sarah handley-cousins
“Wrestling at the Gates of Death” Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Nonvisible
Disability in the Post–Civil War North
On the night of June 17, 1864, Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain walked
anxiously among his sleeping soldiers. They were outside of Petersburg,
Virginia, preparing for a major attack against the Confederate city’s fortifications. Something was bothering the colonel. He was no stranger to
warfare—he had been in the hardest of the fights at Fredericksburg and
Gettysburg, but something about this place felt different. “I had a strange
feeling that evening, [a] premonition of coming ill,” Chamberlain later
wrote. “A dark shadow seemed to brood over me, dark wings folding as
it were . . . and wrapping me in their embrace.”1 His unnerving premonition proved true. The next afternoon, he led his men in an attack against
Rives’ Salient on the heavily fortified Confederate Dimmock Line around
Petersburg. The fight quickly became intense. His staff scattered in the
action; many lay wounded. The corps moved forward and came upon wet,
marshy land that would be difficult to cross. He lifted his sword in one
hand and the flag bearing the Maltese Cross of the Fifth Corps in the other,
using them to motion his men to the left. As he held the flag and sabre
aloft, a minié ball smashed into him, traveling through his right hip to the
left, crushing his bones and cutting into his bladder and urethra. Blood
pooled around his feet. Stunned, he braced himself with the flag and sword
as his men passed, until the loss of blood brought him to his knees.
Removed to the division hospital, Chamberlain believed he was a dead
man. Surgeons located and cut out the ball, but there was little else they
could do. Chamberlain urged the surgeons to leave him aside and put their
efforts toward the other wounded soldiers and officers filling the hospital. The surgeons agreed. Chamberlain asked for pen and paper in order
to write a bloodied last letter to his wife Fanny, then lay back to wait for
the end.2
But the end never came. Chamberlain survived that long night, though
it seemed impossible even to him: “I never dreamed what pain could be
and not kill a man outright.” After six months “wrestling at the gates of
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death,” he returned to the front of his brigade.3 He served out the remaining year of the war, was promoted twice for bravery, and left the army in
1865 as a brevet major general. When Chamberlain returned to his civilian life at the war’s end, he was the very picture of a citizen-soldier. The
former college professor was charming, handsome, and intelligent, but
perhaps most importantly, he was a war hero. In addition to his action at
Petersburg, his leadership had helped win the Battle of Gettysburg, and
was crucial in the war’s final battles in the Appomattox campaign. During
his three years in the army, Chamberlain was wounded six times and seriously ill twice. He returned quickly to the field each time, and his bravery
and dedication helped him to rise through the ranks. When the war ended,
he used his reputation to win four years as the governor of Maine, followed by twelve years as the president of Bowdoin College. Chamberlain
was adored among Civil War veterans and regularly served as a featured
speaker at commemorations and encampments.
This carefully constructed heroic public image, however, obscured a
troubling dimension of the general’s life. Hidden beneath his blue uniform
and fine suits, the wound from Petersburg quietly tortured Chamberlain.
Because of the damage to his urethra, he initially required a catheter, which
created a fistula near the base of his penis that never healed. It leaked
urine constantly and left him susceptible to chronic bladder and testicular infections that caused him, in his own words, “unspeakable agony.”4
He underwent surgery in 1883 to close the fistula; he barely survived, and
his symptoms—including the fistula—soon returned. Over the next thirty
years, recurring infections plagued Chamberlain’s self-described “weak
spot,” often leaving him incapacitated.5 A pension examiner noted in 1893
that painful adherent scars impaired his mobility. His testicles were permanently and painfully enlarged, and his penis was non-functioning.6
When he died in 1914, it was of an infection of the old wound. Chamberlain
was a war casualty—it just had taken him fifty years to die.
Using Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain as a case study, this essay contends
that the experiences of non-visibly disabled veterans challenge the prevailing historical interpretation that most veterans of the Civil War overcame
disability and derived satisfaction from their sacrifices. Nonvisible disabilities—those like Chamberlain’s that were easily concealed under clothing
or had no visual component like chronic illness or psychological trauma—
accounted for the majority of Civil War wounds. While amputations were,
and are, the disabilities most commonly associated with the war, amputees
made up only a small percentage of disabled Union veterans. According
to Theda Skocpol, 281,881 Union soldiers were wounded and survived the
war. Of this number, only 20,802 were amputees.7 Nonvisible disabilities
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may have been more common, but they were also more disconcerting for
able-bodied Americans. These wounds offered few or no visual cues to differentiate the disabled from the non-disabled. As N. Ann Davis has argued,
able-bodied people assume that there must be clear differences between
their own bodies and those of disabled people, and thus they question the
legitimacy of disabilities not immediately apparent. Non-visibly disabled
people must publicly disclose their disabilities to receive recognition, are
subject to greater scrutiny, and are more frequently accused of fraud or
malingering.8 In the Civil War era, amputations were publicly available to
be viewed and contemplated, and as Frances Clarke has noted, “confirmed
[veterans’] service and demanded acknowledgement and grateful remembrance.”9 But nonvisible wounds were kept literally under wraps. To both
claim their status as wounded veterans and obtain governmental support,
disabled veterans like Chamberlain had to publicly reveal their disabilities
in ways that challenged their manhood and resulted in humiliation.
