Mosquito Soldiers

by Andrew McIlwaine Bell

  20. Report of the Philadelphia Relief Committee Appointed to Collect Funds for the Sufferers by Yellow Fever, at Norfolk and Portsmouth, Va., 1855 (Philadelphia: Inquirer Printing Office, 1856), 5–17: Savannah Morning News, September 15, 23, and 30, 1854; Moncure D. Conway, The True and the False in Prevalent Theories of Divine Dispensations (Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Maury, 1855), 17 (quotation); Carrigan, “Yellow Fever,” 60–61; Richard S. Storrs, Terrors of the Pestilence: A Sermon, Preached in the Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn, N.Y., on Occasion of a Collection in Aid of the Sufferers at Norfolk, Va., September 30th, 1855 (New York: John A. Gray, 1855), 20 (quotation).

  21. Alexander F. Vaché, Letters on Yellow Fever, Cholera, and Quarantine; Addressed to the Legislature of the State of New York (New York: McSpedon & Baker, 1852), 7–17; Edward Jenner Coxe, Practical Remarks on Yellow Fever, Having Special Reference to the Treatment (New Orleans: J. C. Morgan, 1859), 9–10; Thomas Anderson, Handbook for Yellow Fever: Describing Its Pathology and Treatment (London: Churchill & Sons, 1856), 10–14; Thomas Y. Simons, An Essay on the Yellow Fever, as It Has Occurred in Charleston, Including Its Origin and Progress up to the Present Time (Charleston, S.C.: Steam Power– Press of Walker and James, 1851), 10–23; New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 4, 1853; Humphreys, Yellow Fever, 8; “The Annual Report of the Board of Health, for the Year 1850, as Required by Law,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 8 (March 1851): 590–91.

  22. Although modern-day historians disagree over whether or not African immigrants possessed genetic immunity to yellow fever, nineteenth-century physicians were convinced that slaves were immune to the disease. See Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 48–49; Carrigan, “Yellow Fever,” 59–63; Humphreys, Yellow Fever, 6–7; H. R. Carter, Yellow Fever: Its Epidemiology, Prevention, and Control (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914), 14; Watts, Epidemics, 217; “Yellow Fever Vaccine,” World Health Organization Weekly Epidemiological Record 78 (2003): 349–59; Samuel A. Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” in Arthur L. Caplan, H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr., and James L. McCartney, eds., Concepts of Health and Disease: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1981), 314; Kenneth F. Kiple, “Black Yellow Fever Immunities, Innate and Acquired, as Revealed in the American South,” Social Science History 1 (Summer 1977): 419–36; Wood, Majority, 80–82.

  23. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 51, ser. 1, pt. 1, 369–70, hereafter referred to as OR; Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson: Galen Press, 2002), 289–90.

  24. Montgomery Meigs Diary (copy), March–September 1861, in John G. Nicolay Papers, box 13, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  25. “Urban” yellow fever requires a substantial and concentrated human population to survive and therefore most frequently appeared in cities. Sylvatic, or “jungle,” yellow fever exists among tree-dwelling mammals in tropical ecosystems and is transmitted by Haemagogus mosquitoes. Thomas T. Smiley, “The Yellow Fever at Port Royal, S.C.,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 67, January 8, 1863, 449–68 (quotation); John Ordronaux, Hints on the Preservation of Health in Armies. For the Use of Volunteer Officers and Soldiers (1861; rpt., San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1990), 85–86 (quotation); “Yellow Fever on the Southern Coast, and How to Avoid It,” New York Times, May 18, 1862; “The Fate of Virginia,” London Review, July 6, 1861 reprinted in Living Age 70, August 10, 1861, 374–75 (quotation); OR, vol. 51, ser. 1, pt. 2, 550; H. H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 191; Mark F. Boyd, “An Historical Sketch of the Prevalence of Malaria in North America,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine 21 (March 1941): 223–44.

  CHAPTER 2: GLORY OF GANGRENE AND “GALLINIPPERS”

  1. H. H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 5; Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson: Galen Press, 2002), 283–375; George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 3. “Malingering,” or feigning illness, was also common in Civil War armies.

  2. These numbers include “typho-malarial,” “intermittent,” “remittent,” and “congestive” fever. The Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War, vol. 5 (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1991), 77–78, hereafter referred to as MSH; Bollet, Medicine, 289; Cunningham, Gray, 191; H. H. Cunningham, “The Medical Service and Hospitals of the Southern Confederacy” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1952), 159; Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943), 253.

