Edgar Miller did not want to participate in the Civil War or "War Between the States." He regarded Negroes as an inferior race and doubted that they were fitted for any better life than slavery.Certainly, he did not want to fight in a war to liberate them from their masters. Also, he could see no particular reason why the southern states should not be allowed to secede from the Union if they chose to.

For these reasons, he sought to hire a replacement to go in his place if he were to be inducted into the Army . This was being fairly commonly done in large east coast cities. Unfortunately, he found that he did not have enough money. Foolishly, he tried to borrow the money from his father who immediately flew into a rage.

"You despicable cowardly ingrate !" thundered Judge Theophilus Miller. "Your great-grandfather, Eliphalet Miller, gave his life in the War for Independence to establish our Federal Union. Your grandfather, Alcibiades Miller, lost his right arm defending that Union against the British in 1814. I attempted to enlist in the Army during the Mexican War but was rejected because of my extreme myopia. But YOU hold our Federal Union in such little esteem as to attempt to avoid your responsibility to it by hiring another to serve in your place ! You ought to be PROUD to have an opportunity to serve your country, you pusillanimous poltroon !"

Edgar resigned himself to the prospect of induction into the Army to fight in a war in which he did not believe. And, indeed, that was exactly what befell him. In March, 1861, at the age of 18, Edgar Miller was inducted into the United States Army and sent to camp for training. When he could not somehow avoid them, he performed his duties in a negligent and perfunctory way. It was not long before his superiors recognised him as a slacker. Various punitive duties, such as peeling potatoes, in no way improved his performance.

He avoided going to the infirmary with imaginary ailments because he had heard that a man could be shot for malingering. However, he also chanced to hear that a

young man had been rejected for military service because of excessive masturbation.

He was uncertain whether grounds for rejection would also be considered grounds for discharge , but decided that it was worth trying.

So, after slightly more than three weeks of training duty, he reported to the infirmary on sick call one morning and talked to Captain Pelham, the medical officer. Captain Roderick S. Pelham. M.D. had a keen eye for malingerers and a deep contempt for them.

He listened silently and expressionlessly as Edgar claimed to have been struggling without avail with an ungovernable masturbation habit for the past five years. The young man who stood before him looked as unlike the classic excessive masturbator as anyone he had ever seen. He was bright-eyed, clear-skinned, slightly stout, not obviously either nervous or exhausted, indeed, the picture of vigorous good health.

Dr. Pelham decided to give the youth enough rope to hang himself.

"How often do you masturbate ?" asked Dr. Pelham. "Well," replied Edgar," It varies a lot depending on opportunity, but seldom less than three and often five or six times a day." Dr. Pelham merely nodded. "And how old were you when you started masturbating several times daily ?" Edgar pondered for a moment and then replied "I guess about thirteen, Sir." Tightening the noose, Dr. Pelham inquired, I suppose that you have made many unsuccessful efforts to stop."

"Oh yes, Sir" answered Edgar. "And, what happens to make you resume abusing yourself ? asked Dr. Pelham. " I become unbearably nervous and shaky and I have an irresistible compulsion to do it. I can't keep my hands away from my member and I just have to do it. If , by an extreme effort, I abstain for three or four days, my testicles ache."

Dr. Pelham nodded again and then asked "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with a girl or a woman ?" Edgar then told the truth for the first time in this farrago of lies. "Er, no, Sir; I'm not interested in women." Dr. Pelham raised his eyebrows.

"Boys ?" Edgar hung his head and softly whispered "Yessir." This, if true (and it was) could constitute grounds for discharge, but Dr. Pelham had his justifiable grounds to doubt Edgar's word.

Tightening the noose another notch, Dr. Pelham asked, "I take it, then, that you have no intention of marrying or of begetting offspring ?" Edgar sighed and answered "No, Sir." Dr. Pelham had come to a decision." Well, Private Miller, I want to examine you to determine how much damage has been done by your masturbatory excesses. Go into the next room." he said, gesturing to a door," and remove all of your clothing. I'll be in shortly to examine you."

