Marked by War: Demobilization, Disability, and the Trope of the Citizen-Soldier in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion

Over a hundred and twenty thousand soldiers have been disbanded within three weeks and eighty thousand have since the 1st of June, passed over the railroads from Washington. But a short time ago the thought of this disbandment and of the return of these soldiers to their Northern homes filled many persons with alarm. These were fears justified to some extent by the experience of other countries that had suddenly disbanded large armies. But our experience has been very different from that of any other country in this respect. Men can be heroes without in the remotest degree losing a sense of their obligations as citizens.

—New York Herald, June 14, 1865.

The Indians die of civilization. So does many a returned soldier. You will have to be careful of yourself for a long time to come.

—John William De Forest, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, 1867.

Although it has commonly been interpreted as either an early example of “realistic” war literature or as a reconciliation romance, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty registers traces of a now almost forgotten subject of concern for northern civilians in the years immediately following the Civil War.¹ Exposed to the violence of combat and the supposedly “demoralizing” influences of army life, civilians were afraid that soldiers might fail to adjust to peacetime life. These fears varied in both specific details and intensity. Some publications, such as the Nation magazine and the newspaper the New York Herald, speculated that returning Union soldiers might dominate postwar politics to such an extent that civil and military distinctions would be erased. For the Nation, this meant the possible end of republican government in the United States, whereas the New York Herald saw this potential shift as the catalyst for a much needed political revitalization.² Other civilian writers imagined a class of men that, while not injurious to our nation’s political future, would nonetheless be disruptive to its social well-being. The Washington Daily Intelligencer complained that “rogues” just returned from the army had led to an increase in crime in Chicago that would injure the reputation “to which the worthy [veterans] are entitled.”³

Time would eventually prove these civilian fears to be unfounded, but in the immediate postwar period relations, between northern soldiers and civilians were tinged with misunderstanding and uneasiness along with joy at having loved ones home from battlefield and camp. These ambivalent emotions were expressed most clearly in the trope of the wounded warrior, which viewed all veterans as potentially disabled and in need of civilian care rather than as a potentially disruptive social force. This turn toward sympathy fit naturally within the sentimental ethos that dominated antebellum northern culture, particularly in its discussion of social ills such as slavery and drunkenness.⁴ It also echoed the approach of a previous generation toward veterans of the nation’s much earlier “people’s war”—the American Revolutionary War.

In his study Suffering Soldiers, historian John Resch notes that the image of the suffering soldier was used to adjust the relationship between civilians and the military. After the suspicion of the wartime generation toward the Continental army, the iconography of the suffering soldier “evoked the sentiment of gratitude” in a new generation following the Revolutionary War and helped it to “affirm its place as worthy heirs to the Revolution.”⁵ What made the use of the wounded warrior trope in the aftermath of the Civil War so different from its predecessor, however, was its adoption just months after the war’s end, in contrast to the nearly twenty year delay that preceded the emergence of the Revolutionary War’s suffering soldier. Clearly, northern civilians were desperately reaching for the familiar while charting the uncertain waters of the postwar era.

To an extent not recognized by scholars, Union veteran John William De Forest’s 1867 novel Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty illustrates one veteran’s attempt to answer civilian concerns about returning soldiers.⁶ De Forest combats the trope of the wounded warrior...