7. D. G. Farragut to W. B. Renshaw, September 19, 1862 (quotation), W. B. Renshaw to D. G. Farragut, October 8, 1862 (quotation), ORN, vol. 19, ser. 1, 213, 255–60; Charles C. Cumberland, “The Confederate Loss and Recapture of Galveston, 1862–1863,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 51 (October 1947): 109–19; Peggy H. Gregory, comp., Record of Interments of the City of Galveston, 1859–1872 (Houston: privately printed, 1976), 28–29, in Rosenberg Library, Galveston; David G. McComb, Galveston: A History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 74–76.
8. Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, October 1 and 3 and November 7 and 10, 1862 (quotation); Galveston Weekly News, September 17, 1862; ORN, vol. 19, ser. 1, 260–61; H. P. Bee to Samuel Boyer Davis, November 15, 1862 (quotation), OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 181–83; Kevin R. Young, To the Tyrants Never Yield (Plano, Tex.: Wordware Publishing, 1992), 123–27; Austin State Gazette, November 12, 1862.
9. Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, October 3 and 27 and November 3 and 7, 1862; W. T. Block, “Yellow Fever Plagued Area during the 1860s,” Beaumont Enterprise, August 7, 1999; Galveston News, September 17 and 24, 1862 (quotation); Natchitoches Union, September 18, 1862; Andrew Forest Muir, “Dick Dowling and the Battle of Sabine Pass,” in Lonestar Blue and Gray: Essays on Texas in the Civil War, ed. Ralph A. Wooster (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1995), 190; Bellville Countryman, September 6, 1862 (quotation); “Autobiography of Mrs. Otis McGaffey, Sr.,” Yellowed Pages 28 (Fall 1998): 1–14 (quotation); Edward T. Cotham Jr., Sabine Pass: The Confederacy’s Thermopylae (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 29; Alwyn Barr, “Texas Coastal Defense, 1861–1865,” in Wooster, Lonestar, 161; OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 144–45, 813–15.
10. Lewis W. Pennington to William B. Renshaw, September 29, 1862, ORN, vol. 19, ser. 1, 219–24; Galveston Weekly News, October 15, 1862 (quotation); X. B. Debray to P. O. Hébert, September 28, 1862, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 815–17; Rodman L. Underwood, Waters of Discord: The Union Blockade of Texas during the Civil War (London: McFarland & Co., 2003), 83.
11. “Autobiography of Mrs. Otis McGaffey, Sr.,” 7–8 (quotation); Francis Lubbock, Six Decades in Texas or Memoirs of Francis Richard Lubbock, Governor of Texas in Wartime, 1861–63, ed. C. W. Raines (Austin: Ben C. Jones & Co. Printers, 1900), 415; A. W. Spaight to R. M. Franklin, September 29 and October 2, 1862, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 145–47 (quotation); W. T. Block, “Yellow Fever Plagued Area during 1860s,” Beaumont Enterprise, August 7, 1999.
It should be pointed out that in Spaight’s official report of the battle, he argued that a larger Confederate force would not have made any difference at Sabine due to Crocker’s superior firepower. But with more men he might have at least temporarily resisted the landing. Instead, the U.S. Navy captured the city with no casualties.
12. It is possible that the small Houston outbreak of 1862 was ultimately caused by the larger epidemic that occurred in Sabine City the same year. The October 13, 1862, edition of the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph reported that a man and wife had died of yellow fever after returning from Beaumont, which received several evacuees from Sabine. Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, September 19 and October 22, 24, and 27, 1862; Galveston Weekly News, October 22 and 29, 1862; San Antonio Semi-Weekly News, October 23, 1862.
13. Lewis G. Schmidt, The Civil War in Florida, A Military History, vol. 3: Florida’s Keys & Fevers (Allentown, Pa.: Lewis G. Schmidt, 1992), 254–55; G.R.B. Horner, M.D., fleet surgeon, “Notice of the Yellow Fever as It Occurred in Key West and in the U.S. East Gulf Blockading Squadron, in 1862,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 92 (October 1863): 391–98 (quotation); ORN, vol. 17, ser. 1, 294; ORN, vol. 1, ser. 1, 507–8.
14. The Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1991), 6:676, hereafter referred to as MSH; Emily Holder, At the Dry Tortugas during the Civil War, quoted in Lewis G. Schmidt, A Civil War History of the 47th Regiment of Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers: The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time (Allentown, Pa.: by the author, 1986), 146 (quotation); “The Situation,” New York Herald, September 11, 1862; Horner, “Notice of the Yellow Fever,” 391–98 (quotation); “Our Key West Correspondence.,” New York Times, October 2 and November 12, 1862.