As soon as Edgar had left, Capt. Pelham summoned his two orderlies, Cpls Lewis and Cummings. "Go into the operating room and await me there. I shall need you to assist me in performing a bilateral orchiectomy."

In the nude, Private Miller's appearence confirmed the impression of radiant good health. Dr. Pelham shined a light into Edgar's eyes with a mirror and examined them. There was no evidence of retinal hemorrhage . Watching the Regulator clock on the wall, Dr. Pelham timed Private Miller's pulse, 65 beats per minute, quite normal. The pulse in his carotid arteries was quite normal and there was no pronounced pulsation in the temples. In short, none of the usual precursors of apoplexy to be expected in an excessive onanist were present. Dr. Pelham listened to Edgar's breathing and heartbeat and found them entirely normal.

Next, he directed his attention to Edgar's sexual organs which, if he masturbated as frequently as he claimed, ought surely to show some signs of wear and tear. He retracted Edgar's unusually long foreskin, exposing the glans penis which showed no signs of frictional irritation, nor did the foreskin itself show any evidence of abuse. The skin of the member was smooth and the veins were neither prominent nor varicose.

Palpation of the testicles revealed them to be of normal consistency and sensitivity. The epididymes were neither congested nor enlarged. There was no evidence of varicocele. Dr. Pelham was beginning to suspect that, not only did Edgar Miller not masturbate excessively, he probably didn't masturbate at all ! There was one last test to perform, however. Dr. Pelham greased his index finger and ordered Private Miller to bend over. He inserted his finger into Edgar's rectum, found his prostate gland and palpated it. There was no evidence of boggy degeneration. the gland was elastic and, though slightly distended , of normal size. Dr. Pelham massaged the gland with the tip of his index finger and Edgar suddenly shook and moaned and discharged a large volume of semen onto the floor, forming, to his intense embarrassment, a large white puddle.

Cpl Cummings cleaned it up while Dr. Pelham washed his hands. Then, assuming a grave worried expression, he turned to Edgar and said, "It's fortunate that you came to see me about this, Private. Luckily, there is a simple cure for excessive masturbation which has been used for about twenty years at the Ohio State Hospital, and even longer by Dr. Crosby in Massachusetts. It must be done immediately. Lie down on the table.

Cummings, Lewis, strap him down in the usual fashion: ankles, wrists, a wide strap around the waist and another across the chest. " This was done so swiftly and efficiently that Private Miller didn't even have time to think about what was going on before he was immobilized. "Er, Sir, what is this cure ?" asked Edgar in a very concerned tone. "Why, castration, to be sure." answered Dr. Pelham with a smile. " WHAT ? Oh no !" Edgar was shocked and horrified. "Oh come now," said Dr. Pelham with a chuckle. "You don't intend to marry or have children. You have nothing to lose but a bad habit."

Edgar realized that he had fallen into a trap of his own making. He dared not admit that he had been lying. He'd be court-martialed. "The cure is 100% successful." continued Dr. Pelham. "Take it from me: after you have been castrated, you'll never masturbate again." Edgar's eyes filled with tears. "But, but...." Dr. Pelham shook his head. "No 'buts'. After all, we can't have you messing about with boys, either, now can we ? After you're castrated, you'll have no further interest in them."

Dr. Pelham laid a gauze pad over Edgar's mouth and nose and began dripping ether onto it, instructing him to count slowly to ten. By "five", Edgar's speech was slurred and "six" was nearly unrecognizable; he never reached "seven". "Cummings" ordered Dr. Pelham, "blow up the fire in the charcoal brazier there and get the cautery as close to white heat as you can. Keep it well away from here, though. We don't want an ether explosion. "

Dr. Pelham snipped away the scrotum with surgical scissors slightly more than an inch from the unconscious recruit's body, thus fully exposing both testicles. He grasped the testicles and pulled them while massaging Edgar's groins with his left hand to expose as much of the spermatic cords as possible. Then he clamped the cords with haemostats close to the body. He then snipped the spermatic cords about 3/8" from the haemostats with the surgical scissors and discarded the testicles and the empty scrotum, throwing them into a waste crock under the operating table.

