Book Review: Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction
Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction. By Sarah E. Chinn. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 270 pp., $39.99.
Reviewed by Tim Talbott
Propelled by a charge of black powder and guided through a rifled barrel, the one-ounce minie ball wreaked havoc on human bodies on the Civil War’s battlefields. In addition, various forms of artillery projectiles—from solid shot and exploding shells to canister—often left soldiers who survived these missiles’ damaging effects with empty coat sleeves and trouser legs. War-caused large-scale disability was an unwelcome challenge for those veterans who endured it, and a visual reality for Americans through the second half of the 19th Century and into the first three decades or so of the 20th Century.
Historians have explored Civil War disability in numerous books over the last 15 years or so. With these new studies scholars encourage students of the conflict to expand their thinking about the long-term effects of the Civil War. Much of the Civil War’s disability history has naturally focused on the soldiers themselves and the challenges they and their families faced, as well as how their sacrificed arms or legs influenced political and societal changes with the emergence of an enormous Union veterans’ pension program.
English professor Sarah E. Chinn’s recent book Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction, looks closely at writings of period radical whites who sought to advance, solidify, and protect emerging racial political changes that aimed to include African Americans as citizens in fact among the American body politic. As she states in the introduction: “This book, then, is about those few white radicals who resisted the ongoing rescripting of the meanings of the Civil War and Reconstruction.” (3)
Chinn’s book explores a similar (but slightly different) vein of study as that previously examined by Allison M. Johnson in her The Scars We Carve: Bodies and Wounds in Civil War Print Culture (LSU Press, 2019). While Johnson focuses on print culture (largely images and poetry), Chinn contextualizes and analyzes—as the title indicates—primarily radical literature. Chinn notes that “The story I’m telling here is comparatively small but important: it’s a story of an ongoing partnership between Black and white activists, and how a network of white radicals refused to allow the realities of slavery and white supremacy to be minimized, palliated, or forgotten, even as the majority of white Americans worked to do just that. They used the figure of the amputee as an emblem of their radical hopes for the postwar nation, for the ambitions of Reconstruction, and as a signifier of protest against the active and passive dismantling of Black civil and human rights.” (5)
Divided into five fairly equal-length chapters, Chinn covers quite a bit of ground in the book’s approximately 200 pages of text. Especially interesting is Chapter 5, “Shaking Hands: Manuel Politics and the End of Reconstruction.” Across all peoples, it is in the hands where we often find a common humanness. And as Chinn reminds us, “Losing a hand profoundly alters one’s relationship to the physical world, especially if it is the dominant hand,” and that, “Hands connect us to ourselves neurologically and to others affectively.” (159) However, “Hands can communicate affection and tenderness and/or deal violence and pain.” (160) Using Reconstruction images made by period political cartoonist Thomas Nast and the novel A Hazard of New Fortunes by William Dean Howells (1890) Chinn notes that hands often served as a point of understanding about the Civil War for both Democrats and Republicans. Veterans, some Democrats thought, used their hands to rob the Federal treasury through expansive pensions, while some Republicans saw hands, or lack thereof, as a means for “fending off (increasingly in vain) the depredations of Southern home rule and national white vigilante justice.” (190)
For some Americans, the Civil War and the wounds it inflicted upon on veterans not only meant the irretrievable loss of a body part, but also an opportunity to reunite a dismembered nation under the ideals expressed in its founding documents. Thought provokingly written and well researched, Disability, the Body and Radical Intellectuals offers more insights to consider to the growing historiography of Civil War disability.
