49
HERE IS POWERFUL EVIDENCE THAT NEW YORK LITERALLY OFFERED A helping hand to its disabled Civil War veterans—at a price, of course. Immediately following the war, a healthy postwar commercial market grew up in response to the heartbreaking demand for artificial limbs. At least, as this singular testimonial suggests, some of the devices functioned astoundingly well. Wartime amputation was a subject that the afflicted soldiers could never forget, yet most home-front civilians—at least those who failed to profit from it—understandably preferred to ignore.
“My fingers are getting better,” a Confederate soldier named Richard Slade wrote home optimistically to his sister in 1864 after undergoing a finger amputation moderate enough to make him feel grateful for the outcome. “I did not have but one of them taken off the second one was broken & the Doctors insisted on taking it off but I would not let them & I saved my finger by this means,” he reported manfully. “It looks rather hard to see them take off legs & arms & fingers & cut the men into pieces but thank God they have not got only a small part of me.” Slade was fortunate indeed. The reigning amputation authority of the period, Samuel Cooper, whose book The First Lines of the Practice of Surgery served as a manual for battlefield medical treatment, usefully recommended “pinching the vessels” to stanch the bleeding that inevitably followed after fingers were shorn off, but otherwise admitted: “I can say nothing from my own experience.”
PLATE 49–1
Other soldiers who took shot and shell in their arms and legs were not as lucky as Slade. Projectiles like Minié balls, made of soft lead, routinely shattered bones and quickly contaminated the resulting wounds when remnants of soiled uniforms and unwashed human skin smashed into the body. Amputations were among the most frequently applied “treatments” for war wounds, easy and relatively quick to perform in lieu of more conservative and time-consuming methods in shockingly overcrowded facilities filled with mangled, screaming battle victims. Doctors working under the green flag with unsanitary instruments in emergency conditions made quick work of human extremities that modern medicine would never be compelled to sacrifice.
Nonetheless, wounded soldiers who refused the procedures often regretted their decisions. After taking a serious hit to a limb during the Battle of Peachtree Creek, Georgia, in July 1864, an Irish-born colonel named Thomas J. Reynolds begged the doctors to spare his valuable leg because it was “imported.” Reynolds lived to write about the incident in his memoirs—more than forty years later. He was an exception. As the historian James I. Robertson Jr. has noted: “More arms and legs were removed in the Civil War than at any other time in the nation’s history.”
Soldiers recuperating in field hospitals from other complaints never forgot the horrible shrieks and groans that emanated from so-called operating rooms. Ether and chloroform were in short supply on campaign, and liquor was used more often to fuel elation than sedation. Patients with access to none of the above were given a stick to bite down on when the sawing commenced. A New Jersey enlisted man who watched doctors perform amputations on two of his comrades remembered: “Neither of them seemed to be under the influence of cloreform [sic], but were held down by some four men, while nothing but a groan escaped them, as the operation proceeded.”
Régis de Trobriand, an officer who spent four years with the Army of the Potomac and recorded his impressions of the war in an 1889 memoir, left a particularly gruesome account of the day he came face-to-face with a battlefield amputation mill during McClellan’s 1862 costly failures on the Virginia Peninsula:
A little stream of coagulated blood reddened the steps coming from the half-opened door. On pushing it to enter I felt a resistance, the cause of which I soon recognized. It was a pile of amputated legs and arms thrown into a corner of the room, waiting the coming of a Negro to take them out and bury them in the garden.…Near the hole there lay by itself a leg white and slender, terminating in a foot almost as small as that of a child. The knee had been shattered by a ball. “You see we have had some work to do,” said a surgeon to me. “Come in, colonel.” Around the room…the amputated were on the floor in rows with the head to the wall. All these mutilated creatures turned their eyes, hollow with suffering, towards me, the greater part of them listless but a few with an air having a shade of defiance. I looked for the one to whom the leg with the child’s foot had belonged. I had no trouble in recognizing him. He was, really, almost a child, with blue eyes, long blond hair, and with emaciated features.
Most soldiers who endured or even witnessed battlefield amputations remained traumatized for life. A Massachusetts enlisted man recovering in a field hospital never got the sights and smells out of his mind. “A large hole was dug in the yard,” he recalled, “about the size of a small cellar, and into this the legs and arms were thrown as they were lopped off by the surgeons, with a coolness that would be a terror to persons unaccustomed to the sights of military surgery after a battle.” The day he made these observations “was hot and sultry,” he recalled, “and the odor of the ether used in the operations and the effluvia from the receptacle of mangled limbs, was sickening in the extreme. Flies came down upon us in clouds, torturing us with their bite.”
On the other hand, when the luckier amputees returned home, diminished but alive, a surprising number took themselves to their local photography studios to make a record of their disfigurement. Lieutenant Legh Wilber Reid of Company E, 25th Virginia Cavalry, posed on crutches when he reached home in 1865 or 1866, wearing a longer-than-normal left trouser leg to discreetly cloak the fact that he had lost his leg. He lived until 1908. Some amputees even posed nude or with the barest of coverings for medical photographers determined to make a record of all manner of deformities caused by the weapons of war or botched surgeries; one hopes that the poor survivors were at least paid for exposing their battered bodies. Even the renowned Mathew Brady (or one of the camera operators in his employ) could not resist taking what amounted to atrocity pictures—portraits of skeletal, limbless, gangrene-afflicted Union soldiers who had survived the Andersonville prison in Georgia. The pictures proved so gruesome they remained unpublished until 1879, and even then appeared only in sanitized woodcut adaptations.
The soldiers who came home without arms or legs had to learn to make do with meager pensions and limited opportunities, though shortly before his second inauguration Lincoln acknowledged “the paramount claims” of “disabled and discharged soldiers.” Most returned to family life or married and raised families. Some miraculously acquired the skills to regain nearly as much dexterity as they had boasted before the war—thanks to modern technology. It was a boom time for the manufacturers of artificial limbs; one historian later claimed that the most expensive item in the postwar budgets of Louisiana and other Southern states was the underwriting of prostheses.
Such struggles were not confined to the South. In New York, a soldier named Joe W. Mersereau even learned to write again using his newfangled artificial arm and, to prove his ability, wrote a testimonial to that effect on April 24, 1865—the very day a hearse bearing the body of his assassinated commander in chief rolled down Broadway toward City Hall. There is no evidence that Mersereau braved the inevitable jostling to attend that momentous event. Instead, he took up a pen that day and showed with his easily decipherable handwriting, shown in plate 49–1, albeit in a stumbling style of expression, that at least one determined life threatened by the Civil War would somehow go on:
New York April 24 1865
To Whom it may Concern
This is a specimen of my penmanship with an artificial arm manufactured by the National Leg and Arm Co. of 44 Broadway N.Y. for an upper amputation.
The stump being only three inches long from the shoulder joint.
Respectfully
Joe W Mersereau
No one kept precise statistics of the numbers of amputations performed during the Civil War (surely in the many thousands on both sides) or of the number of wounded veterans who survived and spent the rest of their days hobbling on prosthetic legs or struggling to perform the simple chores of life with only one arm. But Joe Mersereau at least had the benefit of the best New York–made technology. Compare his postwar fate with that of a North Carolina corporal named Spencer O’Brien, whose leg was amputated after four separate battle wounds. When he returned to his rural home after the war, he made his own wooden leg—out of a wagon axle.