Homesickness  "A Mind Diseased"

The most popular song sung by soldiers around the campfires of both Northern and Southern armies was "Home, Sweet Home". Most soldiers had never ventured far from their hearths before they were called to distant regions to fight for their countries. The majority of enlistees who gaily marched away to seek glory on the battlefield soon found that army life, with its hardships and diseases, was neither exciting or glorious.

A Union soldier from Ohio wrote of his company: "Many of the men had not been much from home, and to say that they were homesick is to state the fact very mildly." An Alabamaman's letter home spoke the sentiments of vast numbers of soldiers: "I am heaire and my mind is wit you at home." "Shut out from the world", wrote a Virginian to his family, "hid away in a pine thicket, we have nothing to think of but the loved ones at home."

The nostalgia and loneliness of homesickness brought soldiers into the depths of gloom and depression and harmed the armies' morale. "Oh! that I was a boy once more at home in peace and knew nothing of the horrors of war," a Tennessee soldier confided to his journal. "When I think of my native home, in a moment I seem to be there. But, alas! recollection soon hurries me back to despair."

Homesickness killed. An Iowan declared that he believed "More men die of homesickness than all other diseases, and when a man gives up and lies down he is a goner." A Texan agreed: "I honestly believe that genuine homesickness killed more soldiers in the army than measles." The symptoms were described by a Union soldier: "It is languor, debility, low fever, loss of appetite, sleeplessness, death; and yet, through it all, it is only that sad thing they call Nostalgia. Who shall dare to say that the boy who 'lays him down and dies', a-hungered and starving for home, does not fall as well and truly for his country's sake as if a Rebel bullet had found his heart out. Against it the Surgeon combats in vain, for 'who can minister to a mind diseased?'"

Fascinating Fact:  One Rebel soldier wrote that he wished a "friendly bullet" would hit him "just severely enough to send me home for 60 to 90 days. I would gladly welcome such a bullet and consider the Yankee who fired it as a good kind fellow."


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