  3. At the bottom of the medical corps’ chain of command were regimental surgeons who were supported by assistant surgeons and private contractors known as “acting assistant surgeons.” Each brigade, division, army, and department also had its own medical officer, all of them under the supervision of the surgeon general. Michael A. Cooke, “The Health of the Union Military in the District of Columbia, 1861–1865,” Military Affairs 48 (October 1984): 194–99; United States Sanitary Commission Records, ser. 7: Statistical Bureau Archives, Camp Inspection Returns, 1861–64, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Geo. B. Willson, “Army Ambulances—Cases in the Hospital of Richardson’s Brigade,” Boston Medical & Surgical Journal 65 (January 1862): 542–44 (quotation); Charles S. Tripler to General George B. McClellan, February 7, 1863, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 5, ser. 1, 76–93 (quotation), hereafter referred to as OR.

  4. John Duffy, “Medical Practice in the Ante Bellum South,” Journal of Southern History 25 (February 1959): 53–72 (quotation); Joseph Janvier Woodward, M.D., Outlines of the Chief Camp Diseases of the United States Armies as Observed during the Present War (1863; rpt., San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1992), 14–17.

  5. Bollet, Medicine, 9–12, 227; “Rules for Preserving the Health of the Soldier. Report of the U.S. Sanitary Commission.” Harper’s Weekly, August 24, 1861, 542; United States Sanitary Commission Records, ser. 7: Statistical Bureau Archives, Camp Inspection Returns, 1861–64, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  6. John Brinton, Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton, Major and Surgeon U.S.V., 1861–1865 (New York: Neale Publishing Co., 1914), 60–61; United States Sanitary Commission Records, ser. 7; Henry H. Wright, A History of the Sixth Iowa Infantry (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1923), 30–31 (quotation).

  7. Paul F. Eve, “Answers to Certain Questions Propounded by Prof. Charles A. Lee, M.D., Agent of the United States Sanitary Commission, Relative to the Health, &c., of the Late Southern Army,” Nashville Journal of Medicine and Surgery 1 (July 1866): 12–32 (quotation); Bollet, Medicine, 270–71; Edward Porter Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 35–36 (quotation); Margaret Humphreys, Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001),14; John Duffy, “The Impact of Malaria on the South,” in Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, ed. Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 29–54.

  8. William T. Sherman to G. Mason Graham, March 1, 1860, in Walter L. Fleming, ed., General W. T. Sherman as College President (Cleveland: Arthur M. Clark Co., 1912), 183–84 (quotation); Benjamin Butler, Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War, vol. 2 (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 112–13, 272 (quotation); Alfred L. Castleman, The Army of the Potomac. Behind the Scenes. (Milwaukee: Strickland & Co., 1863), 110; William C. Holton, Cruise of the U
.S. Flagship Hartford, 1862–1863 (1863; rpt., Tarrytown, N.Y.: W. Abbatt, 1922), 39.

  9. Richard Everett Wood, “Port Town at War: Wilmington, North Carolina 1860–1865” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1976), 176; OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 144–45, 815–17; Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 6.

  10. Wiley, Johnny Reb, 249; J. H. Johnson to “Dearest Wife,” April 16, 1863, Jonathan Huntington Johnson, The Letters and Diary of Captain Jonathan Huntington Johnson (n.p.: Alden Chase Brett, 1961), 112 (quotation); Junius N. Bragg to “My Dear Wife,” July 19, 1863, J. N. Bragg, Letters of a Confederate Surgeon, 1861–65 (Camden, Ark.: Hurley Co., 1960), 158–62 (quotation); Terrence J. Winschel, ed., The Civil War Diary of a Common Soldier: William Wiley of the 77th Illinois Infantry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 130 (quotation); Michael B. Ballard, Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 375 (quotation); T. H. Barton, Autobiography of Dr. Thomas H. Barton, the Self-Made Physician of Syracuse, Ohio, Including a History of the Fourth Regt. West Va. Vol. Infy. (Charleston: West Virginia Printing Co., 1890), 157–58 (quotation); Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 95–96.

