Chapter 2 explores accounts by Civil War nurses and surgeons – first-person nonfiction, lightly fictionalized narrative, sensationalized memoir, and fiction. The central texts in this chapter are Walt Whitman’s Memoranda after the War, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, John Brinton’s Personal Memoirs, Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, and S. Weir Mitchell’s “The Case of George Dedlow.” These narrators represent amputation in different ways, especially the scene of amputation itself, the image of a basket or trough of dismembered limbs, and amputee reflections on the relationship between their remaining bodies and their absent limbs. However, for all the narrators in these texts, amputation is part of a meditation on the meanings of intact and amputated bodies, and their role in making sense of the Civil War. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Army Medical Museum, in which amputated limbs were catalogued, stored, and displayed as examples of the damage done by gunshots and shells. This dovetails with a reading of George Dedlow, in which the protagonist’s legs, stored in alcohol at the Museum, return to him briefly during a séance, absurdly marrying hopes for bodily resurrection with spiritualism’s belief in a humanized heaven.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Civil War and Reconstruction had become sites of significant narrative contests that were carried out in scores of novels and in hundreds of stories published in popular magazines. These writings are arguably central to any understanding of American literary history but usually are represented by only a few canonical Civil War novels, such as Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895), Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock (1898), and Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). Well before the moonlight and magnolia school of Civil War fiction exerted its death grip on the postwar literary imagination, however, an earlier contest waged that sought to set the terms of the debate. Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, William Wells Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper each sought a narrative capable of accounting for the uncertainties and possibilities of this political moment. This essay traces their attempts to imagine a different future, one that broke with the nation’s history of continued abrogation of the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence.