Mosquito Soldiers

by Andrew McIlwaine Bell

  The Union withdrawal emboldened Confederate commanders. At the end of July Major General Edmund Kirby Smith sent a letter to his superior, Braxton Bragg, explaining why he thought the Gulf States were safe from any further attacks. “The enemy will, I think, attempt no invasion of Mississippi or Alabama this summer,” Smith wrote. “The character of the country, the climate, and the necessity for concentration east are insurmountable obstacles.” He went on to argue that there was still time “for a brilliant summer campaign.” Bragg agreed and in August dispatched Smith and twenty-one thousand Confederates into Kentucky to begin a campaign that would culminate in the Battle of Perryville. In the wake of the Union retreat from Mississippi, the shaggy-browed general felt confident launching the invasion in the West which ultimately coincided with Lee’s drive into Maryland.10

  Although a number of factors accounted for Farragut’s failure to capture Vicksburg—including strong Confederate defenses, the city’s high altitude, and the rapid fall of the Mississippi River—anopheles mosquitoes also played an important role. The Union military could not afford to sustain such high disease casualties indefinitely and was forced to concede defeat. This loss, coupled with McClellan’s failure to capture Richmond during the same period (a campaign also affected by malaria), helped convince the Lincoln administration that only the complete subjugation of the South, including the dismantling of slavery, would restore the Union and bring peace. When the president told his cabinet that summer that he had decided to make emancipation one of the North’s primary war objectives, Secretary of State William Seward advised him to keep the decision under wraps until the Union achieved victory on the battlefield. Otherwise, reasoned Seward, the measure might look like the final act of a desperate and doomed government. Lincoln agreed and withheld his plan from the public until Union forces halted the Confederate invasion of Maryland in September 1862 at Antietam Creek.

  The president’s decision to emancipate slaves and arm them for the purpose of killing their former masters represented a radical departure from his earlier policies. Liberal Union generals such as David Hunter, James Lane, and John Phelps had already organized a handful of black regiments, but most of them were disbanded by a White House fearful of the political consequences. The military reversals of 1862, however, convinced Lincoln that emancipation and black enlistment were military necessities. Both policies strengthened northern forces while robbing the Confederacy of its chief labor force. Union medical personnel saw the issue from a slightly different perspective. A majority believed that African-American soldiers could better resist the diseases peculiar to the southern climate. This stereotype—a consequence of some blacks’ limited immunity to mosquitoborne illness—lingered for the duration of the war, even though it was challenged by surgeons who had African-American patients directly under their care. “Notwithstanding the supposed exemption of negroes from the climatic diseases of the South, I am constantly seeing cases of the same fevers and diarrhœas among them, which prevail among the soldiers, and apparently of equal severity and frequency,” wrote one northern surgeon from Memphis in August 1862, after treating a number of sick contrabands. “I am inclined to think that their power of resisting Southern climatic influences is greatly overestimated, though there is doubtless something to justify the common opinion on the subject.”11

  His enlightened views were not shared by most other Union officials. When Brigadier General John Phelps raised five companies of African-American soldiers in New Orleans without Washington’s approval, Butler told his subordinate to put them to work clearing brush and fortifying the rugged terrain between Lake Pontchartrain and the Union lines. When Phelps threatened to resign rather than obey an order he thought degrading to Union soldiers, Butler gently reminded him that only the president could authorize the raising of black units, something Lincoln had not yet done. Butler, who would flip-flop on the issue in a matter of weeks, also seemed genuinely surprised that Phelps failed to recognize the wisdom of his instructions: “You have said the location is not healthy to the soldier. It is not to the negro. Is it not best that these unemployed Africans should do this matter at the present time?”12

  Treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase, an early proponent of the use of African Americans as Federal soldiers, wrote to Butler in the wake of the Vicksburg fiasco explaining how the disease problem in the Gulf States and black freedom were related matters: “We cannot maintain the contest with the disadvantages of unacclimated troops and distant supplies against an enemy enabled to bring one-half the population under arms with the other half held to labor, with no cost except that of bare subsistence for the armed moiety.” For Chase a federal emancipation scheme would not only swell the Union ranks but would do so with men who could better endure the disease-ridden swamps of Mississippi. General Williams knew firsthand the “disadvantages” to which Chase was referring. He noted that the summer of 1862 was an especially unhealthy season along the river and that even those troops not on the sick list were “yet so affected by malaria as to be good for nothing.” Even the supposedly acclimated locals looked “thin, pale spiritless and yellow” to Williams. Several days after the withdrawal, he consoled himself with the hope that the Rebels at Vicksburg were equally sick.13