  11. Albert Theodore Goodloe, Confederate Echoes: A Voice from the South in the Days of Secession and of the Southern Confederacy (Nashville: Smith & Lamar, 1907), 248–49; Henry Warren Howe, Passages from the Life of Henry Warren Howe, Consisting of Diary and Letters Written during the Civil War, 1861–1865 (Lowell, Mass.: Courier-Citizen Co., Printers, 1899), 127 (quotation); Isaiah Price, History of the Ninety-seventh Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, during the War of the Rebellion, 1861–65, with Biographical Sketches (Philadelphia: By the Author for the Subscribers, 1875), 127 (quotation); “Medical History of the Seventeenth Regiment Mass. Volunteers,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 68 (February 1863): 136–41.

  12. MSH, 5:78; Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951), 133 (quotation); Cunningham, Gray, 190; MSH, 3:142, 180, 186 (quotations); E. Andrews to “Messrs Editors,” August 9, 1862, in Chicago Medical Examiner 3 (August 1862): 479–84 (quotation).

  13. Some historians have argued that quinine rationing had a negligible effect on the health of troops, but the existing evidence suggests otherwise. Soldiers who received regular prophylactic doses of the drug were healthier than those who did not. Also, by the mid-nineteenth century most professionally trained physicians knew how much quinine was needed to check intermittent and remittent fevers. See Dale C. Smith, “Quinine and Fever: The Development of the Effective Dosage,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 31 (July 1976): 343–67; and Samuel Logan, “Prophylactic Effects of Quinine,” Confederate States Medical & Surgical Journal 1 (June 1864): 81–83. During the first year of the Civil War the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) published reports endorsing the use of quinine as a prophylactic. Unfortunately, the USSC was only an advisory body and could not enforce its recommendations. See Report of a Committee Appointed by Resolution for the Sanitary Commission, to Prepare a Paper on the Use of Quinine as a Prophylactic against Malarious Diseases (New York: Wm. C. Bryant & Co., 1861); and “Rules for Preserving the Health of the Soldier,” Harper’s Weekly, August 24, 1861.

  Michael A. Flannery, Civil War Pharmacy: A History of the Drugs, Drug Supply and Provision, and Therapeutics for the Union and Confederacy (New York: Pharmaceutical Products Press, 2004), 143–44; Bollet, Medicine, 236–38; Samuel Logan, “Prophylactic Effects of Quinine,” Confederate States Medical & Surgical Journal 1 (June 1864): 81–83; Stephen Rogers, Quinine as a Prophylactic or Protective from Miasmatic Poisoning, A Preventative of Paroxysms of Miasmatic Diseases (Albany, N.Y.: Steam Press of C. Van Benthuysen, 1862), 4; “On the External Application of Oil of Turpentine as a Substitute for Quinine in Intermittent Fever, with Reports of Cases,” Confederate States Medical & Surgical Journal 1 (January 1864): 7–8; “A Startling Fact!” Harper’s Weekly, September 17, 1864 (quotation); Surgeon Geo. Hammond to the Surgeon General’s Office, May 2, 1863, Letters and Endorsements Sent to Medical Officers, Sept. 1862–Sept. 1872, 4:35, Records of the Office of the Surgeon General (Army), Record Group 112, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  14. Letters and Endorsements Sent to Medical Officers, Sept. 1862–Sept. 1872, 4:175, (quotation); Charles McGregor, History of the Fifteenth Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers, 1862–1863 (Concord, N.H.: Published by Order of the Fifteenth Regiment Association, 1900), 261 (quotation); James W. Wheaton, comp., Surgeon on Horseback: The Missouri and Arkansas Journal and Letters of Dr. Charles Brackett of Rochester, Indiana, 1861–1863 (Carmel: Guild Press of Indiana, 1998), 177 (quotation); Minetta Altgelt Goyne, Lone Star and Double Eagle: Civil War Letters of a German-Texas Family (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1982), 140.

  15. Hospital Tickets & Case Papers, Mississippi Squadron, 1862–64, Record Group 52, National Archives (quotation); Hospital Tickets & Case Papers, Pinkney Hospital, Memphis, 1863, Record Group 52, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (quotation); The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, vol. 10, ser. 1, 735–36, hereafter referred to as ORN.

