Feeling right about the Civil War: the Union’s battle for emotional health

Abstract

ABSTRACT Civil War combat trauma remains a subject of interest to scholars studying the social and psychological changes that the war wrought upon American society. The focus has largely been on the South, but if we look northwards we find that combat trauma was too often masked by victory. But soldiers cannot singlehandedly delineate the contours of the emotional landscape of the wartime North. By locating combat trauma within the emotional nexus of non-combatant communities during and after the war, we can better understand the long-term effects of the Civil War on the development of America as a nation.