Union officials enacted a strict quarantine and burned pine branches and barrels of tar and turpentine in the streets in an attempt to purify the poisonous air, leaving the houses in the city covered in black soot. Inside soldiers discovered entire families lying dead in their beds or on the floor. New Bern quickly took on the appearance of a ghost town as houses were tightly shuttered and stores closed. Buildings thought to be infested with pestilence were burned to the ground, and in a short time the only activity on the streets came from the “dead wagons” sent to collect corpses. Army hospitals overflowed with patients, and those who could bear the journey were ferried to facilities in Morehead City and Beaufort. Healthy soldiers too were hastily transferred out of town and given furloughs, although some units remained behind to implement sanitation measures, maintain order, and keep the city from falling back into enemy hands. Because blacks were believed to be largely immune to yellow fever or perhaps simply because they were considered expendable, African-American regiments were moved in to keep the bonfires burning and spread “two hundred carloads of lime” around town. Fifty-eight of their number fell ill, and 15 of them died. The disease spread to Beaufort, where a local hotel, thought to be a source of the pestilence, was shut down to keep a panicky mob from burning it. Before the first frost of November halted the activity of the local Aedes aegypti population, 763 Union soldiers in the area contracted yellow fever, and 303 died from it. Brave medical officers who stayed to treat their patients were hit especially hard. Of the 16 infected with the virus, half of them died.6
The epidemic had a significant psychological impact on Union commanders and reinforced their belief that the south Atlantic region was an unhealthy theater of operations. As yellow fever wreaked havoc on civilians and soldiers in New Bern, word leaked out that it was also present in the Confederate strongholds of Wilmington and Charleston, creating considerable consternation within the Union’s Department of the South. Orders went out to district commanders to maintain strict cleanliness in camps (which included the liberal use of lime) and to quarantine Rebel deserters and refugees before allowing them behind Union lines. Above all, commanders were instructed to keep the situation quiet to avoid a panic among the enlisted men. Northern troops who had come of age reading about the terrifying yellow fever epidemics that hit the South year after year during the 1850s suddenly found themselves occupying an area where the risk of contracting the disease was all too real. These fears seemed justified when yellow jack razed New Bern and surfaced in neighboring Charleston, South Carolina. There the disease swept through facilities housing Yankee prisoners, causing fear and uncertainty among guards and captives alike. Confederate authorities moved quickly to evacuate the vulnerable prisoners but were too late in some cases. According to John V. Hadley, a northern prisoner from Indiana, at least thirty of his fellow POWS perished before they could be moved out of town. A number of southerners died as well, including Colonel D. B. Harris, General P.G.T. Beauregard’s chief engineer.
Although both northern and southern newspapers reported that Charleston was in the throes of a major yellow fever epidemic, the outbreak was limited in scope and curtailed by frosts before it could get out of hand. The same season a few cases of the disease also showed up in Wilmington, North Carolina. Whether or not the 1864–65 Union attacks against Fort Fisher, which led to the capture of Wilmington, were planned for the winter months in part to avoid the yellow fever season is not known, but sources show the disease worried U.S. troops occupying the city in the summer after Appomattox. In July 1865 Grant issued orders for the occupation forces in New Bern and Wilmington to keep the cities clean and to head for the “pine woods” in the event yellow fever appeared.7
