The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans by Allison M. Johnson (review)

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• The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans by Allison M. Johnson
• Marla Anzalone (bio)

The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans. Allison M. Johnson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-0-8071-7707-5. 391 pp., paper, $29.95.

Through the span of the American Civil War, the Union army recorded more than sixteen thousand arm-related amputations, creating an unprecedented volume of disabled veterans who were tasked with learning to navigate the demands of postwar life as one-armed men (2). As chaplain at New York’s Central Park Hospital, editor and poet William Oland Bourne observed a Union soldier who had recently undergone a right-arm amputation signing his chaplain’s autograph book with his remaining, nondominant left hand. In witnessing this act, Bourne recognized the importance of learning to write with the left hand had for one-armed veterans’ recovery and overall social and professional success. Left-handed penmanship provided professional opportunities for veterans who were unable to perform manual labor by refining their writing skills to make them employable clerks or bookkeepers. Inspired through his hospital work, Bourne created two left-handed penman-ship contests for his newspaper, the Soldier’s Friend. Launched in 1864, the paper aimed to provide news and content relevant to soldiers’ interests and to find and furnish employment opportunities for Union veterans and their families. The first contest, announced in June 1865, called for submissions of original work containing “brief essays on patriotic themes, and especially narratives of the writer’s experience in the service of the country, incidents, or sketches of the war” (11). The collected prize essays from the 1865 competition were exhibited twice, first in New York and then Washington, DC, and presented to the public as narratives of war and recovery. In 1867, Bourne launched a second contest at the behest of members of the Left-Armed Corps who had not participated in the first contest. Across the two competitions, 333 entrants emerged, largely from New York, Ohio, and Illinois, the majority of whom were not commissioned officers. Of all the contestants, only two were Black soldiers, who submitted to the first contest.

The archive of Bourne’s writing competitions through the Soldier’s Friend consists of thousands of pages detailing the experiences of the men who comprised the Left-Armed Corps. In The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Soldiers, Allison M. Johnson deftly navigates this archive to present entries of as many veterans as possible in a manner that allows these texts to be accessible and navigable for scholars and Civil War enthusiasts alike. For each entry, where possible, Johnson provides a biographical sketch [End Page 100] of the writer, including information of his service and life beyond the war. In her footnotes, Johnson offers a wealth information to aid readers in further research and especially demonstrates her editorial prowess through her categorization of the essay submissions.

By thematically organizing essay submissions across eight chapters, Johnson has arranged a robust Civil War history. Chapter 1, “Mustering and Marching” and chapter 2, “The Soldiering Life” include collected veteran essays that focus on universal experiences shared by Union soldiers. These chapters provide invaluable insight into soldiering life beyond the battlefield as they describe daily camp life and its required ingenuity, the arduousness of troop movement, the collection and burial of fallen soldiers in the aftermath of battle, and details of the affective bonds forged with the other men with whom they serve. Chapter 3, “Experiencing Battle,” provides individual accounts of major battles, such as Gettysburg and Antietam, that add crucial personal narratives to the historiography of these battles and their role in shaping the outcome of war. Chapter 4, “Wounding, Amputation, and Recovery,” combines essay entries that focus on soldiers’ injuries, the sensation of being wounded, surgeries and hospital experiences, and paths to recovery and living with right-arm amputation. As Johnson notes, the contestants’ discussion rejects scholarly arguments that Civil War writers obscured fragmented and wounded bodies in favor of recovery and national reconciliation. Instead, as the collection and especially her fourth chapter reveal, “many left-armed veterans refused to conceal their injuries...