gettysburg college, pennsylvania. of theus was the legacy civil war. , a panel of historians talk about the challenges confederate veterans faced after the civil war. this is about an hour and 15 minutes. >> good afternoon. i am peter carmichael. i'm the director of the civil war institute. it is my privilege and pleasure to introduce the speakers for our conversation or panel on the return of the confederacy. -- from the confederacy. those of you who are part of the audience, you can be the conversation. we are course twitter, chas been ready. cwi2016.

let me go ahead and introduce our panelists. to my far right, david, who teaches a range of courses on civil war and southern history, reconstruction and civil war. this first book is an excellent moment of despair, suicide, divorce, and debt in civil war era north carolina. next to david is james brumar. he recently assumed the directorship of shepherd university's george tyler center for the study of civil war. shepherd university, as many of you know, is just across the potomac river, and, of course, just in west virginia.

he also is an assistant professor of history in the university history department. he's published a number of articles. he's done field studies for the national parks service and he's just on the cusp of submitting his first book manuscript for publication at the university of north carolina press. next to him is james -- jason phillips. the professor of civil war studies at west virginia university. his first book published by the university of georgia press entitled diehard rebels, the confederate culture of sensibility. this book looks at how confederates came to view the south as invincible, he's currently working on a new project entitled looming. a history of the future. this book explores how the years of anticipating a civil war ultimately influenced the very ways that it was remembered.

next to jason is brian craig miller. brian craig miller is a professor of history at emporia state university in wichita, kansas. he's the author of john bell hood and the fight for civil war memory. he also served as the editor for one of the premier scholarly journals in our field, civil war history, which is published by kent state university. his latest book entitled amputation in the civil war style. and that book is published by the university of georgia press. finally, diane somerville. dine somerville is an associate professor of history at binghampton university in new york, she teaches courses in 19th century u. s.

history, the american south, women's history and the history of sexuality. she's recently published great grace in the 19th century south, and that was released by the university of north carolina press. she's also authored numerous scholarly articles, most recently, a burden too heavy to bear, the trauma, suicide, and confederate soldiers. this piece earned the john t. hubble prize for the best article in the journal's civil war history. so we'll begin with diane, presenting a paper on her work, and then, of course, we have our handle to comment. diane. [applause] diane: well, thank you, everyone, for coming out this muggy summer gettysburg afternoon.

the panelists and i are, what we're going to try to do is to open up ways that we can have conversations with you y'all about the experience of confederate veterans returning home and to that end what i'm going to do is talk for maybe 15 or so minutes about generally the work that i'm doing. but then also pivot each of the panelists who will spend 45 minutes talking about a different topic that we can then have questions about and take it to you and have a really lively conversation that will take us through our allotted hour. i want to begin with a very famous quote by a historian, a social historian by the name of -- who wrote 25 years ago, that we needed to see some history being done on the lives of ordinary soldiers. despite the many, many other

books and articles published on civil war history, surprisingly, little has been written about the personal experiences of ordinary soldiers. most of the work to that point, of course, had dealt with generals and battles, with high politics and with strategy, but the experiences of ordinary men and women emerged as a focus only relatively eventually, and study of veterans even later. books by jim martin, jeff mcclurken, brian jordan and paul, all published since 2009, re-creates the steps of the civil war soldiers as they return home to their families and communities. only one of these books, case studies veterans out of one virginia county is the only book devoted to just confederate veterans. so two of the books cover both

northern and southern veterans. in these treatments we view the myriad experiences of veterans after they return home, from the mundane to the heroics. they return to their plows and scour for employment. they collected pensions and ended up in veterans homes or in insane asylums. they ran for political office. a few became university presidents. others became alcoholics. although i don't think mutually exclusive. quite a few struggled with disability. physical and mental, visible and invisible. historians ask questions like, what did soldiers do after demobilization? how did they live? how did their service affect them? how did war change them? how were they treated when they returned home? we've only just begun relatively speaking to answer these questions but we know the experiences were varied.

we're not even sure what a typical veteran's experience looked like. we also know much more about union veterans largely because of the availability of sources. union veterans, of course, were eligible for federal pensions, so those records, which are a real treasure trove of information about soldiers' lives after the war yield rich details about the veterans and their families. but former confederates were not eligible for federal pension so we lack that same space, although many southern states did offer pensions, those records are spotty and certainly disperse. so working on confederate veterans poses some challenges. that said, we do have some examples of historians working in a variety of areas on confederate veterans. some of them sitting to my right this afternoon. one of the big questions that we will address, either implicitly or explicitly is how did the