15. Schmidt, History of the 47th Regiment, 145–46; Book Records of Volunteer Union Organizations 90th New York Infantry, Companies A to C, Records of Adjutant General’s Office, Record Group 94, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
16. ORN, vol. 19, ser. 1, 165, 184, 286–87 (quotation); ORN, vol. 27, ser. 1, 455; ORN, vol. 1, ser. 1, 493; Book Records of Union Volunteer Organizations 90th New York Infantry, Order Book, Companies A to F, Vol. 6, Record Group 94, National Archives; MSH, 5:679.
17. MSH, 2:235 (quotation); John N. Maffitt to “My Dear Daughter,” September 8, 1862, and Maffitt to “My dear Florie,” September 19, 1862, John Newland Maffitt Papers, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (quotation).
18. MSH, 5:678; Henry F. W. Little, The Seventh Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion (Concord, N.H.: Ira C. Evans, Printer, 1896), 39–54 (quotation); Thomas T. Smiley, “The Yellow Fever at Port Royal, S.C.,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 67, January 8, 1863, 449–68 (quotation); Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care during the American Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 135–38.
19. Smiley, “Yellow Fever,” 451–52; O. M. Mitchel to Halleck, September 20, 1862, OR, vol. 14, ser. 1, 383–84; F. A. Mitchel, Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel, Astronomer and General: A Biographical Narrative (Boston: Riverside Press, 1887), 358–82; McPherson, Battle Cry, 370–71; Russell McCormmach, “Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel’s ‘Sidereal Messenger,’ 1846–1848,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110, February 18, 1966, 35–47; Eicher, Longest Night, 234–35; Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 206–7.
20. Smiley, “Yellow Fever,” 452–54 (quotation); MSH, 5:678; John Bedel, “Historical Sketch of Third New Hampshire Volunteers,” Granite Monthly 3 (September 1880): 513–34; Peter H. Buckingham, All’s for the Best: The Civil War Reminiscences and Letters of Daniel W. Sawtelle, Eighth Maine Volunteer Infantry (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 206; Herbert Beecher, History of the First Light Battery, Connecticut Volunteers, 1861–1865 (New York: A. T. DeLaMare Ptg. and Pub. Co., 1905), 1:189 (quotation).
21. Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), xvi; Charlotte Forten, “Life on the Sea Islands,” Atlantic Monthly 13 (May 1864): 587–96 (quotation); Charlotte Forten, The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten, with an introduction and notes by Ray Allen Billington (New York: Dryden Press, 1953), microfiche, 197 (quotation).
22. Rose, Rehearsal, 171–72 (quotation); Laura Towne, Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne. Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1884, ed. Rupert Sargent Holland (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 39, 89 (quotation).
23. Elizabeth Ware Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1906), microfiche, 68, 73, 105 (quotation); Rose, Rehearsal, 171–72; Towne, Letters, 89 (quotation).
24. Smiley, “Yellow Fever,” 460 (quotation); Mitchel, Astronomer, 379–82; “Death of General Mitchell,” Harper’s Weekly, November 15, 1862, 723; Isaiah Price, History of the Ninety-seventh Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, during the War of the Rebellion, 1861–65, with Biographical Sketches (Philadelphia: by the author for the subscribers, 1875), 134–43 (quotation); OR, vol. 14, ser. 1, 388–89; Stephen Walkley, History of the Seventh Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, Hawley’s Brigade, Terry’s Division, Tenth Army Corps, 1861–1865 (Hartford, 1905), 65.
25. Precisely when the Kate arrived and whether or not she was quarantined are subjects for debate since the sources provide conflicting accounts. See the Wilmington Daily Journal, September 26, 1862, W. T. Wragg, �
�Report on the Epidemic of Yellow Fever Which Prevailed at Wilmington, N.C., in the Fall of 1862,” New York Medical Journal 9 (August 1869): 478–96; and an undated account written by Mrs. Charles P. Bolles, Charles P. Bolles Papers, Archives and Records Division, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Raleigh (quotation); letter to A. J. Turlington, September 13, 1862, A. J. Turlington Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C. (quotation).
26. Wilmington Journal, September 13 (quotation) and 27 and November 20, 1862; letters from William, October 23 (quotation) and October 28, 1862, De Rosset Family Papers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Todd L. Savitt, “Slave Health and Southern Distinctiveness,” in Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, ed. Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 123.
27. H. Drane to Mary Lindsay Hargrave Foxhall, October 23, 1862, Foxhall Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Wilmington Journal, October 2, 1862 (quotation).
