Troops attacked by clouds of insects tried their own prophylactic methods, such as pipe smoking or rubbing bacon fat on exposed skin, the salt supposedly repelling some pests. Very little helped. “There is a hopeless desperation chilling one when engaged in a contest with disease,” wrote Major Charles Wills. “The unseen malaria has such an advantage in the fight.” With no real protection, soldiers came to dread fighting in the swamps where “bad air” invited chills and fevers. A veteran of the 54th Pennsylvania avowed of the Chickahominy swamps, where the armies fought in summer 1862: “the mention of that name causes a shudder to run through the survivors of the Army of the Potomac.” From the Louisiana bayous, Ben C. Johnson of the 64th Michigan, far from home, wrote bitterly that the slimy hand of fever dragged men down, there to be “laid away under the accursed soil of the swamp.”35
Not all sickness derived from insects. Extremes of climate directly instigated illness. Let us acknowledge that certain men thrived on the challenges of living with raw nature in the rugged outdoors. Rutherford B. Hayes boasted that “These marches and campaigns … will always be among the pleasantest things I can remember.” Captain DeForest maintained that the outdoors toughened up dyspeptic New England bookworms, rendering them “gaunt with bad food, fasting and severe marching; gaunt and wiry, but all the hardier and stronger for it, like a wolf.” Those less feral fared more poorly.36
Exposure to harsh sunlight during summer campaigning felled men. The heat on the third day of Gettysburg grew so fierce that Lieutenant W. B. Taylor of the 11th North Carolina saw men faint all along the line. At other seasons, bleak cold and wet attacked the constitution, and failures in the supply system often meant a scarcity of tents. A South Carolina soldier moaned that he was “sad and dreary” from cold, having been rained on for four days, without a tent for protection. Union Major James Wren, 48th Pennsylvania, wrote from camp in Virginia, in November 1862, “Last night thear was a sharp frost & we, having no tents, we felt it. Very Coald. The men run short of rashons owing to the supply train not getting up with the Supplies.”37
The troops also lacked blankets and waterproofs. In January 1862, eleven unequipped men of the 3rd Arkansas were found dead, frozen solid. John B. Jones, a Richmond bureaucrat, saw soldiers trudging along on a dark, sleety January 1865 day, “icicles hanging from their hats and caps, and their clothes covered with frost, and dripping.” Colds, flus, and pneumonia resulted. Confederate Captain Charles Blackford, suffering chills and fever from incessant marching in rain and slush, complained that every joint ached, and he could not get up for three days. “It is a terrible feeling; one could court death when in my situation, for life seems robbed of all charm.”38
Soldiers commonly complained of rheumatism and rheumatic fever. A Union corporal visiting his men in field hospital in February 1862, found “There are many cases of suffering there. Some with the Rheumatism seem to be the worst off—for they are completely helpless and suffer great pain.” Without a cure, patients received opiates to relieve joint pain and quinine for general inflammation. Physicians blistered some on the pain spot, such as the knee, thereby only increasing their misery. “I’ve had very hard work today, dressing blisters is no easy task,” confided Confederate Ada Bacot, a weary nurse in a Virginia hospital. One patient in particular, “a boy about eighteen was making considerable fuss about his blisters.” Complaints of rheumatism became so widespread in the Union army during the first two years that surgeons were ordered to ignore them. Even so, the medical service officially recorded nearly 287,000 cases.39
Older men with preexisting conditions could be very vulnerable to the rigors of campaigning. This category included many senior officers. Prior service had rendered them immune to childhood diseases such as mumps that struck down youths. But years of exposure wore down older regulars, who were at the same time experiencing the typical discomforts of aging. Edwin V. Sumner, a venerable Union general, had to remove his false teeth to bellow orders. Lower down the totem, a Lieutenant Dorrance, 123rd Illinois, swallowed his dentures in action November 1864, “and complains that they don’t agree with him,” according to his droll major.40
Marsena Rudolph Patrick, another older man and provost marshal general of the Army of the Potomac, endured agonies from hemorrhoids and rheumatism, driving him to ride in an ambulance, sedated with opium. Since the eighteenth century, scientists had experimented with electricity to curb rheumatism; Patrick had the telegraph operators hook him up to the wires and shoot a “dose of lightning” through him. He thought this helped him, as did a chloroform rub.41
