Stereocard,“Hospital at Fredericksburg, Va., May, 1864” War Photograph Exhibition Company. (VMHC 2002.460.123)
In the Civil War’s wake, thousands of veterans became addicted to morphine and opium, medicines used to treat painful injuries and lingering sicknesses sustained during the war. Veterans’ families looked on in horror as opioid addiction destroyed old soldiers’ health and damaged their self-esteem, relationships, and reputations.
Opiates were some of the most widely used medicines in 19th-century America. During the Civil War, surgeons administered morphine injections and opium pills to soldiers who had endured gunshot wounds and amputations.
Opium was also a major remedy for diarrhea and other diseases that spread through army camps during the war. The medicines worked well—too well, in fact. Countless veterans became addicted to opium and morphine, which they continued to take after leaving the army.
Veterans dubbed opioid addiction “opium slavery” and “morphine mania,” among other names. As these monikers imply, addiction had severe consequences for veterans’ lives. Drug addiction, although it was widespread, was deeply stigmatized in the Civil War era.
From many Americans’ point-of-views, veterans who struggled with opioid addiction were immoral and unmanly. They deserved to be punished, not helped, according to this line of thinking. Consequently, addicted veterans struggled to find sympathy or medical care, and they often died of accidental drug overdoses.
The experience of Confederate artillerist John Tackett Goolrick and Frances Bernard Goolrick, his wife, illustrates the wide-ranging health, emotional, and social consequences of opioid addiction for Civil War veterans and their families.
The Goolricks wrote scores of letters describing the staggering costs of John’s morphine addiction, which stalked the family for nearly a half-century after the Civil War. The letters are housed in the Goolrick Family Papers collection at the VMHC. Most Americans were reticent to discuss opioid addiction openly. But the Goolricks were frank about their struggles, and their letters provide an unparalleled window into the broader phenomenon of opioid addiction among Civil War veterans.
John enlisted in the Fredericksburg Artillery as a young man. He was an ardent supporter of the proslavery Confederate cause, remaining with Robert E. Lee’s army until the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865, the bitter end to the war in Virginia. Many of Lee’s men had deserted by that point. John suffered a severe gunshot wound in the left leg at the siege of Petersburg in August 1864.
He was transported behind the lines to Richmond’s massive Chimborazo hospital, where surgeons apparently prescribed morphine for the pain before patching John up and sending him back to the frontlines. At Chimborazo, or some point in the ensuing years, John became addicted to morphine.
Lithograph, “Campaign Sketches: The Letter for Home” by Homer, Winslow L. Prang & Company. (VMHC 2000.165.6.5)
John and Frances cared deeply for one another, but his morphine addiction took a serious toll on their marriage. The Goolricks were a fixture of the social scene of Fredericksburg, where they built a life in the decades after the Civil War.
But all the while, John consumed ever-higher doses of morphine. As his addiction grew worse, it debilitated his body and mind. Finally, in 1896, John suffered a morphine-induced breakdown, some 30 years after leaving the army. This was not uncommon, as many veterans lived with chronic addiction for decades. But John’s breakdown imploded his relationship with Frances.
Morphine abuse clouded John’s mind and judgment, leaving him unable to practice law, his postwar occupation. The family’s finances dwindled, and, with little hope that John’s state would improve on its own, Frances demanded that he submit to harsh medical care for addiction.
In the 19th century, medical care for addiction often entailed having one’s morphine dose abruptly discontinued, triggering agonizing withdrawal symptoms. John most assuredly did not want to undertake this grueling medical ordeal. But Frances insisted, threatening divorce if he did not comply. As Frances explained to her brother in a February 5, 1896, letter, John “will beg and implore me not to do this. But I must, I must, I can bear neither for myself or the children, this life any longer.” “I am obliged to leave him,” she added, for “I can see nothing else to do…. His mind and brain [are] clouded by” morphine, and “there is no dependence to be put in him.”
John and Frances’s family took the news of John’s addiction hard. Extended family members appear to have known about the veteran’s morphine addiction before his 1896 breakdown, but almost certainly did not realize the severity of the situation. Because morphine addiction was stigmatized, it threatened the upper-class Goolricks’ social standing. So, the family had to deal with John’s addiction swiftly and quietly.
