Floridian Susan Bradford, like many of her contemporaries witnessing the homecoming of “crushed and dejected” male relatives from the warfront, pondered, “Will they ever be able to forget?” The short, and probably obvious answer to us, is no. Thousands of wounded and battle-weary men streamed home with the silencing of guns. Eager to reconstitute families and relationships, Confederate veterans, many of them afflicted with what today we recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) found that reunions with loved ones and the hopes for a return to all things normal, eluded them. Relying heavily on asylum records and newspaper accounts, this paper will explore the devastating and severe psychological impact of the Civil War on Confederate soldiers and their families. Increased violence was just one by-product of returning war veterans. In a region with a reputation for violence, southern asylum records are notable for their remarks about violent patients who had served in the Confederate military. James Payne from Wilkinson County, Georgia, for one, ended up in the asylum in Milledgeville, Georgia in 1867 after several attempts to kill his father. Often violence at the hands of Confederate veterans was self-directed. John Sharpe, a former prisoner of Sherman’s troops, beat one of his own fingers off with a piece of iron. Many others went further and attempted suicide. A young Albinius Snelson tried to kill himself several times by jumping out a window and by setting himself on fire. A.G. Ewing of Nashville was more successful. Wounded at Fort Pillow, the amputee committed suicide in 1872 by taking chloroform. Serious manifestations of mental illness, such as these, not only hampered Southerners’ attempts to recover from four years of bitter war but also shaped the contours of their new society, especially in areas of community, family, and gender roles. Did the pervasive personal emotional suffering inure southerners to bitterness and resentment, poisoning national reconciliation and dashing hopes for racial harmony in their own region, as some scholars of the Lost Cause have argued? Did the manifestation of mental illness in so many southern men render them effete and weak, in the eyes of many, unable to fulfill their duties as men, fathers and husbands and thus invite suicide? Importantly, this paper seeks to initiate a dialogue about the “hidden history” of mental illness in the post-war South. As Phillip Paludan pointed out not too long ago, for a war that had such an “abiding impact” on the U.S. – the sheer numbers of combatants and deaths, the emancipation of millions of slaves, constitutional amendments that would have far-reaching consequences – it’s shocking how little has been written about the social history of the war. “What did the war do to families? to mothers and fathers and children"? “What kinds of lives were led after the killing stopped?” This paper offers that the experience of battlefield trauma left its mark on millions of southerners. The larger question is, what impact did widespread psychological suffering have on a defeated South as it rebuilt its institutions and recast its identity?

Coroners’ inquests are some of the richest records we have of life and death in the Old South. In some cases, the inquest is pro forma. A jury is called and concludes that the person lying before them died “at the hands of a person or persons unknown.” But in many cases the record is far richer. The antebellum coroner was not a homicide detective or a medical examiner – he was both ("Quincy” meets “Columbo"). He inspected the body and (possible crime) scene, rounded up witnesses, heard testimony, and made a recommendation. If there was cause, he would seek an arrest warrant. Far more than the sheriff, he was familiar with the strange intimacies inherent in the varied ways people go out of the world.

Examining the coroner’s inquests for several S.C. counties between 1800 and 1860, I discovered evidence that would support studies of antebellum abortion, child abuse, spousal abuse, master-slave murder, and slave on slave violence. To be sure, one gets glimpses of these same things in more traditional court records. But especially in the Old South, cases like these had a way of not quite percolating up through the court system. (And this says nothing of cases in which nothing “actionable” occurred – cases of suicide, accidental death, or “act of God.")

Equally interesting was what happens when I pressed forward into the war years. It was as if Death had gone on holiday. Death goes where men go; between 1861 and 1865, it held high revel – in men’s camps and on their battlefields; it had slipped its bureaucratic leash. But what happened to the coroners who remained at home? Had dying, even on the homefront, changed? And when was Death “re-leashed"?

On September 14, 1862, Confederate Brig. Gen. James Chalmers, commanding a brigade in Braxton Bragg’s Army of the Mississippi, launched an ill-advised, spur-of-the-moment assault on the Federal works at Munfordville, Kentucky. Expecting an easy victory, Chalmers sent several waves of attackers against formidable Union fortifications before falling back with heavy casualties. Among them was the Scottish-born Col. Robert A. Smith of the 10th Mississippi, a son of the founder of the Smith & Wellstood stove manufacturing concern. When Smith fell mortally wounded, his close friend and brother-in-law, Capt. George Dobson of Company D, abandoned his shattered men in order to help carry him to the rear. Dobson remained at the makeshift field hospital throughout the rest of the day tending to Smith. Union soldiers captured him there. Paroled after the battle, Dobson did not report his predicament at headquarters. Indeed he disappeared from the ranks in order to return Smith’s body to Mississippi. He only returned to his regiment in late December, later stating that he assumed that he must have been exchanged by then. A month passed before the 10th Mississippi’s acting commander, J. H. Walker, suddenly had Dobson arrested, charging him with absence without leave and allowing himself to be captured. Dobson himself proclaimed that he not only had acted correctly and honorably by helping his kinsman, but also had remained at the hospital only because the regimental surgeon ordered him to do so. He also felt a moral obligation to remain away from the army until exchanged. The charges, he insisted, were merely an attempt by Walker to deflect allegations of cowardice during the Battle of Murfreesboro. The case against Dobson, seemingly tight on the surface despite his defense, soon fell apart. Despite his reputation for severity, Bragg himself came to Dobson’s defense, ordering the captain’s release from arrest because he had acted under “proper motives.” When the trial finally took place, no witness would testify against Dobson, and the charges were dropped. It was Walker, not Dobson, who paid for the episode, resigning his command.

