On April 9, 1865, after 10,000 battles both large and small, the Civil War ended, in a place that Wilmer McLean, whose kitchen had been destroyed in the First Battle of Bull Run, would never have imagined. He had uprooted his family to escape the war after the Battles of Bull Run, relocating in what seemed to be the peace and quiet of a tiny crossroads community in nowhere Virginia called Appomattox Court House. But the war found him there, and, however unlikely, he hosted the terms of surrender between Generals Grant and Lee in the parlor of his roomy Federal-style home. The Civil War was over.
Lincoln prevailed in both his war aims of preserving the union and ending the evils of slavery but at a cost of 750,000 American lives, including roughly 50,000 (predominantly southern) civilian war-related deaths. To grasp the extent of this savagery, the total butcher’s bill would today equate to more than 7 million dead. More Americans died in the Civil War than all other American wars combined. Of the 360,000 Union dead, 65% died of disease. More than 1.3 million cases of malaria were recorded by Union hospitals, with 10,000 deaths, although the actual numbers are presumably much higher. In certain southern theaters of the war, particularly in the Carolinas, annual malaria rates reached a nauseating 235% (multiple infections or relapses per man).
Although Confederate records went up in smoke with the fall of Richmond, the chief surgeon of the Confederacy knowledgeably estimated that of the 290,000 military fatalities, 75% were caused by disease. We can only guess at the total malarial impact on Confederate troops. The consensus among Civil War historians is that malaria rates and deaths were roughly 10% to 15% higher than those of Union forces. Given manpower considerations, malarious mosquitoes helped drain southern military strength, promoted a northern victory, preserved the Union, and dismantled the institution of slavery. With the mosquito-supported Emancipation Proclamation, liberated southern slaves refashioned as soldiers helped to safeguard its promises of freedom.
Over 200,000 African Americans served in Union forces during the Civil War, reporting 152,000 cases of malaria. “I had supposed the black man to be peculiarly exempt from diseases due to malarial influences,” reported Union physician John Fish while traveling with a Colored Regiment along the Mississippi from Baton Rouge to Vicksburg, “but I should not expect to have encountered a greater number of cases of intermittent fever.” Roughly 40,000 African Americans perished fighting for their freedom, with 75% succumbing to illness. The scientific stereotype of African immunity to mosquito-borne disease was discredited. “Notwithstanding the supposed exemption of negroes from the climatic diseases of the South, I am constantly seeing cases of the same fevers and diarrhoeas [sic] among them, which prevail among the soldiers, and apparently of equal severity and frequency,” divulged a Union surgeon from Memphis. “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.” The fallacy of these justifications built on hereditary immunities like Duffy negativity or sickle cell was exposed by the inclusion and participation of African Americans in the Civil War.
High rates of malaria among these country-born African Americans who no longer possessed genetic buffers splintered the prewar pillar of “racial science” and its buttressing pseudoscientific claims that for generations had served as convenient exonerations of slavery. A Union physician bluntly stated that the academic doctrine concerning African resistance to mosquito-borne disease “so often reiterated in our text-books” was demonstrably unfounded. Not only were 4.2 million African Americans no longer the property of plantation owners, the racial stereotypes of mosquito-borne disease were unraveling.
African American military service as fighting troops in the Civil War also undermined prevailing martial race theories. Following the unprecedented body count at Antietam in September 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary outline or warning order for the Emancipation Proclamation. That same month, although technically unofficial, the first African American unit, the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, was formally received into the United States Army. Following the official sanction to muster African American contingents composed of freed slaves permitted by the Emancipation Proclamation, a total of 175 segregated regiments of US Colored Troops served during the war. There were, however, less than 100 African American officers across these regiments, none with a rank above captain, and until June 1864, colored soldiers pocketed less pay than their white comrades. While the military legally accepted African Americans, sanctioned desegregation of the US Armed Forces did not occur until President Harry Truman’s executive order in 1948 after the Second World War. While the Union allowed for stipulated and controlled African American service, the Confederacy wanted no part of arming its slaves.
Major General Howell Cobb, who had served as president of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States prior to the election of Jefferson Davis in February 1861, succinctly summed up the Confederate position and questions of racial hierarchy surrounding the conversion of slaves to soldiers. “You cannot make soldiers of slaves or slaves of soldiers,” he claimed. “The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” In late March, with the war all but lost and manpower reaching a critical mass, the Confederate Congress relented and asked slave owners to allow 25% of their human property to be called into service. Only two confused companies of slave soldiers were hastily raised and showpiece-paraded around Richmond before Lee surrendered and the Confederacy, and its culture of slavery, crumbled.
In the opposing trenches, however, African American soldiers fought for the Union with distinction and courage. They skirmished at Port Hudson near Vicksburg, inspiring Grant to extol, “All that have been tried have fought bravely.” Colored regiments also engaged Confederate soldiers around Nashville, clashed at the Battle of the Crater during the siege of Petersburg, and were among the first troops to enter the abandoned and smoldering Confederate capital of Richmond in the wee hours of April 3, 1865. The famous but futile assault by the 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment in July 1863 on the island ramparts of Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor entered pop culture in 1989 with the Academy Award–winning movie Glory (including a young Denzel Washington).
