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Abstract
The dislocations of the Civil War and Reconstruction sent a diverse array of U.S. Southerners, white and black, free and enslaved, poor and rich, female and male, adult and child, flooding into the state lunatic asylums of South Carolina and Georgia. These patients' shared 'insanity' in no way made them equal, and they usually received different treatment in all senses. The white men tended to be more violent and more free. The white women were often suffering from puerperal difficulties and trauma. The enslaved had usually been half-abandoned with a hope that they would soon become valuable again. With all these differences, the state lunatic asylum provides historians with a common frame, and dominant culture is often at its most conspicuous when studied from the margins. In the mid-nineteenth-century many patients were committed not because of any internal suffering but because of inappropriate external behavior -- a failure to measure up to what was expected of their gender and race. Ironically then we may be able to best study the gender and racial norms of the period from the perspective of those who most breached them and called them into question -- the ostensibly 'insane.' When these patients are considered in their personal, familial, and community context rather than as medical cases of mid-nineteenth century insanity, their lived experiences reveal key conflicts around race and gender during the Civil War era. By studying the plight of patients and their families at the Georgia and South Carolina Lunatic Asylums, the shadowed margins of the 1860s U.S. South become illuminated.