The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

  The fighting therefore was conducted not with artillery—which couldn’t see—nor with cavalry—which couldn’t ride. It had to be conducted by infantrymen with muskets—their guns charged with the dreadful flesh-tearing minié ball, a newfangled kind of bullet that was expanded by a powder charge in its base and inflicted huge, unsightly wounds—or hand-to-hand, with bayonets and sabers. And with the heat and smoke of battle came yet another terror—fire.

  The brush caught ablaze, and flames tore through the wilderness ahead of a stiff, hot wind. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of men, the wounded as well as the fit, were burned to death, suffering the most terrible agonies.

  One doctor wrote how soldiers appeared to have been wounded “in every conceivable way, men with mutilated bodies, with shattered limbs and broken heads, men enduring their injuries with stoic patience, and men giving way to violent grief, men stoically indifferent, and men bravely rejoicing that—it is only a leg!” Such tracks as existed were jammed with crude wagons pulling blood-soaked casualties to the dressing stations, where overworked, sweating doctors tried their best to deal with injuries of the most gruesome kind.

  A soldier from Maine wrote with appalled wonder of the fire. “The blaze ran sparkling and crackling up the trunks of the pines, till they stood a pillar of fire from base to topmost spray. Then they wavered and fell, throwing up showers of gleaming sparks, while over all hung the thick clouds of dark smoke, reddened beneath by the glare of flames.”

  “Forest fires raged,” wrote another soldier who was at the Wilderness,

  ammunition trains exploded; the dead were roasted in the conflagration; the wounded, roused by its hot breath, dragged themselves along with their torn and mangled limbs, in the mad energy of despair, to escape the ravages of the flames; and every bush seemed hung with shreds of bloodstained clothing. It seemed as though Christian men had turned to fiends, and hell itself had usurped the place of earth.

  The second aspect of the battle that may be important in understanding Minor’s bewildering pathology relates to one particular group who played a part in the fighting: the Irish. The same Irish of whom Minor’s London landlady would later testify that he appeared to be strangely frightened.

  There were around 150,000 Irish soldiers on the Union side in the struggle, many of them subsumed anonymously into the Yankee units that happened to recruit where they lived. But there was also a proud assemblage of Irishmen who fought together, as a block: These were the soldiers of the Second Brigade—the Irish Brigade—and they were braver and rougher than almost any other unit in the entire Federal army. “When anything absurd, forlorn, or desperate was to be attempted,” as one English war correspondent wrote, “the Irish Brigade was called upon.”

  The brigade fought at the Wilderness: Men of the 28th Massachusetts and the 116th Pennsylvania were there, alongside Irishmen from New York’s legendary regiments, the 63rd, the 88th, and the 69th—which still, to this day, leads the Saint Patrick’s Day parade up the green-lined expanse of Fifth Avenue in March.

  But compared with those who had fought one or two years before, there was a subtle difference in the mood of the Irishmen who fought with the Federal troops in 1864. At the beginning of the war, before Emancipation had been proclaimed, the Irish were staunch in their support of the North, and equally antipathetic to a South that seemed, at least in those early days, to be backed by the England they so loathed. Their motives in fighting were complex—but once again it is a complexity that is important to this story. They were new immigrants from a famine-racked Ireland, and they were fighting in America not just out of gratitude to a country that had given them succor but in order to be trained to fight back home one day, and to rid their island of the hated English once and for all. An Irish-American poem of the time made the point:

  When concord and peace to this land are restored,

  And the union’s established for ever,

  Brave sons of Hibernia, oh, sheathe not the sword;—

  You will then have a union to sever.

  The Irish were not to remain long in sympathy with all of the Federal aims. They were fierce rivals with American blacks, competing at the base of the social ladder for such opportunities—work, especially—as were on offer. And once the slaves were formally emancipated by Lincoln in 1863, the natural advantage that the Irish believed they had in the color of their skins quite vanished—and with it much of their sympathy for the Union cause in the war they had chosen to fight. Besides, they had been doing their sums: “We did not cause this war,” one of their leaders said, “but vast numbers of our people have perished for it.”

  The consequence was that—especially in battles where it seemed as though the Irish troops were being used as cannon fodder—they began to leave the fields of battle. They began to run away, to desert. And large numbers of them certainly deserted from the terrible flames and bloodshed of the Battle of the Wilderness. It was desertion, and one of the particular punishments often inflicted on those convicted of it, that stands as the third and possibly the principal reason for William Minor’s subsequent fall.

  Desertion, like indiscipline and drunkenness, was a chronic problem during the Civil War—seriously so because it deprived the commanders of the manpower they so badly needed. It was a problem that grew as the war itself endured—the enthusiasm of the two causes abating as the months and years went on and the numbers of casualties grew. The total strength of the Union army was probably 2,900,000, and that of the Confederacy 1,300,000—and as we have seen, they suffered staggering casualty totals of 360,000 and 258,000 respectively. The number of men who simply dropped their guns and fled into the forest is almost equally spectacular—287,000 from the Union side, 103,000 from the Southern states. Of course these figures are somewhat distorted: They represent men who fled, were captured, and set to fighting again, only to desert once more and maybe many times subsequently. But they are still gigantic numbers—one in ten in the Union army, one in twelve from the rebels.

