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?