"Very well, Cummings", said Dr. Pelham. "Bring the cautery over here." It was yellow-hot and, with it, Dr. Pelham seared the ends of the spermatic cords, taking special care to seal the spermatic arteries and veins. The doctor carefully loosened the right haemostat slightly to determine if there would be any leakage of blood. There was none, and he released the haemostat. The spermatic cord retracted into the inguinal canal, out of sight, out of mind.

The left spermatic artery oozed slightly when he loosened the haemostat, so, Dr. Pelham clamped it again and cauterized the cord again. The next time he loosened the haemostat, there was no oozing of blood. He released the haemostat and the cord retracted into the inguinal canal. He handed the cautery, now only red-hot, to Cpl Cummings who returned it to the brazier.

Only suturing the remaining portion of the scrotum remained to be done. his was accomplished only minutes before Private Miller regained consciousness. When he awoke, Edgar raisaed his head and looked down at the operation sits. All he saw was his now useless penis and a gauze pad held in place by two linen bandages which crossed on the pad, and passed over his hips and around his waist. Though he managed not to sob, his eyes filled with tears.

"There", said Dr. Pelham, "you're cured. If you ever masturbated, you never will again." Edgar realized then that Dr. Pelham hadn't believed his cock-&-bull story about habitual masturbation for a moment, and had castrated him not to cure him of excessive masturbation, but of malingering.

Edgar was devastated. He was no longer a man. "You will spend a week in bed rest here in the infirmary," Captain Pelham told him. " Then you can resume light duty for a week, after which I shall remove the stitches, after which you will be fit to return to duty. After all, a soldier doesn't need testicles to perform his duties. You're going to fight the Rebels, not fuck them." The vulgarity shocked Edgar. It was so atypical of the gentlemanly officer.

Edgar was very sick and feverish for the next three days and had nothing to do for the entire week of bed rest but brood over his misfortune. Although he was not much interested in the prospect, he had thought that he might eventually develop an interest in women, ultimately leading to marriage and fatherhood. Well, he need no longer concern himself with that. What kind of a life could a eunuch have, he wondered ?

After his return to duty, Edgar applied himself, albeit unenthusiastically, to his training. He soon discovered that castration had deprived him of much of his strength and he found the physical demands made upon his body to be burdensome and exhausting, especially marching. The only part of his training which interested him was marksmanship .

He was among the first of those to be issued the new 1861 Springfield .58 calibre

rifled musket, which used percussion caps instead of the awkward and unreliable Maynard tape primer used in the 1855 rifled musket, until then, standard issue. Being a muzzle-loader, it was still slow to load, requiring thirty seconds if the shooter didn't drop anything . Luckily, the Rebel forces were armed with a similar rifled musket made in their own armouries, and, of course, no faster to load.

Not having inherited his father's myopia, Edgar proved to be a very good shot and, once in battle, soon learned the limitations of the '61 Springfield. He learned that, to hit a man where he intended to, the range had to be no greater than 60 yards . Out to 100 yards, he could be assured of hitting him somewhere, and from there on the likelikood of hitting him at all steadily decreased to less than 50% at 200 yards. [These figures do not agree with the official ballistics of the '61 Springfield, but are closer to realty.]

After his castration, Edgar Miller seemed to develop two distinctly different personalities. In camp, he was withdrawn , apathetic and taciturn. On the battlefield, he was feverishly excited, foolhardily reckless and cruel. When he shot at a Confederate soldier within 60 yards, he aimed to hit him between the thighs, thus destroying at least part of his male organs. The way the .58 calibre Minié ball from the rifled musket mushroomed on impact, it was very likely to destroy everything as it passed between a man's thighs. Edgar derived a strong guilty pleasure from the thought of castrating a Rebel in this way.

Of course, in a charge, a man with a musket gets only one shot. There is no time to reload. Therefore, he charges with a fixed bayonet so that he can use his weapon as a lance after he has used his one shot. Whenever possible, Edgar tried to thrust his bayonet between a man's thighs, castrating him. Then he would dodge to the side and hit the man on the side of the head with the stock of his rifled musket. It was very likely that the man would survive his injuries to wish that he had died.