experiences of confederate veterans differ from union veterans? after all, all veterans, north and south, shared similar experiences. they fought on the same field, they missed their families and acquired the same diseases but southern soldiers returning home after the war faced a different set of circumstances and conditions that made their post war lives in certain ways very different from that of union veterans. first and obviously, they lost. their fledgling nation was destroyed. they faced defeat unlike union solders who returned home victorious. by contrast, southern soldiers limped home in humiliation. it also meant loss of suffrage and political rights. they were subjugated. second, war was fought almost entirely in their homeland, so as the south sustained extensive physical ruin and economic devastation, many soldiers returned home to find their dwellings demolished or in

ashes. their fields in ruins. third, slavery was abolished. slavery was, of course, a chief form of wealth and labor in the region but it's abolition posed questions about the very essence of southern identity. who were white southerners now without slaves? as confederate soldiers made their way home in 1865 and sought to reintegrate into civilian life these three critical differences from northern soldiers' experiences fundamentally shaped how southern households and communities developed during reconstruction. these posed challenges, defeat, devastation, and emancipation, cut to the quick of masculine identities of southern men and greatly influenced the

homecoming of confederate veterans. humiliation and shame from military loss and submission to the enemy, loss of political independence and rights, scattered confidence, financial and business failure, reliance on women for emotional and sometimes financial support, and diminished status in family and state. regional recovery hinged on the ability of men to return to the support -- to support their family and community networks at a time when those very networks were damaged and destabilized. former confederate soldiers returned home, in some cases, to unimaginable burdens and hurdles recovery. psychological distress brought on by combat experience exacerbated issues, leaving veterans suffering psychological harm that impeded readjustment to civilian life and compounded their emotional and psychological distress. a southerner, like susan bradford, witness add bittersweet homecoming of relatives and commented on the

demoralized demeanor of soldiers returning to the neighborhood. i sit here and wonder, if all the dear men in gray feel as crushed and as disconsolate as these. will they ever be able to forget? this observation, that many confederate veterans were crushed at war's end is borne out in a variety of historical sources. the most seriously afflicted veterans ended up in southern, what was called at the time -- lunatic asylums. it presented history of violence often committed against family members and sometimes themselves. over 3/4 of the veterans admitted to the georgia state

asylum from 1865 to 1872 were described as violent, very violent, had in the past had assaulted persons, many family members. trauma afflicted veterans directed much of their menacing rage toward relatives making reintegration challenges. confederate veterans in a state of emotional turmoil recently -- frequently turned on themselves and responded to their emotional agony by resorting to self-injury. suicidal behavior, of course, is an indicator of war-related trauma like ptsd and occurs at a higher rate among veterans than the civilian population. of the veterans admitted to the milledgeville georgia asylum about 1/3 were suicidal. the case of snelton epitomizes the suicidal spiral of a former soldier after the war. his demise began during the war. after the teen enlisted and earned his distress, his psychological demise earned him an early discharge from the war,

and then later entry into the milledgeville insane asylum. he made clear his intention to destroy himself and while in the asylum tried to burn himself and several times attempted to throw himself out of windows. after years of a recovery and relapse cycle, peppered with multiple suicide attempts, he finally succeeded in ending his life in august of 1871, by ingesting strychnine. another form of self-destructive 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 civilians alike turned to alcohol to escape an array of societal and permanent problems after the war. whether alcohol abuse in the postbellum south can be attributed to post combat disorder or to the depressive malaise that engulfed the region during reconstruction for southerners, especially men, 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 antebellum period opium addiction was mostly -- opium users, opium 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 weighted down by defeat and war

trauma faced financial ruin. unlike the north, south experienced extensive physical damage that made rebuilding difficult. pecuniary embarrassment, underscore the failure of men difficult one of the basic responsibilities of manhood. providing for one family. moreover, southerners experienced pervasive indebtedness. single dependency. undermining their masculine identity. combined weight of financial ruin and embarrassment proved too much to some confederates. the defeated warriors cannot deny the massive work that lay ahead to rebuild. the physical reconstruction at home, farms, fields, and

infrastructure awaited. the economy in shambles offered few opportunities for men who are desperate to resume their statuses as heads of households and breadwinners for their families. with little or no money, sharply diminished wealth, and dim job prospects, southern men faced abysmal -- a dismal outlook with little hope for a quick turnaround. these failures plague postbellum south. the inability to provide one family in an environment of economic uncertainty beleaguered many white men of the region. voted -- devoted their lives to building businesses and cultivating the reputations and networks and relationships that were dependent to those crumbled and pace of business failures. white man business fire in the south eviscerated upon itself. opportunitiesic about productive work, so that

