By Dennis W. Brandt
Loss of courage.” “Battle fatigue.” “Shell shock.” These are just some of the historical names for a debilitating psychological condition inherent to warfare. Modern psychiatrists call it “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” a condition brought to the public’s attention in a post-Vietnam world but one that hardly began in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia. The recent HBO documentary, Wartorn: 1861—2010 includes the tragic story of a young Civil War soldier named Angelo M. Crapsey. I chronicled Angelo’s slip into mental torment in my book Pathway to Hell: A Tragedy of the American Civil War and was honored that HBO included a Civil War segment partly because of the book. I also served as a consultant for the show.
PTSD is a relatively neglected aspect of Civil War research. Obviously, no one can interview those involved, and people then were reluctant to discuss the matter and thus left little documentation. Moreover, historians by nature have little or no training in psychology and are understandably reluctant to psychoanalyze the dead. But what became clear during my research was that those who experienced Antietam, Gettysburg, or Shiloh felt no less terror and were no less psychologically debilitated than those who stormed the beaches at Iwo Jima and Normandy, endured the Tet Offensive, or are fighting now in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Civil War became romanticized even during its veterans’ lifetimes, but it is critical to remember that those photos of reunions depicting former adversaries shaking hands across a stone wall they once tried to kill each other to possess occurred decades later and cannot expose private torments. Angelo’s case is an ideal illuminator because it is founded on extensive primary accounts.
As the U.S. military is no longer ignoring the problem, history, too, must become engaged.
Dennis W. Brandt is a freelance author-historian and the author of Pathway to Hell: A Tragedy of the American Civil War (Lehigh University Press), From Home Guards to Heroes: The 87th Pennsylvania and its Civil War Community, and Shattering the Truth: The Slandering of Abraham Lincoln.