Mosquito Soldiers

by Andrew McIlwaine Bell

  Thirty-three soldiers stationed at Key West died, including Brigadier General Daniel P. Woodbury, who was “buried with military and Masonic honors” on August 17, 1864. The fever hit the Second U.S. Colored Troops particularly hard and sickened nearly all of the outfit’s white officers. John Augustus Wilder was one of those officers stationed at Fort Taylor. He observed that at one point during the epidemic “30 or 40 new cases” appeared each day “among the sailors & others.” Wilder was appalled by the amount of suffering he witnessed. “It seems hard to realize that so delightful & sunny a land on which the smile of God seems visibly to rest should be so deadly & deceitful,” he wrote to his brother-in-law. “Is this indeed Paradise or is it Hell?” For many black soldiers stationed at Key West, southern Florida seemed more like the nether regions. Isaiah Johnson was an African-American farmer and musician from Norfolk, Virginia, who perished at the end of July. His comrade, nineteen-year-old George Washington, had grown up in Mathews County, Virginia, and worked as a waiter before he died on a hospital bed the same month. William Stripling and John Baker were both from South Carolina and joined the Second after it was transferred to Key West to fight for their relatives’ freedom. The two men were early victims of the epidemic and died in May. Basil Berry enlisted in Washington, D.C., as a substitute for James Bradley and died at a hospital in Key West. In the end 7 other black troops in the Second died, and 132 men got sick. The regiment also suffered from smallpox, typhoid fever, chronic diarrhea, dropsy, and consumption while stationed in Florida.17

  The navy ordered its vessels to avoid Key West as it had during the 1862 epidemic. Those ships unlucky enough to be moored in the area as the pestilence spread soon became infected, prompting Rear Admiral Theodorus Bailey to order a general evacuation. “My worst fears have been more than realized,” he wrote in July, “and for more than two months the disease has held its course without abatement and is now as virulent as at any time.” The crews of dozens of ships under his command were laid low. Every sailor aboard the Nita got sick except for two officers, and at least ten men died. The USS San Jacinto, which had been the scene of so much suffering during the 1862 epidemic, was again ordered north, this time to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The De Soto, the Huntsville, and the Merrimac (not to be confused with the ship of the same name that became the CSS Virginia) were also ordered to northern ports as men on board the Honduras, the Honeysuckle, the Iuka, and the Marigold fell ill and died. Other ships were sent to Tampa, but yellow fever followed. Bailey himself was eventually relieved of his command by Gideon Welles, who recommended his subordinate “return north for the purpose of recruiting your health.” During the summer of 1864 Florida’s Aedes aegypti mosquitoes accomplished what would have been impossible for the anemic Confederate navy at the time, scattering the Union’s East Gulf Squadron like sticks in the wind. Fortunately for Washington, the South was too weak to take advantage of the chaos, and by October the fever had burned itself out.18

  More important, the outcome of the war was being decided at the time in Georgia and Virginia rather than Florida. Mosquitoes swarmed soldiers serving in these states too. Sherman’s army suffered with malaria in the summer of 1864 as it maneuvered around Joe Johnston’s Confederates toward the important southern supply hub of Atlanta. In July and August Cump’s surgeons diagnosed over twelve thousand cases of the disease, but thanks to the Union army’s ample supplies of medicine, few of these cases proved fatal. Surgeon C. S. Frink watched malaria sicken several Union regiments that had bivouacked “in a strip of heavy timber” rising out of the Georgia clay. Although “free doses of quinine” quickly improved the health of the men in these regiments, recrudescent fevers and new infections continued to dog them for the remainder of the campaign. Had Joe Johnston been able to cut Sherman’s supply line successfully, malaria would have been a much more significant problem for the combined armies that captured Atlanta. Johnston, who would be replaced in July by the recklessly aggressive John Hood, had his own struggles with malaria. He was losing an average of thirty-four Confederates per month to the disease. Jasper James was a soldier with the Army of Tennessee during the campaign and by June 1864 had already suffered “three agues.” “We have had as you know one of the roughest times any set of soldiers ever encountered in this climate,” he wrote to his parents. “The consequence is, great numbers are sent of sick daily, judging from a company the army must have reduced greatly.” Reinforcements that Johnston received from Mobile, Alabama, put his troops at further risk of getting sick.19

  Mobile was one of the most malarious posts in the Confederacy. In one nineteen-month period, from January 1862 to July 1863, the Confederacy had a mean strength of 6,752 troops stationed in the city, with 13,668 cases of malaria (10,500 “intermittents” and 3,168 “remittents”). William Spotswood, the head of the Confederate navy’s medical department, issued a report in November 1863 which revealed the extent of the malaria problem in Mobile. With “bilious,” “remitting,” and “intermitting” fevers sapping the strength of Confederate crews on ships anchored in the bay, especially those situated “amidst the marshes,” Spotswood recommended that the vessels be moved to healthier locations. In August 1864, as Sherman inched closer to Atlanta, David Farragut led a Union armada into Mobile Bay against three forts and a small southern flotilla. As he shouted the famous phrase that would thrill subsequent generations of American schoolchildren—“Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead”—Farragut faced Confederate sailors who were either ill or recovering from malaria. Southern military personnel on shore were also suffering from the disease. Ross Hospital in Mobile kept records on 1,601 of its patients in 1863, and among them 445 had been admitted for intermittent fever. In July and August 1864, around the time Farragut was attacking, Ross received 706 patients, of whom 336 were suffering from “intermittent, remittent, or congestive fever.” And that autumn “six-sevenths of the officers and men” in some units were prostrated by “chills and fever,” prompting the major general in charge to warn Richmond that the large sick list had left the city all but defenseless. Months later, seeing the hopelessness of the situation and realizing that reinforcements were not forthcoming, the handful of sickly Confederate garrisons guarding the city of Mobile melted away when General E.R.S. Canby’s Federal forces finally arrived near the end of the war. With its appalling disease rate during the sickly season, wartime Mobile was no different from Baton Rouge, Galveston, Pensacola, Vicksburg, or any number of other towns in the Deep South where mosquitoes made life dangerous for soldiers on both sides.20

  But mosquitoborne disease posed the greatest threat to military personnel serving west of the Mississippi River. In fact, the two states where mosquitoes were the most troublesome were both within the region the Confederacy dubbed the Trans-Mississippi Department. For the Union the Department of Arkansas held the ignoble distinction of being its most malarious. Between 1863 and 1865 there were an astonishing 1,287 cases of malaria each year for every 1,000 northern soldiers assigned to the state. Texas experienced more yellow fever outbreaks than any other state in the Confederacy. Southern soldiers stationed in port towns such as Galveston, Lavaca, and Sabine City burned with fever and spewed black vomit before drawing their last breath. But west of the Mississippi malaria was a far more pervasive problem. Repeated infections of the most common form of the ailment, Plasmodium vivax, further weakened the immune systems of men already suffering from deadlier maladies such as chronic diarrhea and typhoid fever and contributed to the region’s high rate of disease-related fatalities. Plasmodium falciparum was by itself lethal and occurred almost exclusively below the thirty-fifth parallel, where the bulk of the territory in the trans-Mississippi theater lay.

  Soldiers transferred to Arkansas from Mississippi at the conclusion of the Vicksburg campaign brought with them various strains of malaria which were quickly spread by armies of anopheles. Compounding the problem were crowds of slaves who sought the protection of Union armies and inadvertently spread plasmodium parasites
in the process. Regiments sent straight from the North as reinforcements, such as the Sixth Minnesota, were quickly overwhelmed by disease. African-American soldiers, believed to be immune to the southern sickly season, also fell ill. Dying on a sickbed rather than a battlefield violated the unwritten rules of Victorian masculinity and was a fate most soldiers thought shameful. But for thousands of young men who served in the states west of the Mississippi River, this was the sum of their Civil War experience. By continuing to pour troops into the region despite its limited strategic value and high rate of sickness, the federal government reduced the size of its armies in the East—where the outcome of the war was being decided—and caused needless suffering for innumerable soldiers and sailors.21

  Of course, the men in blue and gray who were slaughtering one another in the East were not exempt from the ravages of mosquitoborne disease. Neither were the tens of thousands of southern civilians caught in the crossfire. The Union blockade and occupation choked off their access to essential supplies, including quinine, and made escape during the sickly season a difficult ordeal. By the summer of 1864 Confederate patriotism was waning, but as events would show, a handful of southerners were still willing to sacrifice everything—including the lives of innocent men, women, and children—in order to secure their nation’s independence.

