Drawing on letters, periodical literature, poetry, memoirs, and visual materials, The Scars We Carve shows how pervasive the body was, in word and image, in Americans' understanding of the Civil War as it unfolded. Whether in her attention to competing northern and southern depictions of women as carriers of familial and regional strength or in her focus on figures of heroic and maimed African American soldiers, which stand in sharp counterpoint to archetypal images of the scarred body of the slave, Johnson dramatizes the body as a medium of national tragedy reaching beyond sectionalism and race even as it was driven by both. Her study makes a truly original contribution to studies of the Civil War and antebellum American culture."--Eric Sundquist, author of To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature