The Civil War’s “Empty Sleeve” and the Cultural Production of Disabled Americans

Introduction

We are used to thinking about disability as an exceptional bodily condition, and much scholarship treats it as such. But we need to rethink such assessments in relation to the massive injuries, and especially the loss of limbs, brought about by the American Civil War. The Civil War scaled up disability to a prevailing social condition. That condition was not just produced by battlefield injuries; it was also produced by the institution of the first federal military draft. Instated on both sides of the conflict in 1863, the draft used disability as a key measure in assessing the fitness of individual draftees to serve in the armed forces. Disability became a precondition for remaining a civilian, as well as the outcome of having served in action. Particular provisions in the draft—namely, the ability to pay a commutation fee or hire a substitute to serve in one’s stead—also created new forms of sociality, as did the relationships of care into which disabled Americans entered with each other. The Civil War constructed the concept of “disability” where previously terms such as “freak” or “cripple” had prevailed. It was the “Disability Pension Act” (1890), passed as aging veterans’ disabilities continued to increase, that introduced “disability” as a key term into “the official federal legal lexicon.”¹ And yet our current use of the term has almost completely severed it from the Civil War context, which this essay seeks to recover.

The American Civil War marks a historical and cultural moment when disability was made central to the construction of national identity and interpersonal subjectivity. One of the founders of disability studies, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, writes that “the physically extraordinary figure” is “as essential to the cultural project of American self-making as the varied throng of gendered, racial, ethnic, and sexual figures of otherness that support the privileged norm.”² Most of the focus in discussions of the American Civil War has centered on the important catalog Garland-Thomson provides, namely, on questions of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in their relation to normativity. At the time of the war, these categories were newly defined in their relation to military service.

The Civil War context challenges us to reassess disability’s relation to national norms. The relationship between “figures of otherness” and “the privileged norm” becomes complicated by the disabled Civil War veteran, who has norm-breaking as well as norm-making power.³ For most scholars in the field of disability studies, disabled bodies are not themselves a “privileged norm,” nor do they themselves constitute “masculine citizenship.”⁴ Emily Russell writes that “the fullest access to citizenship depends on mastery of the physical,” and that the able body is seamlessly integrated into the “body politic” but disabled bodies constitute “excluded subjects” in the national narrative and “expose the contradictions and gaps upon which citizenship is founded.”⁵ The Civil War confronts us with a different set of possibilities: that there are kinds of disability on which the state and its subject formations are premised.

In his profound meditation on the linkages and disjunctions between queerness and disability, Robert McRuer explores how “compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness” (18) are linked in our own historic moment, but he acknowledges that the “cultural representation of ability and heterosexuality” is “unique to the past few decades (28).”⁶ The mass scale of injury during the Civil War, and the logics of disability and substitution that structured the military draft to begin with, tell a different story from the one with which we are currently familiar. In the context of the Civil War, disability emerges as a social condition and discursive formation on which constructions of national identity as well as of gender and sexuality rely.

In her important book The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (2009), Susan Schweik approaches the “unsightly beggar” as a discourse formation.⁷ She documents how laws emerged in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War through Reconstruction that posited disability as an individual problem rather than relating it “to broader social inequalities” (3, 5). And yet...