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tv   The Civil War  CSPAN  August 13, 2016 10:45pm-12:03am EDT

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>> you are watching american history tv all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. to join the conversation like us on facebook at c-span history. coverage posted by the civil war institute at gettysburg college. the focus was reconstruction. a panel of historians talk about challenges confederate veterans place -- face in the civil war aftermath. good afternoon i am peter carmichael. i am a history has her -- professor here at gettysburg college. it is my privilege and pleasure
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to introduce our panel on the return of the confederate century. who are part of our life c-span audience, you can actually be part of this conversation. twitter at #cwi2016. let me go ahead and introduce our panelists. right, david, who is of americanlecturer history at the university of edinburgh in scotland. he teaches a range of civil war and southern history. his first book is in one published by the university of carolina press entitled "
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moments of despair, suicide, divorce, and debt in civil war era north carolina." next to david is james. james recently assumed instructors up -- instructor university shepherd civil war. it is not far from the battle of antietam. he is also assistant professor of history. he has published a number of studies foritled the national park service. he is on because of releasing his first book for publication at the university of carolina press. jason phillips is the professor of civil war studies at west
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his book isversity titled diehard rebels, the confederate soldiers of disability. he is currently working on a new looming, atled, " history of the future." this book explores how the years of anticipating the civil war influenced the way it is remembered. next is brian. brian is a associate professor at you which talk, kansas. "john belluthor of, hood and the fight for civil war memory." book entitled, "
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in the sleeves, indication in the civil war south." finally, diane. she is a associate professor of binghamton university in new york. she is teaching 19th-century u.s. history, the american south, and the history of sexuality. "e has recently published, race, in the 19th-century style." she is the author of numerous scholarly articles. this piece earned the john t hubble prize for the best article in civil war history. diane who is with
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presenting a very brief paper on her work and we have our panelists. [applause] everyone for this monkey, summer gettysburg afternoon. thisi'm trying to do afternoon is to open up ways that we can have conversations with you all about the experience of confederate veterans returning home. and to that end what i'm going to do is talk about 415 or so minutes about the work i'm doing and giving each one of the panelists who will spend 45 minutes talking about different topics that we can have questions about.
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we can have a lively conversation through our provided hour. i want to begin with a very famous quote by a social historian by the name of mary. who wrote 25 years ago that we needed to speak of history being done on the lives of ordinary soldiers. despite many other books and articles published in civil war history, little has been history -- written about the personal experiences of ordinary soldiers. most of the works had dealt with generals, battles, politics, strategy, but the experiences of ordinary men and women emerged as a focus only relatively recently and the study of veterans later.
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and -- all published in 2009, trace steps of civil war soldiers as they return home to their families and communities. is thee of these books only book devoted to just confederate veterans. two of the books are about northern and southern veterans. treatments we view the myriad experiences of veterans after they return home from the mundane to the heroic. ,he return to their plows families, and women. homesnded up in veterans and insane asylums. they ran for political offices. some became university presidents. few dealt with
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disabilities both invisible and visible. like, whatquestions did soldiers do after the mobilization? how to their service affect them? how did were change them? war change them? trying tost begun answer these questions. we know the experiences were buried. ied.--var we know much more about union veterans because they were eligible for federal pensions. those records are a real treasure trove. they yield rich details about veterans and their families. confederate veterans were not eligible for federal support.
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many southern states it did offer pensions, those records are spotty. so working on confederate veterans poses a challenge. that said, we do have some veteransof confederate being focused on in a variety of areas. one of the big questions that we will address, either implicitly or explicitly, is how do the experiences of confederate veterans differ from union veterans. all veterans, north and south, shared similar experiences. they miss their families and they acquired the same diseases. some of the soldiers returning after the war faced different conditions that affected their lives in certain ways. lost and obviously, they
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their fledgling nation. other things than soldiers who returned victorious. they went home in humiliation. defeat also meant loss of suffrage and political rights. the war was fought almost entirely in their homeland. sustained physical written an economic devastation, many soldiers return home to find their homes and fields in ruin. slavery was abolished. slavery was the key form of labor in the region but its abolition posed questions about the very ethics of southern identity. they were white southerners now without the slaves?
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f confederate soldiers made their way home in 1865, they thought to reinstate civilian , and it fundamentally shake how they -- shaped how they dealt with reconstruction. it greatly influenced the homecoming of confederate veterans. , loss of clinical independence and rights, shatter confidence, financial and , relying onlure women for emotional and financial support, and diminished status within the family. regional recovery depends on the ability of men to return to supporting their family and community network at a time when those very networks were damaged and uncivilized.
