"I Hope to Do My Country Service": The Civil War Letters of John Bennitt, M.D., Surgeon, 19th Michigan Infantry (review)

The Civil War letters of Michigan doctor John Bennitt is a very well-edited collection of more than two hundred letters, some of them pages long, that will serve as an important new source for understanding the day-to-day work of the Civil War surgeon. Because Bennitt was doubtless more literate than most of the medical officers in the Union Army, his letters and their detailed description of army life make interesting reading. His letters, the editor points out, were among those long-forgotten packets of documents in family trunks or local historical societies. There are now quite a number of such collections in print, but of the many I have seen, none has had a more diligent and more informed editor.

Born in 1830 in upstate New York, Bennitt grew up in Indiana, received the M.D. degree from the Cleveland Medical College, and returned to Centreville, Michigan (where he had been an apprentice) to open his own practice.

The first group of letters, from November 1861 to July 1862, was written in Ann Arbor, where Bennitt had gone to take more medical school courses in chemistry and physiology in order to improve his medical skills. He occasionally mentioned the possibility of army service but said nothing about the war that was such a pre-occupation for most of his countrymen. He returned to his practice, but, like so many medical practices in small towns at the time, he was unable to collect the fees owed him and was consequently in great financial straits. The editor of these letters posits that Bennitt enlisted for a three-year tour as an army doctor in order to acquire a steady income.

He began his army service in August 1862, but in late March 1863, Bennitt and some of his unit were captured and sent to Libby Prison in Richmond. As a medical officer, he could have gained an immediate release, but he chose to stay with the sick and wounded in his unit. They were all exchanged after about six weeks in prison. Unfortunately, no letters from prison seem to have survived.

The remainder of the letters encompasses his service until the end of the war. These letters tell us much about day-to-day life in an army regiment as well as indirectly what life with small children was like for the mothers who stayed behind. In these long and self-revealing letters, Bennitt showed his family what a loving husband and father should be and what it meant to be a physician fighting for the survival of the country he held dear. Granted, he was not a run-of-the-mill nineteenth-century physician, and his letters are a window into the stresses and strains of taking care of hundreds of military men while trying to balance the concerns he had for a struggling family that needed him at home. Even his army pay, on which his family depended, was often delayed for months.

After the war, Bennitt returned to his alma mater in Cleveland, where he served on the faculty for the rest of his career. Both the small and large concerns of this one doctor's life are on full display in this very large collection that should become yet another good source for understanding the difficult years of the first half of the 1860s in America.