  By the middle of the war more than five thousand soldiers were deserting every month—some merely dropping behind during the interminable route marches, others fleeing in the face of gunfire. In May 1864—the month when General Grant began his southern progress, and the month of the Wilderness—no fewer than 5,371 Federal soldiers cut and ran. More than 170 left the field every day—they were both draftees and volunteers, and either heartsick or homesick, depressed, bored, disillusioned, unpaid, or just plain scared. William Minor had not merely stumbled from the calm of Connecticut into a scene of carnage and horror: He had also come across a demonstration of man at his least impressive—fearful, depleted in spirit, and cowardly.

  Army regulations of the time may have been rather flexible when it came to prescribing penalties for drinking—a common punishment was to make the man stand on a box for several days, with a billet of wood on his shoulder—but they were unambiguous when it came to desertion. Anyone caught and convicted of “the one sin which may not be pardoned in this world or the next” would be shot. That, at least, was what was said on paper: “Desertion is a crime punishable by death.”

  But to shoot one of your own soldiers, whatever his crime, had a practical disbenefit—it diminished your own numbers, weakened your own forces. This piece of grimly realistic arithmetic persuaded most Civil War commanders, on both sides, to devise alternative punishments for those who ran away. Only a couple of hundred men were shot—though their deaths were widely publicized in a vain effort to set an example. Many were thrown into prison, locked in solitary confinement, flogged, or heavily fined.

  The rest—and most first-time offenders—were usually subjected to public humiliations of varying kinds. Some had their heads shaved or half shaved, and were forced to wear boards with the inscription “Coward.” Some were sentenced by drumhead courts-martial to a painful ordeal called “bucking,” in which the wrists were tied tightly, the arms forced over the knees, and a stick secured beneath knees and arms—leaving the convict in an
excruciating contortion, often for days at a time. (It was a punishment so harsh as to prove often decidedly counterproductive: One general who ordered a man to be bucked for straggling found that half his company deserted in protest.)

  A man could also be gagged with a bayonet, which was tied across his open mouth with twine. He could be suspended from his thumbs, made to carry a yard of rail across his shoulders, be drummed out of town, forced to ride a wooden horse, made to walk around in a barrel shirt and no other clothes—he could even, as in one gruesome case in Tennessee, be nailed to a tree, crucified.

  Or else—and here it seemed was the perfect combination of pain and humiliation—he could be branded. The letter D would be seared onto his buttock, his hip, or his cheek. It would be a letter one and a half inches high—the regulations became quite specific on this point—and it would either be burned on with a hot iron or cut with a razor and the wound filled with black powder, both to cause irritation and indelibility.

  For some unknown reason the regimental drummer boy would often be employed to administer the powder; or in the case of the use of a branding iron, the doctor. And this, it was said at the London trial, was what William Minor had been forced to do.

  An Irish deserter, who had been convicted at drumhead of running away during the terrors of the Wilderness, was sentenced to be branded. The officers of the court—there would have been a colonel, four captains, and three lieutenants—demanded in this case that the new young acting assistant surgeon who had been assigned to them, this fresh-faced and genteel-looking aristocrat, this Yalie, fresh down from the hills of New England, be instructed to carry out the punishment. It would be as good a way as any, the old war-weary officers implied, to induct Doctor Minor into the rigors of war. And so the Irishman was brought to him, his arms shackled behind his back.

  He was a dirty and unkempt man in his early twenties, his dark uniform torn to rags by his frantic, desperate run through the brambles. He was exhausted and frightened. He was like an animal—a far cry from the young lad who had arrived, cocksure and full of Dublin mischief, on the West Side of Manhattan three years earlier. He had seen so much fighting, so much dying—and yet now the cause for which he had fought was no longer truly his cause, not since Emancipation, certainly. His side was winning, anyway—they wouldn’t be needing him anymore, they wouldn’t miss him if he ran away.

  He wanted to be rid of his duties for the alien Americans. He wanted to go back home to Ireland. He wanted to see his family again and be finished with this strange foreign conflict to which, in truth, he had never been more than a mercenary party. He wanted to use the soldiering skills he had learned in all those fights in Pennsylvania and Maryland and now in the fields of Virginia, to fight against the despised British, occupiers of his homeland.

  But now he had made the mistake of trying to run, and five soldiers from the provost marshal’s unit, on the lookout for him, had grabbed him from where he had been hiding behind the barn on a farm up in the foothills. The court-martial had been assembled all too quickly and, as with all drumhead justice, the sentence was handed down in a brutally short time: He was to be flogged, thirty lashes with the cat—but only after being seared with a branding iron, the mark of desertion forever to scar his face.