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soldiersnfederate return home to face, in some cases, unimaginable burdens and hurdles for recovery. psychological stress brought on by combat experience exacerbated those problems, leaving some confederate veterans suffering psychological harm that compounded their emotional and psychological stress. many a southerner, like young susan bradford, witness to the bittersweet homecoming of veterans and commented on the more lies -- and demoralized nature of soldiers returning. gray, the dear men in will they ever be able to forget? this observation that many confederate veterans were crushed is borne out in a
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variety of ways. the more seriously afflicted veterans and up in what recalled at the time lunatic asylums which welcomed words of former soldiers after the war. history of violence often committed against family members and themselves. from 1865 to 1872, many soldiers were described as violent and attacked and assaulted many other persons, many of them family members. veterans directed much of their menacing rage towards relatives. emotionaln a state of turmoil frequently turned on themselves and responded to their emotional agony by turning
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to injuring themselves. at a high rate among veterans than the civilian population. about one third of veterans admitted to the asylum were suicidal. up in mice one man is the suicidal spiral of a former soldier after the war. after he enlisted -- his psychological demise and him a early discharge from the war and later entry into the insane asylum. he made clear his intention to destroy himself and while living at the asylum try to burn himself and several times try to bury himself out of a window. after years of a recovery and numerousycle and
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suicide attempts, nelson finally succeeded in ending his life in august of 1871, by ingesting strychnine. another form of self destructed behavior among confederate veterans was alcohol and drug abuse in the post war years. today, we understand drug and alcohol use by soldiers and veterans as an attempt to self-medicate, to numb one self from the traumatic experiences of warfare but in the 19th century substance abuse, especially alcohol, was viewed not as a symptom of mental illness as we know today but rather as a cause of mental illness. post war southerners noted the rise of alcohol abuse after the war, which they attributed to the suffering associated with the war. excessive drinking by southern men had been well-documented in the antebellum period, but after the war southerners believed it was on the rise and as a consequence of the civil war and its aftermath. ex-confederate soldiers and
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civilians alike turned to alcohol to escape an array of societal and permanent problems after the war. whether alcohol abuse in the postbell um south can be attributed to post combat disorder or to the depressive malaise that engulfed the region during reconstruction for southerners, especially men, imbibed excessively. less commonly than alcohol, but just as addictive and destructive, confederate veterans sometimes abused opium. after the civil war many believed that the war had contributed to the recent uptake in opium users. whether or not the civil war triggered increased opium use, opium addiction became more visible in the 1870s. with the increased visibility of opium addiction the demographics of the users shifted from women to men, in the antibelllium period opium addiction was mostly -- opium users, opium
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eaters, they were called, were almost always believed to be women. wounded veterans like a.g. were among those who sought physical relief from opium. for a decade he relied on opium to relieve the pain following the amputation of a leg in 1862. a reliance that led to that addiction and eventually killed ewing. transitioning back to civilian life proved even more difficult for southern men who, in the years after the war, already wait wheated down by defeat and war trauma faced financial ruin. unlike the north, south experienced extensive physical damage that made rebuilding difficult. financial difficulties or to use the phrase of the day, pecuniary embarrassment. underscore the failure of men to fulfill one of the basic responsibilities of manhood, providing for one's family. moreover, southerners experienced pervasive
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indebtedness which singled dependency, undermining the very basis of masculine identity. on top of anguish from combat memories proved too much for some ex-confederates. as joyous as homecomings were, the defeated warriors could not deny the massive work that lay ahead to rebuild. the the physical reconstruction of homes, barns, fields and infrastructure awaited. the economy in shambles offered opportunities for men who were desperate to resume their statuses as heads of household and as bread winners for their families. with little or no money, sharply diminished wealth, and dim job prospects, southern men faced abysmal outlook with little hope
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for a quick turnaround. the failures and unemployment plagued post belllium south. tin ability to provide for one's family in an environment of economic uncertainty bell leaguered many white men of the region. who had devoted entire lives to building businesses and then cultivating the reputations and the networks and relationships that were attendant to those crumbled in the face of business failures white men business failure in the post war south viscerated one's sense of self. economic opportunities evaporated after the war. southern men were unable to cattle their motional suffering from productive outworks like work. consumed by failure at home, on the military front and at work, southern men, many of them, collapsed psychologically. some committed suicide while others ended up in asylums. a watch maker from richmond, who served in the infantry during the civil war made good on a threat to kill himself february, 1871, despite his wife's pleadings.