Confederate General Daniel H. Hill’s weakness began with probable childhood polio that left him perennially vulnerable. Writing in May 1862, during the retreat up the Peninsula, he confessed that “My bowels pained me so much that at times I was almost in despair.” By January 1863, he felt so reduced that he tried to resign, pleading “a very feeble frame” since a boy. Urged to stay on in the crisis, he was transferred west to the command of waspish General Braxton Bragg, no great prescription for a sick man. Bragg spoke contemptuously of Hill’s health issues, calling him a “croaker” who seemed defeatist and lethargic in action.42
Bragg himself came into the war with a history of accumulated ills, including migraines, stomach problems, and dysentery. He took a mercury compound for the liver and opium to ease digestive pain and soreness from boils. Illness and drastic medication in spring 1863 may account for his subsequent erratic behavior and frequent disorientation that eventuated in a breakdown, rendering him unfit until December.43 The officer’s privilege of riding might appear to offer benefits for weakened constitutions, but hours in the saddle could be torture for sick soldiers, especially cavalrymen. General George A. Custer may have suffered testicular pain from long periods spent bouncing in the saddle, possibly exacerbated by gonorrhea contracted in 1859. According to Captain Lewellyn G. Estes, aide to Judson Kilpatrick, that general “usually rode stooping and bent over the saddle” because “his kidneys troubled him and caused him a pain in the back.”44
General George Stoneman’s hemorrhoids delayed his movements during Sherman’s 1864 campaigns and may have determined his choice of a quick but bloody frontal attack to get past Rebels at Sunshine Church on July 31, 1864, rather than trying a flanking movement that would have kept him in the saddle longer. Infantry generals feeling too sick to walk and forced to ride into action increased their odds of becoming targets. On the third day at Gettysburg, two of Pickett’s brigadiers, James L. Kemper and Richard Brooke Garnett, reported too ill to attack Cemetery Ridge on foot and so rode forward; Kemper ended gravely wounded, Garnett dead.45
Pickett may not have recovered emotionally from the ruin of his division, and he affords a good example of how command stress, compounded by exposure, ground down senior officers. The general’s health had been fragile since childhood; routine military service and the Mexican War added malaria and intestinal issues. By spring 1864 he had worn himself down to where, at successive intervals, he proved unable to exercise command, debilitated by hemorrhoids, dysentery, and strain. Observers described him as prematurely aged, his face bloated, eyes dull, hair lank and lifeless.46
Exhausted officers, however, enjoyed an option unavailable to the troops; they might resign. Colonel Thomas W. Higginson, 1st South Carolina (U.S.), retired North in October 1864, suffering prostration from wounds and overwork. Rebel Colonel Sterling A. M. Wood, 7th Alabama, went home, drained by loose bowels and injuries. But many officers felt constrained by the code of honorable conduct to remain at their posts. Confederate Brigadier John Echols stayed in the field despite “neuralgia of the heart” that sapped his strength. “Why doesn’t Echols move forward?” complained his unsympathetic superior, John C. Breckinridge, during the 1864 Shenandoah campaign. “He is the slowest fellow.” General Ormsby M. Mitchel, Union commander of the Department of the South, his system similarly depleted, died of yellow fever in October of 1862.47
To cope with pain, officers self-medic
ated with opium, alcohol, or laudanum, a mixture of both. Rebel General Henry H. Sibley drank heavily in the 1862 Southwest campaign to manage abdominal agony, affecting his command judgment. Whether near-invalids should have resigned for the good of the service remains debatable. Some received transfers to posts of lesser importance. General John B. Magruder helped slow McClellan’s spring 1862 advance up the Peninsula, yet by the Seven Days Battles in late June he suffered stress, exhaustion, and chronic indigestion. Dosing himself with morphine, although probably allergic to the drug, he became erratic. Chief of Staff, Major Joseph L. Brent, described him as agitated, galloping up and down without purpose, reversing orders, obsessing on trivia. “I am feeling horribly,” Magruder admitted, having lost “so much sleep that it affects me strongly.” He suffered unfair accusations of intoxication, and Lee, whose own fuse grew shorter under stress, had him transferred to the Trans-Mississippi Department.48