The venerated abolitionist, author, and former slave Frederick Douglass, whose own sons fought in colored regiments, avowed shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, “A war undertaken and brazenly carried for the perpetual enslavement of the colored men, calls logically and loudly for the colored men to help suppress it.” Not only did African Americans rally to Douglass’s reasoning that by fighting, “no power on earth [could] deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States,” they carried out his larger vision of life and liberty with heroism and valor. Twenty-three African American soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor during the Civil War. Despite these decorations and accolades, theirs was certainly a different and unique war from that fought by other American troops, both Union and Confederate.
African Americans were fighting for freedom in a segregated and skeptical army against an enemy who offered no quarter and delighted in killing them, all under the microscopic scrutiny of a curious, cross-examining, and judging nation. For African Americans, surrender was not an option. Confederate soldiers were disgusted and appalled at having to fight former slaves in what should have remained a white man’s war, and they exacted harsh retribution on the wounded and captured. African American soldiers suffered sadistic violence at the hands of Confederate soldiers and were singled out for torture and execution on numerous occasions.
The worst atrocity and massacre occurred in April 1864 along the Mississippi River at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. “The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The whitte [sic] m
en fared but little better,” penned eyewitness Confederate sergeant Achilles V. Clark. “Their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen. Blood, human blood stood about in pools and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity. I with several others tried to stop the butchery and at one time had partially succeeded but Gen. Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued. Finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased.” Confederate troops under Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was later elected the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in 1867, mercilessly tortured and killed African American troops and their white officers following their capture or surrender, in what Forrest called “the wholesale slaughter of the garrison at Fort Pillow.” “The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards,” he reported three days after the horror. “It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.” Roughly 80% of African American soldiers and 40% of their white officers were executed. Only 58 African American troops were marched into captivity, which might have been worse than death by execution, as internment was often a prolonged and agonizing death sentence itself.
Confederate prison camps were a graphic nightmare filled with starvation, filth, desolation, squalor, and disease. Death stalked skeletal and emaciated Union prisoners by the thousands. Prior to its liberation in May 1865, at the notorious Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia, 13,000 Union troops died from a medical directory of diseases including scurvy, malaria, dysentery, typhoid, influenza, and hookworm in less than a year. The accounts of the suffering and deplorable conditions at Andersonville are so sickening that they are beyond imagination or description.* The prisoner-of-war camps, however, simply replicated and adhered to the larger thematic cogs of the Civil War—massacre, mosquitoes, disease, bloodshed, and death.
And so the Civil War, like so many wars that came before it and so many that came after, was consumed by mosquito-borne disease and deadly pestilence. Unlike most wars, however, the unprecedented slaughter engendered one positive, humanizing, and nation-enlightening effect. Underwritten by the mosquito, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal [and] all persons held as slaves . . . shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” With the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution on December 6, 1865, slavery was forever banned in the United States.
The cost of freedom was staggering—750,000 dead Americans. Ever the eloquent wordsmith and stirring poet-president, Lincoln tendered the departed of the Civil War, including the sons of Mrs. Bixby of Boston, the consolation that “in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” The casualties of the Civil War certainly did not die in vain. Despite all the ghastly horrors and butchery of the war, General Grant concluded, “We are better off now than we would have been without it.” He believed, as did Lincoln, that the war was a “punishment for national sins [slavery] that had to come sooner or later in some shape, and probably in blood.”
After the mind-boggling carnage of the Civil War, the United States deserved a long vacation from death. There would be no time, however, for the war-torn country to lick its wounds. The mosquito does not respect the grieving period and takes advantage of both petty squabbles and all-out war. Regrettably, while the killing on the battlefields stopped, the mosquito did not recognize the peace-brokering salutes between Lee and Grant on Wilmer McLean’s veranda. Millions of soldiers filtered back home with visions of battle burned into their brains and mosquito-borne disease boiling in their veins. During the politically tumultuous and racially turbulent Reconstruction decades, straddling Grant’s sullied, scandal-plagued presidency, the mosquito unleashed the worst epidemics in American history upon an already mourning and war-weary population.
CHAPTER 16
Unmasking the Mosquito: Disease and Imperialism
Kentucky physician and leading expert on yellow fever Dr. Luke Blackburn was too old to enlist. But as a Confederate zealot, he was determined to serve the southern cause. He hatched a maniacal plan to defeat the Union by unleashing a biblical plague of yellow fever on the District of Columbia, killing Lincoln in the process. Learning of a nasty black vomit epidemic stalking Bermuda, which was also a haven for Confederate blockade runners, in April 1864, he made passage to the island. Upon arrival, Dr. Blackburn proceeded to fill several trunks with soiled garments and bedding from yellow fever victims. The boxes were loaded onto a steamer destined to spread the dreaded virus and fever-burning death to an unsuspecting population. In August, on instruction from Blackburn, Godfrey Hyams, a coconspirator who was to be paid the handsome sum of $60,000 upon delivery, sold the trunks of “contaminated” items to a trade store a few blocks from the White House. Blackburn had told his messenger that the “infected” clothing “will kill them at sixty yards.” This already strange and shocking story of biological mosquito weaponry takes an unexpected turn and enters the bizarre, adhering to Mark Twain’s reality that “truth is stranger than fiction.”
