Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Goodbye, Old Arm": The Domestication Of Veterans' Disabilities In Civil War Era Popular Songs, Devin Burke

Faculty Scholarship

IN October of 1863, two years into the Civil War, a short editorial titled "Empty Sleeves" appeared on the front page of the Staunton Spectator.1 It addressed a question that had become familiar in the wake of the war's unprecedented violence; namely, how to encounter, or how to look at (in both the literal and figurative senses), the quickly growing population of veterans whose injuries marked them as "disabled:' This question could be cause for considerable anxiety in able-bodied Americans whose beliefs were shaped by Victorian and muscular Christian values.