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  • Madness, Malingering, and Malfeasance: The Transformation of Psychiatry and the Law in the Civil War Era
  • Peter McCandless
R. Gregory Lande . Madness, Malingering, and Malfeasance: The Transformation of Psychiatry and the Law in the Civil War Era. Washington, D.C.: Brassey's, 2003. xii + 233 pp. Ill. $27.95 (1-57488-352-6).

This volume is a study of the attempts of the United States military to respond to various forms of misbehavior in its ranks during the Civil War. It focuses on the efforts of military courts to determine if the perpetrators were mentally or otherwise incapacitated, or merely shamming. Gregory Lande argues that a poorly developed understanding of mental illness, combined with a rigid system of military justice that provided the accused no defense counsel, led to the conviction of many men who were mentally ill, incompetent, and poor.

The introduction provides an all-too-brief discussion of the limited development of medical jurisprudence and military justice prior to the Civil War. Lande then devotes the first chapter to the highly documented murder trial of Pvt. Lorenzo Stewart, which illustrates the difficulties that military courts faced in cases where the defendant's mental state was an issue. In many respects, Stewart's case was not typical: few cases produced such a detailed record; few soldiers were tried for murder; and few had access to defense counsel, as he did. In most cases, the accused limited their defense to a supplication for mercy or an excuse based on illness or drink. The last four chapters focus on alcohol and military jurisprudence, prison life, malingering, and insanity. Not surprisingly, Lande finds that the military approach to alcohol, like that of society, was ambiguous and inconsistent; that prisons for soldiers were generally inadequate; that malingering presented major problems of diagnosis; and that insanity defenses were rarely successful.

Madness, Malingering, and Malfeasance is largely based on archival and published government documents, and it is Lande's use of these—supplemented with a few medical and legal treatises and a smattering of correspondence, diaries, memoirs, and newspaper and periodical articles—that is the chief value of the book. Yet it could have benefited from a more thorough investigation and analysis of these sources. Moreover, the author does not adequately situate his primary evidence in the existing secondary literature. For example, the only secondary source he cites on the history of insanity in the United States is Albert Deutsch, The Mentally Ill in America (1937); he ignores the huge literature on this subject and on alcoholism and temperance published since the 1970s, and as a result [End Page 333] presents a distorted version of the understanding of these conditions in the pre–Civil War era.

The book is marred by other problems. Lande fails to adequately develop some of his statements. He tells us that 52 of 267 soldiers executed during the war were from the U.S. Colored Troops, but he does not discuss reasons for this disproportion (p. 44). Occasionally, his logic is flawed. His claim that the system of military justice became more just and compassionate as the war progressed (p. 3) seems undermined by his statement that "the Army of the Potomac sentenced fifty soldiers to death during a six month campaign" against desertion that began in November 1864 (p. 50). Elsewhere, he declares that "patriotic physicians" were able to detect cases of malingering, but he offers no reason why patriotism improved diagnostic skill. Chapter 4, "Life in Prison," contributes little to the overall argument of the book, and could well have been left out. Conversely, the argument itself is inadequately developed and demonstrated, and is not clearly summarized in the conclusion. It is not hard to agree with Lande's claim that the system of military justice during the war was flawed, or that the war brought changes. At the end, however, one is left wondering exactly what changed and why.

Peter McCandless
College of Charleston
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