"I Shall Try and Be a Man": Institutionalized Union Veterans in the Civil War North

In 1864, twenty-three year old Andrew Hamilton, a Union soldier from upstate New York, was discharged for his bizarre behavior in camp. He refused to eat or sleep until his family, desperate for a cure, sent the young man to the State Lunatic Asylum in Utica, NY, but he only grew worse. He wasted away, shouting orders to soldiers and driving teams of invisible horses, and died after only a few short weeks in the asylum. Hamilton was everything the ideal Union soldier was not; he proved unable to control of his emotions or to react to the stresses of war manfully. In this paper, I examine the cases of Union veterans who, like Andrew Hamilton, were committed to mental institutions during and immediately after the Civil War in order to construct a better understanding of the war’s psychological toll. The many stresses of army life, punctuated by the intensity of battle, affected soldiers minds, and by extension, their ability to thrive as civilian men. Some men became hypervigilant and paranoid. Others found it difficult to concentrate on their work, or developed obsessions that made typical work impossible, and simply wandered off. Still other men were unable to leave the rage of the battlefield behind, channeling their aggression into domestic violence. While many have debated the the psychological implications of the Civil War, focusing on the experience of individual institutionalized soldiers provides a more immediate and nuanced understanding of the psychic scars borne by the men who fought it.

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