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he replied to her, i am done. it is too late. and then shot himself. his wife reported suffered from pecuniary troubles. financial calamity and material deprivation awaited confederate men returning confederate men returning home. despair and pessimism about the future. money worries and loss of property paralyzed numerous ex-confederates. women, too, worried about their family's financial well-being. many experienced economic misfortune personally. debt and financial ruin signaled dependency as well as an inability to fulfill one of the chief responsibilities as head of household. that of providers. in addition to diminished prospects for work southern white men experienced reversals of fortune and evaporation of wealth and property that also contributed to their mental decline.
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southern white men beset by pecuniary difficulties after the war were embarrassed by their inability to provide for their families. many equated financial failure with poor character, a holdover from the antebellum times even though intellectually most understood that the war and its aftermath was to blame. emancipation, of course, wiped out the wealth of many slave holding families. take, for instance, virginia family of charles berry. in 1860 he supposed over $10,000 worth of personal property. largely slaves. when the war came, he enlisted and served in a calvary unit and he survived. but in 1870, the extent of his loss and personal property was registered in the census records showing personal wealth worth a mere $250. he drowned himself in a virginia creek in 1871. indebtedness, unemployment, loss of wealth, and livelihoods
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scourged reconstruction south and plagued nearly all southerners. but it was experienced in a very gendered way the financial and material ruin nation of the former confederacy set the stage for an inhospitable homecoming for soldiers, many that brought with them the baggage of emotional and psychological damage. so with that, as a bit of a springboard i would like to pivot to our panelists, each of whom today will speck a little bit about one aspect of the confederate homecoming experience and i'm going to begin with jason phillips, who will start us off this afternoon, by talking a little bit about the process of surrendering. making the point, that the familiar story of surrender -- was experienced very differently for most confederate soldiers. jason? >> jason: thank you. he said wars produce many stories of fix, some of which
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are told until they are believed to be true. popular stories about -- concludes civil war history with peace and reconciliation. this romance of reunion showcases robert e. lee offering his sword to grant who returns to blade and shared military honors. we're told union soldiers affirmed the sentiment by saluting confederates while they stacked arms and unfurled flags. in the end, southerners go home with the federal promise not to be disturbed as long as they maintain peace and uphold the union. for confederate veterans, surrendering and returning home was more emotional and more complicated than fiction suggests. they coped with defeat by viewing the enemy as barbarians, by honoring themselves as the
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heroic remnants of a legendary army. the victors hoped that mercy would ease reunion by displaying their moral superiority. instead, leniency 'em boldened diehard rebels to resist change. the only union superiority the confederates would admit after the war was numerical superiority. diehard rebels cherished their parole certificate not as signs of reunion, but as proof that they personally had never abandoned the cause. returning home presented new challenges for these veterans, during the long journey troops vented, raged, a sense of entitlement. they stole what they needed, even from civilians along their path. a new orleans reporter noted ex-conned rat soldiers have fought for four years without pay and now they propose to pay themselves.
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ragged men, walking home, presented a stark contrast to how they rode to war on trains and horses four years ago. defeat literally brought white men down to earth. horseback riding was a sign of white mastery in the old south. now those masters shuffled along in the dust, along with everyone else. tattered clothing and empty stomachs did not distinguish veterans from thousands of freed people who walked the same roads in search of family members and as an expression of freedom. while heading home, many veterans encountered -- encountered the war's destructive campaign for the first time. in the shenandoah valley veterans followed the tracks of philip sheridan's campaign. for three days, we were refreshed by the sight and smell
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of dead horses, one rebel noted. when he saw the burnt district of richmond, he blamed the destruction on northern immigrants and southern blacks. retreating confederates had burned their own capitol, but this diehard rebel was already rewriting history. thousands of defiant confederate veterans presented one of the biggest challenges to reconstruction. they even vented having to swear and oath of allegiance to the united states. as one veteran put it, they thrust their i oath of allegiance down our throats with bayonets. the presence of black troops in the south infuriated diehard rebels. colored regiments formed a larger percentage of occupation forces, because they enlisted later in the war. ex-confederates ignored this fact, and assumed that the enemy imposed black garrisons on the south to humiliate white men. for diehard rebels, diane
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suggested, reconstruction meant one word. subgation, a permanent that meant confiscation, exile and racial -- almgamation. some say the war is settled and some say the difficulty has hardly begun. for foster, surrendering meant submission, reunion, and free negroes, and we've been fighting too long for that. if confederate veterans accepted reunion and emancipation, thousands of their comrades had died for nothing. think about that. george mercer thought, we must continue the good fight and leave the rest to heaven. veterans avoided defeat and humiliation by keeping quiet, by biding their time until the