In April 1865, as Generals Lee and Grant were cordially discussing terms of surrender in Wilmer McLean’s parlor at Appomattox Court House, Blackburn was back in Bermuda colluding to unleash a second serving of yellow fever, using the same delivery system. This time, he contracted another agent, Edward Swan, to deliver trunks of tainted clothing and linens to New York City for “the destruction of the masses there.” Blackburn, however, had an additional surprise for the city. Once yellow fever had set its hooks and plagued the panicked population, he would unleash a subsequent wave of terror—Blackburn had concocted plans to poison New York’s water supply. Chaos and death would consume his “damn Yankees.”
On April 12, two days before the assassination of President Lincoln, a resentful and still unpaid Godfrey Hyams casually walked into the United States Consulate in Toronto. He calmly and methodically told authorities the details of his involvement in Blackburn’s macabre intrigues. When news reached Bermuda, authorities raided Swan’s hotel and found the trunks and their contents, saturated in black vomit. Swan was arrested and convicted of violating local health codes. With his conspiracy exposed, Blackburn too was arrested, but was eventually acquitted.
Like the British-gifted smallpox blankets of Pontiac’s Rebellion, and Cornwallis’s unrewarding slave-dispensed smallpox ventures during the American Revolution, Blackburn’s nefarious but ingenious scheme, despite an honest effort, was also foiled and ended in failure. The botched conspiracies of Dr. Blackburn, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on yellow fever, also reveal the limited medical knowledge surrounding mosquito-borne disease. Our apex assassin remained anonymous and her lethal subversion undetected.
Only Aedes mosquitoes, not soiled clothes or sheets, can transmit the deadly virus of yellow fever, and in the decades after the war, she did just that. During the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, the mosquito unleashed one of the worst epidemics in American history. In Memphis, the throngs of sick and dying would be ministered to by none other than the illustrious Dr. Luke Blackburn, earning him the morbid nickname “Dr. Black Vomit.” Memphis, climbing from the bluffs of the lazily drifting Mississippi River, was a tired and somber city. The Civil War had drained the vibrant life from the bustling cotton port and railway hub for four major lines. By the spring of 1878, the city was home to a diverse population of 45,000 inhabitants, including freshly emancipated former slaves, sharecroppers, recent German immigrants, Confederate sympathizers and cotton plantation owners, and northern shipping and business moguls. This eclectic population was almost double that of Atlanta or Nashville, and south of the Mason-Dixon Line was second in size only to New Orleans. The contrasting city of Memphis, sitting at the cultural crossroads between North and South, while acting as the gatekeeper to the new western frontier, had gained the reputation as a den of despondency, filth, and disease. In the immediate aft
ermath of the Civil War, it was swallowed by murderous, bloodthirsty mosquitoes.
Memphis was not the only city in the South with the melancholy mosquito-orchestrated delta blues, however. Rapacious mosquitoes insidiously, and quite diligently, gnawed the old Confederacy to pieces. During the devastating yellow fever epidemics that coursed through the South during the 1870s, Dr. Luke Blackburn traveled, like the virus itself, from city to city, including Memphis, to treat the afflicted, refusing any form of compensation.
The first major postwar epidemic mushroomed in 1867, with the mosquito eating her way through the Gulf states, killing upwards of 6,000 people. Having never been convicted for his stabs at biological warfare, Blackburn was in New Orleans, the epicenter of the epidemic, tending to the infected. Despite his best, but medically and scientifically blind, efforts, yellow fever claimed 3,200 people in the “Big Easy.” Six years later, yellow fever snatched another 5,000 lives, including 3,500 in Memphis, where Dr. Blackburn had hung out his shingle. He then turned his migrant medical road show east to Florida in 1877 during another yellow fever epidemic, which killed roughly 2,200 people. A year later, he was back in Memphis as the mosquito was shredding the Mississippi River Valley and harvesting human souls.
By the close of August 1878, Luke Blackburn was exhausted. Not only was he ministering to thousands of floundering yellow fever victims languishing in the sweltering heat of Memphis, he was also the Democratic candidate in Kentucky’s race for governor. An eerie stillness hung over the city while Blackburn, a die-hard Confederate, took some respite to view the historic sights of Memphis, including Jefferson Davis’s home on Court Street. There was no foot traffic, save ghosts, gracing Union Avenue; Beale Street was silent and lifeless; and Main Street was haunted only by windswept trash and a few hurrying, frightened citizens. Nearly 25,000 residents, more than half the city, had already fled in panic. Of the roughly 20,000 remaining, 17,000 would contract yellow fever. The mosquito had besieged Memphis.
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