Interview with Sarah Handley-Cousins, author of Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North

This is an interview with historian Dr. Sarah Handley-Cousins about her recent book Bodies in Blue. To read a review of the book click here.

What was your inspiration for this project? Why did you decide to write a book about disability in the Union?

I always knew I wanted to write something about soldiers, and early in my graduate school career, I’d been drawn to the new wave of scholarship that was unearthing the lesser discussed parts of the war – things like Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering or Stephen Berry’s anthology Weirding the War. But I wasn’t sure what I would actually focus on until I took a class on the history of medicine, which opened up a whole new world of interest for me. More importantly, the professor was particularly focused on disability history, something I had just never before encountered. I was just so excited to delve into these disciplines that were totally new to me, and I began to think about how I could combine my interest in the Civil War with medicine and disability. I started reading what had been written about disability and the war, and found myself coming up with more and more things I wanted know – what happened to soldiers who weren’t amputees? How did soldiers really navigate the pension system? Did soldiers end up in asylums after the war? Eventually, those questions coalesced into chapter topics.

I had a couple of reasons for limiting the focus of the book to just the Union. First, it was simply more feasible for me to conduct that research – it limited the locations I needed to visit to gather sources, which was critical for me as someone with young kids and limited research funding. I also knew I wanted to focus at least the chapter on asylums on New York State, which was home to some of the most important institutions of the nineteenth century. It was also just personal interest – I’ve always loved learning about the Union Army!

You center some of your work around Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. What did you find compelling about his story? Why was he the central figure that you chose to examine?

In the beginning, I was trying to find examples of soldiers or officers who were disabled, but weren’t amputees, who had gone on to be considered ‘successful.’ I was trying to better understand why we so often presume that disabled Union veterans had their lives utterly ruined by their war wounds and paint disability as necessarily dark and tragic. During a meeting one day, my advisor, Carole Emberton, asked if I knew of any officers who might fit the bill to maybe serve as a case study. I sort of searched my memory banks and Chamberlain was the first person I thought of – I vaguely recalled hearing on a battlefield tour (during the Gettysburg Semester!) that he had been seriously wounded, but I also knew he didn’t lose a limb. I did some initial reading, and decided there was enough there to warrant a trip to Maine to get into his papers – so I took a big chance and drove eight hours just really hoping it wasn’t a waste of my limited research funds. Thankfully, the archives were a treasure trove.

At first, I was simply drawn in because I felt like I had found this story of a Civil War disability that just had not been told – an officer who so many people know and love lived with this profoundly impactful disability, and very few people knew that about him. But as I read more and thought more and got further into the larger project, I came to see that Chamberlain really sort of encapsulated my whole thesis: he was disabled, experienced disruptions in his personal life, struggled with pain and limited mobility, and fought with the Pension Bureau – but at the same time, he was a celebrated war hero, politician, academic, and writer. He helped to demonstrate that Civil War disability can’t be simplified down into dichotomies of ‘light’ or ‘dark’ or ‘success’ or ‘failure.’ It was a multilayered experience for soldiers that changed over their lifetimes.

You chose to use disability studies as the framework for your scholarship, which is unique among the scholarship coming out right now. Why did you choose that framework and how do you think that shaped your interpretation and findings?

I believed from the earliest stages of this project that what was missing from Civil War scholarship on disability was a real engagement with the field of disability studies and disability history. That’s not to say that work was bad – it’s great! But I felt the field was missing the deeper analysis that the frameworks of disability studies could provide. For instance, we’ve had a great deal of work that looks at how Americans attempted to reckon with disability in cultural ways – how disabled soldiers depicted in literature and popular imagery, for instance, or how they might symbolize or represent the conflict in a larger sense. At the same time, wounded soldiers appear in medical histories of the war. But what seemed missing was a more granular attempt to understand the experiences of disabled soldiers themselves.

