In August of 1862 Private Jonas Fuller of Bradford County enlisted  in Company A of the 141st Pennsylvania Infantry. His regiment spent time at Camp Prescott Smith in Arlington, VA., and on the march protecting Washington, D.C. The regiment was organized in August, 1862 and did not see significant action until December, 1862, at the Battle of Fredericksburg, after Jonas had passed away. Jonas wrote several letters home that have…

During some research today came across this nugget of a quote from Nathan Bedford Forrest who clearly had “no moral scruples against slavery,” when he apparently stated during the war “If we aint fightin’ fer slavery then I’d like to know what we are fightin’ fer.” Turns out not to be an unknown quote, but where I found it was in the book Veteran Comes Back, by Willard Wallard published…

In his 1998 review of Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (by Eric T. Dean, Jr.), James M. McPherson declared that the work “breaks new ground in its analysis of the psychiatric casualties of battle.” Yet since the book’s publishing it has been vastly overlooked by social historians. When researching Civil War historiography one rarely finds Shook Over Hell mentioned when assessing the soldier. Though McPherson…

Over the last three months SoldierStudies.org has received over 2 million page views! For June alone the total surpassed one million total. The leading search string was “civil war” (21.15%) of all visitors came from a search engine using those key terms! This total is for both the database and the blog.

As noted in Part I, during the Civil War conditions such as “melancholy” and “nostalgia” first appeared as a medical condition in the military surgeon’s reports. According to at least one study, “three cases of nostalgia per 1,000 troops per year were reported among Union soldiers” and most of the soldiers were less than 20 years of age. This led to Surgeon General William A. Hammond in 1862 recommending that…

PART I During and after the Civil War surgeons began looking closely at a medical condition that affected some soldiers; what we today know as PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). It was sometimes first referred to as “melancholy” or “nostalgia” during the war. Then when surgeon Jacob Mendes Da Costa observed symptoms that he classified as a heart issue, which came be to known as “Da Costa’s syndrome,” an idiom…

The average soldier was a white, native-born, single, protestant, male farmer between about 18 and 38 years of age. He stood about 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed about 145 pounds. The tallest recorded being Captain David Van Buskirk (pictured right) of the 27th Indiana Infantry who stood 6’10” and 1/2 inches tall. Union soldiers were known as “Billy Yank” while their Confederate counterparts were called “Johnny Reb.” The…

As the armies melted away from Gettysburg the horror was just beginning for the town and surrounding community. Nurses and volunteers flowed in from as far as New Jersey even before the fighting had ended. One such volunteer was Cornelia Hancock. Hancock was born on February 8, 1840 in southern New Jersey and was one of five children of a Quaker family. By 1863 her brother and “every male relative”…