The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  The solidification of international borders and the new lands conquered and seized during its wars of Manifest Destiny against British Canada, indigenous peoples, and Mexico brought the maturing but insecure United States to a cultural, political, and economic breaking point. The mosquito-ravaged and conflicted nation turned its growing pains inward during its horrendous, monumental Civil War to settle a socioeconomic sibling rivalry between free North and slave South. During this struggle, the mosquito went on an unadulterated feeding frenzy and sponsored a Union victory, finally deciding the issue of “a house divided against itself.” She was the most skilled stalker on the battlefields and emancipated ghosts by the thousands “that a nation might live.” The mosquito ensured President Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom—and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.” Lincoln’s definition of people included African Americans. During the Civil War, mosquitoes acted as a third army of sorts, and primarily aided the northern cause of preserving the Union, and, eventually, with the unfurling of Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, aided in abolishing the very institution of slavery she herself helped to create.

  CHAPTER 15

  Sinister Angels of Our Nature: The American Civil War

  On November 21, 1864, a haggard and forlorn President Abraham Lincoln sat slouched at his desk, staring through sunken eyes at a blank piece of paper. Only fifty-four years old, he had been aged by three and a half years of bloody civil war, his face now worn and drawn by too many sleepless nights brooding over the dead. Although he was witnessing the last stumbling steps of the starving Confederacy, he found little solace in knowing that the end was near. The body count had attained horrifying heights no one could have imagined when he mobilized his army on April 15, 1861, to preserve the Union.

  How could he put into words the sacrifices made by so many who gave “the last full measure of devotion”? He lifted his head, pressed his pen, and breathed life into the leaf of paper. “Executive Mansion, Washington, Nov. 21, 1864,” began Lincoln, before formally introducing his letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, a widow of Boston:

  Dear Madam,

  I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

  I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

  I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

  Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

  A. Lincoln*

  Yet Lincoln, born to humble means at Sinking Spring Farm in the slave state of Kentucky in 1809, had been cultivated and matured by a country that was seemingly always at war. His life shadowed the wars of Manifest Destiny from the War of 1812 to the Mexican-American War. He had even briefly served as a militia captain in 1832 during Black Hawk’s War in Illinois, one of President Andrew Jackson’s numerous ethnic-cleansing military crusades to force the relocation of indigenous peoples, during his callous 1830s policy of Indian Removal. Lincoln summed up his only military service, which lasted a whopping three weeks, with one brief remark: “I fought, I bled, and came away. I had many bloody struggles with mosquitoes; and although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say that I was often hungry.”

  Fierce and bloody struggles with mosquitoes, or “gallinippers” as they were called by soldiers, were a run-of-the-mill, everyday part of military life during the Civil War. Skirmishing with single-minded, bloodthirsty mosquitoes was as common and mundane as marching or carrying a weapon and was an unofficial routine duty of soldierly conduct and drill. “For Billy Yank and Johnny Reb the war was as much a story of putrid infections and burning fevers as one of long marches and frontal assaults. . . . Simply stated, had mosquito-borne illness not been part of the South’s landscape in the 1860s, the story of the war would be different,” points out Andrew McIlwaine Bell in his meticulous and impressive work Mosquito Soldiers: Malaria, Yellow Fever, and the Course of the American Civil War. “Soldiers on both sides frequently complained about these annoying insects that fed on their blood, buzzed in their ears, invaded their tents, and generally contributed to the misery of army life. Little did they suspect that these pests were also helping to shape the larger political and military events of the era.” Not only did the mosquito play a pivotal role in the outcome of the war, but after two years of fraternal butchery on the battlefields, she also profoundly shifted Lincoln’s strategic objectives for the bloodstained struggle itself. In doing so, the mosquito forever restructured and re-formed the cultural and political face of the nation.

  During the first years of the war, the mosquito, assisted by competent Confederate commanders, hammered Union forces led by hesitant and ham-fisted generals, effecting an atmosphere of attrition and “total war.” Lincoln’s initial goal, of preserving the Union and its undivided economic portfolio, was gradually tailored to include a complementary nation-defining war aim—the abolition of slavery. Had the mosquito not prolonged the war and had the Union realized a quick victory, as expected, the Emancipation Proclamation would never have entered the pages of history.

  In a twist of irony, the mosquito was not only a cause of the African slave trade, but during the Civil War she also helped put the final nail in the coffin of the institution of slavery itself, unshackling roughly 4.2 million African Americans from their chains of bondage along the way. Bell acknowledges, “By unwittingly serving as soldiers, mosquitoes have done more to shape our history than most people realize.” He narrows this assertion by reasoning that “the important role these insects played cannot be ignored by any scholar aspiring to understand the Civil War in all its wonderful and dizzying complexity.”