  {7}

  BIOLOGICAL WARFARE

  ON A HUMID DAY in early August 1864, a clerk working in an auction house located a few blocks from the White House looked up and saw a diminutive man with a swarthy complexion dragging several trunks through the front door of his office. The man introduced himself as Mr. J. W. Harris and asked the clerk if he would be interested in auctioning off the trunks, which he claimed contained twelve dozen shirts. Assuming the man was just another northern sutler hoping to turn a quick profit while on his way home from the battlefields of the South, the clerk agreed and advanced the stranger one hundred dollars. When he later opened the trunks, he found more shirts inside than he had bargained for crammed in together with several coats. Initially skeptical that he could make a profit off the merchandise, he bundled the shirts into packages of a dozen and sold them the next day for $142.90.1

  Unbeknownst to the clerk, this seemingly innocent business transaction was in fact part of a nefarious plot designed by Confederate agents to launch a biological attack against the city of Washington. The man who had identified himself as J. W. Harris was actually named Godfrey J. Hyams, and the clothing he sold had been worn by yellow fever victims before they died. The agents working with Hyams hoped the infected fabric would spread yellow jack throughout the District of Columbia and kill officials serving at the highest levels of the federal government. The science behind this attack was of course specious given that only Aedes aegypti mosquitoes can transmit the yellow fever virus. But many nineteenth-century physicians, unaware of the link between insects and disease, believed “fomites,” or infected clothing and bedding, could spark epidemics.

  Hyams’s boss was a Kentucky physician and Confederate zealot named Luke Pryor Blackburn, whose work with yellow fever patients in Mississippi before the war had earned him an international reputation as an expert on the disease. Blackburn had held a variety of jobs with the Confederate government before Mississippi governor John Pettus sent him to Canada to obtain supplies for blockade-runners. While in exile, the doctor decided to disregard his Hippocratic oath and use his knowledge of the “scourge of the South” against its enemies. He found an ally in Hyams, a cobbler who had fled Helena, Arkansas, and settled in Toronto to escape the war but later decided he needed to do something to help the struggling Confederacy. The two were introduced by other southern agents headquartered in Canada, and Hyams agreed to help carry out Blackburn’s plan, which involved using trunks full of contaminated clothing as biological weapons. They met in December 1863 at the Queen’s Hotel in Toronto, where the doctor told Hyams to go home and await further instructions.2

  In order for his scheme to succeed, Blackburn needed access to a yellow fever epidemic. His chance arrived in the spring of 1864 when an outbreak surfaced in Bermuda. He immediately volunteered his services to the Bermudan government, which was grateful to receive assistance from such a well-known American physician. During his stay on the island Blackburn collected the clothing of terminally ill patients, which he packed into several large steamer trunks. In July he arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, trunks in tow, and sent word for Hyams to meet him. Hyams helped unload eight trunks and a “valise” off a steamship and was instructed to take the five trunks containing contaminated clothing to New Bern, North Carolina, and Norfolk, Virginia, both of which were occupied at that time by Federal troops, as well as Washington, D.C. Blackburn had a special purpose in mind for the valise. He wanted it delivered to the White House under the pretext of being a gift for the president from an anonymous admirer. Inside the small suitcase were several expensive dress shirts, but it had previously been packed with clothing taken from yellow fever and smallpox victims. Unnerved at the prospect of showing his face at the front door of the executive mansion, Hyams refused to deliver the valise but agreed to convey the trunks to their intended targets. He bribed a local steamboat captain to smuggle the luggage into Boston and from there accompanied it down the East Coast, through Philadelphia and Baltimore, placing the clothing in several other trunks he purchased along the way. When he arrived in Washington, Hyams sold five of the trunks to the auction house and four others to a sutler named Myers, who was conveniently headed to both Norfolk and New Bern. Having fulfilled his part of the agreement, the Arkansas shoemaker returned to Canada to collect the fortune Blackburn had promised would be his once the mission was completed. The doctor temporarily appeased his underling with one hundred dollars and promises of future payments and headed back to Bermuda to collect more infected clothing for use against the hated Yankees.3

