by Alan Huffman
Elliott was physically a dark presence, with black hair, beard, and eyes and a dusky complexion. He had grown up in Hanover, Indiana, not far from where the Tolberts and the Maddoxes farmed, in a locally prominent family who had donated land for both a school and the Lancaster Church, New Style, which they had helped found. An uncle was involved in the Underground Railroad. Before the war, Elliott worked as a school teacher in Lafayette, Indiana, where he married and fathered a child. His wife died a year later, and he left their daughter in the care of his own mother when he enlisted in the 10th Indiana in 1861. No doubt his abandonment of the child—he never actually retrieved her—was the subject of some careful spin-doctoring, too, but whatever license Elliott took with the facts, his penchant for calm calculation undoubtedly helped him survive.
As Laurence Gonzales wrote in Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, “Only 10 to 20 percent of people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival emergency. They are the ones who can perceive their situation clearly; they can plan and take correct action, all of which are key elements of survival. Confronted with a changing environment, they rapidly adapt.” Survival involves more than being smart or brave. Body and brain chemistry play a major role and can transform a previously brave man into a liability or a weak one into a hero. Disaster can befall anyone, and sometimes how a person reacts is inconsequential, because forces are utterly beyond their control. But at other times those reactions influence what happens next, and who survives. It is important to respond decisively and sensibly to actual circumstances rather than cling to an imagined model of what those circumstances should be—or worse, to panic. Elliott, Tolbert, Maddox, and Summerville proved lucky (though they might have disagreed with that assessment at certain junctures) and never made decisions or reacted in such a way that got them killed. That was the unifying theme of both their most dramatic experiences and their lives afterward.
Survival decisions are made, more or less, in two parts of the brain: The amygdala and the neocortex. The amygdala is a comparatively primitive part of the brain and acts as the watchdog. The neocortex is responsible for conscious decisions and analytical thought. As Gonzales wrote, perceptions about the environment first reach the amygdala, which screens input for signs of danger but is not particularly bright—it is like a barking dog whose response to a threat is “better safe than sorry.” If the amygdala detects danger, it initiates a series of emergency reactions even as the neocortex and the rest of the brain attempt to comprehend what is going on. The amygdala (there are two, one for each hemisphere of the brain) can initiate a rush of adrenaline, causing an increase in heart rate and associated flushing and panting, even if the neocortex subsequently determines that the threat is inconsequential. During what is now often called the fight-or-flight response, the nervous system fires more energetically, the blood’s composition is altered so that it can coagulate more rapidly, muscles involuntarily contract, and digestion stops, all of which increase readiness for sudden action. When the neocortex starts talking, it is usually trying to slow things down. Survivors who recall hearing a voice inside them telling them what to do, or even a voice from beyond, may be experiencing the struggle of the neocortex to rein in responses triggered by the amygdala. Gonzales described emotion—the primary currency of the amygdala—as like a race horse quivering at the gate, and reason—which originates in the neocortex—like the jockey.
All this mental sorting takes place quickly, often in milliseconds; but because the outcome may be irreversible, it is extremely important to strike a balance, to know when to draw from your own experience—your own model of the world—and when to abandon it in favor of a new perspective. Conflicting responses from the amygdala and the neocortex may be nature’s way of hedging its bets, but they can result in the kind of disastrous confusion that beset Summerville’s 2nd cavalry during a patrol in rural Tennessee, when they were part of a larger force that encountered Rebels under Brigadier General John Morgan and simultaneously was attacked from the rear by the notoriously effective cavalry of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. As Union General R.W. Johnson later reported, the encounter went south very fast. “Soon some horses were wounded, riders killed, and confusion began to appear,” he wrote. “Regimental and company organizations were lost, and without any apparent cause at least half of my command precipitately fled, throwing away their arms, &c. Many of the men, after getting a thousand yards from the enemy, wildly discharged their revolvers in the air.” Without warning, previously brave soldiers had panicked. Their neocortexes had lost control. Unable to rally his troops, Johnson was forced to order a retreat. “I regret to report that the conduct of the officers and men as a general thing was shameful in the lowest degree,” he wrote.