One option was institutionalization. Virginia’s public mental asylums, like Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, often admitted Civil War veterans and other Virginians suffering from drug addiction.
But, as John’s brother warned in a March 7, 1896, letter, this measure would bring great shame to the entire family because asylums were, like addiction, stigmatized. If word got out that John had been committed to an asylum, it “would be commented upon and asked about” in the newspapers.
Fearing damage to the family’s reputation, Frances, along with John’s brother and sister-in-law, settled on a more private solution. Within a few days of his collapse, Frances sent John away to his brother’s farmhouse, just outside of Fredericksburg. The family ultimately restrained John by locking him in a room, where hired nurses prevented escape while John endured the agony of opioid withdrawal over the course of several weeks.
John’s ordeal was heartbreaking for his family to witness. As Nora, John’s sister-in-law, explained to Fannie in a March 10, 1896, letter, “my heart aches to look at him.” Eventually, John’s body and mind recovered, and he returned home to Frances. But the family’s letters hint that John relapsed several times before his death in 1925.
The Goolricks’ saga illustrates several aspects of addiction commonly experienced by Civil War veterans who struggled with opioid addiction.
First, the Civil War, despite ending in 1865, caused health complications for John that lasted for decades. This facet of the Goolricks’ story, which was not unique to John and Frances, complicates the persistent myth that most Civil War veterans simply returned to normal after leaving the army.
In reality, many veterans dealt with challenging, war-related disabilities for the rest of their lives. Additionally, like other couples of the era, the Goolricks based much of their self-esteem on their ability to fulfill certain social roles.
Men like John were supposed to act as breadwinners, while women like Frances were supposed to manage the “domestic sphere” of life. Yet, addiction inverted these roles, leaving John unable to work, while Frances stepped in and managed the family’s public and financial affairs—an inversion of gender roles that neither Goolrick relished.
The couple also experienced great shame at the public airing of John’s addiction, demonstrating how opioid addiction was not merely a health problem, but one that affected from all other aspects of life, as well. Finally, the Goolricks’ story reminds us that Americans of generations past struggled with opioid addiction, much like the millions of Americans grappling with addiction amid today’s ongoing opioid crisis. Opioid addiction has a long history dating back to the Civil War.
This article was written by Jonathan S. Jones for Virginia History & Culture Magazine, Spring/Summer 2020. Jonathan received his PhD in History from Binghamton University, Spring 2020. The George and Ann Richards Civil War Center at Pennsylvania State University awarded Jones a postdoctoral fellowship, and he accepted an assistant professorship in the history department at Virginia Military Institute, which he began in the fall of 2021.
Johnathan’s book project, “‘A Mind Prostrate’: Opiate Addiction in the Civil War’s Aftermath,” chronicles the Civil War–era opioid addiction epidemic—America’s original opioid crisis. The project uncovers the traumatic experiences and harsh consequences of opioid addiction for Civil War veterans and their families. The project also reveals America’s long, but largely forgotten, history of opioid crises. The book project stems from his PhD dissertation (Binghamton University, 2020), and his research was enhanced by an Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship at the VMHC in 2019.
Admiral Hyman Rickover bullied physics, bureaucracy, and common sense into submission and birthed the Nuclear Navy. His side quest, the pint-size NR-1 on truck tires, became the weirdest, coolest tool in Cold War deep water.
From Polish Kid To Nuclear Pit Boss
Admiral Hyman Rickover was unique in the annals of the US military. Born in Poland and brought to the US as a child to escape persecution of Jews, Rickover took his first paying job at age nine, earning three cents an hour holding a light for a neighbor who was operating a machine. He entered the US Naval Academy in 1918. In 1922, Rickover graduated 107th out of a total of 540 midshipmen.
Admiral Hyman Rickover was a serious piece of work. He is rightfully known as the Father of the Nuclear Navy. Public domain.
Rickover was acerbic, difficult, and mean. However, he was also notorious for getting stuff done. He spent World War 2 organizing and fixing things on ever-increasing scales. He helped coordinate repairs on the battleship USS California in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks and ended the war in command of a ship repair facility in Okinawa.
When Nuclear Power Hit The Ocean And Everything Shifted
Admiral Rickover was the driving force behind the use of nuclear reactors in modern warships. He accompanied every new nuclear boat on its first trip out to sea. Public domain.
