casualties: The Missing Column in a War without Replacements,” Military Review, August 1980, p. 23; Horace Porter, “The Philosophy of Courage,” Century Illustrated
Monthly Magazine 36 (May 1888–October 1888): pp. 249, 253.

  5. Ella Lonn, Desertion during the Civil War (1928, repr. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966), pp. 231–34.

  6. Mary Livermore, My Story of the War (Hartford, CT: Worthington, 1890), p. 185. Charles East, ed., Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman (New York: Touchstone, 1992), pp. 52–53.

  7. Edward King Wightman and Edward G. Longacre, From Antietam to Fort Fisher: The Civil War Letters of Edward King Wightman, 1862–1865 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), p. 99; Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, ed., The Civil War Memoir of Philip Daingerfield Stephenson, D.D. (Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995), p. 88.

  8. Frank Wilkeson, Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac (1886, repr. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1972), pp. 188–89; Gary W. Gallagher, ed., Two Witnesses at Gettysburg: The Personal Accounts of Whitelaw Reid and A. J. L. Fremantle (St. James, NY: Brandywine, 1994), p. 14.

  9. Peter Messent and Steve Courtney, eds., The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell: A Chaplain’s Story (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), p. 71; Oscar Haas, ed., “The Diary of Julius Gieseke, 1861–1862,” Military History of Texas and the Southwest 18 (1988): p. 52; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), vol. 10, pt. 2, pp. 340–41. Crittenden was demoted to colonel; Carroll resigned the service. C. F. Boyd, “The Civil War Diary of C. F. Boyd,” Iowa Journal of History 50 (1952): p. 72; Francis Augustín O’Reilly, The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), p. 502; David S. Sparks, ed., Inside Lincoln’s Army: The Diary of Marsena Rudolph Patrick (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1964), p. 414.

  10. S. H. M. Byers, “How Men Feel in Battle: Recollections of a Private at Champion Hill,” Annals of Iowa 2, no. 6 (July 1896): p. 441.

  11. Ardant Du Picq, Battle Studies (1870, repr. Harrisburg, PA: Military Service Publishing Co., 1947), p. 118; Joseph E. Crowell, The Young Volunteer: Everyday Experiences of a Soldier Boy in the Civil War (Paterson, NJ: Joseph E. Crowell, 1906), pp. 83, 91.

  12. John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I (1976), on shell shock; William Nathaniel Wood, Reminiscences of Big I (1909, repr. Jackson, TN: McCowat-Mercer, 1956), p. 39; Noah Andre Trudeau, The Last Citadel: Petersburg, Virginia, June 1864–April 1865 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), p. 240; Emil and Ruth Rosenblatt, eds., Hard Marching Every Day: The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), p. 78.

  13. Carol Rainey, A Fine Morning: Stories of a Cincinnati Childhood (Cincinnati, OH: Cyndell, 2009), p. 78; Jacob Roemer, Reminiscences of the War of the Rebellion (Flushing, NY, 1897), p. 79; Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches (1863, repr. Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1993), p. 45; Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr., The Pride of the Confederate Artillery: The Washington Artillery in the Army of Tennessee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), p. 190.

  14. John William DeForest, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867, repr. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill, 1969), p. 334; Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson, AZ: Galen, 2002), pp. 321–23; Peter Svenson, Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 25.

  15. John W. Thomason Jr., Jeb Stuart (1930, repr. New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1958), pp. 456–57; Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., Touched with Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1861–1864 (New York: Da Capo, 1969), pp. 50–51.

  16. Wilkeson, Recollections of a Private Soldier, p. 95; John G. Biel, ed., “The Battle of Shiloh: From the Letters and Diary of Joseph Dimmit Thompson,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 18, no. 3 (September 1958): p. 271.

  17. Talbott, “Combat Trauma in the American Civil War,” p. 210. Discussion of Samuel A. Stouffer, The American Soldier, vol. 2, Combat and Its Aftermath (1949), and S. L. A. Marshall, Men against Fire (1947), in Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 101, 175; Joseph T. Durkin, ed., John Dooley, Confederate Soldier: His War Journal (1945, repr. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), p. 99; Hughes, ed., Philip Daingerfield Stephenson, p. 193.

  18. Captain Wilberforce Nevin, 79th Pennsylvania, quoted in Gerald J. Prokopowicz, All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio, 1861–1862 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 177; E. and R. Rosenblatt, eds., Hard Marching Every Day, p. 217.

  19. T. Harry Williams, ed., “The Reluctant Warrior: The Diary of N. K. Nichols,” Civil War History 3 (1957): p. 36; Hal Bridges, Lee’s Maverick General: Daniel Harvey Hill (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), p. 118; John Laffin, Americans in Battle (New York: Crown, 1973), p. 253; Cecil D. Eby Jr., ed., A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War: The Diaries of David Hunter Strother (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), p. 281.

  20. Ambrose Bierce, “What I Saw of Shiloh,” June 1864, repr. in Bierce’s Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1956), p. 17; Henry Villard, Memoirs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), vol. 1, p. 246; Ulysses S. Grant, “The Battle of Shiloh,” in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence C. Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York: Century, 1884–1888), vol. 1, p. 474.

  21. Abner R. Small, The Road to Richmond: The Civil War Memoirs of Major Abner R. Small of the Sixteenth Maine Volunteers (1939, repr. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 70–71; Albert Theodore Goodloe, Some Rebel Relics from the Seat of War (Nashville, TN, 1893), p. 174.

  22. J. E. Brant, History of the Eighty-fifth Indiana Volunteer Infantry, Its Organization, Campaigns and Battles (Bloomington, IN: Craven Bros., 1902), pp. 56–57; Sparks, ed., Inside Lincoln’s Army, pp. 388, 417.

  23. Joseph Allan Frank and George A. Reaves, “Seeing the Elephant”: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989), cited in Larry M. Logue, To Appomattox and Beyond: The Civil War Soldier in War and Peace (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), p. 68.

  24. Robert Garth Scott, ed., Fallen Leaves: The Civil War Letters of Major Henry Livermore Abbott (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991), p. 143.

  25. Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 307, 324, 382–83; Mills Lane, ed., “Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve about Me; If I Get Killed, I’ll Only Be Dead”: Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War (Savannah, GA: Beehive, 1977), p. 144; Richard A. Baumgartner, Buckeye Blood: Ohio at Gettysburg (Huntington, WV: Blue Acorn Press, 2003), p. 140; Eric T. Dean Jr., “ ‘Dangled over Hell’: The Trauma of the Civil War,” in Michael Barton and Larry M. Logue, eds., The Civil War Soldier: A Historical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p. 411.

  26. David Herbert Donald, ed., Gone for a Soldier: The Civil War Memoirs of Private Alfred Bellard (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), p. 198; Charles Carleton Coffin, The Boys of ’61, or Four Years of Fighting, rev. ed. (Boston: Dana Estes, 1896), p. 173; Charles Winder Squires, “ ‘Boy Officer’ of the Washington Artillery—Part 1,” Civil War Times Illustrated 14 (1975): p. 19; Lynda Lasswell Crist and Mary Seaton Dix, eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971–1995), vol. 8, p. 404; Joseph L. Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Southern Strategy, 1861–1862 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), pp. 102–3; Douglass Southall Freeman and Grady McWhiney, eds., Lee’s Dispatches: Unpublished Letters of General Robert E. Lee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), pp. 122–23; O.R., series 1, vol. 27, pt. 3, pp. 1040–41, 1048; Douglass Southall Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants (New York: Scribner’s, 1942–1944), vol. 3, pp. 217–19; also, Frederick Maurice, Robert E. Lee the Soldier (1925, repr. New York: Bonanza, 1976), pp. 159–60; Sparks, Inside Lincoln’s Army, p. 274.

  27. Thomas B. Buell, The Warrior Generals:
Combat Leadership in the Civil War (New York: Three Rivers, 1997), pp. 87–88; William W. Hassler, ed., The General to His Lady: The Civil War Letters of William Dorsey Pender to Fanny Pender (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 175–76, 179; Donald B. Koonce, ed., Doctor to the Front: The Recollections of Confederate Surgeon Thomas Fanning Wood, 1861–1865 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), pp. 109–10.

  28. Adams, Best War Ever, p. 98; Richard Wheeler, Voices of the Civil War (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), pp. 193–94.

  29. Helen Epstein, “Life & Death on the Social Ladder,” New York Review of Books, July 16, 1998, p. 28.

  30. Wightman and Longacre, From Antietam to Fort Fisher, p. 32; Noah Andre Trudeau, Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May–June 1864 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), p. 191; Allan Nevins, ed., A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journals of Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, 1861–1865 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), p. 422.

  31. Shirley A. Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), p. 60; Basil Duke, History of Morgan’s Cavalry (Cincinnati, OH: Miami Printing and Publishing, 1867), p. 532.

  32. Buell, The Warrior Generals, p. 90; Daniel H. Hill, “McClellan’s Change of Base and Malvern Hill,” in Johnson and Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders, vol. 2, p. 394.

  33. Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, Three Months in the Southern States, April–June 1863 (1864, repr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 277; Richard B. McCaslin, Lee in the Shadow of Washington (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), p. 170; Gordon C. Rhea, The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7–12, 1864 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), pp. 255–56; William Allen, “Memoranda of Conversations with General Robert E. Lee,” in Gary W. Gallagher, ed., Lee the Soldier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 11.

  34. Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988), pp. 196, 218–19, 305, 319–22; George B. McClellan, McClellan’s Own Story (New York: C. L. Webster, 1887), p. 354.