Bullet Tales: Bodies and Embedded Projectiles from the Civil War

In May 1864, at the Battle of Spotsylvania in Virginia, Pvt. James M. Denn of the Ninety-Sixth Pennsylvania Volunteers was shot in the hand. The ball shattered many of his metacarpal bones, causing permanent damage, and the bullet remained near the thumb in a cyst that formed around it. Nearly four decades later, the cyst hemorrhaged, "being no doubt the result of frequent traumatisms [i.e., conditions caused by traumatic injury] from shaking the hand violently near the ears of his friends to cause them to hear the ball rattle in the cyst." Denn's hand was X-rayed at the US Soldier's Home Hospital Laboratory in 1902, and the ball was finally removed in what medical historian Frank R. Freemon has called "the last surgical operation of the Civil War." Denn had spent his later years entertaining (or horrifying) his companions with the sound of his personal Civil War relic, which had become a part of him. Denn's experience was certainly not unique; many other Civil War veterans (Union and Confederate soldiers alike) survived the conflict with pieces of lead in their bodies that became significant touchstones of their identities.¹

Radiograph of Denn's hand, 1902. Louis A. La Garde, Gunshot Injuries: How They Are Inflicted, Their Complications and Treatment, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: William Wood and Company, 1916), 387.

For generations, Americans have infused material objects with meaning and explored methods of analyzing material culture—the "tangible yield of human conduct," according to folklorist Henry Glassie—to deepen our understanding of transformative events like the Civil War. Objects directly associated with those events immediately became significant cultural touchstones and trophies. Firearms (and the projectiles they fired) occupy an important place in American military and material history as both mechanical devices and poignant symbols of aggression, conflict, pain, and mortality. J. W. Gaskill of the 104th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, in his postwar memoir Footprints through Dixie, observed "the almost daily screaming of shot and shell and whistle of musket balls…are a part of our daily life." In a letter to a friend of in the Nineteenth Ohio, a Confederate soldier recalled, "It seemed to me that the air was so full of bullets that I could have caught scores of them simply by grabbing on either side or above me." Bullets that struck trees, buildings, books, and other solid objects became treasured talismans of the war; soldiers and civilians collected minié balls and shell fragments from Civil War battlefields and kept them as souvenirs long after the fighting ceased, even, in some cases, taking them directly from gunshot wounds. But some bullets, like James M. Denn's, remained lodged in human bodies long after their entrance and merged with human tissue to become something entirely different. In what ways did a wounded veteran's body take on a different dimension as a material object when it retained the projectile after the war had ended, and how did interpretations of those embedded bullets change over time?²

The human body itself is a part of material culture, quite literally a "fleshy, corporeal and physical" aspect of humanity (as archaeologist Christopher Tilley has described it), and bodies struck by bullets and shrapnel provide unconventional, illuminating entries in the physical record of nineteenth-century America. Clearly, observers and patients recognized the poignancy of Civil War injuries like these, and "bullet tales" abounded in professional and popular media long after the war ended. These stories transcend time and space, as the bullets in bodies were carried for years, and even decades, after they entered those bodies. These accounts illuminate curious tensions between the experiences and memories of trauma and the war itself. Sarah Handley-Cousins and other scholars, including Brian Craig Miller and Carole Emberton, have conducted important research into the long-term impact of trauma and disability in Civil War casualties, expanding the narrative beyond amputees (which had dominated interpretations of disability even before the war ended) to include individuals who suffered chronic pain, chemical dependency, and "nonvisible" disabilities. This essay analyzes...