This paper will relate the events of Dobson’s capture, arrest, and trial while seeking to understand why Dobson acted as he did, and why a famously harsh commander such as Bragg, as well as the rank and file of the 10th Mississippi, supported the captain’s apparent dereliction of duty and desertion. The army punished enlisted men for abandoning the battlefield and shot them for going home. Why not Dobson? The paper will also discuss how post-war chroniclers explained away or completely erased the episode as part of a larger campaign, led in part by Dobson, to memorialize Colonel Smith, a family-based effort that not only placed a marker in Smith’s native Scotland, but also erected what is still today the only monument at the Munfordville battlefield.

Behind a trench wall New Yorker Charles Bowen stood in a state of shock. He could not believe that he was still alive, having fully expected that in the morning he would be resting under the Virginia sod after participating in suicidal attacks against Petersburg. He admitted to his wife that at any moment he thought he would be discharged from “earth & army at the same time.” Surviving such a massacre pushed Bowen to think deeply about his responsibilities as a soldier. With less than three months left in his enlistment, Bowen wanted his family to know that he had no intention of shirking his duty, even if he were ordered to make another senseless charge. “I intend to fall as a soldier with no dishonor to the name I bear,” he promised on June 20, 1864 “if I fall at all.”

Bowen’s promise to do his duty was a declaration commonly heard from Civil War soldiers in all theaters of the war and during all stages of the conflict But the language of duty was multilayered, and not a simple declaration of manliness or selfless patriotism. It could not prevent men from feeling conflicted about their place in the army. Tensions ran through the concept of duty as men on both sides struggled to remain faithful to themselves, to their fellow soldiers, and to the people back home. Bowen, for instance, took little more than a month before contradicting his June 20 promise to die in the ranks. “I am just almost as sick of the service as any poor devil ever was,” he wrote on July 28. “Would give $50.00 if my time was out this morning so I could start at once.” Bowen finished his tenure in the army, but he felt isolated at times in the army, and it is in the experience of alienation that we can recover new ways that soldiers narrative the war. This is the central line of inquiry in “Soldier Speak".

The inescapable threat of annihilation, the never-ending depravations of living in the field, and the unrelenting pressures of military discipline created physical and emotional burdens that could overwhelm even a reliable soldier like Bowen at any time. Locating moments of personal upheaval provide opportunities to explore how soldiers navigated the day-to-day ordeals of living and fighting in the field. We can turn to personal letters to explore these individual crises, but personal correspondence typically masks the raw actions and mutes the crude words heard in camp. Getting at the “hidden” exchanges among members of the rank-and-file is a daunting but critical challenge. We cannot begin to understand how an individual soldier “did his duty” during times of extreme physical and emotional duress unless we reconstruct the ways that soldiers engaged each other as comrades. The soft touches of a penned letter home can tell us how soldiers wanted to be seen by loved ones, but these letters cannot be read as objective reports of the hard reality of military life. Rejecting soldier correspondence as somehow being false, however, is badly missing the point.

Thus, the overall purpose of “Soldier Speak” is focused on how comrades behaved and interacted with each other within the context of a military hierarchy that tried to control their thinking and actions. The storyline of this paper will follow the experiences of Charles Bowen, juxtaposing his revealing letters home after the battle of Fredericksburg to Court Martial and regimental records from his unit. In doing so, I will recover different forms of narrations that soldiers employed amongst themselves, with their officers, and with civilians. My findings will complicate our understanding of the language of duty as we will see how men in the ranks created a unique vernacular that expressed their alienation from the war.

Ira E. Forbes enlisted as a private in the 16th Connecticut in the summer of 1862 at the age of 19, and served for three years, enduring the horrors of battle and the terrible sufferings of imprisonment. His wartime diary reveals a young man deeply pious and idealistic about the war’s meaning and his own motivations. He became color corporal in the spring of 1863, responsible for the regimental flags, most dramatically when Confederates captured the entire unit at the Battle of Plymouth in April 1864, and his lieutenant colonel ordered him to save the state flag from capture. This banner, along with the regiment’s national flag, was torn from its staff, and scraps were hidden in prisoners’ clothing, many saved until after the war ended.

Cpl. Forbes survived Andersonville prison, and returned home to attend Yale University, marry and pursue a career in journalism. But his great passion was his former regiment, or more accurately, writing about the 16th Connecticut, and assuring that his version of their wartime service gained precedence in the public record. He challenged the single published regimental history of the unit, seeking more detail and claiming less partisanship. Forbes joined other veterans, who sought to create a record of every individual member of the regiment, and produced more than 700 biographical sketches, tracking down survivors as well as family members. Forbes was determined, and demanding, and in time, found himself cast out of the inner circle of veterans. When the unit commemorated a memorial to all Connecticut dead at Andersonville Prison in Georgia, Forbes was notably missing from attendance. He ended up committed to the Hartford Asylum for the Insane and died at the age of 68. It was two of his closest comrades who committed him, describing him as verbally abusive and violent.

This paper will explore how Ira Forbes, as a journalist, sought to make his version of history the dominant one. For a man who had literally carried the flag for his regiment, it made sense that he would see himself as leading the way for his comrades. However, he found himself increasingly isolated and alienated when he began stripping his stories of the war of any anti-Confederate stance. His comrades would not stand by him. And although it is perhaps unknowable if there is a direct connection between his isolation from his former comrades and his insanity (or for that matter his military service), it is difficult to dismiss how crestfallen he became when he realized that he had been rejected by his regiment.

Nonetheless, Forbes’ version of history did prevail, even though his efforts and his individual story (and that of his regiment) are nearly entirely missing from the popular narrative of the war. In some ways, his memory, more forgiving of the South, less racially charged and bitter toward Confederates, did dominate. And the more divisive views of his northern comrades that he contested became muddled, abbreviated and eventually silenced.