The Manhattan Project and the two prototype nuclear weapons that ended World War 2 changed the way the world worked. A vast effort was subsequently expended developing novel applications for nuclear energy as both tools and weapons. In 1946, Hyman Rickover took a job at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His passion became nuclear power for warships.
The original plan was to use miniaturized nuclear reactors to drive US Navy destroyers. Rickover, however, felt that effort would be better expended on submarines.
The Navy, like all bloated military enterprises, enjoys a great deal of administrative inertia. Superior officers who disagreed with the driven little man had him assigned to an office in a disused female restroom in an effort to sideline his efforts. Rickover bulled his way through in the same way he did everything else in his life.
Pressurized Water, Unlimited Endurance, New Tactics
The USS Nautilus was the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine. The Nautilus fundamentally changed the nature of naval combat. Public domain.
In February of 1949, Rickover threw himself into the development of a pressurized water nuclear reactor for submarine propulsion. The prospects were indeed tantalizing. If he could pull this off, Rickover faced the possibility of a stealthy warship that could operate submerged indefinitely. With essentially unlimited energy, a theoretical nuclear-powered submarine could make its own breathable air and clean water.
It could patrol the world’s oceans at will, loitering as needed to avoid detection. At that point, crew endurance and food stores became the limiting factors in operational deployment. Rickover felt that this was a crusade worth fighting for.
His was an inexplicably unpopular position. As a result, Captain Rickover’s superiors wanted him put out of the Navy for failure to achieve flag rank. The list of names the Navy submitted to the US Senate in 1953 for congressional approval of admiral rank did not include Rickover’s.
Where approval of this list is typically a fairly routine, perfunctory thing, the Senate, in this case, refused its blessing without Rickover. The Secretary of the Navy subsequently convened a special promotion board with the express purpose of approving Rickover for that list. The US Senate left the exchange happy, and Rickover got his star.
This is the S1W nuclear reactor that powered the USS Nautilus. It represented cutting-edge 1950s-era engineering. Public domain.
The S1W reactor that Rickover developed was a miracle of 1950s-era technology. Highly reliable and exceptionally safe, this device would fit into a submarine hull with a 28-foot beam. In 1954, the US Navy commissioned the USS Nautilus, powered by an S1W. The Nautilus was the world’s first operational nuclear-powered submarine.
Safety Record That Shamed The Soviets
The Nautilus suffered an underwater collision with the American aircraft carrier USS Essex in 1966. However, none of Rickover’s boats ever suffered a serious reactor failure. Public domain.
Building a compact, self-contained nuclear power plant was a Gordian challenge. Making that device safe to operate for long periods underneath the sea bordered on impossible. However, Rickover pulled it off.
Over the course of the Russian nuclear submarine program, there have been fourteen known catastrophic reactor breaches. Thanks to Rickover and his superhuman compulsion for detail, the US Navy has had none. Spillover tech from US Navy nuclear programs contributed substantially to the safety of American terrestrial reactors as well.
The Interview Chair Trick And Other Rickover Tortures
Rickover was driven beyond all reason. He was also a miserable boss. He personally supervised the launch and shakedown sortie of every nuclear boat launched on his watch. During his tenure as chief of the Navy’s nuclear programs, every candidate for the nuclear power course had to interview with him personally. The content and nature of these interviews became the stuff of legend.
I have a friend who survived his encounter with Rickover. He said that, for starters, Rickover sawed off the front two legs of the chair you sit in a bit shorter than the back two. This meant that if you tried to get comfortable during the interview, you would gradually slide forward out of the chair. Rickover then proceeded to grill you mercilessly just to see how you responded under pressure. Candidates who lost their composure were remanded to Rickover’s unlit coat closet for a time to regain their wits before resuming their interviews.
Power, Eccentricity, And The Personal Submarine
If I were as rich and cool as this guy, I’d be weird, too. Public domain.
All seriously powerful people are eccentric. These eccentricities either drive them to their unusual positions or develop subsequent to their arrival. I would submit Elon Musk, Howard Hughes, Donald Trump, George Soros, Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Putin as examples. These eccentricities are not necessarily bad. However, there inevitably results a sense of entitlement to one degree or another.
I’m not blaming these people. Were I Elon Musk with half a billion dollars in the bank and my own rocket ship company, I’d expect some cool perks as well. In Rickover’s case, he felt he needed a personal submarine.