Union soldiers were not the only ones devastated by the New Bern epidemic. Southern civilians watched in horror as roughly seven hundred of their neighbors died in the space of a few short weeks. The most unfortunate victims were those unable to obtain treatment from overwhelmed U.S. Army surgeons and as such, were forced to suffer in solitude. When a group of concerned local citizens banded together to address this problem and provide care for the sick and dying, half their number perished. Davis and his agents almost certainly knew about the New Bern outbreak (both the northern and southern press picked up the story) and the misery it was causing for their own people. If so, they would have assumed that Blackburn’s scheme had been successful and that the trunk Hyams sold to the southbound sutler was responsible for the epidemic. The people of New Bern certainly believed as much. When a postwar government investigation exposed Blackburn’s part in the plot, a local newspaper editor summed up his fellow citizens’ outrage: “This hideous and long studied plan to deliberately murder innocent men, women, and children, who had never wronged him [Blackburn] in any manner, is regarded here as an act of cruelty without a parallel—a crime which can only be estimated and punished in the presence of his victims in another world.” In spite of the grisly reports coming out of North Carolina during the autumn of 1864, Stewart seems to be the only official who raised any objections to Blackburn’s activities. By all appearances the Confederate government was willing to wage biological warfare, even at the risk of killing its own citizens, in order to secure southern independence.8
Unfortunately for southern civilians, the United States government was indirectly waging a biological war of its own against the Confederacy. The naval blockade, first enacted by Lincoln in April 1861, squeezed off more and more of the South’s medical supplies as the war wore on. Few drugs were in higher demand than quinine, which was believed to be a cure-all for a range of ailments but was effective only against malaria. Some parts of the South experienced shortages of the medicine as early as the first summer of the war, and prices climbed each year thereafter. Wartime profiteering and the depreciation of Confederate currency contributed to the problem. In one Carolina drugstore quinine was selling for $4.00 per ounce during the summer of 1861. Two years later it fetched $22.25 per ounce in Richmond. And late in the war in some areas the drug was selling for as much $600 per ounce.9
As a result of these shortages and high prices, a black market developed, and innumerable methods were devised to smuggle quinine into the South. Women were especially adept at sneaking the drug through Union checkpoints, and some of the most colorful tales of the war revolved around their efforts. Containers of medicine were hidden underneath the enormous hoop skirts that were fashionable in the 1860s. Virginia Moon, or “Miss Ginnie” as she was known to friends, was just sixteen years old when her native Tennessee left the Union. Anxious to assist the Confederate war effort, Moon traveled to Ohio, where she had previously been enrolled in a private school, and returned to her home state with “a row of quinine bottles” and “a row of morphine bottles” attached to her “underskirt.” A similar stunt was attempted by Louisa Buckner, the niece of Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general of the United States and a trusted member of Lincoln’s cabinet. She borrowed money from her uncle, ostensibly for the purpose of buying groceries, but used it instead to purchase over one hundred ounces of quinine, which she promptly had sewn into her dress. Buckner was arrested before she could escape Washington, D.C., and spent a short time in the Old Capitol Prison before her famous relative used his political clout to obtain her release. Nor was she the only woman with connections to the White House involved in quinine smuggling. Mrs. Clement White was the half-sister of Mary Todd Lincoln and a guest at the president’s first inauguration. Once the war started, however, White decided to return to Alabama and took a large amount of quinine with her. Other women smuggled the drug in more creative ways. “Mrs. N. J. Reynolds,” “Miss Shuller,” and “Miss Maggie Oliver” were arrested in Vicksburg when quinine was discovered under false bottoms in their luggage. And in one case the medicine was found inside the head of a child’s doll. Episodes such as these helped erode the gender stereotypes of the period, as middle-class ladies with vials of quinine sewn into their dresses demonstrated skills and daring beyond those envisioned
by the cult of domesticity.10
Men smuggled their share of quinine as well. Authorities nabbed William T. Wilson on a steamship in Baltimore and charged him with “transporting contraband letters and goods to and from Virginia.” At the time of his arrest Wilson was found carrying a “quantity of quinine.” A “Doctor Moore” was also arrested for illegally transporting the drug and was sentenced to hard labor on Ship Island, Mississippi, which had recently been converted into a Union prison camp. He was forced to wear a ball and chain for his crime. In nearby Louisiana, Captain Trask of the Fourteenth Maine Infantry captured a Confederate paymaster carrying “a large quantity of quinine” along with $20,000. And in Memphis the drug was stuffed inside the intestines of dead livestock in order to move it undetected past Federal troops and out of the city.11
