Mosquito Soldiers

by Andrew McIlwaine Bell

  Malaria became a bigger problem for the Army of the Tennessee after the fall of Vicksburg. In July the rate of infection shot up six percentage points over the previous month and peaked at 16.6 percent in August. The number would have likely climbed higher still had a number of units not been moved to more active theaters, most of which happened to be healthier. The troops who were left behind suffered terribly, especially those camped along the Big Black River, where malaria soon became the most common complaint. Union commanders who believed Mississippi’s “hot and sickly season” was over by late August quickly realized their mistake. The Eleventh Missouri Infantry was on the Big Black in September and suffered from intermittent fever more than any other disease. The regiment’s surgeons treated patients with a cocktail of quinine and “Fowler’s Solution” (arsenic), but when supplies ran low, they resorted to cinchona bark. A surgeon with the Eighth Wisconsin Infantry, also bivouacked near the Big Black, found it difficult to procure sufficient medicines for his unit. Army quartermasters only partially filled his requisitions for quinine, and as a result, the men under his care were afflicted with both malaria and diarrhea. The soldiers of the Thirty-fifth Iowa Infantry also sweated and shook with malarial fevers under the scorching southern sun. When several men in the unit contracted congestive fever, they received poor treatment as the Thirty-fifth was in desperate need of a “good Physician.”18

  Farther south, at the same time, mosquitoes were busy killing northern seamen. A yellow fever epidemic struck the Union fleet anchored at New Orleans and came close to spreading into the city itself, a nightmare scenario that could have easily destroyed the unacclimated Federal force stationed there. John H. Clarke was an assistant surgeon working at a hotel–turned–naval hospital on New Levee Street at the time. He and his colleagues received most of the one hundred cases of yellow fever and performed autopsies to confirm its presence. Clarke noticed that the epidemic was “confined to the vessels in the river” but was “spreading among them, as new ones come in from sea.” Union commanders recognized the seriousness of the situation and tried desperately to keep their men from finding out about it. The commander of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, Henry H. Bell, initially refused to quarantine any infected ships out of fear that to do so “would be utterly demoralizing to the whole fleet,” but he was forced to relent in the case of the vessels that were hit especially hard. The USS Pensacola had forty-one cases of fever on board and ten deaths at the end of October. Interestingly, the ship’s surgeon believed the disease was coming from inside the vessel and noticed that a large number of those who fell ill had worked in the engine room. The humid air, pools of freshwater, and concentration of sweaty bodies below decks created a perfect atmosphere for Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.19

  Malaria afflicted the fleet at the same time. When Bell decided to err on the side of caution and send even suspected cases of yellow fever straight to the naval hospital, Clarke saw a number of patients suffering from intermittent and remittent fever. William Law, an engineer with the USS Pinola, was diagnosed with congestive fever (most likely Plasmodium falciparum) and was suffering with chills he had contracted after a visit ashore on September 22, 1863, when he had become “so prostrated that he could not walk to the ship.” His physician blamed the “southern and pestilential climate.” John Johnson was a seaman from Salem, Massachusetts, serving aboard the Estrella. Johnson had suffered from recurring intermittent fever for almost two months before “rigors,” extreme thirst, and a pounding headache finally forced him to seek medical attention. John C. Clark was a blue-eyed blacksmith from Boston also suffering from intermittent fever, for which he sought treatment in September. He first contracted the disease a year earlier and had been taking quinine and arsenic with mixed results ever since.20

  These malaria cases were overshadowed, however, by the clear and present danger of yellow fever. Few other diseases engendered the same degree of visceral fear among nineteenth-century Americans. A flurry of communiqués flew back and forth between U.S. naval officers during the summer and autumn of 1863 as the disease spread from New Orleans to Pensacola, which served as a coaling station and headquarters for the West Gulf Blockading Squadron. In August Dr. B. F. Gibbs discovered the disease on board a navy store ship anchored at Pensacola named the Relief. It quickly spread to a merchant ship and several “bomb-flotilla” vessels before surfacing in the nearby communities of Woolsey and Warrington. The exact number of civilians living in these villages who fell ill is unknown. Gibbs contended that the areas were mostly deserted and that only a few persons got sick. Colonel William Holbrook, who was stationed in Pensacola with the Seventh Vermont Infantry at the time, claimed that only “a few sporadic cases” cropped up in the towns in early September, but he also reported that the epidemic “raged for over two months” in the area and caused an “uncommonly large” mortality rate. However many deaths occurred, the threat of “yellow jack” hung over the heads of Pensacola’s citizens in the fall of 1863 and added pestilence to the list of trials and tribulations they were forced to cope with during the war.21

  Holbrook posted sentries around his camp and halted all “intercourse and communication” between his troops and the “sailors, marines,” and “citizens” inhabiting areas thought to be infected. Mail and supply deliveries to Pensacola ceased. When a few cases appeared even on board a ship anchored near Mobile, Admiral Bell revealed his anxiety in a message sent to Captain John Gillis: “The yellow fever is in the Colorado, but is being subdued, I believe. God grant us this mercy.” The commander found relief only when ice appeared in early December and halted the epidemic.

