“We’ve tended to see soldiers in the 1860s as stoic and heroic-monuments to duty, honor and sacrifice,” says Lesley Gordon, editor of Civil War History, a leading academic journal that recently devoted a special issue to wartime trauma. He had served in the US Navy on the USS Winooski and had received the medal of honor for his service. Genealogists have joined in, rediscovering forgotten ancestors and visiting their graves in asylum cemeteries. Historians and clinicians are sifting through diaries, letters, hospital and pension files and putting Billy Yank and Johnny Reb on the couch as never before. A year ago, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine mounted its first exhibit on mental health, including displays on PTSD and suicide in the 1860s. This veil is now lifting, in dramatic fashion, amid growing awareness of conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder. For the most part, the stories of veterans like Hildt have languished in archives and asylum files for over a century, neglected by both historians and descendants. Mental ills were also a source of shame, especially for soldiers bred on Victorian notions of manliness and courage. Military and medical officials in the 1860s had little grasp of how war can scar minds as well as bodies. This grim tally, however, doesn’t include the conflict’s psychic wounds. The Civil War killed and injured over a million Americans, roughly a third of all those who served. He finally died there in 1911-casualty of a war he’d volunteered to fight a half-century before. Hildt remained withdrawn, apathetic, and at times so “excited and disturbed” that he hit other patients at the asylum. Hildt, a laborer who’d risen quickly in the ranks, had no prior history of mental illness, and his siblings wrote to the asylum expressing surprise that “his mind could not be restored to its original state.” But months and then years passed, without improvement. Hildt survived his physical wound but was transferred to the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington D.C., suffering from “acute mania.” Doctors amputated his shattered limb close to the shoulder, causing a severe hemorrhage. The 25-year-old corporal from Michigan saw combat for the first time at the Seven Days Battle in Virginia, where he was shot in the right arm. In the summer of 1862, John Hildt lost a limb.

Civil war hospital diaries