In nearly every area of the South Union troops would be forced to invade and occupy—the Gulf Coast, the tidewater region of the Southeast, the marshy lowlands along the Mississippi River—anopheline and Aedes aegypti mosquitoes thrived. Southerners were confident their “sickly season” would disrupt the operations of their unseasoned enemies but soon discovered that the diseases that they claimed as their own could work against southern armies as well. Richmond’s need for soldiers brought young men together from the Mississippi Delta and the Virginia hills who had never been exposed to each other’s plasmodium parasites, and during the first year of the war thousands of them fell ill with malaria. Yellow fever was also a threat to the Confederate army, a majority of whose members had grown up in rural areas and had never been exposed to the disease. 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. And before the guns fell silent, these tiny insects played a significant, and heretofore underappreciated, role in the events of the Civil War.25
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THE GLORY OF GANGRENE AND “GALLINIPPERS”
FOR THE AVERAGE soldier who participated in the American Civil War, disease posed a greater threat to life and limb than enemy battalions. A staggering two-thirds of the roughly 360,000 northern soldiers who perished during the conflict died of disease, while Confederates suffered in equal, and perhaps even greater, numbers. Unfortunately, exact figures for the southern soldiers will never be known because most of their medical records went up in smoke along with their short-lived republic’s dreams of independence and perpetual slavery. But after the war Joseph Jones, one of the Confederacy’s most respected surgeons, argued that three-fourths of southern military deaths were attributable to pathologic causes.
Whatever the actual number was, it is clear from the surviving records that a battery of diseases stalked soldiers in both armies for the duration of the war. After the fall of Fort Sumter men who had enjoyed relatively good health on isolated farms in rural areas suddenly found themselves herded into unsanitary army camps that were teeming with bacteria, parasites, and viruses of every description. Mumps, measles, typhoid fever, gangrene, rheumatism, pneumonia, and chronic diarrhea were just a few of the maladies that beset both Union and Confederate troops and made military service a less than glorious enterprise. 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.1
Malaria afflicted the common soldier more frequently than most other diseases. Among Union troops only diarrhea and dysentery were bigger problems. Statistics compiled by the federal government show that on average 224 out of every 1,000 northern men who sought treatment for an illness during the war were diagnosed with malaria. Confederate forces were also hit hard by the disease, which in 1861 and 1862 accounted for one-seventh of the cases of sickness among southern soldiers stationed in the East. Missing from these figures are the unknown numbers of men who either suffered without treatment or were diagnosed with another disease that completely overshadowed the symptoms of their plasmodium infection.2
Soldiers contracted malaria almost as soon as they joined the army. The disease plagued the numerous training camps that were set up early in the war by both the Union and Confederate governments. In the Washington, D.C., area mosquitoes buzzed in and out of the thousands of tents that were pitched within sight of the unfinished Capitol dome, spreading sickness among troops who had only recently arrived from the farms and factories of the North to fight for their country. Camp Michigan was located just a few miles from Alexandria, Virginia, and served as the headquarters for the Third Michigan Infantry and three other regiments. During a three-month period in 1861 George Willson, an assistant surgeon with the Third, had his hands full with patients but managed to record details of the thirty-six hundred cases of sickness that appeared in camp. Willson’s notes show that “catarrh,” a nonspecific Victorian term used to describe almost any ailment that caused sinus congestion, was the chief complaint among the troops, followed by diarrhea and malaria. More than five hundred men were diagnosed with either “intermittent quotidian fever” or “intermittent tertian fever.” Bronchitis, rheumatism, and typhoid fever also tormented the soldiers.
In nearby Arlington the Twenty-fifth New York Volunteers, a predominantly Irish-American regiment recruited in New York City, occupied an unhealthy piece of ground they called Camp Smith. Bored and poorly disciplined, the men of the Twenty-fifth drank to pass the time and urinated within their campsite, even though a latrine had been dug only twenty-five feet away. At night groups of six soldiers huddled into one of the seven-by-five-foot “wedge tents” issued by the government. Anopheles mosquitoes that had hatched in the stagnant pools surrounding the Potomac were attracted by these clusters of warmblooded bodies, and soon the soldiers of the Twenty-fifth were suffering from “intermittent fever,” in addition to diarrhea and rheumatism.
