Malarial fevers caused by the miasmal climate frequently led to complications and deaths. Soon the question was not whether someone was going to die, but how many would succumb. In the first two weeks of the occupation of Hilton Head, nine soldiers died. The makeshift Pinewood Cemetery at the edge of the camp began to fill almost before it was ready. Nellie and her nurses grieved over their failures, becoming more and more discouraged as the days passed.
For each burial, Reverend Browne emerged from his private reveries to perform the services, and his voice grew stronger with each death, as Colonel Leasure had predicted. Browne described the problems in a letter to his father.
It has been a week to try our faith, bravery and patience. Death has been busy in our ranks. The process of acclimation goes hard with our Northern constitution; and many are sick. We brought the measles ashore with us, and it has spread till there are many cases, but in general they are progressing favorably. There are some cases of dysentery, pneumonia, and remittent fever. The latter is of a severer type than is common in our climate. Since we landed as many as nine more have died, two of whom were last week and seven this week; and these sudden strokes of death among us have filled the Colonel, physicians, nurses and others including myself who feel care and responsibility, with sadness.
The medical staff, of course, came in daily contact with the diseases that were ravaging the camp. Several of the women accompanying the regiment grew alarmed at the possibility of their own deaths and found a variety of excuses to keep themselves away from the patients who were suffering the most. Even Mary Pollack’s father demanded she stay away from the hospital tents. Nellie struggled to cover the shortage of nursing staff by working double shifts herself. Doctor Ludington was not unaware of her efforts, but he himself was so busy he failed to notice the early signs Nellie was faltering under her workload. It was, in fact, a patient who first drew his attention to the problem.
“Doctor? Have you noticed how pale and thin our Nurse Nellie is lately?” asked a private who was well on his way to recovery from a case of scarlet fever. “I think she may be working too hard. She’s in here day and night, and I never see her take a break, even for meals.”
Doctor Ludington started at the question. “Come to think of it, she hasn’t been eating in the mess tent lately. I guess I assumed she was taking her meals here in the hospital.”
“I don’t think she’s eating or sleeping,” the young soldier went on. “I’m no medical man, but I’d feel better if you took a look at her.”
“I’ll do that. Thank you.”
Ludington found Nellie at a makeshift desk, making notes on the day’s patients and treatments. When she looked up at him, he was shocked at her pallor. Her eyes were dull, and when her lips smiled, the rest of her face remained blank. “Nellie,” he said, “Are you feeling all right?”
She stared at him for a moment and then gingerly shook her head. “Just a bit of a headache. Nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not so sure about that. May I feel your pulse?” He took her slender wrist and noted the rapid heartbeats that felt like little bubbles bursting under the skin. Her skin was clammy with cold, and when he pushed up her sleeve, her arm immediately puckered into goose-bumps. “You’re cold.”
“It’s chilly in here,” she said. “It’s November, after all.”
“It’s actually warm in here, Nellie. How long have you been feeling ill?”
“I’m not ill,” she insisted. “I’m tired.”
“I don’t think so. Can you stand up for me?”
“Of course. But why?” She pushed the chair back and stood, grasping the edge of the desk to steady herself. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, trying to stop the room from spinning around her. Then she staggered and sat down abruptly, refusing to meet the doctor’s eyes.
“Orderly!” Doctor Ludington called. “Mrs. Leath is not feeling well. Please help her to her tent and then summon Mary Pollack to stay with her. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes, Nellie.”
For the next three days, Nellie lay on her cot, almost insensible to her surroundings. She alternated rapidly from shivering with cold to flushing with fever. She refused food, and drank only sparingly. She jerked her head away when someone tried to administer medicine of any kind. Finally Doctor Ludington lost his patience with her. “You’re a terrible patient, Nellie! What would you do if one of your soldiers refused all your efforts to help?”
“I’d realize he was ready to die,” she mumbled. “Leave me alone.”
Now seriously concerned, Ludington sought help from Colonel Leasure. “I can’t get through to her, Daniel. It’s as if she is willing herself to die. I don’t think she has one of the more serious malarial fevers. Her symptoms aren’t all that severe, but she’s given up. There’s not a spark of life in her. She’s lying there waiting for her body to shut down.”
Daniel Leasure did not need to hear more. He strode directly to her tent, dismissing the nurse and orderly who were attending her. He clasped her hand and shook her shoulder. “Nellie? What’s all this I hear about you?”
Her eyes cleared a little as she gazed up at him. “I’m dying, Colonel. I’m not going to survive this illness, whatever Doctor Ludington chooses to call it.”
“Nellie, no, I can’t accept that.”
“It’s all right. I’m ready to die. Life has been a burden to me. If I can die here, at my post, in the service of my country, I am more than willing to do so.”