  Major General Earl Van Dorn’s Confederates were indeed ill, and malaria was responsible for a good deal of their suffering. W. J. Worsham was with the Nineteenth Tennessee Infantry and recalled that almost all the men in his outfit had “contracted chills” while stationed at Vicksburg. His description of the insect activity in the area explains why: “The enemy’s shells annoyed us, but there was another foe we had to contend with, more annoying than the enemy’s shells—the musquitoes, or, as the boys called them, ‘gallinippers.’ Roll up in your blanket ever so well, they would bite you. They would either get on the blanket with you and roll up with you, or they would bite you through all the folds.” Worsham and the men of the Nineteenth wanted “to leave the land of flowers, magnolias and chills,” but they were unable to obtain a transfer. A contingent of Kentuckians (William Preston’s brigade) arrived in Vicksburg “in as good health as they had ever been since they entered the service” but quickly fell prey to the poisonous climate of the Mississippi Delta. For most of these men it was their first season in the Deep South, and like their Federal enemies, they were unaccustomed to its diseases. In June the brigade had 1,822 men fit for duty, but by July the number had dropped to just over 1,200. Even soldiers who had grown up in the region got sick. A group of Alabamians at Vicksburg was hit hard by disease, while “measles, malaria,” and other ailments put close to 700 Louisianans out of commission in only one month’s time.

  Granville Alspaugh was a sixteen-year-old private with the Louisiana Twenty-seventh Infantry. “I tell you the chills & fever will hold you a long time if you dont do something for them,” he wrote to his mother after suffering with paroxysms every other day for two months. During one such episode Alspaugh was sweating so profusely he “could hardly stand.” The teenager also contracted measles but was eventually able to recover from both diseases. In spite of the widespread sickness in his command, Van Dorn decided that the time was right for an attack on the Union garrison at Baton Rouge and, if everything went according to plan, possibly on New Orleans as well. Williams’s Federals occupied the Louisiana state capital and were still recovering from the malaria they had acquired at Vicksburg when Van Dorn set his attack in motion on July 27. The Confederate commander ordered former vice president John C. Breckinridge to take five thousand healthy soldiers and connect with a smaller force stationed at a camp in northern Louisiana under the command of Massachusetts native Daniel Ruggles. From there Breckenridge and Ruggles were to march eighty miles south and capture Baton Rouge in order to “open the Mississippi, secure the navigation of Red River, then in a state of blockade, and also render easier the recapture of New Orleans.”14

  Malaria affected both armies during this campaign, which culminated in the Battle of Baton Rouge on August
5, 1862. Breckinridge could only find fewer than four thousand men healthy enough to make the trip from Vicksburg to Camp Moore (a “good number” could not go because of “chills”), and by the time the battle actually got under way, he had only twenty-six hundred effectives, with the rest either sick or dead. In one twenty-four-hour period, which included a “night march,” he lost four hundred men to disease. The general blamed “the effects of exposure at Vicksburg” for the “appalling” sick rate among his men, who were poorly clothed (many without shoes or coats) and had spent the hottest part of the summer at Vicksburg deprived of regular doses of quinine. Many of these soldiers were already carrying plasmodium parasites when they arrived in Louisiana and were experiencing recrudescent fevers as they marched toward Baton Rouge. The intense thirst generated by these fevers may explain why so many men ignored the advice of their surgeons and drank from the stagnant puddles they passed on the way to the front, causing an outbreak of dysentery. Some soldiers also ate “green corn” straight out of the fields during the march which made them sicker still.