28. Wragg, “Report,” 478–85 (quotation); William Lofton to mother, October 20, 1862, William F. Lofton Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; E. A. Anderson, “Yellow Fever as It Has Occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, from 1800 to 1872, Being an Examination of the Review of Dr. Thomas, on the Report of Dr. Wragg,” New York Medical Journal 16 (September 1872): 225–59; Wilmington Journal, October 4, 1862; D. MacRae to “Dear Dix,” October 1, 1862 (quotation), D. MacRae to Colonel John McRae, October 15, 1862, MacRae Family Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C.
29. See “Siege Matters—Four Hundred and Seventy-fifth Day,” Charleston Mercury, October 26, 1864.
30. Richard Everett Wood, “Port Town at War: Wilmington, North Carolina, 1860–1865” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1976), 176; W.H.C. Whiting to S. Cooper, January 15, 1863, and Whiting to George W. Randolph, November 14, 1862, OR, vol. 18, ser. 1, 848–49 (quotation), 774–76 (quotation); Wm. A. Parker to J. G. Foster, December 8, 1862, ORN, vol. 8, ser. 1, 263–64.
31. Wilmington Journal, November 27, 1862; Van Bokkelen to Donald MacRae, November 12, 1862, MacRae Family Papers (quotation); I. S. Murphy to Mary Ann Murphy, November 26, 1862, Cronly Family Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; Wood, “Wilmington,” 176; Patterson, “Yellow Fever Epidemics,” 855–65; MSH, 6:679.
CHAPTER 4: “THE LAND OF FLOWERS, MAGNOLIAS, AND CHILLS”
1. T. H. Walker, “Camp Diarrhœa,” Chicago Medical Journal 5 (August 1862): 478–80 (quotation); E. Andrews, “Army Correspondence,” Chicago Medical Examiner 3 (August 1862): 479–84; Peter Josyph, ed., The Wounded River: The Civil War Letters of John Vance Lauderdale, M.D. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1993), 74–77 (quotation); Dr. J. S. Newberry, The U.S. Sanitary Commission in the Valley of the Mississippi, during the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1866 (Cleveland: Fairbanks, Benedict, & Co., 1871), 36–94 (quotation); William W. Belknap, History of the Fifteenth Regiment, Iowa Veteran Volunteer Infantry (Keokuk: R. B. Ogden & Son, 1887), 85.
2. Sherman’s brief description of his bout with “malaria” does not make it clear that he was infected with plasmodium parasites. Because many of his men were infected, however, it is entirely possible that he was too. The Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1991), 5:104, hereafter referred to as MSH; Rachel Sherman Thorndike, ed., The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General Sherman and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), 148; Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War: Natural Biological Warfare in 1861–1865 (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1968), 171–72; William T. Sherman, Memoirs of Gen. W. T. Sherman, Written by Himself (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1891), 1:284; Edward Batwell, “Notes on the Fever That Prevailed amongst the Troops in Camp Big Springs, near Corinth, Miss., in June, 1862,” Medical and Surgical Reporter 13 (December 1865): 364–65 (quotation).
3. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 10, ser. 1, pt. 1, 774–77, 784, hereafter referred to as OR; H. H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 181–82; Kate Cumming, A Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee from the Battle of Shiloh to the End of the War (Louisville, Ky.: John P. Morton & Co., 1866), 18–22 (quotation); MSH, 5:104.
4. OR, vol. 16, ser. 1, pt. 2, 62–63 (quotation).
5. MSH, 5:169, 331; Benjamin F. Butler to H. W. Halleck, October 24, 1862, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 158–60; United States Sanitary Commission Records, Series 7: Statistical Bureau Archives, Camp Inspection Returns, 1861–1864, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; MSH, 1:96–97.
6. Smith had been reinforced since May by Confederate John C. Breckenridge’s divisions from Corinth; Earl Van Dorn assumed overall command. OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 15–19; Bern Anderson, “The Naval Strategy of the Civil War,” Military Affairs 26 (Spring 1962): 11–21; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 420–21; Shelby Foote, The Civil War, a Narrative: Fort Sumter to Perryville (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 547–48.
7. OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 25–26; Charles S. Foltz, Surgeon of the Seas: The Adventurous Life of Surgeon General Jonathan M. Foltz in the Days of Wooden Ships (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931), 243–46; Steiner, Disease, 189; William C. Holbrook, A Narrative of the Services of the Officers and Enlisted Men of the 7th Regiment of Vermont Volunteers (New York: American Bank Note Co., 1882), 21–28 (quotation); Caroline E. Whitcomb, History of the Second Massachusetts Battery (Nim’s Battery) of Light Artillery, 1861–1865 (Concord, N.H.: Rumford Press, 1912), 33; Thomas Hamilton Murray, History of the Ninth Regiment, Connecticut Volunteer Infantry (New Haven: Price, Lee & Adkins Co., 1903), 111.