  The causes of the Civil War were also complex and certainly not as simple as opposing views on slavery between the North and South. Slavery was undeniably a cause but not the cause to the exclusion of other instigators. Numerous economic, political, and cultural factors also played their part. With the argument for secession gaining momentum, the election of 1860 delivering Abraham Lincoln to the White House was the crowning blow to southern convictions. While Lincoln repeatedly assured the slave states that he would not abolish the institution where it already existed, he was also adamant that slavery could not spread west into new states and territories. Poor white farmers, like his own father, needed an opportunity to make a decent living farming food crops on “free soil” detached from the no-win wage competition with unpaid slave labor. The simple economics of slavery impoverished all spectrums of American society, slaves and freemen alike. The money-spinning fusion of slavery and cotton could continue as it also fueled northern industrial wealth. The merging of slavery with other unrelated agricultural markets would not be permitted. Not only did the southern states want to expand slavery westward, in the end they also simply did not trust the new president-elect. They believed that once sworn into office, Lincoln would abolish slavery. Between Lincoln’s victory in November 1860 and his formally taking office in March 1861, the quilted union of thirty-four “united states” came unstitched.

  Prior to Lincoln’s inauguration, seven states peacefully seceded from the Union, issuing individual Declarations of the Immediate Causes of Secession. Together, they formed a government with a capital, first at Montgomery, Alabama, and then, as of May 1861, at Richmond, Virginia. They ratified a constitution and elected Jefferson Davis president of the Confederate States of America. Upon his swearing-in on March 4, Lincoln inherited a country on the verge of Civil War. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow country
men, and not in mine,” he reflected during his inaugural address, “is the momentous issue of civil war.” War arrived a month later, when Confederate troops forced the surrender of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. By June, four more states voted for secession, rounding out the eleven states of the Confederacy. “Both sides deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let a nation survive,” expressed Lincoln, “and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And War came.” When the first shots of the rebellion ricocheted off the walls of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Lincoln’s unwavering war aim was to preserve the territorial and economic integrity of the nation—including southern slavery.

  Like the American colonies during the revolution, all that was left for the Confederacy was to win the war. Unlike for the colonists, however, help would not arrive. There would be no genius foreign general like the Marquis de Lafayette to answer the call and no equivalent French fleet to break the garroting Union naval blockade. The Confederacy gambled on two rolls of the dice. The first was that Lincoln would back down. He didn’t. The second was that Britain, dependent on southern cotton to fuel its lucrative textile industry, would come to a Confederate rescue and break the Union blockade, or at worst, send military supplies and other resources. It didn’t.

  Britain had banned the slave trade in 1807 and banned slavery itself in 1833. Its population was fiercely opposed to slavery, an opposition that only intensified after Uncle Tom’s Cabin became an instant national bestseller in 1852. Britain was also fiercely opposed to yellow fever. There was great consternation among politicians and civilians alike that ships making the Home-Islands-Caribbean-Confederacy-Home-Islands run would be floating carriages of death. “Although the finer points of the discussions taking place,” conveys Mark Harrison, professor of the history of medicine at Oxford, “were probably unknown to most of the public, the occurrence of two outbreaks of yellow fever on European soil in the space of a few years created great alarm.” The British media speculated that “climate and terrible yellow fever” might allow the Confederacy to defy “all the levies that the North can bring against it.” Britain wanted no part of the Confederacy’s yellow fever, which, ironically, never materialized.

  For decades prior to the Civil War, the southern states were ravaged by mosquito-borne disease. For this reason, unlike in wars of the past, yellow fever did not affect the outcome of this war, for it had already bestowed immunity on the survivors. In addition, at the onset of war, the Union Navy implemented General-in-Chief Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan,” blockading Confederate ports, putting a stranglehold on southern trade. Foreign ships, specifically those from the Caribbean, could not make port and deliver their cargo or distribute the dreaded virus and its disease-vectoring sailors and mosquitoes.

  New Orleans, the heart of Dixie trade, was captured a year into the war in April 1862, followed by Memphis a month later, effectively damming the Mississippi River and choking the flow of blockade runners and Confederate supplies. In doing so, the Union also inadvertently closed river access to yellow fever, saving the occupying forces from the nightmare of disease and death that historically engulfed New Orleans and the Mississippi delta. Confederate planners fully expected New Orleans to be a headache for the Union. A Virginia newspaper predicted that the vital port of New Orleans would be “a prize which will cost them vastly more to keep than the animal is worth, if his Saffron Majesty [yellow fever] shall make his annual visit.” Sharing this same fear, a Union surgeon forecasted at the outbreak of war that “throughout both the North and South it was prophesied that the great scourge of the tropics, yellow fever, would decimate any northern armies that might penetrate the ‘Cotton States’ within the ‘yellow fever zone.’”

  As it turned out, yellow fever was scarce during the war, especially in New Orleans, where it killed only eleven residents. The Union occupation force maintained stringent sanitation measures and a strict quarantine. During the Civil War, only 1,355 cases and 436 deaths were reported among Union troops. As the Anaconda Plan tightened its stranglehold on the South, yellow fever became increasingly less likely. However, the same cannot be said for its sibling malaria. While yellow fever was kept in check, malaria flourished.