men were unable to challenge their emotional suffering into productive outlets like work. home, andy failure at the military front and at work, southern men collapsed psychologically. some committed suicide while others ended up in silent -- a silent. a german born watchmaker who served in the virginia infantry made good on offer threat to kill himself in february of 1871 despite his wife pleading. he replied to her, i am done. it is too late. then he shot himself. his wife reported that he suffered from troubles. financial calamity and material deprivation awaited confederate men returning home. the dire situation and pessimism about the future. money worries and loss of property paralyzed numerous next confederates. women also worried about their

family financial well-being of many experienced economic misfortune. signaledfinancial ruin dependency and an inability to fulfill one of the chief responsibilities as head of household, that a provider. in addition to diminish prospects for work, so they're wightman street's reversal of wealth of property that also contributed to their mental decline. menhern wightman -- white were embarrassed by their inability to provide for their families. many equated financial failure with poor character, a holdover from the antebellum times though intellectually most understood that the war in the aftermath was to blame. emancipation wiped out the wealth of many slaveholding families. , in 1860, hefamily possessed over $10,000 worth of property, largely slaves.

when the working he enlisted and served in the cap reunion -- cap reunion -- cavalry unit. a is the war, it was wealth of $250. he drowned himself in a virginia creek later. indebtedness, unemployment, loss of wealth, and livelihood, kurt reconstruction south and light nearly all southerners. but was a spirits in a very gendered way. -- experienced in a very gendered way. it set the stage for an inhospitable homecoming for soldiers,atchels -- many of him who brought with him the baggage of emotional and psychological damage. with that as a bit of a springboard, i would like to pick it to our panelists -- pivot to our panelists who will speak a little bit about one aspect of the confederate

homecoming. i will begin with jason phillips will start us off this afternoon by talking about the process of surrendering, making the point that the familiar story of surrender at appomattox was experienced very differently for most confederate soldiers. thank you, diane. when ulysses s. grant recovered appomattox, he said or has produced many stores of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true. popular stories about appomattox history civil war with peace and reconciliation. this romance of reunion offereds robert e. lee his sword to greater returns the blade and shared military honors. then we are told that union soldiers confirmed the sentiment by saluting confederates while they stacked arms and hold flags. homee end, southerners go

with a 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 the fiction suggests. confederates coach with defeat by demeaning the enemy as barbarians, by arming themselves as the her rope remnants of a legendary army. remnants of a legendary army. the victors helped it would ease union by this plaintiff moral superiority. leniency embolden diehard rebels to resist change. the only union superiority the confederates would admit was numerical superiority. diehard rebels cherished themselves a sign of reunion, but as proof that they personally had never abandoned

the cause. returning home present a new challenges for these veterans. during the long journey, troops invented rage and a sense of entitlement. they stole what they needed from storehouses and even from civilians along the path. a new orleans reporter noted x confederate soldiers have fought for four years without pay and out they proposed to pay themselves. homed men walking presented a stark contrast to how they read to war on trains -- rode to war on trains and horses or years ago. to see that it 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. and emptylothing stomachs did not this thing with veterans from thousands of free

people who walked the same layered -- rode in search of family members and as an expression of freedom. while heading home, many veterans and counter the worst final destructive campaign for the first time. in the shenandoah valley, veterans follow the tracks of philip sheraton's campaign. or three days we were refreshed by the site and smell of dead horses. when he saw the burnt district of richmond, he blamed the destruction on northern blacks.ts and southern retreating confederates had burned their own capitals, but this diehard rebel was already rewriting history. thousands of defined confederate veterans presented one of the biggest challenges to reconstruction. they even resented having to swear an oath of allegiance to the united states. it, theytter and put

thrust their bile of the legions .own our throat with bayonets the presence of black troops in the south infuriated diehard rebels. colored regiment formed a larger percentage of occupation forces because they listed later in the war. factfederates ignore the and an assumed -- assume the enemy and post-black barry simms in the celtic humiliate white men. regiments to humiliate white men. this but like subjugation. martial law, confiscation, exile and racial amalgamation. home, captaing samuel foster talked with comrades about the future. some say the war is settled. some say the difficulty has hardly begun. for foster, surrendering meant submission, reunion, and free

negroes. we have 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 are keeping quiet, by biding their time until the federal occupation ended and they want to again return to power. was moreern insurgency than a response to postwar challenges during reconstruction. it was a continuation of the civil war by other means. if i could ask one question, it sounds like you are arguing for accepting surrender as the onset of reconstruction rather

than the title act of the civil war. if we accept that, how would that change how we look at that period? >> that is a good question. the surrender close military conflict but it opened political debate about the future. one of the first challenges of reconstruction was securing federal oversight in the south. only wartime powers could justify this control. only an army could enforce it. said theebels surrender men more than this. they hope that the surrenders mentees. the end of federal control in the south. so they could rule their region again. meant theurrenders end of confederate authority in the south. a very different thing. therefore the spread of federal power in the south. we see this debate even between grant and lee about the terms of surrender before appomattox takes place. i think the first step of reconstruction really happens at

appomattox courthouse. the path to reclaiming masculine prerogative and control in the private's beer was a bumpy one for confederate veterans. david will tell us a little bit about how these challenges should the reentry of confederate veterans into their households as well as the relationships with wives, children and other family members. david. >> thank you. one thing you rate in your talk was the ways in which we can highlight the confederate experience and homecoming space was different than the union experience. one of the ways in which they are different is that in the north, there is this trope 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 return

and have a better return and resume normalcy after the war. i'm not sure that they can share trope works as well for confederate veterans. in the south, so much of the homefront and battlefront are blurred. that makes it difficult sometimes to think about confederate families at home trying to sustain their prewar lives. this happens in lots of different ways. thousands of confederate families are forced to become refugees. they're driven away from home during the war. we can think in large part of the confederacy, confederate civilians on the move trying to find someplace where they will be safe for the conflict. when we think about soldiers coming home in april of 1865, their families are coming home also. some cases the scenes we have

are not the family waiting patiently for the soldier to return home, but both groups coming home and sometimes the soldier gets on first and greatest the family coming home months later. which i think is a very different kind of experience. other veteran families are very much on the front lines. the union army marching to the south and so families are coming face-to-face with the enemy just as the soldiers are coming face-to-face toupees for dme -- with the enemy. white cameras in the south are facing huge financial problems especially in the latter house -- half of the war. they been deprived of their major form of agriculture labor in the form of the man at the household who has gone off to fight. there are food shortages as we know across the patterson. -- confederacy. all of which i think put families in a precarious situation financially.

war,e end of the confederate currency is worthless and they have lost their slaves. which soldiers are coming home, family's been suffering for a number of years. all of whichich -- is to say that many of the soldiers coming back are coming back in bad shape. missing limbs, psychological trauma and parents warfare, but their families are also in pretty bad shape. 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. one of the ways you can look at this, one of the ways you can gauge the extent of the trauma of the war on families, look at divorce records. divorce is very rare in the south throughout the 19th century. in of the things you find 1866, many seven counties, you

have more people filing for divorce that year in the previous 20 years. divorce look at those petitions, they will say our marriage was great until the war happened. that happens whether the petition is filed by the husband or the wife. i think the trauma happening to the families is a product of the ways in which not only the soldiers had their experiences in the family suffering during the war itself. it is interesting to note these problems that white families are theyg an problems and how are falling apart at the same moment african-americans are trying to encode their families with legal protections, they are getting married and try to find children that have been sold away and try to rebuild their families. the falling apart of white families simultaneously happening with the rebuilding of lots of families broken by

slavery. the final point i want to make is thinking about the veteran experience and the family's bridge. there is a huge diversity of veteran experience. lots of veterans are coming back with the trauma of war and missing limbs, other veterans are coming back with relatively intact physically and mentally. same is true with families in geography. some parts of the south where facing destruction of their farms, new starvation conditions and other parts of the south they are able to sustain themselves with a fairly similar standard of living as they had before the war. when you mix these two variables , the ways in which families are able to receive their soldiers back is going to vary tremendously. question, i wonder if there is much difference

between divorce records in northern communities compared to the south, what do you think the difference would be? southern men and women struggle to get back together after the war just like northern men and women. were his dramatic for families i think we know from more recent conflicts when soldiers come home that the families are suffering in different ways and soldiers but very difficult to maintain those relationships. confederate soldiers are away from their families for a longer of time than northern soldiers and are coming back in worse shape. all that is reflected in the divorcewhich their petitions are coming through. many of the husband's accuse their wives of infidelity. whichdid the same thing is the only legal basis for

divorce in the 19 century. this directly with this happening once they went off to fight. ng from family ties to bonds between former confederates, tim will share his thoughts on the brotherhood of veterans. >> she said that historians had for a long time thought that the war was quickly forgotten or soldiers turned away from it after its conclusion. i think what is so exciting about some of the current scholarship is they suggest otherwise. what you are hearing today and you were here throughout the dichotomy is that the that once existed between hibernation and survival is that it there's a lot of fluidity discovered and soldiers and veterans thought a great deal about their wartime extrinsic throughout the postwar era.