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federal occupation ended, and they once again returned to power. the southern insurgency during reconstruction was more than a response to post war challenges. it was a continuation of the civil war by other means. >> if i could just ask one question here. it sounds like you're arguing for accepting surrender as -- rather than -- as the onset of reconstruction rather than the final act of the civil war so if we accept that, then how will that change how we look at that period? >> that's a good question. i think obviously, the surrender closed military conflicts, but they opened political debate about the future. one of the first challenges of reconstruction was securing federal oversight in the south. and only war time powers could justify this control, and only an army could enforce it. diehard rebels hoped that the
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surrenders meant more than this. they hoped the surrenders meant peace. the end of federal control in the south. so that they could rule their region again. instead, the surrenders meant the end of confederate authority in the south. ok? it's a very different thing. and therefore, the spread of federal power in the south, and we see this debate even between grant and lee, about the terms of surrender before it takes place, i think first step of reconstruction really happens at appo -- courthouse and other is surrender ceremonies. >> the past to reclaiming masculine prerogative and returning control was a bumpy one. david will tell us a little bit about how these challenges shaped the reentry of confederate veterans into their households as well as the relationships with wives, children, and other family
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members. david? >> david: thank you. one of the things you raised in your talk was the ways in which we could -- we could highlight the ways in which the confederate experience is different from the union homecoming experience and one of the ways in which i think they are fundamentally different is that, in the north, there is this issue of the vacant chair. the soldier has gone off to war and the family remains at home and tries to sustain themselves until they can hopefully, with any luck, return to have the veteran return to the family and resume some kind of normalcy after the war. and i'm not sure that they can -- if the vacant chair works as well for confederate veterans, because the home front and battle front are blurred and that makes it difficult sometimes to think about confederate families at home trying to sustain their pre-war lives unhindered. this happens in lots of
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different ways. thousands of confederate families are forced to become refugees, they are driven away from home during the war. we think in large part to the confederacy of confederate civilians on the move trying to find some place where they will be safe for the conflict. so when we think about soldiers coming home, in april of 1865, their families are coming home, too. and so, in some cases the scenes we have are not the family waiting patiently for these soldiers to return home but both groups coming home and sometimes the soldier gets home first and he greets the family coming home months later. which i think is a very different kind of experience. other confederate families are really, in some ways, very much on the front lines, that the union army, of course, is marching through the south, think about sherman's march and what have you, so families are
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coming face-to-face with the enemy just as the soldiers are coming face-to-face with the enemy. and even if they are not refugees and they are not on the front line i think families, white families in the south, are facing huge financial problems, especially in the latter half of the war. they have been deprived of their major form of agricultural labor, the man of the household, who has gone off to fight, there are food shortages, as we all know, across the confederacy, rampant inflation, bread riots, all which puts families in a very precarious financial position for the last few years of the war. and then the end of the war, confederate occurrencely is worthless, and they have lost their slaves. and so the moment in which soldiers are coming home, families have been suffering for a number of years. all of which is to say that sold soldiers are coming back, many
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of the soldiers are coming back in pretty bad shape. coming back with missing limbs, coming back with the psychological trauma that's inherent to warfare. but their families are also in pretty bad shape. and i think this complicates the reunion between soldiers and their families in 1865. in many ways you have across the south white families in crisis. and one of the ways that you can look at this and one of the ways you can gauge the extent of trauma of the wars on families is look at divorce records. divorce is very rare in the south throughout the 19th century, but one of the things you find in 1866, many southern counties, you have more people filing for divorce that year than the previous 20 years. when i look at the divorce petitions you will see -- it happens whether the petition is filed by the husband or by the wife. think i, you know, the trauma that's happened in these families which resulted in marriages breaking up is a product of the ways in which the
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soldiers had their experience, but the families were suffering during the war itself. i think it's interesting to note that these problems that white families are having and the problems -- white families are falling apart, it's the same moment that african-americans are trying to encode their families with legal protections, that they are getting married, that they are trying to find children that have been sold away and trying to rebuild their families, so the falling apart of many white families is happening you simultaneously with the rebuilding of lots of families that have been broken in slavery. the final point i want to make is thinking about the veterans experience and the families experience. there is a huge diversity, i think, of veterans experience. lots of veterans are coming back with the raum ma of war, missing limbs, but other veterans are coming back, i think, relatively intact both physically and mentally. the same is true for families and gee ogra if i is playing huge part in. some parts of the south, they are facing destruction of their farms and near starving