Lee’s famous lieutenant, Stonewall Jackson, also had performance problems during the Seven Days. Drained by constant campaigning in the Shenandoah Valley, he at times acted lethargic and dull. Returning from a night ride to confer with Lee, he collapsed, experiencing an adrenaline depletion. His slowness helped cost Lee a decisive advantage at Frayser’s Farm, where Jackson clearly became befuddled, failing to support Pete Longstreet’s heavily embattled troops. Exhausted, Jackson at one point fell asleep eating a biscuit. By July 8, he told his wife that he still “suffered from fever and debility” but felt he might be on the mend.49
Like many Victorians, Jackson suffered periods of ill health from youth, including attacks of intense gastrointestinal pain starting at fifteen. Hearing tell of a man driven to suicide by dyspepsia, Jackson said he understood. The general self-medicated and eschewed foods that he liked, convinced they must be bad for him. For recurrent eye pain, he used an eye bath, a chloroform liniment, and a glycerine/nitrate-of-silver compound taken through the nostrils. Exposure and the burden of command caused premature aging. John Jones, who witnessed Jackson and James E. B. “Jeb” Stuart at a Richmond gathering, thought that both men, though not yet forty, looked older and “war-worn.”50
Robert E. Lee provides the most famous example of the destructive effect of command stress and long months in the field. Due in part to his long military career, Lee periodically suffered from diarrhea, malaria, lumbago, probably arthritis of the spine, and, most critically, progressive heart disease partly attributable to acute rheumatic fever. The war brutally wore Lee down. By the Fredericksburg campaign of late 1862, he became forced at times to travel in an ambulance and, by March 1863, felt seriously ill from rheumatism and heart trouble. After the strain of Gettysburg, he confided in a letter to President Davis, August 8, 1863, that “I sensibly feel the growing failure of my bodily strength.” Lee’s admission that “I have not yet recovered from the attack I experienced last spring” has led one biographer to speculate that sickness may have diminished the general’s leadership capacity in the summer of 1863.51
Sickness confined Lee to an ambulance again for a chunk of September-October of that year, his debilitation interfering with his conduct of the Bristoe Station campaign. For example, he could not supervise the savage fighting on October 14. His physical condition continued to decline. In late May 1864, illness cost him an opportunity to hit Grant when the North Anna River divided the Union army into three sections. The war cost Lee his cause, but it also ruined his health and shortened his life expectancy.52
Debilitation not only affected generals’ individual performances. Factors of disease, climate, and environment also circumscribed what they could achieve with the men under them, also struggling against the same natural enemies. Generals faced challenges in three areas of command: the ability to plan campaigns and move troops forward to battle; the facility to direct their actions when engaged; and finally the opportunity to follow up encounters effectively.
First, disease that affected a high percentage of troops hamstrung offensive operations. For example, in extenuation of his torpidity in late June and July 1862, General George B. McClellan pleaded that 29 percent of his roughly 103,000 men had become unfit. Onslaughts of malaria, typhoid, and yellow fever hampered early Union attempts to establish solid bridgeheads along the Confederacy’s Atlantic coast. In the west, similar outbreaks, especially of malaria, stymied Grant’s initial operations against Vicksburg. The 1st Kentucky Brigade (U.S.) alone lost one-third of its strength to disease in a month.53
Cautious generals hesitated to risk their men in extreme conditions. Colonel James Garfield, operating in the Kentucky winter of 1861–62, wrote, “there are fathers and mothers in Ohio that I hardly know how I can endure to meet.” Most of his 42nd Ohio came down sick. “This fighting with disease is infinitely more horrible than battle.” When, in early 1864, Lee demanded to know why Jubal Early had not forded the icy Rapidan to get at the Yankees opposite, Early asked what would happen to the resultant “pneumonia patients.”54
When armies did march, weakened men battled heat, dust, drought, rain, and mud that helped to thin the ranks. Able men felt challenged to march thirty miles a day carrying forty pounds of equipment, but a third or more of a unit’s strength, if already in poor condition, and especially if also suffering battle fatigue, might drop out on long marches. Hiking toward Gettysburg, Private John Dooley saw comrades in the 1st Virginia fall “by tens, twenties, nay by hundreds along the dusty roadsides.” Virginia Captain Charles Blackford said his men suffered greatly on this campaign: “Some died on the roadside from the effects of the heat.” Union Private Wilbur Fisk, approaching the battle from the opposite direction, witnessed “many men fall out to fall in no more.” Those still in rank might stumble onto the battlefield exhausted. A Union lieutenant in the 2nd Corps, marching into battle during Grant’s 1864 summer campaign, slumped comatose on the firing line: He “had a ball enter his shoulder and it embedded itself under the shoulder blade and he never waked up at all.”55
