Sultana

by Alan Huffman

  Maddox got caught in the intestinal crossfire in October while on a series of reconnaissance missions in northern Alabama. Though he had been in the army only a few weeks, it would have been obvious that the list of potential killers was long. The microcosm of camp was as hot as any battlefield, with weakened soldiers playing host to a raucous swap meet of excited and deadly pathogens. The soldiers’ only hope was that a bout would last a few days and be gone, though the troubles had a way of coming back.

  Diarrhea is caused by a variety of opportunistic microbes, most of which thrive where people are crowded together in unsanitary conditions. Civil War camps had no conventional bathrooms or access to clean water and nutritious food was limited. As the men shod their horses, wrote letters home, played cards, or flicked lice from their clothes, legions of germs, bacteria, and viruses met, coupled, feasted, and fought inside their digestive tracts. Perhaps the men joked about it at first, but as the sufferer took on a dangerous pallor and began having trouble walking, the laughter died away.

  The troubles got comparatively little play in the written record, aside from official tallies of casualties, in which diarrhea was sometimes identified as dysentery. Even in private diaries it was rarely discussed in any detail. What was there to say? I’m tired of watching my life dribble away into the stinking leaves. A soldier might record in his journal the number of times he was stricken that day, as a way of charting the progress of the malady, but more often he simply noted that he was “still sick.” Even today, nearly a century and a half later, when Civil War reenactors stage cinematic mock battles and encampments, diarrhea is not a prominent feature of the historical play. The reenactments lack the awful details of rotting horse carcasses, camps ringed by cesspools, fistfights, and other troubling facts of life for men who endured being crowded together in a succession of rank and hostile environments for months at a time. There are no piles of amputated arms and legs outside the faux surgeons’ tents, no disturbing stains on the seats of the soldiers’ pants, no reenactors salving saddle sores or high-stepping to the woods. Somewhere, out of sight, there is toilet paper.

  Civil War soldiers were accustomed to many privations that people today would consider intolerable, but faced with the prospects of thousands of men exchanging parasites, germs, and diseases, the army had to institute at least rudimentary sanitation measures to keep its soldiers functional. At the start of the war, the camps tended to be reasonably clean. Tents were pitched in orderly lines, with designated latrines drained by hand-dug ditches. There were regimental guidelines for just about everything. Each man carried half a tent—a rectangle of white cotton canvas to which his mate adjoined a complementary piece to assemble a shared shelter. The day began with a bugle call summoning them to reveille, or roll call, though typically the men were still pulling on their boots and stuffing in their shirt tails as they fell in line. After roll call there was a mass exodus to the latrines, which were not pleasant places but were at least situated and engineered logically.

  In long-term camps, the soldiers sometimes built small log huts to replace their tents, complete with stick-and-mud chimneys, and arranged their possessions inside just so, perhaps with a candle mounted on the butt-end of a bayonet stuck in the ground by which to read and write letters. This was all done with the knowledge that their lodgings were temporary. As John Billings observed, “It was aggravating after several days of exhausting labor, of cutting and carting and digging…to have boot-and-saddle call blown, summoning the company away, never to return to that camp, but to go elsewhere and repeat their building operations.” During the long marches, when skirmishes and chance encounters with the Rebels were common, camps were established hurriedly wherever the men found themselves, and they were likely to be struck with equal haste. Formerly essential items were often left behind, and there was no time to dig even crude latrines. A soldier might “wash” his knife and fork by running them into and out of the dirt a few times. Clothes went unchanged for months at a time, seldom washed because there was neither the time nor the means. Opportunities for thorough bathing likewise became increasingly few and far between. The result was that even short-term camps quickly grew foul, and as the war intensified, order became harder to maintain, never more so than on extended marches and raids.

  Army life is notorious for its rampant testosterone, which during the Civil War occasionally led to fights and attracted camp followers, who brought their own ingredients to the already volatile epidemiological mix. By bringing together men and sometimes women from different backgrounds and regions in the crowded, generally unsanitary environment of camp, the war helped spread disease and enabled the formation of explosive new combinations of the sort that nature seems to love. The mix of stress, squalor, and occasional violence both contributed to and exacerbated the problem. Maybe a soldier was playing cards, or riding with the column through unfamiliar terrain, or on solitary picket duty when he suddenly felt the stabbing pain in his gut and thought, Not now. This is not a good time. In fact, there was never a good time, though some times were worse than others, such as when a soldier was stuck in the saddle on a long foray through hostile territory.

  Maddox got sick while the 39th Indiana was camped at a temporary fort near Stevenson, Alabama, a small rail crossing on the Tennessee River. The 39th was then mounted infantry—basically foot soldiers who traveled on horses—and the men spent most of their time roving the countryside in the vicinity of Chattanooga, guarding railroads and river crossings. Sometimes they chased the Rebels; sometimes the Rebels chased them. The fighting was sporadic, unpredictable, and amorphous, shifting randomly back and forth through forests and fields. The men camped in remote bivouacs and subsisted mostly on stale hardtack, beans laced with weevils, and salt pork and beef that were tough as leather yet laden with parasites and germs. One night Colonel Harrison observed long lines of lights among the distant trees, from the fires and lamps of an army camp. He heard the movements of horses and artillery but could not tell if the lurking figures were enemies or friends. It would not have been a good time to wander off into the trees alone.