  Williams’s bluecoats were in bad shape as well. He supposedly had seven thousand troops with which to defend Baton Rouge but could only find twenty-five hundred men healthy enough to fight on the day of the battle. Half of these men were still recovering from “malaria and chronic diarrhea” and were too weak to dig trenches around the city in preparation for the Confederate attack. As Breckinridge’s forces swung into action on the morning of the fifth, men on both sides were fighting sickness as well as each other. Confederate lieutenant L. L. Etter was suffering from a “high fever and intense thirst” and was shaking so violently he could barely stand but managed to stay with his fellow Tennesseans and battle the Fourteenth Maine Infantry, which was itself not at full strength on account of disease. A number of Union soldiers got up out of their sickbeds to participate in the battle. One captain with the Seventh Vermont Infantry, who was “seriously ill,” made a heroic effort to get to his unit, but exhaustion kept him from making it before the battle ended. S. K. Towle was a surgeon with the Thirtieth Massachusetts Infantry at Baton Rouge and reported that a minimum of four hundred of his men had been ill each day during the month of August “almost entirely from malarial diseases, chiefly remittent fevers.”15

  After a five-hour fight Breckinridge pulled his troops back to the Comite River, when word came that the CSS Arkansas—the South’s ironclad answer to the Union gunboats supporting Williams’s forces— had broken down four miles away. The exhausted and disorganized Union soldiers were in no condition to give chase, having lost their general to a Rebel musket ball earlier in the day. When Van Dorn learned of the Confederate repulse at Baton Rouge, he moved Breckinridge’s forces to Port Hudson, a key location on the Mississippi with greater strategic value than the Louisiana capital. With both Vicksburg and Port Hudson occupied by men wearing gray uniforms, Richmond controlled a hundred-mile stretch of the Mississippi River and was able to keep both halves of the Confederacy connected for another year. Seeing the futility of occupying a city with no real military value and worried about the safety of New Orleans, Butler withdrew his soldiers to the Crescent City. He praised them for having “repulsed in the open field” an enemy “who took advantage of your sickness from the malaria of the marshes of Vicksburg to make a cowardly attack.”16

  To the large number of men who were ill, Butler’s words offered little comfort. They arrived in New Orleans in a condition that shocked surgeon Eugene Sanger. “The patients complained of burning in the stomach and exhaustion,” he later reported. “They seemed wholly unconcerned whether they lived or died, and continually tossed to and fro until death relieved them from their sufferings.” A number of these cases responded to quinine treatments, indicating that malaria was definitely present and, based on the symptoms, may have been Plasmodium falciparum.

  Two months after being dispatched to capture Vicksburg, these regiments were back where they had started, a shadow of the proud and optimistic units they had once been. Disease, chiefly malaria, had helped check the campaign against Vicksburg and created a stalemate in Baton Rouge which ultimately gave the Confederacy an advantage in the region. If either side had been at full strength on August 5, it might have captured or destroyed the other and reigned supreme in lower Louisiana. Instead, Butler retreated to the relative safety of New Orleans, while Van Dorn secured Port Hudson, which was almost immediately reinforced by a Louisiana artillery battalion that authorities in Richmond thought “could stand the climate.” The Mississippi River remained closed until another general with greater resources and ambition found a way to take Vicksburg out of the war.17

  While mosquitoes sickened Butler’s and Halleck’s armies out West, the insects were adversely affecting Union military operations in the East. Four months before yellow fever killed Ormsby Mitchel, malaria had helped convince his predecessor, Major General David Hunter, to abort a campaign to capture Charleston. In early June 1862 Hunter had landed two divisions on the southern end of James Island (just below Charleston) and planned to move his forces up the Stono River toward the city that was the birthplace of secession. Capturing Charleston would have dealt a severe blow to southern morale and provided a launching point for future Federal operations. Facing a determined band of Confederates under the command of Brigadier General Nathan G. Evans, Hunter decided to delay his advance and wait for reinforcements.