Other units posted near the Potomac River also contracted malaria. When one-third of the soldiers in a number of regiments camped on the Arlington “flats” fell ill with “diarrhea, intermittent, and typhoid fevers,” the medical director of the Army of the Potomac, Charles Tripler, recommended that they be moved to higher ground. But Brigadier General Irvin McDowell’s chief surgeon doubted that such a move would make any difference in the health of his men and openly expressed his skepticism in a report addressed to Tripler. Some units headed for higher ground anyway. The Fifth Michigan Infantry set up camp on Arlington Heights—outside the flight range of the myriad mosquitoes that infested the river bottomlands—and avoided plasmodium infections altogether (typhoid fever was still a problem for the Fifth). But for the most part Tripler was besieged on all sides by obduracy and incompetence. Many regiments arrived in Washington either without medical officers or with volunteer surgeons who had received only limited medical training and were “accustomed to a village nostrum practice.” They disregarded army supply regulations and freely dispensed whatever medicines they thought might work at a time when the medical director was grappling with the logistics of moving medical stores to needy regiments.
This disorganization was caused in part by the haphazard selection process used for regimental surgeons in 1861. Some surgeons were appointed by state governors for political reasons, while others were elected by the soldiers of the regiment. Eventually, the federal government created examining boards that weeded out the most egregiously incompetent physicians and established a structured chain of command for the medical corps, but no such regulations were in place at the beginning of the war.3
Even the best-trained physician practicing in the 1860s, however, could do little to help his sick patients. The medical profession had made little progress since ancient times, and some of the most highly respected surgeons of the day still believed that diseases were caused by an imbalance of the body’s four humors (“blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile”), an idea first introduced by Hippocrates around 400 b.c. Unfortunately, Joseph Lister’s experiments with antiseptics, Robert Koch’s postulates on germs, and Walter Reed’s discoveries regarding yellow fever were still years away, which meant Civil War surgeons could only treat symptoms rather than address the root causes of disease.4
In many cases untrained civilian volunteers did a better job of preserving the health of soldiers than surgeons did. The United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) was formed in New York City in 1861 by women and men who were worried that American armies might face the same epidemiological disaster that befell British forces in the Crimea. Not knowing that bacteria, parasites, and viruses were responsible for disease, they were nevertheless observant enough to make a connection between cleanliness and good health. Sanitary Commission volunteers published health advice for the army, lobbied government officials to place a higher priority on hygiene, donated equipment, and dispatched inspectors to c
ampsites and hospitals to make sure that these areas were kept clean. Although the USSC was only an advisory body and could not enforce its recommendations, its high public profile goaded the government into enacting reforms that undoubtedly saved lives.5
Sanitary Commission volunteers worked in Union camps out West, where the situation was even more chaotic and unhealthy for the Federals than it was in the East. In Cairo, Illinois (the spot Dickens had dubbed “a breeding-place of fever” years earlier), the armies that would eventually triumph on the battlefields of Tennessee and Mississippi were then just a disorganized mass of sickly recruits, braying mules, and nonplussed officers. Surgeon John H. Brinton was medical director for the district and faced many of the same problems Tripler was dealing with in Washington. Brinton grew annoyed at the incompetence of commanders who seemed unable to keep their troops healthy and was surprised at the enlisted men’s tendency to succumb to even mild ailments. “The men from the country had often not passed through the ordinary diseases of child life,” he later wrote in his memoirs, “and no sooner were they brought together in camps, than measles and other children’s diseases showed themselves, and spread rapidly.” He also noticed that the “malarial influences” of the nearby Ohio and Mississippi rivers were sickening soldiers, especially those who hailed from “higher regions” and healthier locales. Unbeknownst to Brinton, many of these men were being infected with plasmodium parasites for the first time in their lives by the clouds of mosquitoes that hovered around the campsite.