But these individual efforts produced only a fraction of the quinine needed by the South. A larger quantity was brought in by blockade-runners, which supplied the Confederacy with a range of much-needed items throughout the war.12 A glance at the cargo manifests of runners operating out of Bermuda shows large amounts of quinine being smuggled into southern ports as early as 1862. The British-built screw steamer Minho had seven cases of the medicine (over 1,200 ounces) when it left St. George’s in September. Another runner, the Herald, transported thirty cases the following month, along with gunpowder, saltpeter, and other war materiel. These shipments netted enormous profits for investors. The Anglo-Confederate Trading Company, for example, which ran ships between the Bahamas and North Carolina, was able to pay its original shareholders a 2,500 percent return on their investment in the autumn of 1864. A list of items smuggled into Wilmington on board an Anglo-Confederate vessel shows that quinine accounted for some of the firm’s success. Northerners also made money off the drug. Union blockade ships intercepted millions of dollars worth of contraband goods, including medical supplies, which were sold off at auction houses in northern cities. Sixteen hundred ounces of “Pelletier’s Quinine” and a few hundred ounces of opium seized from a Rebel ship fetched close to $7,500 for one shrewd seller. Another batch of illicit medicines, which included “two cases of quinine,” sold for over $5,000. When a group of concerned northern physicians attending the 1864 meeting of the American Medical Association tried to put a stop to such practices by introducing a motion to lift the embargo on medicines, their proposal was immediately quashed.13
As the blockade tightened and an increasing number of Confederate ports came under federal control, smugglers found it impossible to keep up with the South’s high demand for medicines. Southerners were thus forced to employ a variety of largely ineffective substitutes to treat their infirmities. The Confederacy’s surgeon general, Samuel P. Moore, had recognized early in the war that the new nation would need to rely on its own natural resources for pharmaceuticals. To this end he established a string of drug laboratories throughout the South and in the spring of 1862 circulated a pamphlet to his surgeons containing a list of indigenous plants that could be used in place of specific medicines. Months earlier Moore had commissioned a South Carolina physician named Francis Porcher to compile a more thorough work containing similar information. The result of Porcher’s research was a dense guidebook entitled Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests, which was published in 1863 and listed a number of quinine substitutes among other natural medicines. The bark of yellow poplar, chestnut, hazel alder, black alder, holly, Georgia bark, and dogwood trees were just a few of the malaria treatments the book recommended. The dogwood bark remedy proved especially popular, and Porcher reprinted a letter written by one of his Charleston colleagues claiming that Huguenot settlers in South Carolina were the first to use the tree to treat malarial fevers. Cottonseed tea, knotgrass, and thoroughwort (boneset) were also endorsed as ague elixirs. As shortages became acute at the end of 1863, Moore sent out his own recommendation for a quinine substitute consisting of 30 percent dogwood bark, an equal portion of poplar bark, and 40 percent willow bark mixed with whiskey. Several of his subordinates at the Pettigrew Hospital in Raleigh thought that rubbing turpentine on malaria patients’ abdomens prevented paroxysms. The southern public had its own ideas. Newspaper editors received letters from readers who claimed knowledge of formulas that worked as well as quinine. Among the harshest of them was a tea that contained red pepper.14
Any relief that southerners experienced after imbibing these concoctions was purely psychosomatic. In reality only quinine could effectively control the symptoms of malaria, and the South’s supply dwindled each year of the war. Even captured Union supplies—an important source of the medicine—became unreliable as the Confederacy’s battlefield losses mounted. Southerners quickly realized that the botanical cures recommended by Richmond were useless. One Florida physician complained that the native remedies he tried did nothing for his fever patients. Another surgeon, W. T. Grant, admitted in the summer of 1864 that the South’s search for a quinine substitute had failed. He held out hope, however, that either sodium chloride or turpentine might provide a cure.