“Well, I’m not willing to let you do it,” Colonel Leasure replied. “And you’re not ‘dying at your post’. Your post is out there in the hospital, taking care of our patients. You’re not serving your country by lying here feeling sorry for yourself and tying up the time of our medical staff who are needed elsewhere.”
Now Nellie was glaring at him, and he was delighted to see the spark return to her eyes. “I’m not faking my illness, Colonel,” she answered.
“No, you’ve been ill, I admit. I’m a doctor, remember? You’re weak from lack of food and water, and you’ve had a bit of a bout with this coastal fever that’s been going around. But it’s not going to kill you, any more than that fall on board the Ocean Queen was going to kill you. You seem to enjoy the drama that surrounds the possibility you might die, but we don’t have time for it at the moment.”
“What would you have me do?” she asked, tears beginning to brim under her lashes. “When I tried to work my way though the illness, Doctor Ludington sent me to my bed. Now that I’m here, you’re chastising me for not being at work.”
“Just don’t die, Nellie. We need you back, as soon as you feel able. You need to work at getting well. Right now you’re letting the weakness of your body dictate to your flagging spirit. But your spirit has always been strong. Give it the upper hand over this illness.”
Nellie didn’t answer. Her eyes closed and her lips pressed together in a tight line. She struggled to pull herself together. Two days later, she was back at work, a bit shaky but cheerful as ever. The two doctors watched her covertly as she moved among her patients.
“You were right, Daniel,” Doctor Ludington admitted. “Her malady was more in her mind than in her body. I wonder what it is that makes her so ready to welcome death.”
“We may never know, Horace. She’s a troubled soul, obviously. Whatever happened to her in her former life has scarred her. She’s afraid of something, and she’s holding it at bay by devoting herself to a righteous cause. As long as she’s helping others, the threat of her past can’t reach her. When her work disappears, the fears return.”
For the soldiers of the Roundhead Regiment, homesickness glorified and exaggerated their memories of autumns filled with brilliant red and gold trees, rolling hills of amber grain, and the rich smells of burning bonfires. Like other Union soldiers, they could find little to like in the scenery of their current surroundings. Stephen Walkley, who originally came from Connecticut, complained:
If I walk outside to see the beauties of n
ature, there are none to see. The Palmettoes are interesting; the live oaks with their silvery moss are beautiful, but all else is a flat waste of dreary, dirty sand. The matted vines trail down into the dank edges of the swamps and the hot sun by day decays them enough to exhale malarious gases by night. Aside from the fort I have not seen a hill a foot high nor a rock big enough to throw at a robin.
Insects continued to be a problem. Mosquitoes, fleas, chinch bugs, and deer flies do not die off easily in the warm, wet South Carolina climate. Pennsylvanians, used to killing frosts in early autumn, did not expect to be assaulted by squads of tiny nuisances in November. Nellie had several ideas that might help the sufferers, but she could hardly keep up with the demand. She suggested solutions of chloride of lime, arsenic, or soap, but few had the time to brush the substances on all the surfaces of their living quarters. Closing off an area and fuming it with camphor, burning brown sugar, or plantains dipped in milk would work only if the rooms could be sealed off. She sent some soldiers on a hunt for wild garlic to hang around their necks, and for bites, she recommended vinegar. The cures sometimes worked, but the soldiers complained the awful smells were almost as irritating as the bites.
For Nellie herself, the worst insect invasion came from palmetto bugs. These looked like giant cockroaches, some of them an inch or more in length. They made a creepy clicking noise, and Nellie swore she could hear their toes scrabbling in the dirt. On one occasion, challenged by an unusually large specimen in the ward, she upended a bucket over it until she could find some brave soul to squash it. She was horrified a moment later to see the bucket sliding across the floor as the palmetto bug pushed it along. It sometimes seemed to Nellie she was stranded on a deserted island inhabited only by God’s nastiest creatures.
Nellie was correct in seeing Hilton Head as a deserted island, and it was not only a result of the recent exodus when the Union forces attacked Port Royal Sound. Hilton Head provided an excellent port as well as a thin but fertile soil, both of which made it a desirable location for invasion and occupation. Early island plantations raising indigo and tea were targeted by the British during the American Revolution. Many were attacked, their crops and slaves carried off on British ships. Again during the War of 1812, the British burned Hilton Head plantations along the navigable waterways. Some planters simply gave up and moved inland early in the nineteenth century, while others hung on until the shallow soil became depleted of nutrients. As the market for tea and indigo declined, long-staple cotton became the crop of choice, and, as it did so, planters needed fresh soil, uncontaminated by salt marshes. Long before the Expeditionary Force landed at Fort Walker, a number of plantations on Hilton Head had been abandoned and left to the ravages of time and weather.