  He pleaded with the court; he pleaded with his guards. He cried, he screamed, he struggled. But the soldiers held him down, and Doctor Minor took the hot iron from a basket of glowing coals that had been hastily borrowed from the brigade farrier. He hesitated for a moment—a hesitation that betrayed his own reluctance—for was this, he wondered briefly, truly permitted under the terms of his Hippocratic oath? The officers grunted for him to continue—and he pressed the glowing metal onto the Irishman’s cheek. The flesh sizzled, the blood bubbled and steamed; the prisoner screamed and screamed.

  And then it was over. The wretch was led away, holding to his injured cheek the alcohol-soaked rag that Minor had given him. Perhaps the wound would become infected, would fill with the “laudable pus” that other doctors said hinted at cure. Perhaps it would fester and crust with sores. Perhaps it would blister and burst and bleed for weeks. He didn’t know.

  All that he was sure of was that the brand would be with him for the rest of his life. While in the United States it would mark him as a coward, as shaming a punishment as the court had decreed, back home in Ireland it would mark him as something else altogether: It would mark him as a man who had gone to America to train with the army, and who was now back in Ireland, bent on fighting against the British authorities. He could clearly be identified, from now on, as a member of one of the Irish nationalist rebel groups. Every soldier and policeman in England and Ireland would recognize that, and would either lock him up to keep him off the streets, or would harass and harry him for every moment of his waking life.

  His future as an Irish revolutionary was, in other words, over. He cared little for his ruined social standing in the United States; but for his future and now very vulnerable position in Ireland, he had been marked and blighted forever by the fact of one battlefield punishment, and he was bitterly angry. He realized that as an Irish patriot and revolutionary he was useless, unemployable, worthless in all regards.

  And in his anger he most probably felt, justly or not, that his ever-more-intense wrath should be directed against the man who had so betrayed his calling as a medical man and had instead, and without objection, marked his face so savagely and incurably. He would have decided that he was and should be bitterly and eternally angry at William Chester Minor.

  So he would go home, he vowed, just as soon as this war was over; and once home he would, the moment he stepped off the boat on the docks at Cobh or Dun Laoghaire (or Queenstown or Kingstown, the ports for Cork and Dublin), tell all Irish patriots the following: William Chester Minor, American, was an enemy of all good Fenian fighting men, and revenge should be exacted from him, in good time and in due course.

  This, at least, is what Doctor Minor almost certainly thought was in the mind of the man he had branded. Yes, it was later said, he had been terrified by his exposure to the battlefield, and “exposure in the field” was suggested by some doctors as the cause of his ills; one story also had it that he had been present at the execution of a man—a Yale classmate, according to some reports, though none included a time or a place—and that he had been severely affected by what he had seen; but most frequently it was said he was fearful that Irishmen would abuse him shamefully, as he put it, and this was because he had been ordered to inflict so cruel a punishment on one of their number in the United States.

  It was a story that was put about in court—Mrs. Fisher, his landlady in Tennison Street, Lambeth, had, according to the official court reports in The Times, suggested as much. The story was raised many times over the following decades—when people remembered that he was still locked up in an asylum—to account for his illness; and until 1915, when as an elderly man he gave an interview to a journalist in Washington, D.C., and told quite another story, it remained one of the leading probable causes for his insanity. “He branded an Irishman during the American Civil War,” they used to say. “It drove him mad.”

  A week or so later Minor—suffering no apparent short-term effects from his experience—was moved from under the red flag of the advanced field hospital (the red cross symbol was not to be adopted by the United States until the ratification of the Geneva Convention in the late 1860s) and sent to where he had been originally bound, the city of Alexandria.

  He arrived there on May 17, and went first to work at L’Overture Hospital, then reserved largely for black and so-called “contraband” patients—escaped Southern slaves. There are records showing that he moved around the Federal hospital system: He worked at Alexandria General Hospital and at the Slough Hospital; there is also a letter from his old military hospital in New Haven, asking that he come back, since his work had been so good.

  Demand like this was unusual, since Minor was laboring still at the lowliest rank of the
war’s medical personnel, as an acting assistant surgeon. In the course of the conflict 5,500 men were Federally contracted at this rank, and they included some devastating incompetents—specialists in botany and homeopathy, drunks who had failed in private practice, fraudsters who preyed on their patients, men who had never been to medical school at all. Most would vanish from the army once the fighting was over: Few would even dare hope for promotion or a regular commission.

  But William Minor did. He seems to have flung himself into his work. Some of his old autopsy reports survive—they display neat handwriting, a confident use of the language, decisive declarations as to the cause of death. Most of the reports are forlorn—a sergeant from the First Michigan Cavalry dying of lung cancer, a common soldier dying of typhoid, another with pneumonia—all too common ailments during the Civil War period, and all treated with the ignorance of the day, with little more than the dual weapons of opium and calomel, painkiller and purgative.

  One report is more interesting: It was written in September 1866—two years after the Wilderness battle—and it concerns a recruit, “a stout muscular man” named Martin Kuster, who was struck by lightning while he was on sentry duty, imprudently standing under a poplar tree during a thunderstorm. He was in bad shape. “The left side of his cap open…facing of the metal button torn off…hair of his left temple singed and burned…stocking and right boot torn open…a faint yellow and amber colored line extended down his body…burns down to his pubis and scrotum.”