26 minute read
Legacy of Violence
THE LURE OF THE American West brought pioneers and settlers from nations around the world. “Go west, young man,” had been a call to the American spirit since the early 17th century and ended as recently as the admission of the states of Arizona and New Mexico in 1912 and Alaska in 1959. Moving west has been embedded in the American psyche from the days when Americans migrated from the Atlantic coast into Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Northwest and Mississippi Territories. There, the boundary of the west once was the Father of Waters.
The massive move to what we now call the Old West began with President Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleonic France. An expansionist attitude, coupled with a “Promised Land” theology and economy, called Manifest Destiny, soon emerged. It fostered the belief that Americans possessed a God-given right to conquer the continent and broaden the nation’s borders to include the great expanse of the west. Americans believed the land was theirs for the taking like the Israelites of old, by force or other means, despite the rights of indigenous peoples and residents from other nations who had lived there for centuries.
This expansionist attitude was so embedded into the American psyche that as the Civil War began, a 20-by-30-foot mural, Westward the Course of Empire Takes It’s Way, was painted by Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutze behind the western staircase of the House of Representatives chamber in the U.S. Capitol Building. His idealized impression of settlers carving out lives in the wilderness and prospering served as propaganda to Americans seeking new beginnings and better lives. An extreme, individualistic frontier spirit armed with the desire to escape the confines of the State was etched into the minds of westward moving Americans. Conquering and possessing land and property owned by another was fomented by the government, blessed by God, and even expected, if a person called himself an American.
As Frederick Turner postulated, “American democracy was born… of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier.” What caused it to succeed was an egalitarian attitude, little care for high culture, and willingness to be exposed to, and even participate in, extreme conditions and brutal violence.
By the end of the Civil War, many war-weary Americans were looking for just that—better lives and freedom from restriction. They took to the frontier on foot, in covered wagons and steamboats, and later, trains to begin another great migration to what we now call the Old West. And though the guns of the Civil War became silent and rebuilding the nation became central, the damaging effects of war ran deeper than wrecked cities, ruined economies, freeing slaves, and massive human losses suffered because of the war.
Imagine the scene....
A farmer breaks ground for spring planting in the back forty. His chest swells in pride as his eightyear-old son guides the mule. The boy’s mother calls to wash up for supper. Father wipes his brow and says he’ll be along in a moment—a moment too late. Thundering hooves, men shouting, guns blazing, smoke rising, loved ones screaming…. His only reward for racing to the scene is a home going up in flames, a murdered family, a saber wound to the face, and being left for dead. He awakes to bury the remains of the family he always wanted. He sifts through ashes of a good life now gone having seen things he never should have—things that couldn’t be, shouldn’t be. But he did witness the horror. It was real, and he will never be the same. With a soul empty as a dry well, he knows not where to go or what to do. He finally musters the courage to dig through the smoldering remains of his ruined home to find his old pistol and begin an inconsolable blood vengeance against his attackers. A guerilla force appears, offering no comfort or consolation but an opportunity to find inner peace in the violence of revenge, even reckoning.
Civil War and Western movie enthusiasts know this story all too well—The Outlaw Josey Wales, starring Clint Eastwood. While the movie contains minor inaccuracies, it portrays the effects of wartime violence that took its toll on men who survived the war and went west. In the film, Josey Wales experienced regular flashbacks, the desire to be alone, inability to socialize well and exhibited a controlled and determinate rage that allowed him to mercilessly kill without so much as a twitch of feeling or remorse—all symptoms of a deeper issue within.
FAMED WESTERN HERO JOSEY WALES (PLAYED BY CLINT EASTWOOD) IS DEPICTED WITH CLASSIC SYMPTOMS OF POST TRAUMATIC STRESS FROM HIS SERVICE AS A SOLDIER DURING THE CIVIL WAR.