  The chief importance of this outbreak was the damage it inflicted on the Union blockade. Ships that were needed to apprehend Confederate runners were instead quarantined or diverted to northern locales with the hope that cooler weather would destroy whatever it was in their hulls that was causing yellow fever. The USS Albatross steamed out of New Orleans in September to serve with the blockading fleet but was ordered back to shore two weeks later after a number of crewmen fell ill with yellow fever. A sailor on board witnessed the death of seven of his shipmates from the disease and observed “half of the Ships company” writhing in agony in their hammocks. While in quarantine at Pensacola, he also noticed the large number of other U.S. vessels alongside the Albatross. “All the mortar fleet that was in the river are laying here,” he wrote to friend and former mate Louis Boyd. “They have all lost the best part of there crews with the fever.” During the following winter and spring the John Griffith, the O. H. Lee, the Sarah Bruen, the Sea Foam, and a number of other vessels that had been infected during the outbreak were ordered North to prevent a future epidemic.22

  New Orleans natives had been predicting that yellow jack would save their city since David Farragut’s fleet had captured it in April 1862. In the weeks following the surrender of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, the last two Confederate strongholds on the Mississippi River, their predictions nearly came true. But the North’s luck held. Yellow fever proved to be only a temporary setback for the navy’s West Gulf Blockading Squadron. And nothing could diminish the importance of the North’s victories in Louisiana and Mississippi. These triumphs were made possible by Grant and his subordinates as well as unsung heroes in Washington who were serving their country by slicing through red tape rather than Rebel regiments. No man proved more adept at navigating the federal bureaucracy than Surgeon General William Hammond. Hammond had secured his position a year earlier, thanks to the political influence of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, which lobbied the Lincoln administration to appoint a younger man to run the army’s Medical Department, one who would enact sweeping changes and embrace the latest developments in medicine and disease prevention.

  Hammond lived up to the commission’s expectations. His reforms were one reason the North’s early “improvised war” became a more organized one by 1863. On the day Farragut captured New Orleans, he inherited a moribund department that had failed to spend even the pal
try sum ($2.4 million) Congress had allocated for it during the first year of the conflict. Before being ousted by his political enemies for questioning the efficacy of mercurial treatments, Hammond nearly quadrupled the department’s spending and cleared many of the bottlenecks that were keeping medical supplies out of the hands of his frontline officers. Unfortunately for the Army of the Potomac, he did not receive his appointment early enough to reduce the high rate of sickness among the troops participating in the Peninsular Campaign in any significant way. But by the time the Army of the Tennessee pushed past Vicksburg and landed in Mississippi, Hammond had solved the Medical Department’s worst logistical problems and issued orders for Grant’s soldiers to receive regular doses of quinine.23

  Richmond could not keep its armies equally well provisioned. By 1863 the Union blockade and occupation of broad swaths of Confederate territory were disrupting the South’s supply channels. Pemberton’s men were suffering from acute shortages of food, clothing, and medicine in the weeks before they surrendered—a scenario that would become increasingly familiar to both southern soldiers and civilians over the next two years. But even after its humiliating losses at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the South was determined to fight on, which meant men and mosquitoes could continue the killing.

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  “THE ROUGHEST TIMES ANY SET OF SOLDIERS EVER ENCOUNTERED”

  IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of the epic battles in Mississippi and Pennsylvania, Union military progress slowed to a crawl. Union general William Rosecrans successfully maneuvered Braxton Bragg’s Confederate army out of Tennessee before receiving a drubbing at the Battle of Chickamauga. In the East, Major General George Gordon Meade’s army moved at a snail’s pace after winning at Gettysburg. Lincoln believed that Meade had snatched defeat from the jaws of a total Union victory by allowing Lee’s army to escape back into Virginia, but the commander in chief was in no position to dismiss one of his few generals who had proven himself a winner. Meade maintained command over the Army of the Potomac, while the president and Halleck turned their attention to the western theater. Halleck thought the states in this region, especially those located west of the Mississippi River, were ripe for the picking and could be more easily conquered (and subsequently reconstructed) than the Rebel fiefdoms back East. Lincoln agreed, and when word came that a sizable Confederate force in Little Rock under the command of Sterling “Old Pap” Price was threatening to invade Missouri, Arkansas quickly became one of the North’s primary military targets.