1865, veterans started to sort out or symbol meaning to this conflict. there are two ways in which we can look at this. i will look at it one way and set up by sanders another week and look at it. there is a rich public discourse mealy after the american civil war. 1865, the so-called southern spirit thrives. regimental histories are turned out in small numbers and eventually great numbers and survivors of associations begin to his -- begin to thirst. -- flourish. that is a public discussion. so too did veterans look to the war and private ways that they had done throughout the conflict. many people who maybe had not written a great deal became quite prolific during the wartime era. wrote sometimes hundreds of letters and continued in the

postwar erperiod but on the same numbers. it is certainly there. i think when i started to latch onto is that in this private discussion, these unpublished letters, veterans have clearly changed in some sort of soughtntal way and they to make connections with the wartime experience is with other veterans. for me at least, the way that we can understand the best is through the lense of emotions history. these are individuals who have a spirit depredation, trials and indeed combat and had a very similar set of emotional reactions. men in these antebellum era, before the civil war, had been disinclined to talk to other men and anyone but their wives about their

feelings. with this evidence that survives, veterans start talking to each other in postwar period through these letters. it is not a vibrant discourse. are suggested.do think, they are turning back to their wartime experience. diane shared earlier two of the sure beer -- severe trauma. we see this pickup in the postwar era. , during therolinian wartime era says no one can imagine anything like it referring to battle unless he has been in one. we have soldiers compartmentalizing their experiences and suggesting to their family that essentially they can't fully understand whether this is right or wrong.

we know a scholar civilians into her horrible traumas. many soldiers feel as though their families cannot fully understand the wartime experience. instead, who do they turn to? that they have slept with, thought with, eaten with for out 3-4 years of combat. individual isn writing to his friend and it's incredibly evocative language. he says sometimes in my sleep my mind wanders to the bad battlefield, i'm lying down as thin as a chip, frightened, expecting at any moment the command of war were. he experienced -- forward. he experienced these nightmares and sought out other veterans to see if they too were experiencing similar things. as he found, some suggested that

they had similar experiences. nightmares. or the modern era, ptsd. smith, the way in which he is dealing with this is through correspondence with his commanding officer and other soldiers. you see this rich exchange andughout the late 1850's early 1870's in which smith is trying to seek out anyone possible to continue the correspondence and talk about their experiences. and parse out the feelings and see if you can get some help and make sense of it all. he is quite successful in many cases. with the suggest to me is that there is a profound transformation. ,he southern men experienced they looking at other southern men in unique ways. they are disclosing themselves which iunique ways

would say were not probable or possible in the antebellum era. the so-called emotional communities that exist among veterans are a means by which many of these men begin to really make sense of the war and try to navigate the postbellum host of trials and travails for the veterans. near of ading the closed southern culture has impartially shattered by civil war southern men forever changed by the conflict sought out ,eterans to express and examine in many instances, the men better most accessible were other confederate veterans. very interesting.

did you find any ways in which those expressions changed over time? the think that many men by 1880's discontinue their private memoirs, theublish regimental histories that are very much aware of. period isleast, the the most interesting were the emotions are most involved. where the reactions are most visceral. by the 1880's, you still see remnants of that trauma but the language has been tempered and it is a peer -- there's a lot more political motivation behind the discourse i will say that the private discussion is discontinued by the 1880's. or unwilling to correspond and

people have lost track. ryne sandberg's going to take us in a different direction. he's going to talk about the question of what it means to historians when we focus on those who are disabled and damaged? >> thank you, diane. in 1883, new orleans decided to hold an event that was advertised in the local newspapers as a corralling of the cripples. would moveals through the streets of the prez quarter and pick up all the , includingggars dozens of confederate veterans who had no economic choice but beg. andg -- the rossi -- wealthy residents and tourists had become shocked and sickened by the sight of men exposing their wounds, their

deformities, their empty sleeves in order to secure a few nickels. in anleans was not alone act into walls. cities across the south removed digitally damaged men from public view who had few financial opportunities. for thousands of confederate veterans who lost a limb or suffered from a severe injury, a corralling marked only one of the many arduous tasks that emerged in the transition from the military to the homestead. confederate veterans return to a society that had been accustomed to judging the disabled as unmanly, as pristine had marked for the masculinity. and museums and traveling shows, americans upheld the beauty of the healthy white body and bore witness to what they would define as deviant bodies. horror as they saw the sideshows

of that ladies and conjoined twins in those born without arms or legs. for years prior to the american civil war, damaged in disabled bodies have been relegated to hidden spaces. hospitals, prisons and sideshow attractions. meante end of the war that for numerous communities, ew these now vi indicated men on it daily basis torn.de them a cloud of defeat hung over the south and filled the minds of many exhibited by the heart and four, disabled men found few economic opportunities in the men rooted in economic labor. one veteran noted, after spending months seeking work, he telik the entire south had a say noign hanging up

named veteran need apply. the struggle might apply here and i go into greater detail, clashes are perceived misunderstands the veterans. the lost cause and of the united come,erate organization they did their darndest to accentuate that the manly honor of all who fought had been worth it. speeches and monuments claimed that this is a group of honorable men, not broken men. these are real challenges in terms of understanding the entire encompassing experience of all that is. even some historians have been a comfortable recognizing the place of damage and dissolution veterans. i as was my panelists are not here to tell you that everything of confederate veteran returns home damaged in some ways. lives but very from at the same time we cannot discount or discredit the