Those deep issues, and others, we now classify as one who has been diagnosed with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. The consequences, and hence the behavior of traumatic stress, lingers long after the event. For Josey Wales, and thousands of other former Civil War soldiers, the guns may have fallen silent, but the war would never end.
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A PTSD RESPONSE IS triggered by experiencing or witnessing a life-threatening traumatic incident to his/her person or persons dear to them, as in wartime combat, terrorism, natural disaster, sexual assault, or serious physical and emotional injury and family abuse. This most often happens to those whose minds and emotions are unprepared to receive such unexpected horrors. Traumatic events happen outside the normality of what the person has experienced as rational and real, thus having a damaging effect upon the victim’s core value and emotional system. Even so, the event becomes real in the victim’s mind and thus has no place to go in the normality of their cognitive or emotional understanding. This type of trauma can shatter a person’s view of how the world should work as they have experienced it.
Persons with PTSD suffer increased arousal and reactive symptoms, such as a startling easy, inability to concentrate, sleep loss, easily angered or irritated, and engaging in reckless and self-destructive behavior. People, places, and things that once were safe, now associated with the traumatic event(s), become threats, making life difficult to manage. This can render the victim of PTSD dangerous, incalculable, unhealthily self-protecting, and unpredictable in relationships, familiar and not. Research shows that most people diagnosed with PTSD are not violent, but those whose traumatic experience included extreme violence against their person or loved one, are more likely to exhibit violence in relationships, especially family.
Depictions of PTSD go back as far as the Epic of Gilgamesh, who suffered the torment of “recurrent and intrusive recollections and nightmares” related to his friend’s death. Herodotus, Hippocrates, the Gisli Sursson Saga, and the poem Ramayana all describe soldiers who experienced PTSD. Dr. Johannes Hofer coined the term “nostalgia” to characterize Swiss soldiers who suffered despair, homesickness but also anxiety and sleep loss due to wartime trauma. In the mid-1700s, Josef Leopold in his Inventum Novum, described traumatized soldiers as listless and desiring solitude, reporting all efforts did little to help them. The term “nostalgia” became a common medical diagnosis for PTSD, though some attributed soldier’s symptoms to weakness that affected men with “feeble will.” “Gross Stress Reaction” (1952), PTSD, or even “shell shock” (first used in 1915), were designations neither used nor understood during the Civil War.
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THOUGH THE TERM PTSD was not entered into the lexicon of psychological diagnoses until 1980, the effects were abundantly clear during and after the Civil War. Not much was known of Post Traumatic Stress during the Civil War, but reports indicate soldiers who experienced wartime horrors exhibited all the classic signs of the body’s physical and emotional reaction to extreme stress. Veterans with “invisible wounds” suffered equally alongside those with physical wounds.
Symptoms of soldiers whose mental capacities had been diminished because of war were often misidentified, dismissed, or given oversimplified diagnoses, such as acute mania, soldier’s heart, nervous shock, railway brain or spine, melancholy, nostalgia, dementia, hysteria, feeble will, sunstroke, moral turpitude, cowardice, or more simply, “the War.” Having never witnessed war, death, and destruction on a scale seen in the Civil War, Americans were unprepared for the psychological damage done to veterans afflicted with PTSD. Suicides and divorces spiked soon after the end of the war. Hospitals and asylums were overwhelmed, and often, the treatment led to widespread addiction to opium and morphine.
Thousands of soldiers applied for assistance after the Civil War—blue directly from the federal government, gray from state governments in which they resided—and physical injury was compensated. Little to no money was allotted to ease the suffering for mentally traumatized veterans. It fell to the families to care for their damaged loved ones, a financial and emotional strain at the very least. Family accounts offer stories of traumatized veterans sleeping with weapons for protection against enemy attack.