  Union planners realized that they needed to gain control over the Arkansas River in order to protect the northern part of the state and Missouri from Rebel attacks. With this goal in mind and in order to bleed the South’s beleaguered armies even further, Grant ordered Major General Frederick Steele to march twelve thousand bluecoats across Arkansas to destroy Price’s army and capture Little Rock. A second Union force under James Blunt moved eastward from Indian Territory at the same time. Steele created his Army of Arkansas from regiments that had been stationed at Helena all summer—a city that one Union soldier remembered as a “malaria-stricken, disease-fostering hole”—and units transferred from Mississippi after the fall of Vicksburg. Large numbers of men in both groups were already infected with plasmodium parasites when they rendezvoused in Helena at the end of July. Two brigades from Nathan Kimball’s division (Sixteenth Corps) arrived from Snyder’s Bluff “suffering severely from the malarious influences of the Yazoo country.” Their comrades in the Third Minnesota had contracted malaria in the same vicinity while felling trees, digging rifle pits, and performing picket duty. A number of other units sent to Steele had spent time along the Big Black River, an area the U.S. Sanitary Commission had found to be rife with disease. The parasites these men contracted in Mississippi were introduced into an environment that was already plagued with endemic malaria. The countryside surrounding Helena was dotted with “swamps” and “bayous” that were “covered with green scum in dry weather,” conditions that allowed mosquitoes to thrive. In fact, malaria was so common in Helena that one soldier thought the city’s residents subsisted on “corn whisky and quinine” and that their “chief occupation” was “damning the Union every day and shaking with ague every other day.”1

  The anopheles population of Arkansas quickly spread these various strains of malaria between the men in Steele’s command and helped make their march to Little Rock a nightmarish ordeal. Scores of men fell out of the ranks in exhaustion, while others cast off blankets, clothing, and knapsacks to lighten the load, creating a trail of litter along the marching route. By the time Steele arrived in Clarendon, Arkansas, where he was reinforced by John W. Davidson and six thousand Union cavalrymen, malaria was epidemic in his army. Andrew Sperry was a soldier with the Thirty-third Iowa who in later years described Clarendon as the “home and headquarters of ague in bulk and quantity.” He and his fellow Iowans, who had grown up in a malarious state, believed the Arkansas variety of the disease was especially severe. One morning during their stay at Clarendon the bugler responsible for blowing the Thirty-third to sick call was shaking so severely he could not perform his duties. When two other men, including a lieutenant colonel, attempted to fill in for the ailing soldier, they too were seized with malarial shakes, leading Sperry to conclude that there “was ague in the bugle.”2

  By the time the army reached De Valls Bluff at the end of August, Steele took notice of the disease problem facing his troops in Arkansas. “The sick list is frightful, including many officers,” he reported to Major General Stephen Hurlbut on the twenty-third. “More than 1,000 here present are reported unfit for duty, and about one-half of the command proper are absent.” On September 1 he identified the cause of his troops’ suffering: “Many of our men have been taken down with fevers, and chills and fever, lately.” Leander Stillwell was a soldier with the Sixty-first Illinois who rejoined his regiment after it arrived at De Valls Bluff. He was transported by boat from Helena and along the way noticed the rugged, inhospitable conditions of the Arkansas interior: “The country along White river from its mouth to Devall’s Bluff was wild, very thinly settled, and practically in a state of nature.” He had been sick at Helena and arrived heavily dosed with quinine (“taken to break the fever while in the hospital”). Stillwell blamed the drug and a rainstorm for a case of rheumatism that put him out of commission for the remainder of the campaign. From the vantage point of an ambulance, however, he was in a unique position to observe the suffering of his fellow sick soldiers. “At night, the sick of each division (of whom there were hundreds) would bivouac by the side of some lagoon, or small water course,” he wrote. “The attendants would prepare us some supper, and the surgeons would make their rounds, administering such medicines as the respective cases required. The prevailing type of sickness was malarial fever, for which, the sovereign specific seemed to be quinine.”3

  Malaria was rampant in Steele’s army for a number of reasons. First, the troops were marching through the “swamps and marshes” of Arkansas at a time of year when mosquitoes were highly active. Nineteen thousand men and an untold number of animals clustered together presented an irresistible target for hungry female anopheles. Many of these men had spent the summer in the Big Black, Mississippi, or Yazoo river basins and were already carrying plasmodium parasites before the campaign began. Second, the Army of Arkansas was poorly provisioned. Many of the soldiers had not been issued tents and were forced to sleep in the open, making it easier for mosquitoes to feed on them. Quinine was administered irregularly because of army supply problems and the unusually high demand for the drug in the department. Steele set up temporary hospitals at Brownsville, Clarendon, De Valls Bluff, and eventually Little Rock, a move that stretched his supply of medicines to the breaking point. Requests for additional drug supplies had to be sent to Memphis, which created “long and vexatious delays.” Finally, Steele’s medical staff was in disarray during much of the campaign. There was a shortage of doctors—several regimental medical officers were in
explicably absent during the campaign—and at least some of those on duty were “manifestly unfit for their place.” Shoddy treatment of the sick prompted Steele to take action on August 24 while the army was camped at De Valls Bluff. He ordered his regimental commanders to find out who was to blame for the “gross neglect” of ill troops. Charges of “incompetency and neglect of duty” were brought against J. C. Whitehill, assistant medical director of the army, by a group of regimental surgeons, but Steele, pressed by Confederate cavalry raids and worried about Price’s next move, dropped the matter.4