Civil War reenactors portraying Union Army artillerymen fire a cannon at Fort Pickens, Florida. Photo courtesy of the National Parks Service. Public domain image. https://www.nps.gov/media/photo/gallery-item.htm?id=f542dd79-817a-4cbc-a15e-fe86ba00eb48&gid=29D48948-1DD8-B71C-070A-F9F53A420D29.
Our story begins on August 9, 1862 at the Battle of Cedar Mountain. The day was brutally hot, and many of the soldiers on the Union side were suffering from the heat even before the battle began. The Union line, under the command of Major-General Nathaniel B. Prentice, had situated themselves along a thin ridge on the far side of a small stream called Cedar Run. A road ran through this area leading southwards to the Union army’s principal objective – the massive railroad depot at Gordonsville, Virginia. However, twenty miles away from their destination, just one or two days’ march away, the Union army’s path was blocked by a large force of Confederate rebels led by General Stonewall Jackson, who were assembled within the thick woods that carpeted the base of nearby Cedar Mountain.
Among the men present on the Union side awaiting the coming clash was the 30 year old 2nd Lieutenant William Cooper, an artillery officer serving with Battery L of the 2nd New York Heavy Artillery Regiment. He had frequently boasted to his fellow soldiers of his former military service in the French Army, although the circumstances of this are not elaborated upon in any of the documents which I’ve seen, and it’s entirely possible he was lying.
Then, the shooting started.
Yet scarcely had a few cannonballs from the enemy been fired in Battery L’s direction when a sudden change overcame Lieutenant Cooper. In the words of his commanding officer Capt. Jacob Roemer, Lt. Cooper was immediately seized with what he called “cannon fever” – “Trembling from head to foot, he was put into an ambulance and sent off the field…He never appeared in the Battery again”. In fact, Lt. Cooper resigned from the military a few months after this battle (Roemer 1897, page 50; “Annual Report of the Adjutant-General of the State of New York For the Year 1898”, page 1,400).
Captain Jacob Roemer uses the same term to describe the reaction of a horse-driver who was responsible for pulling one of the battery’s cannons into position – “The driver of the lead team had caught the ‘cannon fever’ and had lost control of his horses” (Roemer 1897, page 51).
The fact that Capt. Roemer puts the words “cannon fever” deliberately into quotation marks within his memoirs on two occasions indicates that this was a well-known expression used in his day to describe what many soldiers of the Western Front would refer to as “shell shock”. We would nowadays refer to it as “post-traumatic stress disorder”, or PTSD for short.
Not only men, but animals too could suffer from the horrors of war. Captain Roemer of Battery L describes the psychological reaction that his horses exhibited after being cannonaded for the first time at the Battle of Cedar Mountain: “Battery L was now ordered to go into position at a point farther to the right and on higher ground. The Battery had already limbered to the rear to make this change, but when the proper command had been given to start the movement, a strange thing occurred. Some of the battery horses seemed either to have forgotten what they had learned on the drill-ground or to have become totally deaf. The heavy cannonade of the previous day must have had a bad effect upon them, for they seemed as if they had been paralyzed” (Roemer 1897, pages 50-51).
For many Civil war soldiers, “cannon fever” was a tongue-in-cheek term for “cowardice” rather than “shell shock”. Captain Jacob Roemer had observed that Lt. William Cooper, who had often bragged to his comrades about his former military service in Europe, immediately broke down when the first cannonballs started flying towards his position. On July 20, 1864 at the Battle of Peach Tree Creek, Horatio D. Chapman of the 20th Connecticut Infantry Regiment writes “The rattling of musketry was now rapid and without cessation (some were now taken with the cannon fever and sneaked to the rear out of danger)” (Chapman 1929, page 75). Likewise, Louis Lehmann, a German immigrant serving in the Confederate cavalry, made a similar observation of some of the soldiers suddenly and conveniently becoming ill just before marching out to face the blue-bellied Yankees: “In the night of Dec 21-22 [1863] I was on duty…when suddenly there was a horn signal that all the buglers on the line began to pick up, although it took one of them 10 minutes before he could get a note out because he was so scared, then in the distance gunfire could be heard and the call to ‘saddle up’ was heard from all the officers–the ‘Yankees are coming’. Then there was great confusion…and after 1/2 an hour of much flurry, the regiment fell in–a lieutenant had to search our company’s camp to see that everyone had left, and in each of the others they found 3-4 men who had suddenly developed cannon fever, or had suddenly been so overtaken with sleep that they hadn’t heard all the commotion–in short, it turned out that all the men who sound off like the greatest fire-eaters and always know everything better are the biggest cowards and had hidden themselves” (Kamphoefner and Helbich 2006, page 460).
Some people were skeptical if those who exhibited symptoms of shell shock were being genuine, or if they were faking their illnesses in the hope of being discharged. Malingering in the military is as old as the time of the Roman legions, and in the American Civil War it was no different. Experienced doctors could spot if a person was faking, but many decided to give the soldiers the benefit of the doubt. Sergeant Cyrus F. Boyd of the 15th Iowa Infantry Regiment made the following remark in his diary for May 15, 1862 as his men approached Corinth, Mississippi: “Only 33 of our company were out today. Some of the balance were sick and some had the cannon fever” (Throne 1998). A poem which was published in the Army Square Hospital Gazette sums up the sentiments of one person who, like General Patton, thought that “cannon fever” was the coward’s way out (Spar 2017, page 72)…
“The Cannon Fever”
What is the cannon fever?
Tis a dread of that voice like thunder
In fear it comes, those ugly bombs,
Might tear one’s limbs asunder.
It pains the heart–it shakes the nerves,
It causes the frame to tremble
It makes a man forget himself,
And meanly to dissemble.
He leaves his regiment in the field
Gives up his guns, his sword and shield.
Forgets his country and her honor,
When rebel bands are loose upon her.
He is sick yet still his cheeks are round.
Apparently he looks quite jolly.
The doctors come, ah! Then he’s found
Dejected–seems quite melancholy.
Then in a faint and hollow voice
He tells him of some hidden pain
Deep seated in some vital part,
Perhaps his leg, or arm is lame,
He limps around from room to room,
Expects discharge and pay day soon.
Quick as it comes he feels quite gay,
Receives it, throws his [walking] stick away,
Gets citizens dress and sports a beaver [cap],
That’s what I call the cannon fever.
Officers who were said to have exhibited “cannon fever” were scorned far more than enlisted men. Any officer who was believed to show timidity in battle was expected to resign from the service immediately. Ira Dodd reports, “The enemy’s cavalry hung about our flanks and rear and the sound of cannon was frequent. We had as yet no fighting but we were constantly threatened, and that helped the discipline. It taught us unceasing vigilance and the need of perpetual readiness; it also tried the nerves of our officers. The unfit ones began to drop off. First our lieutenant-colonel, then our major was smitten with what the men called ‘cannon fever.’ Their health failed suddenly, their resignations were offered and accepted and we were well rid of them” (Dodd 1898, pages 66-67). On July 30, 1862, Theodore Sargent of the 10th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment wrote: “Capt. Walkey has resigned on the plea of ill health, and also Lieut. Chase. The cannon fever has been troubling our officers some. A discharge seems to be a certain cure for this disease” (Tower 1903, page 50). During the Battle of Seven Days, “Captain Stearns, missing since the shelling at White Oak Bridge, rejoined the company at Harrison’s Landing, claiming that he had been ill. The verdict of [Marshall] Twitchell and most of the company, however, was ‘cannon fever.’ To Twitchell’s relief, Stearns resigned his commission a few weeks later” (Tunnell 2004, pages 55-56).
Thus it seems to us that “cannon fever” was regarded as both un-military and un-manly. Entrenched Victorian ideas of masculinity and toughness were used to belittle and shame soldiers who had “seen too much”. If you showed signs of cracking up, then it must mean that you had a weak mind, and if that’s the case then you must be a weak man. Real men don’t shy away from battle, real men don’t conjure up excuses of being sick to avoid one’s duty, real men don’t run away from the front. Others took a more sympathetic attitude towards those who had seen too much of blood and death, especially when it was obvious that men’s minds had snapped. Some soldiers who returned home following the war’s end suffered from chronic nightmares about their time in uniform, often replaying a single harrowing incident over and over again in their sleep for years on end. For example, Corporal John Hildt of the 1st Michigan Infantry Regiment had to have his arm amputated following severe wounds suffered at the Battle of Seven Pines; he was afterwards transferred to a lunatic asylum in Washington, D.C. for “acute mania”. He would spend the rest of his life there before dying in 1911. Family members who visited him were shocked and dismayed that his mind showed absolutely no signs of improvement during the decades that he stayed there. (“Did Civil War Soldiers Have PTSD?”).
Possibly the reason why Cpl. John Hildt didn’t show any signs of improvement despite being decades under care was because the “care” given to him was nothing of the sort. During the 19th Century, asylums were more like prisons rather than hospitals. Patients who suffered from nightmares, flashbacks, hallucinations, anxiety, and depression were often given hefty doses of opium and morphine to sedate them, which only ended up getting them hooked on drugs. All manner of quackish explanations were given to explain away a soldier’s nightmares and panic attacks, from over-exertive physical activity, to having one’s rucksack straps on too tight, to chronic masturbation – anything except being exposed to the horrors of combat. Unfortunately, doctors of the time often chocked up PTSD to moral degeneracy rather than to psychological trauma, believing that their condition must be due to flaws in their character. If PTSD was caused by being a moral degenerate, then the cure was obviously moral correction. A virtuous life of prayer and physical work would fix them. Some felt that the best cure for someone who had suffered from the horrors of combat was simply to expose them to more combat, as if they were trying to inoculate men from the disease of shell shock by exposing them to more of it in the hope that they’d become immune (“Did Civil War Soldiers Have PTSD?”).
Thankfully a lot has changed since the 1860s. We know a lot more about the effects of combat on the human mind, and people are much more understanding than they used to be. However, there is still an underlying stigma within the military and the general public that soldiers who suffer from PTSD simply aren’t tough enough to hack it, especially within the strutting posturing “macho man” culture of the US military and America in general. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a way to go.
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Bibliography
“Annual Report of the Adjutant-General of the State of New York For the Year 1898 – Registers of the Marine Artillery and First to Thirty-Fourth Batteries”. Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York, One Hundred and Twenty-Second Session – 1899. Volume XIV, No. 65, Part 3. New York: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co., 1899.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Documents_of_the_Assembly_of_the_State_o/AhQbAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Thirty-fourth.
Chapman, Horatio Dana. Civil War Diary. Hartford: Allis, 1929.
Dodd, Ira Seymour. The Song of the Rappahannock: Sketches of the Civil War. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1898.
Kamphoefner, Walter D.; Helbich, Wolfgang, eds. The Letters They Wrote Home: Germans in the Civil War. Translated by Susan Carter Vogel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Roemer, Brevet-Major Jacob. Reminiscences of the War of Rebellion, 1861-1865. Flushing: The Estate of Jacob Roemer, 1897.
Spar, Ira. Civil War Hospital Newspapers: Histories and Excerpts of Nine Union Publications. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2017.
Throne, Mildred, ed. The Civil War Diary of Cyrus F. Boyd, Fifteenth Iowa Infantry, 1861-1863. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998
Tower, Henry M. Historical Sketches relating to Spencer, Massachusetts, Volume III. Spencer: W. J. Heffernan, 1903.
Tunnell, Ted. Edge of the Sword: The Ordeal of Carpetbagger Marshall H. Twitchell in the Civil War and Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004.
Smithsonian Magazine. “Did Civil War Soldiers Have PTSD?”, by Tony Horowitz (January 2015).
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ptsd-civil-wars-hidden-legacy-180953652/. Accessed on July 30, 2025.
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