Witnessing brothers and friends die in battles like Gettysburg with over 50,000 killed or perishing from starvation, disease, bullets, and cannon shrapnel in a 47-day siege such as Vicksburg, experiencing the horrors of a prison camp Union or Confederate, or
suffering under the knife and saw in primitive medical facilities filled with screaming patients, men who survived couldn’t help but have been psychologically damaged by the daily threat of death—not to mention the constant emotional toll of worrying for families and friends back home.
One such case was that of Owen Flaherty who joined the 125th Illinois Infantry. Following the brutal four-day Battle of Stones River, he became sullen, ill-tempered, experienced sleep loss, and sunk into what one soldier termed, a “deep study all the time.” He experienced recurring night terrors and fell into deep despair until he encountered an earth-thundering cannon contest near Resaca, GA. After that battle, he would wander aimlessly at all hours, ate and slept in solitude, and was short-tempered. He once barged into camp from picket duty screaming that the Rebels were attacking. No sign of gray soldiers could be found. After the war, he fared far worse. He lost his job and drove away his son in anger. His irritability and violent outbursts forced the police to his home several times. His unpredictable and uncontrollable anger flared at any mention of the war. Soon, he found himself homeless and living on the street. Finally, he was taken to the Indianapolis Hospital for the Insane where he was diagnosed with “acute mania.” Not long after, he was taken to the poorhouse where the medical examining board took note of his irrational anger, violent tendencies, and his hallucinogenic fear of imaginary persons who intended to kill him. Doctors concluded his state of mind was due to mental shock mostly likely suffered in military service. As Ron Soodalter put it in his article, “The Shock of War,” “Today, Flaherty would most certainly be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.”
It was not uncommon for psychologically damaged soldiers unable to cope with life after the Civil War to experience what we now call PTSD. Reports indicate that up to one fourth of all residents in soldier’s homes suffered mental anguish. And though not all cases of mental illness in soldier’s homes could be attributed to the horrors of combat, some were unmistakable.
One New Jersey boy admitted to a Washington military hospital, suffered physically with only a minor knee wound. But, as volunteer nurse Louisa May Alcott recorded, “He lay cheering his comrades on, then counting them as they fell around him, often clutching my arm, to drag me from the vicinity of a bursting shell, or covering up his head to screen himself from a shower of shot; while an incessant stream of defiant shouts, whispered warnings, and broken laments poured from his lips”—all symptoms of what we now call PTSD.
Confederate veteran William James, from Alabama, was captured and held in a northern prison camp. When released, he departed physically ill and his thinking “much disordered.” Returning home to his life of farming, he was unsuccessful in managing his uncontrollable violent nature, even threatening to murder his father and ending his own life by hurling himself down a well.
A matron serving in the Illinois Soldier’s and Sailor’s Home reported one such case. As she made her rounds one evening, Emily Lippincott witnessed “an insane man” who was fighting “his battles over again.” She reported that he “fought the rebels all day… tearing his bed and clothes until exhausted.”
One aging Shiloh veteran, resident Joseph Lapp, was reported as experiencing recurring delusions of persecution. He finally convinced the home managers to allow him to reside outdoors in a tent to be alone. On occasion, in fits of rage, Lapp would destroy flower beds and even shredded and burned the tattered remains of his blue uniform.
In the 2016 PBS Original Series, Mercy Street, a physically unwounded Confederate soldier, Tom Fairfax, exhibits all the classic symptoms of the invisible wounds of war. He experiences extreme hallucinations and whose Doctor, Foster, finds his only and best cure for Tom is opium. With his inability to understand his own situation, he declares that the doctors “don’t understand what’s wrong with me.” And, they don’t, which reminds the audience that even today, PTSD is still misunderstood. Cowardice and other stigmatizations were often leveled against those who tried to interpret the effects of wartime trauma on soldiers.
Post-war asylum records reveal numerous cases of veterans exhibiting uncontrollable rage and threat to family members. Take the case of one young man who had enlisted in the 46th Georgia Infantry. Neal Story returned home after the war to start life again but found himself “wanting in his former energy and activity.” He became increasingly violent, even threatening to kill his family and reduce the house in flames. The family constructed a special small cabin in which to confine him. When that didn’t succeed, he was institutionalized and further declined.
Many former soldiers suffering such symptoms eventually had to be committed to state or county mental facilities, or as in the case of the author’s own second grand uncle, Columbus “Lummy” Nathan Tullos, diagnosed with acute mania. He fought in the lunette next to the Stockade Redan with the 27th Louisiana Volunteer Infantry during some of the most vicious Union assaults and suffered the horrific siege of Vicksburg. He then joined the 1st Mississippi Mounted Rifles (Union) a year and a half after Vicksburg surrendered and participated in Grierson’s Winter Raid on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad of 1864-65. Acute mania was often given as a cause of death for veterans who had been institutionalized or hospitalized for mental illness due to wartime trauma. In other words, it was a convenient catch-all phrase for what they did not understand at the time. Lummy passed away in the Leavenworth Soldiers Home in Kansas, June of 1904 at age 69 and is buried in the National Cemetery there.
The saddest story to be told is the number of cases of suicide that spiked after the war. Eric T. Dean, in his Shook Over Hell, reports that over half of the residents of an Indiana Civil War veteran’s home were either suicidal, attempted suicide, or were successful. The toll of the war on some was simply too great, and these men could only put the war behind them by taking their own lives.
These few instances serve as examples of damaged soldiers trying to cope with PTSD. There were undoubtedly hundreds, even thousands more, and little was known by doctors as to how to help them. For many, the war only ended when they were finally laid in the grave. As one former soldier wrote, “That sickly sentiment which would have us believe that the soldiers on either side can ever forget the privations they have endured, the painful marches, the dreadful battlefields, their suffering in field, camp, and prison… is more than foolish.”
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SOON AFTER THE CIVIL War, U.S. doctor Jacob Mendez Da Costa attributed particular physical symptoms unrelated to combat wounds to be the result of the heart being overstimulated. The condition soon was labeled “soldier’s heart,” “irritable heart,” or “Da Costa’s Syndrome,” for veterans who experienced PTSD-like symptoms—missing home, feeling sad, trouble sleeping, and anxiety. “Soldier’s Heart” was used to describe changes noticed in veterans returning from combat, many of which were not good. It referred to the physiological model based on heart and circulatory system being altered. “Nostalgia,” in kind, referred to psychological disturbances experienced by war weary veterans. Both have been determined to be PTSD. And though the condition was being studied, little was known as to how to help soldiers experiencing PTSD. The Civil War finally ended but not its traumatic effects.
As the nation tried to leave the horrors of the war behind and replace them with positive spins, it ensured veterans would not be cared for as they should be. There is no way to know how many Civil War veterans suffered from PTSD. Many, haunted by their war experiences, learned to cope with the long-lasting effects while others were unable to deal with the ongoing painful memories. Not all soldiers suffering were destined to be alcoholics, commit suicide, or end up in a soldier’s home. Some went west to start new lives.
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THE COUNTRY’S CALL FOR Manifest Destiny also captured the hopes of men who’d lived through horribly traumatic wartime experiences. Men who experienced wartime violence didn’t just go back home to their farms and businesses, they also went west and took their damaged souls with them. Many, with nothing left to return home to, found hope and opportunity, as Americans had always seemed to, and went west. The rugged, independent, individualistic, conquering mindset etched into the spirit of Americans moving west served these men and women well.
The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of free land if settlers would improve the property and stay five years. Men and their families traveled west for opportunity to prosper, but so did those with intentions not so pure. Some went with the attitude that what’s yours can be mine if I take from you, by force if necessary. Coming out of the violence of the Civil War, many had the willingness, ability, and skills to do just that. As men and their families went west, they found a vast wilderness with virtually no law except the justice a man could muster up for himself. That meant a man with a fearless ability to use a gun and little else to live for could become quite prosperous.