  As the Union troops performed picket duty and awaited orders, clouds of mosquitoes attacked them “night and day,” leaving behind “poisonous and irritating” bites. One Connecticut soldier thought the insects “were the most awful enemies he ever encountered.” He and his battery camped in a cotton field and were “nearly devoured by fleas and mosquitoes.” Hunter’s careful planning, however, included daily drams of quinine and whiskey, which controlled the malarial parasites swimming in the soldiers’ bodies. But enforcement was lax, and many soldiers chose not to take the bitter-tasting medicine, especially after surgeons started dispensing it without whiskey. Malaria soon began to take its toll, along with other diseases such as typhoid fever. When one of Hunter’s subordinates, Brigadier General Henry Benham, disobeyed orders and launched a disastrous offensive that culminated in a Union loss at the Battle of Secessionville, Hunter realized his position was untenable and ordered a withdrawal. He wrote to Brigadier General H. G. Wright (Benham’s replacement) that having heard “from Washington that there is no probability of our receiving reenforcements, and it being all-important to provide for the health of the command in the sickly season approaching, I have determined to abandon James Island, in order that the troops may be placed where, in so far as practicable in this climate, they may be out of the way of malarious influences, and where the picket duty will not be so exhausting on our men as at present.”18

  Hunter knew that Washington was focused on the campaigns in Virginia and that the soldiers under his command would be decimated by disease if they dallied too long on James Island—a location reputed to be unhealthy even among supposedly acclimated southerners. His men complained about “the miasma rising from the saturated ground” and the suffocating vapors they believed were caused by a combination of heavy rains and broiling heat. Their Confederate enemies on James Island also suffered from malaria. Even before Hunter’s forces landed, South Carolina governor Francis Pickens worried that Charleston might be vulnerable to Union attack, knowing that a southern defense force could not survive on the island during the sickly season. John G. Pressley and a contingent of South Carolina volunteers guarded the area after Hunter’s forces were withdrawn and noticed that the mosquitoes were “fearfully troublesome.” By July malaria was “very common among the troops,” and quinine was being offered on a regular basis by Confederate surgeons. But southern troops, like their northern counterparts, often disregarded their surgeons’ instructions and chose not to take the bitter-tasting medicine. In addition, the Union blockade was causing price hikes and shortages of the drug in the South which made it d
ifficult to dole out effective doses consistently. As a result, Pressley’s sick list expanded until an average of “seventy to one hundred” soldiers a day fell ill. An outbreak of typhoid fever compounded the problem, and his men suffered until the first frosts appeared in October and halted the activity of the mosquitoes.19

  Union troops stationed further north, in eastern North Carolina, were also battling mosquitoborne illness. The previous year a joint army-navy operation led by Butler had secured a northern beachhead on Carolina’s Outer Banks. Over the next six months U.S. forces captured nearly every important coastal port in the “Old North State” (Wilmington, a notable exception, remained in Confederate hands for most of the war).

  But North Carolina’s sickly season, which was sicklier than most, taxed the health of the occupation force that was subsequently sent there. In a single year the U.S. military recorded 2,353 cases of malaria “per 1,000 mean strength,” leading the Department of North Carolina to earn the ignoble distinction of being the second “most malarious” district in the South. Only Arkansas was worse. Troops stationed in Washington and Plymouth and along the rail line between New Bern and Morehead City suffered severely from “chills,” “congestive fever,” and “intermittent fever,” especially during the autumn months. Picket duty and reconnaissance missions sickened “nearly every man” in the Seventeenth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers, which reported 1,100 cases of malaria in one month alone. The regiment was taken off picket duty, housed in New Bern, and successfully treated with quinine. Quinine was irregularly administered to the soldiers of the Pennsylvania Fifty-first, whose ranks were soon decimated by “diarrhœa, dysentery, ague, camp fever, and smallpox.” By April 1862 only 350 of the original 981 men in the regiment were able to fight. Two Connecticut regiments stationed near New Bern were in a similar predicament. The principal problems diagnosed among the men by their assistant surgeon were “malaria, diarrhoea, and malingering.” As the War Department continued to send fresh troops into the area, new infections multiplied. Surgeon D. W. Hand took over as medical director for the Union forces in North Carolina in August 1863 and was swamped with innumerable cases of intermittent and remittent fever over the next three months. According to Hand, between 40 and 168 men per regiment stationed near New Bern were sick each day, and several died of congestive fever. Most of these men likely contracted malaria while on patrol in the North Carolina countryside since the disease was not a problem within New Bern’s city limits.20