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conditions and in other parts of the south they are able to sustain themselves with a fairly similar standard of living that they had before the war, and so i think when you mix these two variables, diversity of the soldiers' experience versus the family experience, means the ways in which families are able to receive their soldiers back is going to very tremendous. >> is there much difference between divorce records in northern communities and northern states compared to the south what do you think difference would be because certainly southern men and women struggled to get back together again just like northern men d. what do you think major difference would be? >> war is traumatic for families. families are suffering in different ways than the soldiers
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are, difficult with the soldiers being away for long periods of time. confederate soldiers are away from their families for a longer period of time than most union soldiers. and they are coming back in worst shape and their families are in worst shape and all of that is reflected in the ways in which the divorce many husbands accuse wives of infidelity, and wives do the same thing. that was the only legal basis for divorce in this time. they taught it directly to saying, this only started to happen once the got out. >> pivoting from family ties to bonded confederates, we won't share -- we will share what jim calls a brotherhood of veterans. >> historians have looked for a long time that the war was quickly forgotten, or quickly soldiers turned away from it
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after its conclusion. the current scholarship suggest otherwise. what you are hearing today and throughout the conference is that the dichotomy that once existed between the hibernation and revival is too schematic. there is a lot of fluidity we are discovering. soldiers and veterans thought a great deal about their wartime experiences throughout the postwar era. in 1865, veterans started to sort out a simple meeting to this conflict in sundry ways. for me, there are two ways to look at it. southern spirit thrives in the press. regimental histories are turned out in great numbers, and
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survivors associations begin to flourish. eventually, in great numbers. that is a public discussion that exists. so too did veterans look to the war and private waste as they had done threat the conflict. -- private ways as they had done throughout the conflict. some "prolific through the wartime era. some wrote hundreds of letters. they continued in the postwar period. not in the same numbers, which is unfortunate for us the scholars, but it is certainly there. in these unpublished letters, veterans had clearly changed in some fundamental way. they sought to make connections to the wartime experiences with other veterans.
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for me, the way where we can understand this best is through the lens of emotions history. these are individuals who experienced deprivation, trials, and combat, and had a very similar set of emotional reactions. an outpouring to these experiences. many of these men in the antebellum era had been very disinclined to talk to other men, and indeed, anybody but their wives about these inner feelings. but what we see in these slivers of evidence is that veterans are talking to each other in the postwar period through these letters. it's not as vibrant. those that survived or extremely suggestive. they are turning back to their wartime experiences. i shared earlier several
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examples of the severe trauma that soldiers had adored. we see these threads ticked up in the postwar era. one north carolinian, walter clark, says "no one can imagine anything like it," referring to battle, "unless he has been in one." suggesting to their family that essentially they can fully understand whether this is right or wrong. we know as scholars that civilians and your horrible traumas during the conflict. they thought that their families could not extend -- not understand their wartime experiences. the same men that they had in many cases fought and slept with throughout years of combat. one example, an individual is writing to his friend in ythis evocative language.
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he says "sometimes in my sleep, my mind wanders to the sad battlefield. i lie down in the lines, have frightened, expecting at any moment the command of 'forward!" smith experienced these night terrors, and thought out others to see if they too had similar experiences. indeed, as he found, some suggested that they had similar experiences. in the process 40 and era -- the post-freudian era we might say, ptsd. the way you do with this is through respondents with the commanding officer and with other soldiers. you see this very rigid strange throughout the late 1960's, early 1870's in which smith is
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trying to seek out anyone possible to talk about these experiences. just to parse out these feelings and see if he can somehow make sense of it. if he can lend meaning to it. in some cases he is successful. what this suggests is that there is a profound transformation to his experience, the southern men experience. they're looking at other southern men in unique ways. they are disclosing themselves in very unique ways that i would say are not probable or even possible in the antebellum era. these so-called emotional communities that exist among veterans are a means by which many of these men begin to make sense of the war and tried to navigate the postbellum era. it has a host of trials for these veterans.