“Violent remittent” and intermittent fevers appeared among the troops along with cases of typhoid fever, causing widespread sickness and death. In September 1861 the Eighth Illinois Infantry was camped in Cairo, close to a levee on the Mississippi River. Remittent and intermittent fevers soon broke out among the soldiers, who were also battling diarrhea and typhoid fever. Scores of these men were either sent to the regimental hospital or confined to quarters. Many of their comrades assigned to other locations in the West suffered a similar fate. Union camps in Kentucky and Missouri were plagued with malaria and other diseases. The Sixth Iowa Infantry left home to cheering crowds and fife and drum corps tributes only to discover that the realities of army life did not jibe with the heroic picture portrayed by politicians. A measles epidemic sickened close to one hundred members of the regiment while it was stationed in Jefferson City, Missouri. At the same time, “a large number of serious cases of chills, fevers, and camp diarrhoea” appeared among the men, putting a tremendous strain on the Sixth’s medical staff.6
The Confederacy’s armies were even sicklier. Like their northern counterparts, southerners who had grown up in sparsely populated areas were susceptible to ailments that nineteenth-century physicians considered “infantile diseases,” such as whooping cough and measles. Measles proved especially problematic among new recruits, and several regiments were temporarily disbanded in order to check its spread. Meningitis, respiratory tract infections, dysentery, and typhoid fever were just a few of the other diseases that sickened southern volunteers early in the war. Malaria was also pervasive. The ailment was endemic in most areas of the Confederacy, and many men arrived in training camp already carrying plasmodium parasites in their bodies. Because different strains of the disease plagued different regions of the South, even recruits who had developed a tolerance for the variety of ague that existed in their home counties were vulnerable to bouts of chills and fever.
The prevalence of malaria in the Confederate ranks may help explain why southern troops often appeared sicklier to observers than northern soldiers. Edward Porter Alexander, who would earn lasting fame as an artillery officer in the Army of Northern Virginia, traveled to the North during the early months of the war and noticed that the Yankees he saw “were all fine healthy looking men, with flesh on their bones & color in their cheeks, thoroughly well uniformed, equipped & armed.” In contrast, the Rebels he encountered in Georgia and Tennessee “were less healthy looking” and “sallower in complexion.” By 1860 malaria had all but disappeared from New England and was on the decline in the northwestern states due to long winters and northerners’ efforts to drain and develop their land. In the South, on the other hand, mosquitoes could survive most of the year, and southerners’ dependence on slave labor produced crude housing, poor sanitation, and undeveloped land—conditions that aided the spread of plasmodium parasites. War brought men and malaria together, and the clouds of mosquitoes that were a part of the southern landscape quickly spread sickness through the ranks of both the Union and Confederate armies.7
Malaria was not the only mosquito-borne illness that threatened the health of the average enlisted man during the Civil War. Most Union and Confederate servicemen had never been exposed to yellow fever and harbored a deep-seated fear of the disease that had killed so many southerners in the 1850s. A few months before South Carolina seceded, William Tecumseh Sherman admitted in a letter to a colleague at the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy (later Louisiana State University) that his fellow northerners possessed “an utter dread of the yellow-fever and other epidemics of the South.” His assessment proved accurate for the throngs of unacclimated Union soldiers who were tasked with invading and occupying the unhealthiest areas of the South. While anxious to prove their mettle in combat, many of these men became unnerved at the prospect of facing a disease they knew could wipe out an entire army in a short period of time. In New Orleans, for example, Major General Benjamin Butler watched in frustration as a number of officers in his occupation force were “frightened home by fear of yellow fever.” The disease also preyed on the mind of Alfred Castleman as he marched with the Army of the Potomac through Virginia in the spring of 1862. Castleman doubted that the war would end even if the North captured Richmond because the Rebels could easily “fall back on the Cotton States” and lure the Yankees against defenses “more formidable than [Southern] guns,” which he enumerated as “rice swamps, hot weather, and yellow fever.” Several months later, in December 1862, navy man William Holton was thankful that he and his fellow sailors had avoided the disease, which he thought was “more to be feared by unacclimated persons than the fiercest battles.” It is clear from these and other accounts that most Union military personnel considered the scourge of the South every bit as dangerous as Confederate cannons.8