Despite his immense popularity as a subject, historians have generally
overlooked that Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was disabled. The result is
what Jeffrey A. Brune has described as an abstract form of passing: historians have disregarded or minimized the disabling effects of Chamberlain’s
wounds, allowing him to “pass” as able-bodied in their work.10 His presence during two iconic moments of the Civil War, the struggle for Little
Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg and the “passing of the armies”
after the surrender at Appomattox, have made Chamberlain one of the
most beloved figures of the Civil War era and a symbol of the nation’s victory over disunion and death. Most work on the general, therefore, focuses
on maintaining his status as war hero in the “great man” tradition, minimizing the presence of the wound and maximizing Chamberlain’s ability to
overcome it. Alice Rains Trulock, in her celebrated biography, minimizes
the wound’s impact on his life to a few brief remarks and keeps important
details, like the fact that Chamberlain was declared “totally disabled” in
his pension documents, to endnotes. When his wounds are discussed, it is
often to mark his gallantry in battle and provide proof of his dedication to
cause and country. For example, Trulock asserts that through his wounds,
Chamberlain “transcended death to become a true hero in the romantic and classical tradition that stretches back through chivalric times to
epic deeds of ancient warriors.” She goes on to say that, “like his beloved
country,” the general faced a future “shadowed by the continuing pain of
wounds slow, if ever, to heal.”11
Though she acknowledges the long-term ramifications of Chamberlain’s
injury, Trulock also employs the wound to anchor his placement among
the heroes of the war, tying his private pain to the abstract suffering of a
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nation. This is in keeping not only with other biographies of Chamberlain
but with other historical readings of Civil War disability. Much of the
scholarship on disabled Union veterans focuses on the ways war wounds
came to be used in postwar reconciliation projects.12 Postwar conversations
over the wholeness or, perhaps more accurately, un-wholeness, of veterans’
bodies and minds were discussions of the state of the uneasily reunited
nation writ small. Veteran amputees themselves, as Brian Matthew Jordan
has recently submitted, worked to construct a memory that emphasized
the righteousness of the Won Cause and lent the most significant meaning
to their missing limbs. This scholarship has reached a consensus that while
Union veterans were changed and challenged by their wounded bodies,
they overcame disability by drawing meaning from their afflictions and
focusing on hard work.13 In particular, this interpretation asserts that Civil
War amputees were proud of their sacrifice and believed that the loss of
their limbs was intimately connected to the Union victory.
Although ostensibly about the experiences of all disabled veterans, this
current body of work almost exclusively considers amputees. Because of
the high visibility of amputations, war disability and amputation were
nearly synonymous in the post–Civil War North. As disturbing as amputation could be for able-bodied civilians to contemplate, these wounds also
seemed self-evident. It was difficult to deny that a veteran missing an arm
or a leg had made a sufficient sacrifice, and amputees therefore received
larger pension payments and faced less opposition when they requested
patronage or charity.14 As the image of amputee became symbolic of the
sacrifices of the war years, amputation came to carry a cultural cachet in
postwar America not associated with other disabilities. As several historians have demonstrated, the northern public used the bodies of disabled
veterans as a kind of symbolic shorthand to signify the national suffering of
the Civil War, but that body was of the amputee: men like Chamberlain did
not see bodies like their own depicted in the public conversation on wartime disability.15 In addition, while it may have been important for some
disabled soldiers to create larger meaning for their bodily losses, their
experience of disabled life did not end there. As Kim Nielsen points out,
while war wounds were associated with heroism, this did not necessarily
“guarantee social acceptance and financial security for disabled veterans.”16
Neither did such satisfaction mean a veteran had “overcome,” a term that
suggests these men somehow shed their disabilities in order to live typical
lives. Some veterans, no doubt, did believe their disabilities resulted from
noble sacrifice and went on to postwar success, but this did not help them
cope with chronic pain and illness, find employment, maintain happy
home lives, or gain acceptance in an able-bodied society.
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Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain never described his own disability as a
patriotic sacrifice. Rather, the near-fatal wound was more akin to an old
and bitter enemy. In January 1865, Chamberlain received a leave from the
army to undergo the first of three surgeries on the wound. The moment
of pause from his military service provided the time and space to contemplate the future. His family hoped that with this painful procedure he
would finally have had enough with the army, but he soon wrote to say that
he had decided to return to the front upon recovery. His mother, Sarah
Chamberlain, unhappily argued that he had “done & suffered & won laurels enough in this war to satisfy the most ambitious.”17 Chamberlain disagreed. “Not all the titles that can be given or won would tempt me to
hazard the happiness and welfare of my dear ones at home,” he assured her.
Titles and honors would be worthless to him anyway, he wrote, since “these
terrible wounds . . . must cast a shadow over the remainder of my days,
even though I should apparently recover.”18 Chamberlain understood that
although he survived, his life would be significantly different. His wound
was not described as necessary or honorable, but rather as “terrible,” a
trauma so immense that it would darken his future. Leaving the army
would not change that. “It is a time when every man must stand by his
guns,” he later explained to his father. “And I am not scared or hurt enough
to be willing to face the rear when other men are marching to the front.”19
*****End of excerpt *****
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