  In late September and early October, the 39th was dispatched on a manhunt through east Tennessee in pursuit of the Confederate guerilla Champ Ferguson, whose men were reviled by Union troops as ruthless cut-throat raiders. Ferguson and his men had allegedly murdered a group of black Union troops and their white officers as they were recuperating in a military hospital, and they ceased the slaughter only after a band of Cherokee Indians and highland vigilantes arrived to drive them away. Bizarre rumors circulated around Ferguson—that he decapitated prisoners and rolled their heads down hillsides as a joke, that he killed elderly, bedridden men. If Harrison’s men encountered him he was to be executed on the spot. A soldier would want to be in fighting trim when he went after a man like Champ Ferguson. In the end, the manhunt turned out to be a wild goose chase. The 39th roamed a network of inscrutable switchback roads, past hardscrabble farms, through the deceptively beautiful mountains, without ever finding Ferguson or his men. Eventually the 39th was summoned back to Nashville to receive its new designation as the 8th Cavalry and to take on two companies of new recruits. From there they headed south, past Chattanooga, deeper into enemy territory.

  Harrison set up his first field headquarters in a tavern at a place called Poe’s Crossroads, where he awaited further orders. While there, his men contended with bands of Rebels who stole horses, menaced the guards posted at the all-important river crossings, and destroyed railroads that provided the Union lines of supply. Harrison’s troops were hungry and in many cases sick, and he was reluctant to press farther until he had been issued more rations and replenished his lost wagons, horses, and mules. It took tons of food to support seven hundred fifty men and horses and more than a hundred mules, and the logistics of transporting even minimal supplies, including medicine, were complex. Often there was not enough loot to sustain them in the countryside. In one report Harrison lamented, “We are now 50 miles from rat
ions and 25 miles from forage. We cannot ration our men and forage ore’ horses with the transportation on hand. The discrepancy is becoming serious.”

  The day after Harrison filed his dispatch, he was ordered to a ferry crossing on the Tennessee River known, coincidentally, as Harrison’s Landing, where his men lingered in nervous ignorance, interrogating any civilians who came their way, sinking all the boats they could not use, and wondering what would happen next. The region was conflicted about the war, and that resulted in frequent guerilla and revenge attacks. At Rankin’s Ferry a young black boy was caught transporting Rebel mail and arrested as a spy. At Harrison’s Landing a local white woman arrived in camp to provide information about the movements of Confederate troops. The soldiers were fearful of being overpowered, and it was often difficult to tell who was on their side.

  The 39th had been in the vicinity of Harrison’s Landing the previous summer, before Maddox and Tolbert arrived, doing much the same thing, though the circumstances were serene by comparison. John Barrett, a soldier with the 39th who was present during the previous picket, wrote to his brother to say the Rebels were camped directly across the river and that he and a few fellow Union soldiers had gone bathing there one evening and conversed with one of them as he sat on the opposite bank. At night the bands of the two armies battled it out in song, and at one point four Illinois soldiers surreptitiously crossed the river and allowed themselves to be captured and released on parole, which meant that according to the rules of war they were prohibited from fighting until they had been officially exchanged. “They were tired of the service,” Barrett observed.

  By the fall of 1863, however, encounters between the opposing armies were uniformly hostile, and when Harrison’s men were sent to guard the river crossing at Stevenson, their base was a rudimentary fort—a ring of earthworks on a hill within firing range of the local supply depots, warehouses, and the two railroads that intersected in the small town. The site of the fort would one day become a popular spot for mountain bikers, then a police shooting range, and eventually a city park, but in October 1863 it was a lonely, dangerous outpost, and it was where the war got inside Maddox for the first time.

  As a boy Maddox had suffered through typhoid fever, which was arguably a greater threat than diarrhea, but he was now far from adequate medical care, in a hostile land. He had no choice but to tough it out. When the troops were ordered back to Nashville, he was admitted to a military hospital, and his diarrhea eventually ran its course. But as often happened, his recovery was more of a remission. The troubles would haunt him not only during the rest of the war but off and on for the rest of his life.

  Chapter Four

  THE RAIDS

  FROM THE LATE FALL OF 1863 THROUGH THE FOLLOWING spring, the soldiers of the 8th Cavalry got to know the area between Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Ringgold, Georgia, perhaps better than they wanted to. They were assigned to courier duty, which meant ferrying messages and supplies, foraging, and serving as sentinels. Now and then they engaged Rebel cavalry. Travel was difficult over roads that became muddy and rutted once the winter rains set in, and they had little protection from the elements other than their rubber blankets and, for some, broad-brimmed hats.