Although they initially hoped that “yellow jack” would aid their cause by sickening unacclimated Yankees, southerners soon realized that the disease threatened their own armies as well. Early in the war the virus killed gray-clad troops in North Carolina and Texas, forcing the withdrawal of a number of garrisons protecting the strategic ports of Wilmington and Sabine. As the conflict continued, other outbreaks surfaced in South Carolina and Texas which claimed the lives of even more Confederates. While it was true that southern soldiers who had grown up in towns that were regularly afflicted with yellow fever often contracted the disease in childhood and acquired lifelong immunity, the bulk of the South’s armies were composed of young men from rural hamlets that had never experienced an epidemic. For them the thought of entering an area plagued with yellow fever was just as terrifying as it was for their northern enemies.9
Both malaria and yellow fever were transmitted by the incalculable number of mosquitoes that Civil War soldiers encountered nearly everywhere they went in the Confederacy. The insects, often called “gallinippers” by Rebel and Federal soldiers alike, were active most months of the year in the states of the lower South. “The mosquitoes are becoming very thick out here,” wrote Union captain Jonathan Johnson in April 1863 from his post near New Orleans. “We have the worst time here in the evening when we try to write. It is write with one hand and fight with the other and they say the worst is yet to come.” The worst came for Dr. Junius Bragg in July 1863 while he was stationed with the Confederate army in Delhi, Louisiana. Bragg thought the mosquitoes he encountered there were “the largest, hungriest, and boldest of their kind.” At night he covered himself from head to toe with a blanke
t to escape the pests but was bitten the moment any part of his body became exposed, however briefly. “May you never know a mosquito!” he wrote in exasperation to his wife, Josephine. As a surgeon in the southern army, Bragg saw countless cases of malaria and contracted the disease himself while stationed in his native Arkansas. William Wiley, a private with the Seventy-seventh Illinois Infantry, thought the “moskeetoes” he saw in southern Alabama were “as big as an Illinois wasp” and were “worse than rebel bushwhackers.” The hands and faces of the men in his unit were soon covered with bites, and Wiley developed a severe case of malaria.
During the siege of Vicksburg soldiers became so frustrated by the hordes of mosquitoes they found inside their tents that they exploded powder cartridges in order to smoke the pests out. One enlisted man joked in a letter to his parents that an especially large Delta gallinipper had grabbed him “by the throat” one night and made off with his “Boots, hat, & 5,000 doll[ars] In Green Backs.” Dr. Thomas Barton was also in Mississippi during the summer of 1863 and spent time along the Yazoo River, an area he described as “abounding with malaria.” Barton found the local mosquitoes to be “very troublesome” and was shocked that some of the insects were “as large as the common house fly.” They swarmed his tent at night, forcing him to move to higher ground on more than one occasion. In South Carolina the insects were still a nuisance as late as November. A week before Thanksgiving, Orra Bailey wrote to his wife from Beaufort, explaining why he thought slavery might be a necessity in the South—he believed he needed a minimum of three hundred slaves to keep the mosquitoes away.10
Picket duty was often the time when the insects were the biggest annoyance. Soldiers posted in wooded thickets and swamps at night were unable to light fires that might drive away the pests because doing so could give away their positions to the enemy. As a result, infantrymen frequently came off duty covered with red, itchy welts. While on picket duty in Louisiana, Henry Warren Howe was amazed to see clouds of mosquitoes that “filled the air like rain drops.” He was equally surprised that his servant was able to fall asleep on the ground while so many of the pests hovered overhead. In South Carolina the men of the Ninety-seventh Pennsylvania also found the night air “filled” with mosquitoes while performing picket duty on James Island. Their comrades in the Seventeenth Massachusetts Infantry were pulled off picket duty in eastern North Carolina after swarms of anopheles infected most of the regiment with malaria. The troops of the Seventeenth were confined to the city limits of New Bern in order to expedite their recovery.11
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