In very close quarters, sometimes it came down to knife fighting. Edgar had bought himself an "Arkansas toothpick", a very large Bowie knife with a wide blade, nearly as formidable a weapon as the Roman short sword or gladius which Edgar had once seen in a museum. Several times he had cut the tendons of an opponent's wrist with his "Arkansas toothick" so that he dropped his knife, and then castrated the man with a quick thrust of his knife with the flat of the blade upward. He would then laugh insanely at the horrified and dismayed expression on the Rebel's face and go on his merry way. All of these terrible deeds, he duly recorded, with evident relish, in his diary.

Edgar had become a bloodthirsty madman, by his own later admission, a monster. Whether it was better to avoid killing men and castrate them is a moot point. Before 1863, he did not think about this issue. His letters to his father were brief, dutiful, and uninformative, until the Battle of Chancellorsville.

The Battle of Chancellorsville, April 30 to May 6, 1863, was the Union's worst defeat and the Confederacy's greatest victory. General Joseph Hooker's timidity and indecisiveness coupled with Generals Lee's and Jackson's boldness made it possible for a Confederate force of 60,892 men to defeat a Union force of 133,868 men ! In this battle, the Confederacy lost General Stonewall Jackson, the victim of his own bravado. Jackson exposed himself unnecessarily to Union fire and, when warned that it would be best to get down, laughed and said "Why, they couldn't hit an elephant at this.........".

In this same battle, Edgar Miller lost nearly half of his no longer virile member. A Confederate musket ball passed between his thighs and carried it away. Despite his recklessness, he had never heretofore been wounded . Suddenly, he discovered how much it hurt and had some realization of what he had been doing to others for two years. It also provided him with an excuse for losing his testicles, a fact which he had kept secret from both his father and his comrades in arms. In the first long letter which he had written to his father, he carefully avoids actually lying while giving a completely false impression.

"May 3rd, 1863.

Dear Father,

Well, finally, I have been blooded. Yesterday, a Confederate musket ball passed between my thighs and painfully and grievously wounded me. I regret to have to tell you that I shall never provide you with any grandchildren, for I am no longer a man. If I live to see the end of this cruel war, I have no idea what I shall do thereafter. What kind of work can a eunuch do ? There are no harems to guard here

(except, perhaps, in the Mormons' Kingdom of Zion).

You may well disagree with my opinion in this matter, Father, but I am convinced that , however righteous the cause may be, war is intrinsically EVIL ! It makes monsters of men who do , on the battlefield, shameful things which no decent man would do under other conditions. Please do not ask me to elaborate on this. It involves painful memories.

Give my regards to Mother and Kate.

Respectfully,

Edgar"

Note that Edgar does not actually say that it was his wound received at Chancellorsville which made him a eunuch, though he surely implies it. Also, there seems to be here the beginning of a revulsion against the maniacal cruelty which he had displayed on the battlefield throughout the war up to this point. Henceforth, his diary reveals no further mentions of battlefield castrations, formerly described in disgustingly gleeful detail.

The Battle of Gettysburg, about two months later (July 1-3, 1863) marked a turning point in the Civil War and in the life of Edgar Miller, now Corporal Edgar

Miller, as of May 10, 1863. At ten o'clock in the morning of July 2, 1863, Edgar Miller intentionally killed a Confederate soldier in hand-to-hand combat , and it broke his heart. Here is why, in his own words from his letter to his father written on Independence Day, July 4, 1863.

"............Two days ago, I killed a young Confederate soldier in self-defense in hand-to-hand combat. I am tormented by the thought that, had I been less startled and frightened, I might have spared his life. Needing to pass water, I had laid down my musket for a moment and was about to unbotton my trousers when a Confederate soldier armed only with a Bowie knife leaped at me from over a slight hillock before me. I grasped his right wrist with my left hand and drew my own Bowie knife. I looked into his face as I was plunging my blade into his heart and I was heartsick.

He was just a boy, surely not a day older than 15 years old, a beardless, apple-cheeked, freckled, blue-eyed boy, some mother's darling. As I saw the piteous look in his dying eyes, it wrung my heart and I bursted into tears. What was a child like that doing on a battlefield ? He ought to be home in the bosom of his loving family.