  Like yellow fever, malaria was chronic prior to the Civil War, but unlike yellow fever, it continued to stalk the battlefields, debilitating millions between 1861 and 1865. “Mosquitoes,” decreed a malaria-stricken soldier from Connecticut, “were the most awful enemies” he ever encountered. The total military mobilization of 3.2 million men during the war allowed malaria to blossom and thrive. Unseasoned Yankee soldiers crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into the South in huge numbers, breaching the epidemiological barrier. “As men from all over the country assembled to settle the issues of federalism and slavery on the battlefield, the mosquitoes of the South were galvanized by the large number of new prey that suddenly appeared in their midst,” stresses Bell. “And before the guns fell silent, these tiny insects played a significant, and heretofore underappreciated, role in the events of the Civil War.” With the mass movement and migration of soldiers and civilians across our three zones of infection, pulsating mosquito populations took flight and quickened the marching steps of malaria.

  Without British aid, the undermanned and undersupplied Confederacy was left to fight it out alone against both mosquitoes and the Union. Lincoln’s military machine possessed an overwhelming advantage in everything needed to win a war, from manpower, resources, infrastructure, industry, and foodstuffs to all manner of weapons, as well as quinine, as crucial to victory as bullets and bayonets. The only portfolios that tipped South were raw cotton and slaves and yet on the front lines, the Confederacy controlled the first two years of the war.

  Until the concurrent Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, the underdog Confederacy was driving the momentum of the war, and Johnny Reb and the mosquito were getting the better of Lincoln’s overconfident blue-clad Yankee boys and their bumbling generals. For the North, which had every military benefit, the war was not supposed to have lasted this long nor stooped and descended into a war of attrition. Forecast to be fleeting and steeply tilted in favor of the Union when the first few harmless Confederate shots were lobbed at Fort Sumter, this rebellion of the southern states was ferociously set ablaze at the First Battle of Bull Run.

  On a beautiful sunny day in July 1861, Wilmer McLean sat on his front porch in Manassas, Virginia, listening to the rumble of artillery and the clatter of marching soldiers. His house had been commandeered to headquarter Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard. In the distance, he could see hundreds of well-dressed, dapper spectators on the surrounding hilltops, sitting in chairs under shade umbrellas, snacking from wicker picnic baskets. These were the enraptured elite and wealthy of Washington, DC, including numerous senators, congressmen, and their families, who had made the twenty-five-mile journey to watch the bloody spectacle and historic event, not wanting to miss the Union crushing the southern rebels in one swift stroke. As the whining grew louder, McLean covered his head and shuddered as a Union cannonball ripped through his kitchen chimney, prompting Beauregard to write that “a comical effect of this artillery fight was the destruction of the dinner of myself and staff.” It was the mosquito that had chosen McLean’s front yard near Bull Run Creek as the site for the first significant salvos of the Civil War, although she cannot be held liable for destroying his kitchen.

  Winfield Scott, commanding general of the United States Army, was a veteran of the War of 1812, the Seminole Wars, and the Mexican-American War. Having already served for a staggering fifty-four years, he knew firsthand the dangers mosquito-borne disease presented for unseasoned troops. He had outwitted both Santa Anna and the mosquito in Mexico and was not prepared to sacrifice his soldiers to her bite with a southern campaign against Confederate homelands. At the onset of the Civil War, Scott warned both President Lincoln and his immediate military subordinate, Major General George McClell
an, that if the Union did not attack the South immediately, the public would grow impatient. By design, however, his Anaconda Plan needed time to starve out the Confederacy. Scott was also aware that the public, shielded by climate from endemic mosquito-borne disease, did not fully appreciate the grim reality of fighting in southern mosquito country. “They will urge instant and vigorous action, regardless I fear of the consequences,” he counseled. “That is, unwilling to wait for the slow instruction . . . and the return of frosts to kill the virus of malignant fevers below Memphis.”

  When the War Cabinet met in June 1861, a month before Bull Run, the decision facing its members was whether to mount the main offensive in Virginia or the Mississippi River Valley. Virginia won the contest because it was resolved that it would be military suicide to “go into an unhealthy country to fight them.” Union physicians had also warned Lincoln that “northern troops, in passing now no farther south even than the lower Chesapeake enter a climate entirely foreign to their constitution [with] marsh miasm.” On July 21, 1861, at the mosquito-selected site near the McLean house in Manassas, Virginia, on the banks of Bull Run Creek, the two armies finally clashed.

  After fierce fighting throughout most of the day, and a stubborn stand by Confederate general Thomas J. Jackson, earning him immortality as “Stonewall” Jackson, the chaotic Union forces and a disorderly mob of shocked and rattled spectators fled in a panicked, rain-dashed retreat back to Washington, somersaulting the nation toward total war. Overconfident Union forces were routed in what was the largest and bloodiest battle in American history up to that point. This distinction and military achievement would be repeatedly shattered during the brutal battles that lay ahead, with names like Antietam, Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, Chickamauga, and Gettysburg that still resonate through the collective consciousness of the country. Littered with the battered, disfigured, bloated bodies of thousands of Americans, on the blood-soaked battlefield of Bull Run any prospects, delusions, or pipe dreams of a short war went up in smoke. This was going to be a protracted, grisly struggle, and the mosquito would do everything in her power to prolong it.