“The God Who Shielded Me Before, Yet Watches Over Us All”: Confederate Soldiers, Mental Illness, and Religion

On a warm July day in 1864, near Decatur, Georgia, Mississippian William Nugent prepared to take a nap. The New Year had not been kind to him. A soldier in Company D of the 28th Mississippi Cavalry, he had seen a summer filled with terrible slaughter and suffering. The Yankees had been relentless, and Nugent had “passed through stirring scenes,” fighting “nearly every day of the week and scarcely able to take any rest.” Finally, the moment for rest had come. The thirty-two-year-old Confederate stretched his weary legs under the boughs of a nearby pear tree and waited for sleep. Approaching, a young captain casually remarked “upon the probability of our being disturbed by the enemy.” Moments later, a random Yankee shell showered white-hot shrapnel around the pear tree, striking and killing the young captain, who fell dead next to Nugent. Shocked by his comrade’s death, Nugent wrote his wife: “The poor fellow was hurried out of the world almost without any notice whatever, and his words had scarcely died upon his lips before he fell, striking my left arm and falling between me and the bedstead.”¹

After the death, Nugent struggled to understand why his mate had died and he had lived. Deaths on the battlefield were random enough. This one had been pointless and bizarre; indeed, Death seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, as if it had been standing next to his friend’s elbow the entire time. In the weeks that followed, Nugent descended into a mental tailspin. Was Death standing at his elbow? How was he supposed to sleep? Gradually though, like most of his fellow soldiers, he decided that God must have a plan, however unknowable. Nothing was random; Death was not at his elbow; God was. If God decided it was Nugent’s time, then it was; until then, it was not. Until then, he was indestructible. Nugent had been looking at the incident all wrong. It was not that Death had almost gotten him; it was that Death had tried to get him but God had intervened (even as He had killed another man). God’s aegis was no spiritual metaphor, but a literal shield.

This article will suggest two things. First, combat stress greatly affected Confederate soldiers; war trauma could result in a wide variety of physiological and psychological symptoms in the southern men who fought. Second, and no less important, Confederate soldiers struggling with the traumatic experience of combat often turned to religion as an effective self-therapy. I assert that religion proved uniquely able to short-circuit the cycle of perseverating thoughts and to stabilize the psyche after battlefield trauma. Right or wrong, mid-century Americans believed in a particular kind of God, one who counted the hairs on every head and noted the fall of every sparrow. The faith in such a God to bring order out of chaos and make the irrational rational, became self-fulfilling prophecy—and effective therapy to minimize the stress of psychological breakdown.

How exactly did mid-century Americans understand the relationship between trauma and mental health? To be sure, many of the experiences and medical revelations that led to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were years in the future.² Revelatory research on injury of the nerves would only be published near the end of and after the war.³ Medical authorities in Europe began an intense debate centered on the effects of trauma and the human mind—a debate that included John Erichsen, Herbert Page, Jean-Martin Charcot, Theodule Ribot, and Sigmund Freud—but that debate was years after the Civil War.⁴ To be sure, in that void of medical authority at mid-century, a vast sea of ideas existed, but most keyed in on the notion that “insanity” or “lunacy” was either inherited from previous family members or the result of a chronic failure to control one’s emotions, impulses, or habits.⁵ This emphasis on inheritance and chronic conditions made it much more difficult to...