The paucity of quinine and the widespread use of ineffective substitutes in the South allowed the region’s malarial fevers to flourish. As a consequence, Confederate soldiers and civilians suffered immensely, especially during the sickly season, when mosquito activity was at its peak. Wartime travel restrictions meant that white southerners accustomed to fleeing their plantations for healthier climes during the summer and fall months were forced to stay home. The limited amount of quinine which made it through the blockade was quickly snatched up by the Confederate government, leaving civilians to fend for themselves. Those who could afford it paid exorbitant prices on the black market for the drug, while others wrote to relatives in the North requesting that it be sent by mail. “My precious mother,” began Anna DeWolf Middleton from Summerville, South Carolina, in September 1864. “I write now to beg you to send in your next letter a quarter of an ounce of quinine. You know, in this climate, life depends upon quinine—and though large quantities come in every ship, it is taken up so immediately for the army that it is exceedingly difficult for private individuals to procure it even at a very high price.” Middleton went on to express her concerns about what the quinine shortage would mean for her children. They would certainly suffer, she noted, if unlucky enough to contract “the fever.” Her plight was hardly unique. The lack of quinine and resulting spike in malarial fevers created additional hardships for southerners, who were already grappling with other painful changes wrought by the war, such as food shortages and a breakdown of plantation discipline. The Union blockade not only prevented medicines from reaching the Confederacy but also kept southerners from escaping during the mosquito season, which aided the spread of plasmodium parasites.15
Soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia noticed the change. They were in desperate need of quinine at a time when Surgeon General Moore could do little besides recommend substitutes for the drug. During the siege of Petersburg malaria sickened hundreds of Confederates tasked with disrupting Benjamin Butler’s attempt to build a canal across Dutch Gap on the James River. Frustrated with enemy batteries at Trent Reach which were preventing Union ships from moving on Richmond, Butler hoped he could bypass the defenses altogether by digging a 174-yard-long ditch through a spit of land created by a bend in the river. The Confederates put together a joint army-navy operation to harass Butler, but malaria hindered its effectiveness. Rebels in artillery battalions positioned near the river were attacked by “malarial fevers of every type” but because of widespread shortages were not administered quinine. At the same time, the Confederacy’s James River Squadron was “very much impaired” by a disease it had picked up while anchored near a marsh along the river. Three ironclads and three gunboats were eventually sent into battle, but the men on board these vessels also fell ill. A report issued by the fleet’s commander on August 22, nine days after the skirmish, shows that five of his ships had more crewman in the naval hospital than were fit for duty. Malaria continued to plague t
he James River Squadron throughout the fall of 1864 and helped limit its effectiveness at a time when Lee desperately needed the Confederate navy to relieve pressure on his bleeding army, which was itself suffering from the disease.16
Grant’s forces were also afflicted with malaria but were better able to deal with the problem. In July 1864, 5 percent of his army was sick with the disease, and the figure rose to 6 percent in August. The number of “quotidian intermittent fever” cases spiked in October and November. Malaria occurred at roughly the same rate in the Army of the Potomac in 1862 and 1864, but Grant’s medical staff did a better job of controlling the disease than McClellan’s had two years earlier. Quinine-laced whiskey was administered to troops on a daily basis, and mosquito nets were hung over hospital beds (a decision intended to keep pests away but one that unwittingly prevented the transmission of plasmodium parasites). Union troops in 1864 were also better fed and clothed than southerners, which made them less susceptible to a variety of diseases, including malaria. And unlike his predecessors, Grant did not let concerns about southern pestilence keep him from relentlessly pursuing the Confederate enemy. Malaria or no malaria, his forces achieved victory by following Lee’s army wherever it went. Grant’s tenacity during the late summer and fall of 1864 is especially impressive when one considers the timidity of his predecessors, who severely limited or postponed Union military operations along the Eastern Seaboard each year when the South’s climate became “a better defense than casemated forts.”17
Ironically, the naval blockade that worsened the South’s malaria problem simultaneously reduced the threat of yellow fever. Outbreaks during the prewar period were generally caused by an infected mosquito or passenger traveling from an area where the disease existed year-round, such as the West Indies. Once inside the United States, the virus was quickly spread by the local Aedes aegypti population. By restricting the flow of commercial traffic to the Confederacy in order to starve it into submission, the Union navy inadvertently reduced the possibility of an epidemic. Quarantine and sanitation policies enacted by Union commanders such as Benjamin Butler limited the possibility even further. But despite these measures, a number of yellow fever outbreaks struck the South, causing tremendous suffering for the civilians who endured them and adding to the region’s reputation for unhealthiness. Fathers and mothers already concerned about sons in combat were forced to watch their neighbors perish in a manner that even nineteenth-century Americans, accustomed as they were to death on a daily basis, considered gruesome.
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