Lieutenant Colonel Edward McCook, who was in command of the nearby 2nd Indiana, lamented the loss of nerve that prompted the retreat, and noted that the men of the 5th Kentucky, in particular, had fled like “a drove of stampeded buffaloes…There appeared to be a question of rivalry between officers and men for which should outvie in the disgrace of their cowardly scamper.”
A panicked amygdala can prompt good or bad decisions as a result of the same stimuli, and sometimes the results are not evident until later, such as when the soldiers compared notes around the campfire or mentally revised their personal narratives. Survival almost always involves a series of crucial choices that are influenced by luck and the ongoing dialogue between animal instincts and reason. A mindless rush of adrenaline, force-fed to the body’s potent army of emotions, can save a person’s life or cause a fatal overreaction. In this case, after the high-tailing Kentuckians passed through McCook’s ranks, he managed to restore order among his own men, who waited until the enemy was within twenty-five yards and then “opened a volley which broke the rebel line and threw them back in confusion some 500 yards. In the meantime General Johnson’s whole command, save the Second Indiana, had left and taken up a hurried retreat.” At this point, McCook wrote, “General Johnson rode up to me and asked what he should do. I replied that no officer could command those damned cowards, pointing toward the Fifth Kentucky retreating.”
Johnson’s neocortex then made its own bad call. He told McCook he wished to surrender and asked to borrow a white handkerchief—a request McCook refused in disgust. McCook and his men found it necessary to retreat toward Nashville along a road littered with discarded rifles, pistols, sabers, saddlebags, canteens, curry-combs, brushes, and hats, all abandoned, as he put it, “in helter-skelter style.”
If the 5th Kentucky’s aim had been to stay alive at all costs, the argument could be made that they had succeeded. But in a time of war, staying alive usually means disabling or killing the enemy. In that regard they had failed miserably, and it would not be forgotten.
Fear that he might run was Henry Fleming’s abiding fear in The Red Badge of Courage. Though Fleming was said to be a fictional composite of numerous veterans whom Crane—who never went to war himself—interviewed, his characterization was clearly on target, based on the book’s popular reception by veterans. Fleming yearned for courage and grace, for himself and from others, which was crucial both during the conflict and afterward.
Armies are a diverse farrago of men with different backgrounds and motivations. But on the whole, soldiers tend to be young, volatile, and impressionable, and—at least in the beginning—are not likely to have ever experienced being shot at by anyone else. Under the circumstances, it is natural to feel that every gun in the opposing army is aimed specifically at you, and during the Civil War, new recruits such as Tolbert and Maddox soon found that their fellow soldiers brought to the battlefield a multitude of potentially lethal subtexts: Cowardice, vindictiveness, and all sorts of ulterior motives. Among the more common threats within their own ranks were men known as bounty jumpers, who joined the army only for the monetary reward, then bolted at the first opportunity. Bounty jumpers might leave their comrades in the lurch and so could be as menacing to the whole as enemy soldi
ers who donned blue uniforms to blend in until they could escape with horses and guns. There were also soldiers who bore grudges against comrades or officers, or who sought to discredit their peers to curry favor with their superiors. There were tricksters, frequently veteran soldiers who knowingly gave bad advice to green soldiers for sport. One soldier recalled a new recruit being encouraged to climb a tree in a hilltop orchard to pick high-hanging fruit, which attracted the attention of an unseen enemy battery on an opposing ridge. The unwitting recruit was startled by the sudden crash of shells through the branches, dropped from the tree, and scurried for cover, enabling others to gather the newly fallen fruit. Sometimes another soldier’s bad judgment or simple mistake rippled through the lines, with disastrous consequences. In extreme cases, a perpetrator was drummed out of camp, or even shot.