Some continued their military careers and carried their wartime trauma with them, as in the case of Ranald S. Mackenzie. Graduating first in his 1862 West Point class, Mackenzie quickly rose in rank fighting in battles from Second Bull Run to Five Forks. An officer who led from the front, he suffered six wounds, indicative of the intensity of his combat experience. His PTSD symptoms showed up several years after the war while serving as an Indian fighter and was wounded a seventh time—a Comanche arrow in his thigh in 1871. In 1881, Mackenzie suffered a mental break down yet continued intense frontier service. A subordinate reported that Mackenzie became “irritable, irascible, exacting, sometimes erratic, and frequently explosive.” His superiors finally had to take charge of Mackenzie, whose behavior had become erratic with episodes of high/lows, unprovoked violent outbursts, estrangement from others, and feelings of persecution—all symptoms of a person suffering from PTSD. Mackenzie was taken to the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane in New York City in December 1883. He was medically retired from the Army and died not long after his 48th birthday in 1889.
NOT ONLY REBELS. BRIGADIER GENERAL RANALD S. “BAD HAND” MACKENZIE, AHIGHLY-DECORATED UNION OFFICER WHO WENT ON TO BECOME A FAMED INDIANFIGHTER HAD HIS CAREER AND LIFE CUT SHORT BY THE EFFECTS OF PTSD.
In “Distant Drummer,” an episode of Gunsmoke, retired U.S. Cavalry Sergeant Dan Shay (Victor French) portrays a similar story. He is forced to face his past after meeting a young Indian boy whose father was killed in a massacre. Shay participated in the murderous attack and experienced regular flashbacks and other symptoms that clearly would be diagnosed as PTSD today.
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SOME OF THE MOST famous outlaws of the American West started their careers as bushwhackers, guerillas, and raiders, particularly connected with pro-Rebel secessionists who harassed the Union Army relentlessly. Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, the two Virginias, and even California felt the devastating effects of bushwhacker violence, with the most intense in Missouri and Kansas. Pro-Union guerilla fighters, sometimes called Jayhawkers, from Kansas carried on cross-border raids for the Union. And though Partisan Rangers were sanctioned by the Confederate Army, some self-organized Missouri bushwhackers carried out their destruction outside the chain of command in both Missouri and Kansas. There was a fine line between whether bushwhacker attacks were authorized military actions or simply the work of terrorists bent on criminality. Whether a man served with Jayhawkers or Partisan Rangers, both brought unspeakable horrors down on soldier and civilian alike.
Bank robbers Frank and Jesse James and Cole Younger developed their taste for violence riding with guerilla leaders like pro-Confederate William Quantrill. Quantrill was a schoolteacher and career outlaw who suffered a tempestuous childhood. He joined a gang of bandits who rode down escaped slaves in the Missouri/Kansas countryside. When the war broke out, Quantrill readily joined the Southern Cause to begin a series of brutal raids as a Partisan Ranger wreaking havoc on pro-Union sympathizers.
At the height of his Rebel guerrilla career, Quantrill destroyed the city of Lawrence, Kansas, a known anti-slavery stronghold. Some suggest Quantrill inflicted so much death and damage on the town in retaliation for the death of four women who had given aid to his Raiders, one of whom was the sister of his notorious and close ally, Bloody Bill Anderson. Quantrill, with as many as 450 raiders, murdered around 150 men and boys old enough to carry a rifle. All but two businesses in the town were burned.
FAMOUS OUTLAW JESSE JAMES.
JESSE JAMES'S BROTHER AND FELLOW OUTLAW, FRANK JAMES.
NOTORIOUS OUTLAW COLE YOUNGER.