8. MSH, 1:153–54; Holbrook, Vermont, 22–29; Murray, Connecticut, 109; Harper’s Weekly, August 2, 1862; OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 31–33.
9. T. Williams to C. H. Davis, July 24, 1862, Extract from Diary of Flag-Officer Davis, July 31, 1862, ORN, vol. 23, ser. 1, 239–41, 270–72 (quotation).
10. E. Kirby Smith to Braxton Bragg, July 24, 1862, OR, vol. 16, ser. 1, pt. 2, 734–35 (quotation). The following year Smith informed his subordinate in the Trans-Mississippi Department, Major General John Bankhead Magruder, that “the yellow fever” and “malaria of Lower Louisiana” would pressure the Union forces at New Orleans into launching a campaign up the Red River Valley “with an eye to the establishment of bases of operations against Texas.” Union general Nathaniel Banks led just such a campaign in the spring of 1864 but mainly because of political arm-twisting and pressure from northern manufacturers who wanted access to Black Belt cotton. See E. Kirby Smith to J. B. Magruder, June 11, 1863, OR, vol. 26, ser. 1, pt. 2, 47–48.
11. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 66–68; E. Andrews, “Army Correspondence,” Chicago Medical Examiner 3 (August 1862): 479–84 (quotation);
12. Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Free Press, 1990), 7–8; Benjamin Butler, Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 2:143–44 (quotation)
13. OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 34–39; Salmon P. Chase to Butler, July 31, 1862, in Butler, Private and Official Correspondence, 2:131–32 (quotation); G. Mott Williams, “Letters of General Thomas Williams, 1862,” American Historical Review 14 (January 1909): 304–28 (Williams quoted p. 325).
14. Van Dorn’s confidence stemmed in part from the success of the CSS Arkansas, a Confederate ironclad that had triumphantly engaged Farragut’s fleet during the Vicksburg campaign. Earl Van Dorn to District of Mississippi Headquarters, September 9, 1862, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 15–19 (quotation), 76–81, 1125–26; Ed. Porter Thompson, History of the First Kentucky Brigade (Cincinnati: Caxton Publishing House, 1868), 119, 158; Ste
iner, Disease, 188; Dr. W. J. Worsham, The Old Nineteenth Tennessee Regiment, C.S.A., June 1861. April, 1865. (Knoxville: Press of Paragon Printing Co., 1902), 57–59 (quotation); Mary Elizabeth Sanders, ed. “Letters of a Confederate Soldier, 1862–1863,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 29 (October 1946): 1229–40.
15. OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 14–19, 76–81; Steiner, Disease, 203; Major John B. Pirtle, “Defence of Vicksburg in 1862—The Battle of Baton Rouge,” in Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 8: January to December, 1880 (Richmond, Va.: Rev. J. Williams Jones, D.D.), 327–28; Worsham, Tennessee, 59; G. Mott Williams, “The First Vicksburg Expedition and the Battle of Baton Rouge, 1862.” in War Papers Read before the Commandery of the State of Wisconsin, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (Milwaukee: Burdick, Armitage & Allen, 1896), 57–61; Holbrook, Vermont, 50; Foote, Sumter, 579; Ira B. Gardner, “Personal Experiences with the Fourteenth Maine Volunteers from 1861–1865,” in War Papers Read before the Commandery of the State of Maine, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (Portland, Maine: Lefavor-Tower Co., 1915), 4:90–113.
16. Foote, Sumter, 580–82; Butler, General Orders No. 57, August 9, 1862, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 15–19, 41–42 (quotation), 76–81.
17. Again, precise diagnoses are impossible without a lab test. MSH, 5:331; G. W. Randolph to R. E. Lee, August 4, 1862, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 794 (quotation).
18. David J. Eicher, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 256–57; Price, Pennsylvania, 127; Herbert Beecher, History of the First Light Battery, Connecticut Volunteers, 1861–1865 (New York: A. T. DeLaMare Ptg. And Pub. Co., 1905), 1:157–70 (quotation); William Todd, The Seventy-ninth Highlanders: New York Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (Albany, N.Y.: Brandow, Barton, & Co., 1886), 144–66; D. Hunter to H. G. Wright, June 27, 1862, OR, vol. 14, ser. 1, 43–47 (quotation).
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