Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction

During the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of men were injured, and underwent amputation of hands, feet, limbs, fingers, and toes.

As the war drew to a close, their disabled bodies came to represent the future of a nation that had been torn apart, and how it would be put back together again.

In her authoritative and engagingly written new book, Sarah Chinn claims that amputation spoke both corporeally and metaphorically to radical white writers, ministers, and politicians about the need to attend to the losses of the Civil War by undertaking a real and actual Reconstruction that would make African Americans not just legal citizens but actual citizens of the United States.

She traces this history, reviving little-known figures in the struggle for Black equality, and in so doing connecting the racial politics of 150 years ago with contemporary debates about justice and equity.