existence of these men in society. howr plight would dictate the south would come to terms with the price of failure and the burden of defeat. files across the former confederacy reveal an entire generation of men physically and economically suffering and even if you dig one level deeper and go to the governor's papers of many southern states, you will find numerous letters to him if he take it and physically suffering men begging for help. give me something because i have served the state. homeoldiers who came bearing this phenomenon of the missing limb will create a permanent class of disabled and disease men. such veterans face chronic bouts of pain and mobility. the citizens who know how to process their place in a society so long rooted in the physical and mental body.

disabled men with them back up on their and family to assist them in dealing with the everyday physical and emotional rigors of life. the damage that information dependent on society's willingness to accept them as honorable men even if manual labor was no longer in the cards . haphazardly, in some cases reluctantly agreed to extend the aid in the form of tensions, prosthetic limbs, land grants, educational opportunities and even a spot in veterans homes. the very presence of these forcesd men of the south a cultural reconstruction, one in which the broken bodies would eventually be honored and one in which the physical and psychological sacrifices of the veteran population demanded a reconsideration of a government that would now allow for a class

of dependent citizens who could still even be seen as manly and their dependents. especially one given a pound of flesh for the cause of the american civil war. one question that i have as somebody who writes about damaged men returning home, how do you navigate that tricky word, victim? how do you write about them sympathetically and recognizing that they are deserving of all the humanity and dignity that we can give them? >> it is a difficult thread -- or needle to thread here because the stories are difficult to digest. this was a difficult project that i'm sure you have experienced. it is hard not to read a file filled with very long paragraphs of a man explaining his graphic

injury in details and he is doing it just so he can prove that he can get some money where prosthetic limb because it was on the burden of the individual disabled man to prove that he had lost that women battle rather than an industrial accident or if he had been born with a deformity. as you start to gather these tales, you have to look at the larger picture. there is a reason disabled history is not at the forefront of our historical study. it is difficult to comprehend, it does not always neatly fit the narrative of the return home of the veterans. it is a necessary one in which richins -- in richins and deepens our understanding of the war. >> without uplifting panel -- [laughter] i think i would like to turn it over to you all to ask questions of these very interesting, lots

of questions. gary. we learned about empty sleeves and suicide and alcoholism and drug abuse and i know some military historians have mentioned and criticized this dark turn and civil war history and i'm wondering, how do you respond to that? what do you think is the place of this? >> we are not dark personally. we have received some criticism and focusing on this somewhat morbid aspects of veteran expenses. on the other hand, if we end the story in 1865 and don't look at what happens to them afterwards,

we really distorting the experience of hundreds of thousands of soldiers who came minorsome with fairly some withes and enormous consequences they lived with for the rest of their lives. to respect their experience, we need to explore these narratives. the other thing we are doing, there's a narrative embedded in the lost cause of the confederate soldier who comes back almost triumphant and unbroken and we need to recognize that myth of the lost cause is hiding a large part of the truth. >> i would add that one of the things we keep in mind and why this dark turn as happened is because of the digits of >> digitization of a lot of files these records are much

easier to access for historians for historians. in some cases, where you are seeing medical holds or psychological holds a record starting to look because so much time has passed. these records are enormously rich but they are detailing the level of suffering decades after the war. kentucky's pension program does not come into place until 1912. you're talking about several decades were these men are still writing about the constant physical pain they are having from the agitated limbs, from their feet that have been damaged by marching during the war, that they no longer can work. their life has been consumed by deeper level of suffering. the economic commitment that's other state governments will have to put forward to take care of these men and their widows and their orphaned children, i think demands an exploration of the studies because it has a profound impact in terms of southern culture moving forward.

if i could add, one of the criticisms is that by side,phasizing the dark that we run the risk of blurring a typical experiences -- a typical experiences can be blurred these experiences from the normative ones. i would say that we don't know what the normative one is. i just read a fabulous essay on chamberlain recently. this is a guy who is normal and great and rights looking back it was president of the college, but if you read the article, you realize the rest of his life he suffered physically and mentally and it affected his family and almost cost him his marriage. i would be my response to that.

