"Harmonies of Form and Color": Race and the Prosthetic Body in Civil War America

This article considers the cultural meanings of Civil War injury, particularly amputation, with regard to race. Putting elements of print and visual culture in conversation with the material history of prostheses, the article explores competing understandings of war-acquired disability as a unifying category that could cross the color line or, alternatively, as a site of (white) racial distinction. While a number of depictions of "Empty Sleeves" in the Northern press in the early years following the war depicted black veterans' battle injuries as proof of their fitness for citizenship, representations of prosthetic limbs tended to tie rehabilitation to whiteness and to exclude blackness from the imagined national future. Exploring representations of Civil War injury and prosthetic reconstruction thus nuances accounts of the intersection of disability and race in the nineteenth century, revealing a form of disability inclusion that produced new elements of subjection and exclusion.