Civil War veterans and PTSD

[Sampiro]

My great-great-grandfather was a private in the 51st Alabama Cavalry. He enlisted in the war when he was 29, a married smalltime farmer with 5 kids, and saw active duty at Manassas, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Atlanta and other campaigns. He survived the Battle of Shelbyville at which half of his unit (including one of his brothers) was killed, and for a two month period in 1864 he literally saw battle every single day. At the end of the war he returned home, resumed farming, had several more kids and lived a quiet and productive life as a farmer and family man.

While he saw more action in the war, I have other relatives who did the same thing: joined up, saw bloody combat, came home, got on with life. There’s nothing special about this as millions of other men from Florida to Maine and from Charleston to San Francisco did the same thing.

By all accounts the Civil War was one horrifying conflict, causing more deaths from battle and disease than any other war in our history and most of it in very close quarters with very little food and medical supplies. Guts and blood were the same color then as now and cannonballs were just as loud. Yet you rarely read about men who went home, farmed for a few years, then ten years later climbed into a belltower and started shooting people or killing their families or similarly going mad due to post traumatic stress.

Are there any theories as to how they were so successfully able to get on with their lives? Or is their literature that there was a lot of latter day emotional problems associated with the war? (The best thing I can think of for the former is that they had massive support groups [though they wouldn’t have known the term of course] due to the huge number of veterans around for the next 60 years.)

[Captain_Amazing]

There’s actually a book…Eric T. Dean’s “Shook Unto Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War”. From the publisher’s summary:

His extensive study reveals that Civil War veterans experienced severe persistent psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, and flashbacks with resulting behaviors such as suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence. By comparing Civil War and Vietnam veterans, Dean demonstrates that Vietnam vets did not suffer exceptionally in the number and degree of their psychiatric illnesses. The politics and culture of the times, Dean argues, were responsible for the claims of singularity for the suffering Vietnam veterans as well as for the development of the modern concept of PTSD.

[Hello_Again]

They had battle-related mental problems in the Civil war – even had a name for it: “Soldier’s Heart.” In later wars they used the terms shell shock, battle fatigue and nowadays PTSD.

[Kent_Clark]

@Sampiro

Yet you rarely read about men who went home, farmed for a few years, then ten years later climbed into a belltower and started shooting people or killing their families or similarly going mad due to post traumatic stress.

The U.S. being a largely rural, agrarian society after the Civil War, there’s a good chance many of those veterans simply went back to their farms where they wouldn’t have shown up in any records. Probably some took up drinking as a way to overcome their problems. Others earned the comment “he was never the same after the War.”