shaker heights, ohio. any comments on confederate deserters of which there were many? >> how they were treated? when they came home? >> it depends on when you deserted. if we are talking about the end of the war, it is interesting to note, i focused on the formal ceremonies, not every confederate soldier ended war at a place like appomattox. dispersedunits were in other places, in order to not feel like they were deserting, they left together and they left in military order in a way that anticipates what you are finding, they are using their

communal experience in wartime to handle thisst transformation into peacetime. if you left camp alone, you are a deserter. if you left camp with your company, you were not. desertion comes at a price. when you apply for your pension or prosthetic limb, you have to prove that he departed the army in an honorable fashion. if you left because of your injuries and do not have the proper paperwork, your pension application was denied. on from ohio, the defendant of two confederate veterans were both wounded in the war. one lost his left hand and the other for 45 years to prior to the income above for farmers. the question, has there been another study specifically about returning veteran farmers?

in those years, farming with such a difficult thing to do physically when you were whole and healthy. a lot of veterans coming home were not healthy but were expected to be farmers. it seems like that is a special subgroup to be and i'm wondering if anyone has looked at that. yeah, there was a case of a farmer who returns home and is missing to limbs and his wife actually takes them out every morning and ties into the plow and uses it to guide forward. most of the records i came those of amputees were who continue trying to farm in some capacity. most of them were unsuccessful and this is why they were demanding prosthetic limbs just to help them mobility wise move to the deals themselves. there is been a few recent studies on agriculture in the south. i'm not sure how deep they have gone into postwar veteran issues.

in jeff mcclurkin's book, jeff looks at the economic patterns then. looks at virginia. it would give you at least a pretty in-depth view of one cap 26. and the questions they have with agriculture and farming. >> oxford, ohio. probably a psychological question and medical question, undoubtedly looked at the same group or the large group of returning northern soldiers facing the same circumstances. do you have any percentages that indicate that southern soldiers were quote worse off psychologically or better off or somewhere in between and those

from the north? o, what was the result of amputationsand -- in terms of what both governments differ for both sides in the medical situation? >> jim martin will be here tomorrow, he can talk about the union side. the postbellum south is not a great place to gather statistical data for lots of reasons. they didn't tend to keep vital for into the 20 century. lots of records did not survive the war. it is impossible to answer that question from a difficult point of view. argue withying to that conditions after the war andworse in the south

conditions were worse in the support was not there for southerners. explains, hen makes the argument that things were not great for northern veterans. >> and the medical side of treatment for both? how the horribly disfigured people were handled from one end of the country to the other? >> third friday of experiences. the northern government has a structure in place to create a and thisc limb program goes on during the war itself. southern states will have to rely on the care during the war itself of organizations that use private donations together funds to collect authentic limbs. then it is up to the individual states. the confederate soldiers are barred from federal benefits by the 14th amendment. >> northern people also had to document the upper limb was lost in service or did they just walk

in and have one replaced? jim at good question for 9:00 a.m.. or can jim shouted out -- shout it out? >> there's a long list of questions of how the word was affected. >> from the standpoint of suicide and substance abuse, do you have a rough ballpark estimate of the percentages? more than half, less than half? estimate?l rough >> no. [laughter] can't because it is just too difficult. the sources are not there. northern records, anyone who has worked in the official records, the records kept there, there is no analog for the confederacy.

it is a lot more, unfortunately, anecdotal. thats you get statistics you draw from an asylum which i'm working on but the problem is they don't identify asylum dwellers as veterans. it means you have to go to a second and third layer to try to identify them as veterans. it is very cumbersome. today, evenated today it is bad. they try to look into good numbers. compare them between different states and countries. the data is not as good as we think it is. through this in the 19th century makes it 10 times harder. the data is not good. but the north and south, they recognize that something is happening that was new. global -- suicide

epidemic, there where something is happening. they are aware something is happening. lee.estions about robert e a couple of years ago a book was written, the lee family had found a chest full of letters that lee had written after the war. the author put a lot of stuff into the book and showed it to the lee family and said take a lot of it out. he survived the war without battle injuries but the question is, somebody like him who was well educated and had a lot of responsibility versus a lowly private, was there any way to tell if the education of a person, the responsibility they war if they survived the

without ptsd? i asked the other if lee suffered from ptsd and she said she was on a psychiatrist. does education and all that stuff make a difference? >> in my own work of suicide, i place orcide taking suicidal activity taking place among common soldiers all the way up to the officers. i think there are a variety of different triggers that are very different. of a virginia cavalry officer who basically had a breakdown before a battle. he became incapacitated them are probably by fright. that as a military officer, he was leading his men down. his company realized that he was

ill and started leaving him back home when en route, he got a hold of a sidearm and shot himself. that his motivation was very different than an ordinary soldier. >> trying to figure out which soldiers ended up with ptsd, if we're going to call it that, in very difficult. people respond differently to the trauma of war. and in complex ways we can't figure out. i think certain conditions tended to be more likely to be psychologicalh trauma afterwards been a prisoner of war was particularly dramatic if you are prisoner of war late in the conflict. losing a limb in externally dramatic.