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the forbidding veneer of this closed southern culture. southern men sought out veterans to express and examine their new emotions. in many instances, the men that were the most acceptable, the ones that would understand best are other confederate veterans. confederate veterans. >> did you find any ways in which those expressions changed over time? >> i think that many men, by the 1880's, discontinue their private writings and are more apt to publish memoirs, regimental histories that we see today. for me that period between 1865 and the late 1870's is the most interesting, or the emotions are most raw, where the reactions
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are most visceral. whereas by the 1880's, you still see the remnants of that trauma, but the language has been tempered, it is a period in which the lost cause is flourishing. there's a lot more political motivation behind the public discourse. as a private one, not as interested . that private discussion more or less is discontinued by the 1880's. they are just getting quite old or not willing to correspond. >> brian is going to take us in a different direction. he is going to talk about the question, what does it mean to historians when we focus our attention on those that are disabled and damaged? >> in 1883, new orleans decided to hold an event that was advertised in the local newspapers as "a corralling of
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the cripples." city officials would move through the streets of the french quarter and pick up all the disabled bakers, including dozens of disabled veterans that had no economic choice but to beg. they then placed them all in the shakespeare alms house. the wealthy residents and those tourists who had visited the city on regular basis had become shocked, disgusted, and second their wounds, their deformities, their empty sleeves in order to secure a few nickels. new orleans was not alone in acting these beggar for thousands of confederates or suffered an injury.
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at the gary of type parlors, museums, and traveling shows, americans upheld the beautiful body andalthy white bore witness to what they deemed unseemly bodies. they gawked at fat ladies, twins, and those born without arms or legs. since the civil war, damaged bodies have been delegated to hidden spaces. the war meantd of that for numerous communities, they would now view these amputated man on a daily basis. , torn. them in many ways
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a cloud of defeat hung over the many, and in the minds of who asked if the sacrifice of those made in the war was worth it. one veteran in louisiana noted that he felt like the entire -- had a signn hanging up that said no maimed veterans need apply. depth in myer in veteransty sleeves, did their darndest to show that the manly honor of those who fought had been worth it.
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they were honorable men, not broken men. they were facing real challenges that all veterans faced. i expose my talents here, i am not trying to tell you that everything will can better it damaged ineturned some way. but at the same time we cannot discount or discredit the existence of these men in society. their plight dictated how the south would come to terms with the price of failure and defeat. --s would reveal an entirely an entire generation of men who were financially and economically set up for -- suffering. if you go into the governor's pages, you will find letters
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from physically suffering men begging for help. me something, because i have served during the war. soldiers who came home bearing the phenomenon of a missing limb would create a permanent class citizens.lass disabled member loan back upon their spouses and families. damaged veterans also remained dependent upon society's willingness to again accept them as honorable men. even with diminished economic prospects. to stated return
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government, who would sometimes, very reluctantly, would extend financial aid, evengrants, and sometimes jobs. they hope to create a world in which the broken body would be honored, and the physical and mental sacrifices of veterans would demand a consideration for a class of dependent citizens that could still be seen as manly in their dependents. especially considering their causes they fought for in the civil war. have, asestion i someone else who writes about damaged man returning home, how do you navigate that tricky
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word, victims? how do you write about these men sympathetically, but also recognize they are deserving of all the humanity that we can give them? these bring in the needles of dread in many ways. these stories are difficult to digest. i am sure you have experienced the same thing. it is hard not to read a pension file that has a man explaining butgraphic injury in detail he is doing it just so he can prove that he can get the money. because itic limbs, is on the burden of the individual disabled man to prove that he had lost that land in battle -- limb in battle rather than an accident or a deformity. if you gather these tales you have to at the same time, get back to the larger picture.
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artist -- and these are not at the forefront of our historical studies. you do not neatly fit the narrative of the return home of veterans. what it is in many ways, and necessary one. these deepen our understanding of the war. >> i think i would like to turn it over to you all to ask questions of these very interesting stories. >> i'm from new york. we have been told about empty sleeves, alcoholism, and drug abuse. some of these stories have been criticized as dark turns of history, and i was wondering how do respond to that and what
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you think the places and more history, why you think it is important? >> gentleman? david? >> they are not all that dark actually. had received some criticisms of veteran experiences. on the other hand if we end the story -- the soldiers story and do not look at what happened to afterwards.ords -- some of them came back with fairly minor consequences of war and some of them came back with obviously and norma's consequences they lived with for the rest of their lives. we have to respect their experiences and explore their narratives. is,other thing we are doing there is a narrative embedded in
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the lost cause of the confederate soldier who comes back almost triumphant and unbroken. thated to recognize that myth of the lost cause is only hiding the large part of the truth. add to that, one thing to keep in mind, and why this doctrine has happened is because of the digit ideation at -- why this dark turn has happened the cousin of the digitization of records. they had become much easier to access for historians. in some cases, states have medical holds or psychological holes on records starting to lift because so much time has passed. these records are enormously rich. a level oftailing suffering decades after the war.