Some officers put straggling down to ill discipline and cowardice. While overexposure to combat did turn men into malingerers, a Union veteran also made a point in responding to criticism of the ranks: “When a man is physically unable to walk, all the discipline in the world will fail to keep him in the ranks when the regiment marches.” He always prayed for a night’s rest before battle; otherwise “along those ranks could be seen a great many thin faces, whose bodies were weakened by exposure and consequent disease, and who were poorly able to endure.” Shortage of footwear, noted above, increased straggling and failure to reach the line of battle, particularly on the Rebel side. A. L. Long blamed lack of shoes, along with malnutrition, for much of the chronic straggling in Lee’s army during the 1862 Maryland campaign, winnowing effectives down to 45,000. John H. Worsham, 21st Virginia, thought barefooted men falling out helped to cost Early his chance to get into D.C. in 1864.56
Dehydration, rather than strategy or tactics, could dictate where troops fought. The armies that mauled each other at Perryville, October 1862, marching in fierce heat, found their movements dictated by the search for water sources. A Union staff officer complained of “all this dreadful dust no water to be met with for miles, but stagnant pools and slimy ponds redolent of the odor of the cattle of the neighborhood.” As the forces deployed into line, Union General Daniel McCook moved five miles out of position to find water, saying he had no choice. Reflecting on Gettysburg, Colonel William C. Oates of the 15th Alabama noted that parties of men had been out of line searching for water when he ordered the attack on Little Round Top. Their absence contributed to the pivotal failure to take the hill and turn the Union left flank. Officers’ inability to prevent men, particularly famished Rebels, from stopping to eat food abandoned by retreating enemies, stalled advances. Plundering supply wagons cost Patrick Cleburne’s command their momentum in the attack at Bald Hill, July 22, 1864. Rebels on day one of Shiloh lost the benefit of their surprise attack, delaying to eat Yankee breakfasts.57
Exhaustion and sicknes
s curtailed postbattle movement. General Abner Doubleday described his condition after Chancellorsville as wretched:
I am so cut, scratched, and bruised that I can hardly hold a pen in my hand. My limbs are covered with swellings from the bites of insects and torn from forcing my way through briers and thorny bushes; my eyes close involuntarily from lack of sleep and excessive fatigue. My legs are cramped from so much riding, and I have not yet succeeded in getting rid of the chill caused by sleeping on the wet ground in the cold rain. My clothes, up to last night, had not been taken off for a week. As I lay down every night with my boots and spurs on, my feet are very much swollen.58
Nothing romantic could be found in death and disabling by disease and exposure. Bacteria robbed many boys of gallant dreams as they wasted away in faraway places. They died for country but without a red badge of courage. “He who so longed for a heroes death on the battlefield, died of wasting fever,” recorded South Carolinian Grace Brown Elmore on May 11, 1862, after hearing cousin Willy Taylor was gone. “None of his own people were there to smooth his pillow and receive his last sigh.”59
Being among strangers made the losing struggle against ravaging sickness even worse. Civilian endings usually took place at home, with consoling rituals of deathbed visitations by friends and relatives, giving meaningful opportunity for reconciliation, resolution, and farewell. By contrast, soldiers’ deaths frequently took place “lonely, solitary, and anguished, without the comfort of companionship, without the possibility of being ‘good’ deaths.”60
The religious took consolation from faith. With family absent, a soldier could still receive God’s loving comfort and grace at the end. A captain in Kershaw’s brigade, marching in Virginia mud in February 1863, took pity on a twelve-year-old stumbling along. But the boy, too proud to leave the ranks, refused to ride the captain’s horse. Shortly, he fell dead and received a hasty burial. The officer ruminated that the lad would have no headstone, but “God, who notes the fall of a sparrow will not forget the gallant boy.” Georgia Private Shephard Proyer wrote his wife from the front: “If I should fall, my dear, grieve not for me. Be assured that I die in the faith and hope of a crown of glory that awaits me above where there will be no more wars or troubles of any kind. I want you to meet me there.”61
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