The kindness of strangers: soldiers, surgeons, civilians, and conflict intimacies in the American Civil War

ABSTRACT

America’s Civil War is often identified as the instigator of a new, industrial discipline that replaced the individualism of the antebellum era. Its traditional narrative trajectory is one of consolidation and cooperation that emphasizes the emergence of order from the chaos of conflict and the ordering of idealized, individual masculine bodies in the service of an equally glorified national body. This article complicates contemporary assumptions pertaining to gender, martial manhood, and national health in a wartime context. Juxtaposing the reports produced by Draft Board doctors in the later years of the conflict against a selection of nursing memoirs, it examines the ways in which elite assumptions about national health and military preparedness were challenged by the intimate realities of the war. It explores the tensions revealed through the federal draft between voluntarism and coercion, and the resultant shift from intimacy to estrangement in the later years of the conflict. It reveals that the points of intimacy between strangers effected by the Civil War were not always positive or supportive. Too often they were controlling confrontations that challenge the national narrative that has for so long pertained in the case of America’s mid-nineteenth century civil conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• American Civil War
• draft boards
• Union surgeons
• Union soldiers
• nursing care
• masculinity

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Philip Shaw, Holly Furneaux and Joanna Wilson-Scott for the opportunity to present earlier versions of this work as part of their Passions of War project, and for their generous encouragement, help and advice in bringing the final version to fruition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.