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pension program does not come into place until 1912. you're talking about several decades where these men are still writing about the constant physical pain they are having from their indicated limbs, from their feet that have been damaged from marching during the war, that they can no that they know -- that they no longer can work. their talk about their widows and they are orphaned children -- i think demand that exploration of these studies. it hasn't -- it had a profound impact, at least in terms of southern culture. could add, one of the criticisms is that why overemphasizing, and i think that is the way it has been characterized, the dark side, that we run the risk of blurring a typical -- a typical ,xperiences -- suicide, trumpet
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-- reputation, tation, that we somehow blur the typical experiences from the the atypical experiences from the normal ones. >> any comments on confederate disorders, of which there were many. >> if we are talking about the
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end of the war, it is interesting to note i focus on the formal ceremonies. not every confederate soldier ended the war at a place like appomattox. men whose units dispersed in other places in order to not appear like they were deserting, they left together. they left in military order. almostt in a way that anticipates what you are finding, that they are using this community experience in war to handlemartial host this transmission into peacetime. if you left cap alone, you are a deserter. if you left camp with your company, you are not.
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>> i'm the descendent of two confederate veterans who were both wounded in the war. prior to the war, both were and i was wondering if there had been another study about returning veterans who were farmers. a lot of veterans coming home were not whole and healthy, but -- butre not expected they were expected to be farmers. >> one man can tell you there is wanted toa farmer who
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still be a farmer, and his wife takes them out and ties him to a plow. -- came i came off across who were amputees were still trying to farm in stone -- some capacity. looking for limbs to farming wise. i'm not sure how far they went as far as post war veterans. >> there was a time from in virginia 1870
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that we could certainly answer in some capacity at least. >> you undoubtedly looked at the same group or a large group of returning northern soldiers facing the same circumstances. do you have any percentages that indicate that southern soldiers off"quote -- "worse psychologically yoko --? two, what did governments do in terms of horrible dismemberment on both sides. sides? post fell in south is not
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a great place to gather physical data. for lots of reasons. vitalid not tend to keep statistics into the 20th century. lots of records did not survive the war. it is impossible to answer that question from a specific point of view. was trying to implicitly argue, the conditions after the war were so far worse in the south and the support was not there and the support was not there for southerners. although brian might take issue with that, because he makes the northerners either. >> what about the medical treatment for both, and how those horribly disfigured people were handled from one end of the country to the other?
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>> there are a variety of experiences. the other government have a structure in place -- the northern government has a prosthetic limb structure in place. southern states have to rely on benevolent care. organizations use private donations to gather funds to collect prosthetic limbs. then it is up to the individual states because private soldiers are barred from federal benefits from the 14th amendment. >> so they had to document that they lost a limb in service? >> that would be a good question for jim at 9:00 a.m. [laughter] can he shout that out from the audience? >> i think you had to establish. there were questions about how the wound was affected. >> from the standpoint of suicide and substance abuse, do you have a rough ballpark estimate of the percentages. the number of those that were
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affected? a rough estimate? >> no. [laughter] you just can't. it's just too difficult. the northern records; anybody who has worked in the official records, there is no analog for the confederacy. unfortunately, it is a lot more anecdotal. unless you get statistics that identify asylum dwellers as veterans. you have to do to set -- go to second and third layers to identify them as veterans. it is very cumbersome. >> with suicide data today, even
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now it's bad. trying to get good numbers and do comparisons between different dates -- the data isn't as good as we think it is. doing this in the 19th century makes it 10 times harder. the data isn't good. but those in the north and south recognize that something is happening. mania, suicide epidemics. they are aware that something is happening with veterans and entire communities in the postwar period. >> questions about robert e lee. a couple of years ago a book was written, the lee family found a chest full of letters that lee had written after the war. so the author put a lot of stuff in the book, took it to the lee
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family, and they said it take a lot of it out. -- said it to take a lot of it out. he survived the world without -- the war without any injuries. the question is, somebody like him who is well-educated, who had a lot of responsibility versus a lowly private -- was there any way to tell if the education of the person or responsibility they had -- i almost asked the authored if property lee suffered from ptsd, and she said she was not a psychiatrist. can education make a difference? >> in my own work of suicide, i found suicides taking place among common soldiers all the way to officers. i think there were a variety of triggers that are different, right?