to recognize if the committee they have after the war, the ability to have soldiers they can talk to about their experience, their families , the people who seem to be most likely to gravitate to suicidal idolization is -- tendencies are not conjunction with one another. >> i have a question about alcoholism. --, alcoholics

and continued on with their lives? that --ld say david studied this in north asylums,and the medical caregivers in the 19th-century conflated causes and symptoms. not, if somebody is behaving -- if somebody is behaviors aberrational or erratic, it would be considered -- associated with a call is in and they would go no further. they would not look at the service in the military as an explanation. alcoholfew were abusing . , butalcohol than opium

that was common. >> what i would like to add to the psychological framework there working in is a pre-freudian one. we today, when we look at somebody who is struggling with oroholism or suicidal depression or what have you, we tend to think, what happened to this person at some point in the past earlier than their lives -- earlier in their lives that led to this place. in the 19th century, they asked what happened in that morning. the idea that the war could affect someone 20-30 years later had not been developed yet. ofir remedy for all kinds mental issues, the asylum model was largely to put someone in a bucolic setting and hope that make them better. was veryeatment

limited. the only kind of treatment they really had was that had a contentious debate throughout the 19th century about the extent to which you restrain silent. in a better to kill themselves or want to kill themselves and strapped into a chair all day? not good choices. those were the debates they were having. compare andpanel contrast the experience of white confederate veterans in the south with returning african-americans coming back for more service with the union army? service with the union army? an interesting thing happens, at least with suicide in the 19th century. before the civil war in the

south, suicide is associated with slavery. something slaves do. what happens during the war and after the war is that it looks. suicide becomes associated with whiteness and not associated with african-americans. the test piece of evidence i have is that an ultralight of asylums, tworee white asylums in an african american asylums. .the white asylum s are struggling with suicide and the black asylum say you're after year, we have lots and lots of patience but none of them are suicidal. they have some racist ideas about why that is. eventually one african american patient commit suicide and the explanation was, he was in a black asylum but was very light-skinned so does not count. [laughter]

record,t the patient says he hung himself before daybreak, looked almost white. the way in which suicide and race are tied together, i think that is mostly cultural perception rather than reality. the ways in which those traumas will be processed by the communities will be very different. >> one more question. i did not want a question, i want to commend that the question was raised about the dark turn and i would like to say that i really find these panels, the work being done, so enlightening. we now have records that are being opened up, we can look at them online and go to the archives and can tell the stories of those forgotten people just like in the earlier decades only look at other

records sat moldering in a warehouse facility in maryland. i think the way has stimulated the field and got people looking, a lot of these questions i don't know, i know diane you took the south and the record-keeping is so difficult. nevertheless, there are records and you are turning up stories and the stories are not meant to take away or rob the honor of those who fought, returned, restored the nation but it is nevertheless their story that deserves a voice. maybe we can reconstruct their lives. thank you all. [laughter] -- [no audio] -- [applause] >> time for one more question. fight it out. rock paper scissors.

injuries, these indications are chronic, he gets a chronic illness. we forget that published a paper in 2000 on the history of infectious diseases in the united states military from 1860 to the present. soldiers didhe not tell. , his was frombout a year -- urologic cause. and develop gonorrhea on the way to west point. >> the effects for long-lasting. last question. when i listen to descriptions

of the social pathology during the civil war, traumatic experiences, if i came in in the middle of the conference and i did not know what work you are talking about, i would think you're talking about vietnam or iraq or the other things the soldiers have been involved in, my feeling is generally, there's a great similarity in terms of the results of any kind of war that are soldiers have been in. i think you got it looked at. the uniqueness of what is going on -- if you look at shelters war --people from divorce, suicide, was look at the uniqueness of a spirit and i think there is much more similarity. >> i think what a lot of people

see if is a lot more similarities than we have one time believed. and for your,. -- thank you for your comment. >> thank the panelists. [applause] >> you're watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. join the conversation, like us on facebook at c-span history. tonight on q and a, a documentary film instructor talks about his students a whirling documentaries. some of which have been grand prize winners at our annual studentcam competition. high school. jenks >> i'm not the kind of teacher he will look at something that

is not good and say that is nice. you did a nice job. i will say, what is not working. eventually every single one of my kids mix a better piece than they did at the beginning. every single one of them. eventually the kids to do really well internalize all of the stuff. so i no longer have to say to them, their own brain is saying these things to them. >> tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span q&a. the 1862 civil war adolor fredericksburg, virginia was bought from december 11-13 on the small transportation held along the river, an hours drive from washington dc. 150th events marking the anniversary of the battle that resulted in almost 2000 deaths and 16,000 casualties, american history tv captured video of reenactments including the river crossing and landing under fire anre