In retaliation, General Ewing forced thousands of Missourians to abandon their homes while Union troops marched in behind them enacting such trauma and devastating destruction that the three and a half county area along the Kansas border became known as the “Burnt District.” Wintering in Texas afterwards, the sentiment in favor of Quantrill and his raiders was so strong that his sympathizers lynched Collin County Sheriff, Captain James L. Read, for shooting two of Quantrill’s men who had recently killed a farmer. Americans had become too familiar and comfortable with wartime violence. The traumatizing events experienced by soldiers, raiders, and civilians created and contributed to the lawless violence that soon would encompass the West.
After a disagreement among his men, Quantrill’s raiders splintered into several groups, sending their outlaw destructiveness in every direction. Quantrill’s strategies and merciless tactics are quite often noted as having influenced many ruffians, bandits, outlaws, and hired guns as Americans sought new lives in the West. Quantrill was wounded in combat in Kentucky and died shortly after in June 1865. His absence was filled by young men like Frank and Jesse James who willingly carried on the cause. The skills these men acquired in war would prove invaluable to launching their lawless careers.
The 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven characterizes such men. Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke) is one of seven men enlisted by Sam Lincoln (Denzel Washington) to protect the small village of Rose Creek. In the story, he is nicknamed the “Angel of Death,” having 23 confirmed kills during the Civil War Battle of Antietam. He’s an excellent marksman, hard drinker, and obviously suffers from PTSD. Although he suffers from Civil War battlefield trauma and fails in his mission at times in the story, Goodnight certainly proves his worth as a hero when the need arises. His fighting talents and troubled state of mind are attributed to his experience in the Civil War.
Robert Ewing Younger, born thirteenth of fourteen children in Missouri in 1853 to Henry and Bersheba Younger, is a prime example. Eight-yearold Bob watched as Union soldiers murdered his father, a Union sympathizer, and burned their home to the ground. This event certainly must’ve traumatized young Bob. Still just a boy himself, Bob’s older brother Cole joined pro-Confederate Quantrill’s Raiders to get revenge as a “bushwhacker.” In fact, Bob’s older brothers and Frank James were categorized by Broadwater in his, Boy Soldier and Soldier Boys, as just that, boy soldiers. Senior in the gang was Frank at 18 when the war began. Cole was 17, Jim 13, and John just 10 years of age. It should be expected that young men will experience severe trauma having witnessed and participated in such violent atrocities.
OUTLAW BOB YOUNGER.
By 1868, the Younger brothers were in full outlaw mode and formed a gang with Frank and Jesse James.
Young Bob is credited with being the first to join the newly formed James-Younger Gang that eventually met its demise in 1876. They spent nearly a decade terrorizing and murdering Unionists as well as robbing banks, trains, and stagecoaches across Kansas, Missouri, and neighboring states. The trauma experienced by young Bob certainly must have factored into his life of outlawry. His brothers and the Jameses simply provided the opportunity through which his childhood traumatization could be played out. Bob and his two brothers were wounded trying to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota.
THE JAMES-YOUNGER GANG. COLE YOUNGER, JESSE JAMES, BOB YOUNGER, AND FRANK JAMES POSE TOGETHER IN ALL THEIR POST CIVIL WAR NOTORIETY.
Twenty-year-old Clay Allison enlisted in the Confederate Army as an artillerist in 1861 but was medically discharged due to an old head injury rendering him incapable of service. Less than a year later, Allison rejoined the war under General Nathan Bedford Forrest. The head injury coupled with the wartime horrors Allison witnessed at such a young age serving with the “Wizard of the Saddle” certainly made Allison a likely candidate for PTSD and may have contributed to his brutal outlawry.
WILD THING: AFTER THE WAR, CLAY ALLISON DEVELOPED A REPUTATION FORVIOLENCE, SURVIVING MULTIPLE KNIFE AND GUNFIGHTS AND BEING IMPLICATEDIN SEVERAL VIGILANTE JAIL BREAK-INS AND LYNCHINGS.
Probably the most famous outlaw who surely must’ve experienced the effects of PTSD was Jesse James. During the war, young Jesse witnessed his mother and sister being arrested, his stepfather beaten and tortured, and his family exiled from their homes in Missouri by state militia. Joining the Rebel guerrillas in 1864 at age sixteen, it was a pretty easy leap for a growing young man to become an outlaw riding alongside men like Archie Clements, one of Bloody Bill Anderson’s lieutenants. Clements is credited with turning his guerilla comrades into outlaws after the Civil War, often targeting banks owned by Union supporters.
MASTERMIND. FROM LEFT: ARCH CLEMENTS, DAVE POOL, AND BILL HENDRICKS.ONE OF BLOODY BILL ANDERSON’S TOP LIEUTENANTS, CLEMENTS IS CREDITEDWITH HAVING TURNED HIS GUERILLA COMRADES INTO OUTLAWS AFTER THE WAR.
Robert Redford’s The American West (2016), chronicles Jesse James’s transformation from Confederate bushwhacker to outlaw. Forced to “swallow the dog,” another way of saying “taking the oath to the Union” near the end of the war, Jesse begins a spree of bank robberies that soon will target trains. Former Confederate Major John Newman Edwards, who served with General Joe Shelby and escaped to Mexico rather than surrender, returned in 1867 to publish newspaper stories about the James brothers fighting back against Union corruption. His stories elevated Jesse to near Robin Hood status and deified former Rebel bushwhackers Quantrill, Anderson, and the James brothers alongside famed Lost Cause icons Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, and P. T. Beauregard. His writings glorified outlawry that had its beginnings in the Civil War. Among other topics, the 8-episode series follows famed outlaw Billy the Kid, the Earp family, and concludes with Jesse’s death by the hand of Robert Ford. All of these outlaws had their beginnings due in part as a result of Civil War horror.
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AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, some men were bolstered into continuing the war but in a different way and for different reasons. Men possessing little fear of death and having become accustomed to violence had little choice but to turn to the wrong side of the law to prosper, most often just to survive. With the devastating experiences these men and their families suffered during the Civil War, why would we not believe the depth of the traumas they suffered would not affect their thinking and influence their behaviors resulting in robbery, murder, rape, and other outlawry?
Several factors contributed to the violence and lawlessness of the Old West, and no doubt there are others, but these three certainly should be considered. The concept of Manifest Destiny provided the philosophical and theological foundation that encouraged Americans to believe that it was their God-given right to take lands and possessions not theirs. Secondly, the rugged frontier spirit already embedded in the hearts and souls of the American psyche that preceded the westward migration to some extent had prepared men and women for the violence they might encounter and be prepared to face. Lastly, the traumatic effects of the Civil War on men and their families certainly enflamed and contributed to the violence and outlawry in the rapidly expanding West.
Not enough is known of Old West outlaw’s personal lives to make a concrete connection between wartime trauma and their lawless activities, and even if so, too little was known at the time about the effects of PTSD. Though no definitive evidence proves that outlaws in the Old West carried out violent behaviors as a result of PTSD experienced in the Civil War, the symptoms they exhibited and results of their lives reveal a close association if not a direct connection. At the very least, we can reasonably ask the question of those victims traumatized by war horrors who became notorious outlaws, “How could they not have been affected?”
—ANTHONY WOOD grew up in historic Natchez, Mississippi, fueling a life-long love of history. His ministry in the inner city of Memphis, Tennessee inspired him to co-author Up Close and Personal: Embracing the Poor. He is also the author of A Tale of Two Colors, a series of Civil War Historical novels based on the real-life wartime journey of his ancestor, Columbus Nathan “Lummy” Tullos. His writing has won a number of awards, including a Will Rogers Copper Medallion for his Western short story “Not So Long in the Tooth,” published in the Winter 2020 issue of Saddlebag Dispatches. When not writing, Anthony enjoys researching and roaming historical sites, camping and kayaking on the Mississippi River, and being with family. Anthony and his wife, Lisa, live in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
