Undying pain for a broken infantryman

The American Civil War is often remembered through song. Its stirring anthems aimed to unify through patriotism, but many songs linger on the traumatic undercurrent of war. One such was Walter Kittredge’s ‘Tenting on the Old Camp Ground’:

“Many are the hearts that are weary tonight, Wishing for the war to cease;

Many are the hearts that are looking for the right

To see the dawn of peace.”

Yet despite war’s traumatic cultural resonance, medical practitioners in late 19th-century America still struggled to distinguish between mental and physical illness. Da Costa’s Syndrome, named after the American Civil War physician Jacob Da Costa, was known informally as ‘soldier’s heart’. It was thought that post-battle mental states were brought on by a weak heart or overexertion.

Like the Napoleonic Wars half a century earlier, we can draw a picture of soldiers’ mental states from the letters and diaries they left behind. The Union soldier Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: p'aten nothing – suffered the most intense anxiety and everything else possible --…[Y]ou cannot conceive of the wear and tear.”

One of the most tragic stories of the war lies with the men of the 16th %onnecticut +nfantry regiment fighting for the Union. Barely trained, they took part in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, with most ending up in a Confederate prison camp. Some died in what were inhuman conditions, while those who did survive to be reunited with their families were described as “broken”. One of them, Wallace Woodford, continued to cry out in his sleep after his return: he died just a few weeks later, at the age of 22. His headstone reads: “Eight months a sufferer in Rebel prison *e came home to die.”

#lthough still undefined, it is clear that war trauma haunted the lives of many of the men who fought in the American Civil War, and that its effects were becoming widely recognised as the dawn of modern war approached.