Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll (review)

Eric T. Dean Jr. broke new ground in 1997 when he suggested in Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War that Civil War soldiers exhibited symptoms he suspected were related to war trauma, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; see Eric T. Dean, Jr., Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997]). Historians, however, resisted taking on the psychological impact of the Civil War on its participants for about two decades. In recent years, though, studies on the war’s impact on individual soldiers and their families have proliferated. The convergence of social history, history of medicine, gender and family history, and military history has yielded valuable works on Civil War soldiers and their families that expose the horrific and damaging consequences of war on the psyches of combatants. Dillon J. Carroll’s Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers is an important addition to this literature.

Carroll’s ambitious agenda is to examine “how the Civil War damaged the minds of its participants” (10). In eleven chapters, he touches on the experience of soldiering, institutional care of soldiers and veterans, the impact of war on Black soldiers as well as US and Confederate veterans and their families, and the rise of the field of neurology. Throughout the book, Carroll identifies myriad ways the Civil War affected the mental health of its participants. He makes good use of both published and archival sources: letters, diaries, memoirs, asylum records, and pension applications. And he is exceedingly cautious, as he should be, about overstating links between war-generated trauma, like PTSD, and aberrant behaviors of Civil War soldiers and veterans.

Carroll’s thesis, that participants in the Civil War suffered psychological damage, mirrors those of Dean and authors of recent studies including this reviewer, Jeffrey McClurken, and David Silkenat (Diane Miller Sommerville, Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018]; Jeffrey W. McClurken, Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009] and David Silkenat, Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011]). Carroll’s original intervention is to consider not merely those who suffered from psychological distress but those who did not. He raises a new question: what of those who emerged from war with their minds intact? Carroll identifies coping mechanisms, like religion, humor, and camaraderie that, he believes, allowed some soldiers to resist succumbing to psychic disorders. Whether he can then claim that Civil War soldiers “were not as psychologically traumatized as some historians believe,” however, remains an open question, perhaps even unanswerable (5).

Scholars will no doubt grouse about the skimpy coverage of relevant historiography and Carroll’s reluctance to explicitly situate his own work in a number of these debates. He makes clear his work rejects the “triumphalist narrative” and aligns with the so-called dark turn in Civil War literature. But he misses important opportunities to inform his readers about myriad conversations historians have engaged in about many of the subjects he raises. For instance, he might have more effectively used the debate about death and the Civil War spawned by Mark Schantz and Drew Gilpin Faust to elevate his own argument about war trauma and death (Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008]; Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008]). Carroll has ample goods to challenge Schantz’s assertion that Civil War soldiers were insulated from the shock of death because it was so prevalent and familiar in the nineteenth century and to instead fall into the Faust camp, which asserts that...