  During this second trip Blackburn filled three trunks with “blankets, pillow cases, drawers,” and other material “stained and soiled” with black vomit and left them on St. George’s Island in the care of a hotelier named Edward Swan. The Kentucky physician was worried that a northern cold snap might render his weapon useless and wanted to wait until the spring of 1865 to launch another attack. According to witnesses who later testified at a government hearing, Blackburn instructed Swan to ship the trunks to New York City and to collect compensation for his efforts from the Confederate office in Bermuda. The doctor then took passage on a steamer bound for Canada and never returned to the islands.

  In April 1865, as the Confederacy itself was falling apart, the whole plot began to unravel. Tired of trying to collect the large sum of money he had been promised by Blackburn, Hyams decided to spill his guts at the U.S. District Attorney’s office in Detroit in return for a pardon. Several days later in Bermuda, a Confederate agent tipped off authorities about the trunks at Swan’s boardinghouse, prompting a police raid and a full-scale investigation. As details of Blackburn’s activities emerged, it became clear that his plan to kill both northern civilians and soldiers with yellow fever had been approved at the highest levels of the Confederate government. According to Hyams, the hundred dollars he received for the Washington mission had been paid by Colonel Jacob Thompson, a Confederate operative who was involved in a plot to disrupt the election of 1864 by starting fires and sowing mayhem in a number of northern cities. Thompson’s secretary, a man named William Cleary, who was also a close confidant of Jefferson Davis, admitted that he and his boss knew about Blackburn’s plan but denied any direct involvement. Davis himself almost certainly knew about the plot. He and Blackburn had been friends before the war, and during the winter of 1864 the Confederate president received two letters from an Episcopal clergyman and southern agent named Kensey Stewart which contained details of Hyams’s mission. God, warned Stewart, would not be pleased with southerners if they employed such wicked tactics against their fellow men. Despite these warnings, Davis did not try to stop Blackburn, who continued his quest to start
an epidemic among the vulnerable northern population.4

  The Confederate government’s support of Blackburn’s plot seems particularly heinous in light of the events that took place along the North Carolina coast in 1864. That fall yellow fever struck Union-occupied New Bern with a vengeance. The first officially documented case appeared on September 9 with the death of Sergeant Mason Rogers of the Fifteenth Connecticut. Fortunately, before the war the regiment’s surgeon, Dr. Hubert V. C. Holcombe, had spent time among yellow fever victims in Vera Cruz, Mexico, and recognized the disease; none of his colleagues had ever seen it. When he reported his findings up the chain of command, the Union leadership, fearful of creating a panic, immediately denied that there was a problem. Surgeon D. W. Hand, the medical director for Union forces in North Carolina, was not yet ready to acknowledge that yellow fever was present and criticized Holcombe for unnecessarily causing a stir. By one account Hand had even ordered a cover-up when a case appeared earlier in the summer. But when the medical director finally accepted the truth and informed his superiors of the problem, he encountered similar hostility. General Innis N. Palmer, the commander of the department, launched into a tirade of “scorn and abuse” and accused the director of being ignorant of southern fevers. Although Palmer eventually relented and accepted that yellow fever had broken out in his command, both he and Hand tried to keep the news from the press. Word of the outbreak leaked to the enlisted men anyway, creating considerable “anxiety.” Hand also did a poor job of keeping his surgeons informed about the threat they were facing. Two weeks after Rogers’s death, Union sailors as far away as Beaufort knew yellow jack was present in New Bern, even though some doctors within the city still could not identify the disease. Cases began to pile up in the area hospitals, and soon a full-blown epidemic was raging through the city. Northern soldiers who had heard horror stories of the scourge of the South were terrified.5