  16. Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care during the American Civil War (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 135–36 (quotation); Richard D. Arnold, An Essay upon the Relation of Bilious and Yellow Fever (Augusta, Ga.: J. Morris, 1856), 7–8; Medical Journal U.S.S. Colorado, June 4, 1861, to February 5, 1864, Record Group 52, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (quotation); MSH, 5:681 (quotation); G.R.B. Horner, M.D., “Notice of the Yellow Fever as It Occurred in Key West and in the U.S. East Gulf Blockading Squadron, in 1862,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 92 (October 1863): 391–98.

  17. MSH, 5:678–82 (quotation); Bollet, Civil War, 235; Stanley B. Weld, “A Connecticut Surgeon in the Civil War: The Reminiscences of Dr. Nathan Mayer,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 19 (July 1964): 272–86; Joseph Janvier Woodward, M.D., Outlines of the Chief Camp Diseases of the United States Armies as Observed during the Present War (1863; rpt., San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1992), 160–61 (quotation); Flannery, Pharmacy, 131.

  18. Alfred Jay Bollet, M.D., Plagues & Poxes: The Impact of Human History on Epidemic Disease (New York: Demos, 2004), 37.

  CHAPTER 3: MOSQUITO COASTS

  1. Shelby Foote, The Civil War, a Narrative: Fort Sumter to Perryville (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 369–71; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 419–20; David J. Eicher, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 239–42; Gerald M. Capers Jr., “Confederates and Yankees in Occupied New Orleans, 1862–1865,” Journal of Southern History 30 (November 1964): 405–26.

  2. K. David Patterson, “Yellow Fever Epidemics and Mortality in the United States, 1693–1905,” Social Science and Medicine 34 (1992): 855–65; John Duffy, “Yellow Fever in the Continental United States during the Nineteenth Century,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 44 (June 1968): 687–701; Jo Ann Carrigan, The Saffron Scourge: A History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana, 1796–1905 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1994), 82; Jo Ann Carrigan, “Yankees versus Yellow Jack in New Orleans, 1862–1866,” Civil War History 9 (September 1963): 248–61; M. Lovell to Thomas O. Moore, May 12, 1862, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 15, ser. 1, 733–34, hereafter referred to as OR; Harper’s Weekly, 17 May 1862.

  3. Benjamin F. Butler, “Some Experiences with Yellow Fever and Its Prevention,” North American Review 147 (November 1888): 525–41; Carrigan, “Yankees versus Yellow Jack,” 250–53; Benjamin Butler, Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 2:112
–13.

  4. Elisha Harris, M.D., “Hygenic Experience in New Orleans during the War: Illustrating the Importance of Efficient Sanitary Regulations,” Southern Medical and Surgical Journal 21 (July 1866): 77–88 (quotation); Butler, Private and Official Correspondence, 342; OR, vol. 2, ser. 3, 634–35 (quotation); New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 6, 1862; Harper’s Weekly, August 16, 1862, and January 17, 1863.

  5. Butler’s policies did not eliminate all of the mosquito’s potential breeding sites. Nineteenth-century New Orleanians kept their water in above-ground cisterns (wells are impractical in an area that rests below sea level), which may have also contained Aedes aegypti eggs. Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 104–5. Robert S. Holyman, “Ben Butler in the Civil War,” New England Quarterly 30 (September 1957): 330–45; Michael A. Ross, “Justice Miller’s Reconstruction: The Slaughter-House Cases, Health Codes, and Civil Rights in New Orleans, 1861–1873,” Journal of Southern History 64 (November 1998): 649–76; New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 28, 1862.

  6. L. Pierio to Andrew J. Hamilton, December 9, 1862, in Salmon P. Chase, Diary and Correspondence of Salmon P. Chase (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1903), 428 (quotation); Brownsville Flag article reprinted in Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, November 12, 1862; Brownsville Flag editorial reprinted in Galveston News, October 8, 1862 (quotation); Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, vol. 19, ser. 1, 289–91, hereafter referred to as ORN; John Carrier, “Medicine in Texas: The Struggle with Yellow Fever, 1839–1903,” Texas Medicine 82 (November 1986): 62–65; Bellville Countryman, October 18 and 25 and November 1, 1862; Galveston Weekly News, October 22, 1862; D. G. Farragut to Gideon Welles, October 9, 1862 (quotation), H. French to D. G. Farragut, September 18, 1862 (quotation), D. G. Farragut to H. French, October 7, 1862 (quotation), ORN vol. 19, ser. 1, 265, 289–93.