I needn't have killed him. I could have driven my knife into the palm of his hand, forcing him to drop his knife, rather than into his heart. I acted instinctively to save my own life, the worthless life of a barren eunuch. He could have grown up to marry and have children.

This is the worst of all of the terrible unspeakable things I have done in this war. Surely, I have earned myself a place in Hell. I know that his last piteous look will haunt me to my dying day. Where will I find the pity, the mercy, and the consolation which I do not deserve ?....."

This is surely not hypocrisy. It is genuine remorse. The madman has returned to his rightful mind and is overcome by the evil which he has wrought.

He wrote another less anguished but more embittered letter to his father three days later. "......and so, I resolved to seek counsel concerning the moral responsibility for the evil deeds done in war, for the most part at the behest of others, by consulting the Protestant chaplain, Mr. Thompson. I found him to be a pompous old fool content to offer consolation by dispensing shopworn Biblical platitudes. He was unable to answer the moral questions which I raised, perhaps, even to understand them.

I asked 'Does a man have the right to delegate the moral responsibility for his deeds to others even if they be in a position of authority over him ?' His reply was. 'Our Lord has said 'Render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar's and unto God those which are God's.' ' I don't think that that quotation is even relevant.

So, I asked, 'If, under constraint, a man does deeds which he knows are evil and wrong, is the guilt for them his or are those who constrained him to act so guilty ?'

He replied 'If you accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour, 'Though thy sins be as scarlet, thou shalt be as white as snow.' ' I asked then ' Do you mean, then, that the guilt is mine, but Jesus can take it upon himself ?'

He answered me saying 'Jesus is the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world.' Even though, I knew that I was treading upon perilous ground, I had to ask

'Even though He be the Son of God, by what moral authority does Jesus have the right to take upon himself the responsibility for my actions ? '

Mr. Thompson replied 'To God, all things are possible.' That doesn't answer my question at all. Possible, of course, but morally right ? I didn't bother to ask the old blowhard that question. I suppose that he would have told me that God, being a righteous God, whatever He doth is right. 'Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan.' I am not satisfied by such answers.

It seems to me that the responsibility for my actions is mine alone and is NOT delegable. Of course, by taking this position, I am damning myself to endless torment, for I can see no way to expiate my own guilt. If I were a Roman Catholic and believed in Purgatory, living with my guilt and shame in this world would qualify as at least a foretaste of Purgatory. "

During the remaining two years of the war, Edgar Miller never intentionally aimed his musket at a Confederate soldier. If he ever hit anyone, which he tried hard to avoid, it was accidental. Thus he sought to assuage his conscience which gave him no rest. In his last letter to his father before returning home after the war, Edgar had still not found peace, but he had found purpose in his life.

"June 5th, 1865.

Dear Father,

Now that this cruel war has ended, I cannot help wondering what it has accomplished. Supposedly, it has ratified by force of arms the Emancipation Proclamation. Now that the Negroes have been freed, will they be grateful to their liberators ? Will they distinguish between the white men who enslaved them and those who spilled their blood on the battlefields of the Civil War to free them ? Or will they hate all of us ? Only time will tell.

Also supposedly, our Federal Union has been preserved. Will it ever be the same as it was before the war ? This war has established, by force of arms, the Constitutional principle that the states are not autonomous and do not have the right to secede from the Union. Will not this status have to be maintained by coercion ? How many of those rights reserved to the states by the Constitution will they be forced to relinquish ?

I have not resolved any of the ethical conflicts which I discussed in my second letter from Gettysburg. However, reflecting upon them has enabled me to decide what to do with my life. I intend to enter a University and study, with the intent of investigating it thoroughly and ultimately becoming qualified to teach moral philosophy.

I cannot tell you how I regret not having been able to see Mother again before her passing last August. Alas, I have no expectation of seeing her in Heaven, for I cannot imagine that I am going there. Please give my love to Kate and my greetings to her husband.

With Sincere Filial Affection,

Edgar"