Two central tenets of disability studies shaped the way that I went about us. First, I chose to use the social, rather than the medical, model of disability, which teaches that disability is culturally and socially shaped by an inherently inaccessible and ableist society. So instead of simply seeing a disability as an isolated medical problem, I explored how Civil War disabilities were disputed, debated, and interpreted by the disabled and nondisabled alike. Second, disability scholars often use the phrase “nothing about us without us.” While that typically means is that we need to listen to the voices of disabled writers and scholars – but I applied it in my work to mean that I needed to put the voices of disabled soldiers and veterans at the very core of the narrative, rather than the voices of authority figures, particularly physicians. In other words, I had to try to shift the typical power dynamic that shapes histories of war wounds, where the words of doctors and surgeons make up the bulk of the source material. At the same time, it’s tricky to actually do that since the bulk of the source material is, well, medical reports or examinations. So I had to learn to read into and against those sources to listen for the experiences of the disabled subject. I also made the deliberate decision to take disabled people at their word – when they attested to a symptom or ailment, I honored their testimony rather than immediately accepting the (often countervailing) assessment of the doctor, bureaucrat, or superior officer. So, for instance, if a soldier was court-martialed for straggling but offered a defense that he fell behind because of pain or sickness, I accepted his explanation. I think it’s really important that we make those kinds of decisions – even if some will disagree – or else we’ll continue to produce the same old stories about the Civil War.

You have a chapter about the Army Medical Museum and the army’s efforts to collect and catalog evidence of war wounds, which was a fascinating chapter. Why did you decide to include that topic in your study of disability?

Oh my goodness, this chapter! I spent many hours worrying about how this chapter fit into the larger narrative – and I did get feedback sort of questioning what this story about dead soldiers and body parts was doing in a book about disability. But I felt very strongly that this was part of the same larger, national dialogue as the other topics in the book. After all, the bodies (and bits of bodies) on display in the Army Medical Museum were the bodies of disabled soldiers – bodies that were explicitly displayed because of the ways that they deviated from nondisabled or ‘normal’ bodies. There was also the tricky question of consent, which is so often central to histories of disability. Disabled bodies have been displayed in anatomical collections, almost always collected and displayed without consent, for centuries. This practice has helped to create the stigmatizing idea that disability is monstrous and should be prevented. Finally, it also got at the question of what bodies (both living and dead) were – were they cannon fodder, owned by the federal government? Were they useful medical specimens? Who had the power to determine what happened to them in life and in death? Even though this chapter is a bit different from the others, I think the themes in it were critical to understanding Civil War era disability.

What was the most surprising or memorable thing that you came across in your research?

This is a big question! I had a couple of moments that sort of stopped me in my tracks, for sure. I think most of those moments came from the sources I used to write the final chapter, on institutionalized soldiers and veterans. I remember the first time I read the letter from Daniel Folsom in which he told his sister, “I shall try and be a man.” He was so worried about what his time in the asylum would mean for the rest of his life, and must have been feeling such confusion and despair. It just took my breath away. I felt almost like a sign that I was on the right track – that there was a ‘there there.’

What is your book's biggest contribution to Civil War scholarship? What does it make us rethink or reevaluate about the period?

I believe that the book’s biggest contribution is that it proposes a change in how scholars think and write about Civil War wounds, sickness, and disability. I wanted to show not only how richly nuanced this history really was, I wanted to demonstrate that disability must be studied as a subject unto itself, not as an understudy to or side effect of other forces – battles, medicine, politics – or as purely a symbol or metaphor.

I also hope that the book inspires scholars to think critically about how they write about disabled soldiers. In one really simple way, I hope it inspires others to use more nuance when even describing disability – rather than using negative descriptors like “destroyed” or “broken,” using words like “changed” or “challenged.” I also hope it encourages other scholars to take the words of disabled soldiers seriously. Just these small shifts can completely changes the way we think about Civil War disability.

Sarah Handley-Cousins is a clinical assistant professor of History and associate director of the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo. She is also an editor for the history blog Nursing Clio, and co-producer of Dig: A History Podcast.