CIA vs Rickover Over Nuclear Turf
The nuclear submarine USS Halibut was eventually acquired by the CIA for clandestine use during the Cold War. Hyman Rickover was absolutely livid over that. Public domain.
At such rarefied levels, military operations often distil down to petty little turf wars. Flag officers are absolutely insane about maintaining their own little fiefdoms. Hyman Rickover felt that all nuclear-powered submarines should answer to him personally. Naval Intelligence and the CIA felt otherwise.
The CIA co-opted the USS Halibut as an underwater intelligence gathering platform as part of Operation IVORY BELLS. IVORY BELLS was a fabulously successful initiative designed to locate, isolate, and tap Soviet underwater communication cables.
The communists assumed the cables were secure, so they did not bother encrypting their communications. Once we tapped into these cables, we could surveil Russian military activities in real time with no one being the wiser.
NR-1 The Tiny Nuclear Sub That Went Where Divers Could Not
NR-1 was a small nuclear-powered submarine that was originally proposed as a search and rescue vessel. Reality was a good bit murkier. Public domain.
The very existence of the Halibut was like sand on Hyman Rickover’s eyeballs. When he realized that the CIA wasn’t going to give its spy submarine to him, Rickover decided that the next best thing would just be to build his own. Rickover’s personal nuclear-powered midget sub was designated NR-1. NR-1 was launched in 1969 at a cost of $30 million. That would be about a quarter billion dollars today.
NR-1 was an exceptionally capable machine. She could safely descend more than 2,300 feet deep and use her remote manipulator arms to do Sneaky Pete stuff on the ocean floor at depths well beyond the capabilities of even hard-suit divers. To thrive at those depths, the hull had to be perfectly circular and utterly uniform. Tolerances were less than a millimeter all around. Under Rickover’s direction, naval engineers pulled it off.
Not even the Father of the Nuclear Navy could write a check for a quarter billion bucks without some good reason. Rickover, therefore, declared that NR-1’s mission was actually Deep Sea Rescue. While an honorable pursuit, NR-1 didn’t technically possess the means to rescue anybody. It just went really, really deep.
Inside NR-1 What Made It Work
This is an early concept drawing of NR-1. You can see the truck tires on the bottom that allowed the sub to creep along the ocean floor and gather bits of discarded Russian kit. Public domain.
While NR-1 was an exceptionally capable machine, it was also cramped and fairly austere on the inside. Crew space for the 7-man complement was minimal, and support equipment for stuff like food preparation was decidedly suboptimal. The boat would sortie for up to a month at a time, during which the crew subsisted on instant TV dinners. However, the tech built into the vessel was unprecedented.
Lead shielding for submersible reactors is always a technical challenge in submarine design. NR-1 got around this by incorporating a single lead bulkhead that separated the miniaturized reactor in back from the crew spaces up front. Once complete, NR-1 would indeed operate submerged indefinitely. In actual practice, the limiting factor in operational deployments was the capacity of the toilet.
NR-1 incorporated a set of wheels on the bottom that allowed the sub to creep along the ocean floor. These wheels were equipped with otherwise standard Goodyear truck tires. One crewmember was positioned on his belly in the bottom of the sub behind a set of portholes. In this configuration, NR-1 crept along the sea floor gathering up the remains of Soviet nuclear missiles that splashed down after operational tests.
What We Know About NR-1 Missions And What We Don’t
NR-1 was a weird boat commissioned by kind of a weird guy. It was, however, undeniably cool. Public domain.
Even today, nobody is completely sure what NR-1 actually did operationally. Her conning tower and sail were painted orange in keeping with the charade that she was actually a search and rescue boat. In 1976, NR-1 located an F14 fighter jet that rolled off the deck of the USS John F. Kennedy and sank in 1,960 feet of water. Ten years later, she helped locate the remains of the space shuttle Challenger after it broke up in flight. NR-1 was formally retired in 2009.
Hyman Rickover served through thirteen Presidential administrations. Reagan eventually forced him to retire at age 82. Rickover was rendered apoplectic by that. Public domain.
Hyman Rickover got a special dispensation from Congress to spend a total of 63 years in uniform. He was the longest-serving member of the US armed forces in American history. Rickover served under thirteen different Presidential administrations and oversaw 3,000 ship-years of accident-free nuclear warship operations.
This is the second nuclear-powered attack submarine to be named after Hyman Rickover. It remains in service today. Public domain.
Despite his legendarily grueling work ethic, Rickover was married twice and fathered one child. His first wife died of natural causes after 41 years of marriage. The Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine USS Hyman Rickover was commissioned in 2021 and remains in active service today.
Despite this draconian approach, or more likely because of it, US Navy nuclear power officers have earned a righteous reputation for excellence in both military and civilian circles. Rickover succumbed to a stroke in 1986 at age 86, four years after he retired from the Navy. His nicknames included “The Father of the Nuclear Navy,” “The Kindly Old Gentleman,” or, simply, “KOG.” Rickover’s ghost still drives the Navy’s nuclear power program to this day.
NR-1 Specifications And Quick Reference
Model
NR-1
Caliber
N/A
Barrel Length
N/A
Overall Length
N/A
Weight
N/A
Capacity
7 crew
MSRP
$30,000,000 (1969)
Pros And Cons Of Rickover’s NR-1 Legacy
Pros: Extreme depth capability, remarkable safety culture, innovative mission systems like manipulator arms and seafloor wheels.
Cons: Cramped crew conditions, limited galley, ambiguous official mission, zero true rescue capability despite the cover story.
Gen. Buford : Whole damn Reb army’s gonna be here. They’ll move through this town, occupy these hills on the other side, and when our people get here Lee’ll have the high ground, and there’ll be the devil to pay! The high ground! Meade’ll come in slowly, cautiously, new to command. They’ll be on his back from Washington.
Wires hot with messages. “Attack! Attack!” So he will set up a ring around these hills. And when Lee’s army is all nicely entrenched behind fat rocks on the high ground, Meade’ll finally attack, if he can coordinate the army. Straight up the hillside, out in the open, in that gorgeous field of fire. We will charge valiantly… and be butchered valiantly! And afterwards, men in tall hats and gold watch fobs will thump their chests and say what a brave charge it was.
[he takes off his hat and rubs his head in resignation]
Gen. Buford : Devin, I’ve led a soldier’s life, and I’ve never seen anything as brutally clear as this. It’s as if I can actually see the blue troops in one long, bloody moment, goin’ up the long slope to the stony top. As if it were already done… already a memory.
An odd… set… stony quality to it. As if tomorrow has already happened and there’s nothin’ you can do about it. The way you sometimes feel before an ill-considered attack, knowin’ it’ll fail, but you cannot stop it. You must even take part, and help it fail.
Gen. Buford : We have twenty-five hundred men. They’ll be comin’ in force. There’ll be twenty thousand comin’ down that road in the morning. If we hold this ridge for a couple hours, we can keep ’em away. If we can block that road ’til the main body gets here, we can deprive the enemy of the high ground!
Gen. Buford : We can force the Rebs to deploy. That’s a narrow road they’ll be comin’ down. We stack ’em up, it’ll take ’em a while to get on track, to get into position. Is Calef’s battery up yet?
Gen. Buford : How far back is Reynolds with the main force?
Cavalry Officer : About ten miles, sir. Not much more.
[Gamble and his aide gallop up at full speed]
Col. William Gamble : Sir, you were right. My scouts report the Reb army is comin’ this way, and that’s for sure. They’re all concentratin’ in this direction.
[Buford sighs and looks in the direction of the Confederates’ approach]
Gen. Buford : We’re gonna hold here in the morning. Long enough for Reynolds and the infantry to arrive. We hang onto the high ground, we have a chance to win this fight that’s comin’. Understood?
Officers : Yes, sir.
Gen. Buford : Post the cannon along this road, the Chambersburg Pike. The Rebs’ll hit us at dawn, but I think we can hold ’em for at least two hours.
Gen. Buford : Rebs’ll hit us just about first light. Keep a clear eye! Let’s have the pickets give us a good warning. All right, gentlemen. Let’s get posted.
Gen. Buford : There’s an old Indian saying: “Follow the cigar smoke, find the fat man there.”
Gen. Buford : [as the Confederates try their first attack] Got one brigade in position and that’s all. We got the best damn ground around and they’re hitting me with one brigade… lovely. Lovely!
[turns around and looks with his binoculars for Gen. Reynolds, seeing no sign]