Most Union soldiers were laborers—farmers, like Tolbert and Maddox, or industrial workers, with only a small percentage in commercial or professional pursuits. Within those categories were thieves, child molesters, religious zealots, patriots, tagalongs, leaders, overall good guys, and countless others whose personal integrity had not been tested or proved, and whose personalities were exaggerated by the stress of military life. Helping a wounded comrade to the rear was a popular way to avoid fighting, and desertion was a common problem on both sides. Some soldiers fled because they were scared, sick of war, never intended to fight, or had pressing concerns back home. The listing was occasionally in error, as occurred when a soldier was unaccounted for after being captured, killed, wounded, or cut off from the army.
As Dave Grossman wrote in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, many Civil War soldiers—the vast majority, by some estimates—never fired their guns. During the unimaginable intensity of battle, preconceptions about long lines of men firing in orderly formation quickly evaporated, “And in the midst of the confusion, the smoke, the thunder of the firing, and the screams of the wounded, soldiers would revert from cogs in a machine to individuals doing what comes naturally to them,” Grossman observed. Some loaded guns for others; others tended to the wounded, shouted orders, or wandered off in the smoke to find a convenient hiding place. A New York private wrote in a letter, “When you read of the number of men engaged on our side, strike out at least one third as never having struck a blow.”
Even the behavior of those who fought was frequently erratic and wild. A person might lose all fear, all sense of time and place and self-consciousness as cognitive thought was interrupted by responses from another comparatively primitive part of the brain, the hippocampus. The brain’s neocortex, the seat of language and reason, is where active memory operates. The amygdala, keyed into the nervous system, is the source of emotional responses, and it is where related memories are processed and consolidated. The hippocampus is where the information is put into context and, in many cases, stored. The three work in concert to determine how a person reacts to events and later reconstructs them, and they influence how he will react in the future. When a person faces a survival threat, the result can be a perfect aria or a discordant and dangerous racket.
In his book Surviving the Extremes, Kenneth Kamler, a physician with extensive experience treating people in survival situations, wrote, “The hippocampus flips some switches off, maintaining circuits essential to life, such as breathing and heartbeat, but shutting down stimuli to the higher centers that are less important for immediate survival. With incoming signals blocked, the frontal cortex receives no stimulation and loses its awareness of the individual self.” A person in such a state may experience tunnel vision and lose track of time. The world may seem to move in slow motion, not unlike the way climactic battle scenes are depicted in movies, and the person may have an out-of-body experience triggered by fear, low oxygen or blood sugar, or fatigue.
“In a battlefield environment, if a person does not simply turn tail and run, the highly developed frontal lobes of the brain—the seats of judgment, thought, and will—command the body to embrace hostility, suppressing the survival instinct and protecting itself from the results as best it can,” Grossman wrote. “This is otherwise known as discipline, and it is the only way a person can be made to wage offensive war, to seek out a threat to [his] own life. Once a person enters this realm, he becomes—at the behest of the part of his brain that normally subdues such tendencies—animalistic and aggressive.”
A Massachusetts lieutenant wrote in a letter to his mother of one battle, “during that terrible 4 or 5 hours that we were there I had not a thought of fear or anything like fear, on the contrary I wanted to rush them hand to hand…and yet will you believe it? all day before the battle I dreaded it.” Likewise a Texas artillery-man referred to “that wild hallucination which none but those in the brunt of battle can feel.” An Iowa sergeant wrote similarly of “a strange unaccountable lack of feeling with me…Out of battle and in a battle, I find myself two different beings.” Reconciling the two selves was crucial both to survival and to framing personal experiences afterward. Typically, the stress of battle increased with each engagement. Soldiers were bolstered by the hope of reaching the end, by a sense of honor, by peer pressure, by discipline, or by coercion. After the fighting ended, they often collapsed or became ill.
Some soldiers experienced battle fatigue and were plagued by nightmares, regardless of their ability to overcome their natural revulsion to killing. Others developed callous disregard. One Indiana soldier, William Blufton Miller, wrote that after overwhelming a Rebel force, “We captured about a hundred prisoners and killed about thirty of them. It was fun for us to see them Skip out. I seen one old Reb lying along the road (quite an old man) that had been a Saber stroke across his back and was not dead yet but mortally wounded and under other circumstances his grey hairs would have appealed to my heart for simpathy but we are not here to Simpathize and our orders is not let them cross the River.” Otherwise sensible men tortured and killed captive enemies, mistreated women and children, and tore though private homes, smashing mirrors, pianos, and china, and rending someone’s precious jacquard. Such behavior not only stoked desire for revenge but often disturbed fellow soldiers. A person who breaks free of his moral constraints poses a potential danger to everyone.
