The Best Specimen of a Tyrant: The Ambitious Dr. Abraham Van Norstrand and the Wisconsin Insane Hospital

3. “My Blood Is Up”

T H R E E My Blood Is Up As chairman of a committee that welcomed Stephen Douglas to Jefferson during the 1860 presidential campaign, Abraham Van Norstrand got to see his party’s nominee up close and was not encouraged :“He appeared as if he was just waking up from a prolonged drunk.”1 The encounter was an omen of the long hangover in store for the Democrats. All but a few dozen pages of Van Norstrand’s memoirs are devoted to his two and a half years of wartime service in the army. It was the most exhilarating time of his life. He was the surgeon of the Fourth Wisconsin, which suffered the third highest death toll of the state’s 58 infantry regiments, but he expressed few sorrows and no regrets. In page after densely scribbled page, he comes off as a real-life Harry Flashman, crossing swords with towering figures like Winfield Scott and Dorothea Dix and with villains like Thomas Williams, a general despised by his own officers but revered by the ladies of Baton Rouge. Van Norstrand cut them all down to size. Like Flashman he had a gift for attaching himself to local gentry on both sides of the conflict and basking in their flattery. He delighted in recalling many a feast laid out for his pleasure and many a bottle of aged brandy or claret urged upon him in one white-pillared mansion or another. As head of the biggest hospital in the Department of the Gulf, he saw Fourth Wisconsin comrades die lingering deaths and was himself worn down by illness and exhaustion, to say nothing of the frustration of being locked into middling rank. But again and 48฀฀•฀฀The Best Specimen of a Tyrant again those lavish encounters with the privileged—slave owners or not—and every favor and deference granted him as surgeon, officer, man of the world, energized him. And finally that old seductress, easy money, caught his eye. Picture him in his mid-fifties—stout, brooding, no longer radiating the old heartiness—sitting at his great ledger book with pen in hand, the family heritage of early death constantly in his thoughts as through wartime letters and his album of military papers he recreated the part he had played in the great national crisis. By the spring of 1861 he was angry at extremists on both sides— southern leaders who in their “eternal bombast and overweening pretension” demanded that “we must assert and proclaim that the institution was of divine origin, [and that when a slave escaped] every man must turn Negro-catcher”* and abolitionists “willing to sacrifice all their wife’s relations but [taking] precious care to keep their own bodies out of harm’s way.”2 Not that his opinion mattered anymore. Republicans held sway in Madison and Washington. In repudiating his politics they also undermined his livelihood. For the first time ever he found himself on the wrong side of history. On Monday, April 15, he was at the depot when travelers arriving from Chicago brought word that Fort Sumter had surrendered. He asked a friend to tell Lucy that he was off to Madison, and he hopped aboard. “I sought out Governor Alexander Randall, an acquaintance of nearly 10 years, and offered to take any duty he wished to order me to.”3 By the end of the month he was back home and had raised a company of volunteers so eager for action that he feared many would defect to units in Illinois unless called to duty immediately. “My blood is up in this matter,” he warned the governor.4 Webster P. Moore from the town of Beloit in nearby Rock County had brought a dozen young men with him and in return won a guarantee from Van Norstrand that he would be second in command.5 What a month it had been. At the beginning he had been * This is in reference to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. struggling to keep his bank solvent and praying that war would be avoided. By the end he was impatient to muster into the Union army as the captain of a spanking new rifle company proudly calling itself the Jefferson County Guards. It had not taken him long to get back on the right side of history. Although he claimed to be “well-pleased” as a leader of fighting men, he...