Shell shock, battle fatigue, posttraumatic stress disorder, lack of moral courage: different terms for the same mental condition, formal names that change with observed circumstances and whenever experts feel prompted to coin a more suitable descriptive term for the shredding of the human spirit. Although the specter of psychological dysfunction has marched alongside all soldiers in all wars, always at the ready to ravish minds, rarely is it discussed when the topic is America’s greatest conflict, the Civil War. Yet mind-destroying terror was as present at Gettysburg and Antietam as in Vietnam and today in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Drawing almost exclusively from extensive primary accounts, Dennis W. Brandt presents a detailed case study of mental stress that is exceptional in the vast literature of the American Civil War. Pathway to Hell offers sobering insight into the horrors that war wreaked upon one young man and illuminates the psychological aspect of the War Between the States.

Dennis W. Brandt is a freelance author-historian and the author of From Home Guards to Heroes: The 87th Pennsylvania and Its Civil War Community and Shattering the Truth: The Slandering of Abraham Lincoln. Richard Wheeler is the author of over sixteen books of military history, including Voices of 1776: The Story of the American Revolution in the Words of Those Who Were There. Thomas P. Lowry is a retired psychiatrist and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco and continues his work as an independent historical scholar. He is the author of Venereal Disease and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Nebraska 2005).