Soldiers naturally sought out others with whom they had an affinity. Perhaps they exchanged small photographs of each other and shared blankets and treats from home. But sometimes what a soldier expected from others turned out to be dead wrong, and it was never more obvious than when they were put to the test on the tattered, bloody fringes of morality. As Indiana soldier Jacob Bartmess wrote in a letter to his wife, it was not always enough to be on the same side. “I always was in favor of the administration and the war, and am yet, but there is a great evil right at the heart of the whole thing,” he wrote. “That evil is, the war is carried on and led, principally by wicked and God dareing men.”
THERE ARE FEW RELIABLE BYWORDS of war. It can be hell, as Sherman famously said, but it can also be boring, exciting, liberating, inspiring, and at times fun. In the downtime of the Civil War, there were snowball fights, sing-alongs, cannonball-bowling matches, stag dances, gambling tournaments, and what might be described as freestyle arts and crafts. On the basis of evidence unearthed by modern relic hunters, more than a few soldiers whiled away the quiet hours whittling lead bullets into frivolous items such as tiny penises.
A soldier’s behavior during war is an extreme extension of his civilian life, and while the war stories most of them like to tell typically involve violence and deprivation, most of the tests are far less dramatic. John Maddox learned right away that serious danger could develop inside his own body and that, moreover, there was never a good time to drop your pants in the presence of your enemies. This was not a matter of mooning a distant column or debasing a conquered foe, both of which have occurred in other conflicts, but of enduring a sad pageantry of pit stops brought on by chronic diarrhea.
Of the more than six hundred thousand men who died d
uring the Civil War, the majority succumbed to intestinal disorders brought on by bad water, rank food, and poor medical attention. The war was thoroughly toxic, and the stress it placed on the soldiers’ bodies could quickly transform an ordinary bug into a fatal coup de grace. To make matters worse, “the troubles,” as they were sometimes called, presented an inauspicious way to die, whether on the march, in camp, in a hospital, or on a suddenly, exponentially more complicated battlefield. Death by diarrhea would not likely be memorialized in heroic terms back home. There would be no news item in the Courier paying tribute to valiant digestive casualties among the ranks of the local boys.
For soldiers cut loose behind enemy lines, as Tolbert, Maddox, and Summerville were in the fall of 1863, even a minor case of diarrhea could be deadly. Some men wasted away; others were shot by snipers while squatting behind bullet-riddled trees. There were few options other than letting the sickness run its course, even if it meant the death of the host. The most common remedy was quinine, “whether for stomach or bowels, headache or toothache, for a cough or for lameness, rheumatism or fever and ague,” as Union veteran John Billings noted in his book Hardtack & Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life. Quinine, a bitter drug obtained from the bark of a tropical tree, was considered the cure-all; unfortunately it did not cure all. Although personal hygiene might play a role in determining whether a soldier got sick, in many cases luck played a greater role in influencing his survival than all the other variables over which he had a measure of control, including physical fitness and mental outlook.
In established camps, there was a special bugle call each day summoning ill soldiers, and while some men jumped at the chance to escape duty, true sickness was serious business. To make matters worse, even a relatively mild case of diarrhea was a source of quiet shame because it prevented soldiers from pulling their weight. They fouled their uniforms, made messes all over camp, fell behind on marches, and were frequently troubled by related hemorrhoids. Michigan soldier John Clark Ely wrote in his journal of his fear that the fort in which he was camped would be attacked while he was incapacitated by diarrhea, and of his sadness at not being able to uphold his duties. “Not feeling better yet,” he wrote in one entry, “do wish I could feel well and get over this constant run of the sh-ts.”