  Summerville’s 2nd Indiana followed a similar routine, and by Christmas the two cavalries were operating in tandem through north Georgia. Twice they visited the farm of Champ Ferguson, where they captured supplies that his men had confiscated from the Union Army. They caught a few Confederate stragglers and stripped them of their mounts, arms, and clothes before turning them loose. There was not much notable action, aside from one fight that earned the 8th accolades. After watching a small detachment overwhelm forces under the vaunted Confederate General Joseph Wheeler in February, Union General William Carlin wrote in a dispatch, “On arriving within 500 yards of the town, Colonel Harrison, with only 25 men, charged on the enemy and put him to a most disgraceful flight…This was the most gallant and handsome exploit of cavalry I ever witnessed. Had it occurred in the early days of the war it would have immortalized the gallant men engaged in it.”

  Such encounters presaged even more intense cavalry engagements the following summer. In April and May, the 8th was furloughed, which gave the men a brief respite before the most rigorous work detail many of them would undertake during the war: A series of exhausting raids into western Georgia aimed at disrupting the lines of supply to the Confederate stronghold in Atlanta. During the raids the men would ride for days, shifting from one haunch to the other, stomachs growling, eyes caked with dust, dry-mouthed and saddle-sore, alternately anxious and bored. The raids were about as far as an organized force could get from formal warfare, which was both exciting and uniquely taxing.

  In the campaign leading up to the siege of Vicksburg, Union General U.S. Grant had learned that his infantry could operate without a fixed line of supply by living off provisions confiscated from the local residents. It had been a radical concept at the time, but Grant’s success proved that it could be done. By the time the 8th and other associated troops departed on their Georgia raids, living off the land—in the most brutal way—was an established practice in the Union cavalry. But being cut off so far behind enemy lines, and meanwhile attracting the attention of Confederate troops by raiding arsenals, towns, and farms, they faced new and pressing dangers. Their most reliable lifelines proved to be their horses, which enabled them to get into and out of trouble quickly.

  Horses have been used to wage war for thousands of years, and during the Civil War they were used extensively by the cavalries of both armies for reconnaissance, marches, delaying actions, and raids. Superior weapons had reduced the effectiveness of traditional cavalry charges, and during organized battles most cavalrymen, like mounted infantry, fought on foot. But during the marches and raids, the men were still likely to engage the enemy from the saddle. Horses enabled them to cover broad expanses while pursuing and eluding their enemies, and good mounts were prized for their ability to endure hunger and thirst, to remain manageable during violent encounters, and to survive long, grueling marches.

  The Confederate cavalrymen were considered superior to their Northern counterparts in the early years of the war because the Rebels tended to have more personal experience with horses, having raced them for sport and grown accustomed to riding them for long distances. Rebel cavalrymen were also more familiar with the terrain they were passing through. General Sherman made no secret of his lack of confidence in his own cavalry. By the summer of 1864 they were learning the ropes, though the added mobility of a horse could become a liability if a soldier got lost, which happened fairly frequently.

  During marches that lasted for weeks, often for twenty hours a day with only brief rests, the column traveled at a rate of about four miles per hour—fast enough to be “killing to horses,” as Massachusetts cavalryman Charles Adams put it. “An officer of cavalry needs to be more horse-doctor than soldier, and no one who has not tried it can realize the discouragement to Company commanders in these long and continuous marches,” Adams observed. “You are a slave to your horses…”

  More than a million horses died or were killed during the war. In addition to being shot or hit by cannonballs, they broke their legs on rough terrain and died of exhaustion, infection, and disease. Aside from his gun and his own life, a cavalryman’s mount was his most valuable possession; yet, few kept the same mount from beginning to end. A few soldiers took their own horses to war, accepting the risk because they were confident of the animals’ behavior, but most, including Tolbert and Maddox, had to make do with whatever mounts the army (or unfortunate local civilians) provided. A good cavalry horse could be ridden hard, fast, and long and performed to its utmost, whether out of excitement over the chase or in blind obedience to its rider. It was not unusual for a horse to run itself to death. A good horse anticipated its rider’s needs and could respond to his shifting weight and the changing stimuli of a fight with minimal reining. Losing a good horse was a major setback, but it
happened often, and cavalry soldiers had no choice but to find new mounts and press on. The heavy behind-the-scenes work was usually done by mules, which were famously durable and less finicky than horses but more temperamental, prone to kicking and biting, and averse to conflict. Horses had a steadier disposition and “under fire behaved better than men,” Billings wrote.

  When horses flagged, the soldiers had two choices: To send them to the rear or to force them to continue until they dropped. “I do my best for my horses and am sorry for them;” Adams wrote, “but all war is cruel and it is my business to bring every man I can into the presence of the enemy, and so make war short. So I have but one rule, a horse must go until he can’t be spurred any further, and then the rider must get another horse as soon as he can seize on one.”

  “Every few weeks a veterinary surgeon would look over the sick-list of animals, and prescribe for such as seemed worth saving or within the reach of treatment, while others would be condemned, led off, and shot,” Billings wrote. Burying dead horses was among the more loathsome tasks in camp, not only because of the stench but because the pits had to be so large and the carcasses had to be manhandled into them. Not surprisingly, dead horses were not buried on the march, and particularly after skirmishes and battles, the roads were often littered with their carcasses for miles.