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i have the one story of a virginia cavalry officer who basically had a breakdown before a battle. he basically became incapacitated. probably by friday. fright. he- realized that as a military officer he was leading his men down. his company realized that he was ill and started leaving him back home to petersburg, when en route, he got a hold of a sidearm and killed himself. i think is motivation was different from an ordinary soldier who would have taken his life. >> i think trying to figure out which soldiers end up with ptsd
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is difficult today. we can't always tell which soldier will respond differently to the trauma of war, and complex ways that we can't figure out. let alone figure out for someone that is been dead for 150 years. war tended to be associated with trauma. being a prisoner of war was ,articularly traumatic particularly in the conflict. losing a limb is extraordinarily traumatic. the other thing important to recognize his the communities -- is the communities after the war, their ability to have fellow soldiers to talk about experiences with, their families, those that seems to be most likely to gravitate toward suicidal ideation chain to be ideation tend to be those who are isolated. those work in conjunction with each other.
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i have a question about alcoholism. can it be cured? are there a number of alcoholics that left the asylum during their lives? >> alcoholics? anyone want to tackle that? , my own would say that read, medical caregivers in the 19th century conflated causes and symptoms. more often than not, if
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somebody's behavior was aberrational or erratic, it would be associated with alcoholism. it would go no further. they would not look at service in the military as an excellent -- as a explanation. quite a few were abusing alcohol or opium. but that was common. >> the psychological framework that they work in is a freudian -- is a free freudian one. e-freudian one.
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if we look at somebody that is struggling with alcoholism or suicidal ideation or depression or what have you, we tend to think, what happened to this person earlier in their lives that led them to this place? in the 19th-century, they asked, what happened to them that morning that led them to that place? the idea that something could affect somebody 20-30 years later -- that idea did not exist yet. their remedy for all kinds of mental issues, the asylum model was to put somebody in a bucolic setting and hope that made them better. actual treatment was very, very limited. the only treatment they really had -- they had a conscientious debate about whether or not they restrain patients in a silence -- in asylums. is it better for them to kill themselves, or struck them
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-- stick themselves in a chair all day? those are not good choices for doctors to make. >> with the panel contrast the experience of white veterans in the south african-americans that came back from war service with the union army? >> there is an interesting thing that happens with suicide in the 19th century. before the civil war in the south, suicide is associated with slavery. it was thought to be something that slaves do. it does not mean that white people don't do. what happened in some ways, that flips. suicide becomes associated with whiteness and not associated with african-americans. the best piece of evidence i have is in photo lineup, -- in north carolina, there were 2 white asylums and 1 black
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asylum. the black asylums, if you read the records, they say year after year, we have lots of patience, ents, but none are suicidal. they have pretty racist ideas about why that is. one african-american patient finally commits suicide. the explanation in the annual report is, he's black, but he was very white skinned, so he doesn't count. "hung himself before daybreak, looked almost white." that is cultural perception rather than reality. the ways in those traumas are processed by communities are very, very different. >> we have time for one more
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question. >> i didn't want to question, i just want to commend the question was raised about the dark turn. i really find these panels, the the work being done, so we now have records that are being opened up. we can tell the stories of those forgotten people. just like in the earlier days we looked at the freelance records from a maryland. i think the way you simulated the field -- the record-keeping is so difficult. but nonetheless, you are turning up stories. and these stories are not meant to take away or rob the honor of
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those who fought, returned, and restored the nation. but nevertheless, they are their stories that deserve an equal voice. maybe we can reconstruct their lives. so thank you all. [applause] >> one more question. we have time for one more question. fight it out. [laughter] rock, paper, scissors. >> all these injuries or invitations are chronic. you can see chronic illness and an amputated vet. i read a paper in 2000 on the -- i published a paper in 2000 on the history of sexually transmitted diseases from 1860 to the present in the military.
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i have written about -- his was from a urologic cause. this man had developed gonorrhea , and suffered from the rest of his life. he was killed at petersburg. >> the effects were very long-lasting. last question? >> we're out of time. >> when i looked into the descriptions of the degree of social reform during the civil war that were related to traumatic experiences. if i came in the middle of the conflict and didn't know what war you were talking about, i would think you were talking about vietnam or iraq. my feeling generally that there is a great similarity in terms of the results any solider we've
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been in than differences. there is a uniqueness going on. if you look at the shelters today, there is a great degree people who resemble those on shelters on the streets right now. suicide, all of that. we should you look at the i think there is a lot more similarity. >> right, i think that is what a lot or people see. there are a lot more similarities than people saw at one point. >> thanks to all of our panelists. we will see you after dinner. [applause] >> will come back to gettysburg
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like us on facebook at c-span history. years --w, the content the contenders and their series who ran fors president and lost, but still changed history. this is american history tv, only on c-span3. >> in 1968, many americans thought they were voting to bring our sons home for vietnam -- from vietnam. since then, 20,000 of our sons have come home in coffins. i have no

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