Colonel Leasure, Doctor Luddington, and several other officers set out one day to refresh themselves by exploring the island, but what they found left them feeling sadder than when they left the fort. After hacking their way through heavy underbrush, they began to discern the remains of old roads, which in turn led them to abandoned plantations. Further along the path, they came to an old burial ground, again in the midst of tangled underbrush, the fences broken down, and the tombstones broken to pieces. They spotted one huge marble mausoleum and identified some family names—Kirk, Grimes, McCabe, and Baynard—sad reminders of the fleeting nature of human prosperity.
All were disturbed by their contacts with the Negroes who were living in the interior of the island. The Roundheads, many of whom came from staunchly abolitionist families, had set out in the assumption they were fighting to free the slaves. They believed in equality and freedom for all men. Their own ancestors had fled from Ireland to escape oppression. Their hometown churches taught that slavery was a sin. Innocently the men had believed that, when the rebels were defeated, the slaves would become free and equal citizens. They were ill-prepared for the realities of Hilton Head Island.
When the Confederate troops of Fort Walker fled, the civilians living on the island headed for the safety of Charleston or points further inland. But the slaves had neither joined the flight nor left their everyday tasks on the plantations. Without supervision from overseers, they went about the job of harvesting the crops, taking care of abandoned animals, and raising their families in the same little cabins where they had lived all of their lives. Occasionally one would wander into the Union camp looking for help with a sick child or hoping for employment. But for the most part, they kept to themselves, seeming to be almost as angry about the invasion as had been their owners.
The commanding officers were confounded by the existence of abandoned slaves. General Sherman estimated there were at least nine thousand blacks on Hilton Head. With increasing frequency, he wrote to headquarters and to Lincoln himself, begging for help, or at least instructions, on how to handle the problem:
Hordes of totally uneducated, ignorant, and improvident blacks have been abandoned by their constitutional guardians, not only to all the future chances of anarchy and starvation, but in such a state of abject ignorance and mental stolidity as to preclude all possibility of self-government and self-maintenance in their present condition.
He exaggerated the helplessness of the slaves but not the frustrations of the soldiers.
“Why don’t they leave?” was a common point of discussion among the men. “Don’t they understand they are free? What’s stopping them?”
“I feel like I brought somebody a birthday present and they said, ‘No, thanks’,” Jim McCaskey complained. “We’ve handed them their freedom, and they don’t want it.”
“Yeah. I thought that was what we were fighting about,” Jacob Leary agreed. “If we’re wasting our time, I’d rather be home at my chores. It’d sure be easier than digging this confounded ditch.”
“Did you hear Reverend Browne has taken one of the slaves into his tent as his own personal servant?” The speaker was John Wilson, a cocky Pennsylvanian who often thought the worst of his friends and comrades. “Calls him Tony and says he’s teaching him to read the Bible. Needs somebody to wash his socks more likely.”
“The Reverend wouldn’t do that,” someone protested. “Colonel Leasure already said, back in Annapolis, we couldn’t keep the blacks as servants.”
“Yeah, but that was before he was surrounded by them,” John replied. “Maybe we should follow Browne’s example and get our own crew of slaves to dig for a while.”
Jim McCaskey shook his head in exasperation. “I still believe in our cause. We’re here to put an end to slavery. The slaves around here don’t understand that yet. Once the war’s over, and there’s no threat of the plantation owners coming back, they’ll see what good we’ve done. Give them time.”
Nellie, too, had much to learn about the slaves she thought they had come to rescue. One morning at breakfast, she was trying to make pleasant conversation with the chaplain. “How do you think the morale of the troops is holding up?” she asked him. “You talk to them when they are at their most discouraged. Are they sorry they came, do you think?”
“Ah, no, Mrs. Leath. They’re tired and sore and dirty, but they still believe in the cause for which they enlisted. They’re having some contact out in the woods with the slaves whose owners abandoned them here on this island when we landed. They’re learning at first hand what life has been like under conditions of slavery, and many of them have been visibly upset by the stories they have been told.”
“There are slaves living in the woods? I had no idea! I haven’t seen any Negroes here in camp, so I assumed they had all left.”
“No indeed. When the planters saw Fort Walker was about to fall, they skedaddled with only what they could carry in their arms. They ordered their slaves to follow, but no one seems to have enforced that order. For the most part, the slaves simply hunkered down and hid until their masters left.”
“But what are they doing out there? We’ve taken over the plantation houses and eaten their food supplies. Are they really living in the woods, like primitives?”
Nellie felt herself being to bristle with indignation at his patronizing remark. Swallowing hard, she tried to keep smiling. “Are they looking for our help? Should we be doing something positive for them?”
Beyond All Price Page 17