Unbeknownst to Civil War soldiers suffering from malaria, the annoying but seemingly innocuous mosquito bites that appeared on their flesh were responsible for the violent chills and fevers they were experiencing. These trademark symptoms of the disease were especially worrisome to new recruits. One Illinois volunteer sent to Cairo for training in 1861 claimed that he and his comrades were “more afraid” of the ague in the area “than the enemy.” The disease also shocked supposedly acclimated southerners. A Confederate stationed in North Carolina in the autumn of 1862 insisted that he was nearly shaken out of his garrison while suffering with a particularly bad bout of the disease. Veterans became accustomed to these “shakes” over time but still sought treatment whenever they reappeared, which was often. Troop transfers and the constant influx of fresh recruits meant new types of malarial parasites continually circulated through the ranks of both armies during the war.
Although Plasmodium vivax alone rarely proved fatal to soldiers, it created medical complications and weakened the immune systems of men who were already battling other, more dangerous diseases. Chester Rasbeck was a twenty-year-old private in the Tenth New York Heavy Artillery when he was admitted to Harewood Hospital in Washington, D.C., for “quotidian intermittent fever” and “chronic diarrhœa.” Rasbeck’s first week in the hospital was as hellish as any battle he had endured. He shook violently with chills and passed “fifteen to twenty stools daily.” Doctors were eventually able to bring his malaria symptoms under control, but dehydration and exhaustion had already taken a lethal toll on Rasbeck’s body—he died on October 26, 1864. John Fulton, a twenty-three-year-old private attached to the Sixteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry, also went to the hospital in 1864 for intermittent fever and chronic diarrhea. He was treated with a variety of medicines, including opium, but perished two days after Christmas. Even mild cases of malaria drained the strength of armies because soldiers sent to the sick ward for intermittent fever frequently never returned to their units. Many died after contracting more dangerous diseases in the unsanitary conditions that existed in the average Civil War hospital; others deserted or received unnecessary furloughs. During the early months of the war especially, inexperienced physicians granted medical discharges to “vast numbers of men” who were suffering from “diseases of a temporary character,” a category that included malaria.
Oftentimes soldiers did their best to ignore their malaria infections in order to stay with their comrades. Civil War battlefields from Pennsylvania to Texas were traversed by men who were seriously ill with ague and any number of other maladies. During a battle in Virginia, John Kies’s right forearm was punctured by a Rebel minié ball that fractured both his ulna and radius and created a wound that bled profusely. While receiving treatment for this injury, Kies confessed to doctors that he had been suffering from diarrhea and malaria for almost two months. His reluctance to seek treatment for these diseases could very well have stemmed from his fear of hospitals, a common phobia among soldiers during a time when a visit to a sick ward often turned into a trip to the morgue. In Kies’s case his arm was successfully amputated, but he died several weeks later in his hospital bed after suffering with diarrhea and “a hard dry cough.”12
Soldiers who did seek treatment for their malaria infections usually received quinine, a medicine derived from the bark of the South American cinchona tree. Civil War physicians were well aware of the value of cinchona, which by 1860 had been in use as a malarial specific for over two centuries. They prescribed quinine for a range of ailments, even though it was only effective against plasmodium parasites. Unaware that the drug suppresses the symptoms of malaria rather than prevents infection, surgeons on both sides employed it as a prophylactic. These experiments were successful when the amount doled out was large enough to check outbreaks of chills and fever. Many of Grant’s troops, for example, benefited from regular doses of quinine during the sieges of Vicksburg and Petersburg. Soldiers in the armies of the Tennessee and the Potomac lined up to receive their daily dram of the drug, which was frequently mixed with whiskey to make it more appealing. Previous Union campaigns in these areas had failed in part because of a scarcity of the medicine. Despite recommendations from U.S. Sanitary Commission officials and others to dispense it regularly as a preventative, the Union medical department was too disorganized during the early years of the war to provide its surgeons with sufficient supplies of the drug. Compounding the problem were the quack remedies soldiers found advertised in northern journals and sold in camp by dishonest peddlers. Men who believed that “Dr. D. Evans’s Medicated Flannel Abdominal Supporter” or “Hawes Vegetable Tonic” would cure their ague had no reason to subject themselves each day to the bitter taste of quinine. This chaotic situation—a reflection of the independent streak that was common among Civil War soldiers—allowed the disease to spread through the Union ranks unabated, sickening infantrymen who were needed on the battlefield.
The Confederate medical department suffered from quinine shortages for most of the war. The effectiveness of the Union naval blockade meant southern surgeons were forced to use crude, ineffective substitutes such as turpentine plasters and various indigenous barks to treat malarial fevers. Given the prevalence of malaria in the South, it is astonishing that any Confederate troops were healthy enough to fight by the end of the war, when Richmond’s quinine supplies were extremely low.13
The only other effective weapon soldiers had to use in their fight against malaria was the mosquito net. These devices were issued solely to keep pests away but had the unintended effect of helping troops stay healthy. One purchase authorized in May 1863 by the U.S. surgeon general was for “two hundred mosquito netting frames, at $2.00 each,” to be used in camps and hospitals. Troops were delighted to hang these “mosquito bars” in their sleeping quarters, which offered a modicum of relief from the South’s superabundance of insects. One Union soldier stationed in Louisiana was optimistic that his new bar would “keep off the varmints completely.” He and his comrades were given the nets for free but were told they would have to pay “$3.20 apiece” for any that were lost or ruined. Mosquito netting made life easier for Dr. Charles Brackett while he was camped along the Mississippi River near Helena, Arkansas, in August 1862. “There is not much comfort here after night expect under my mosquito bar,” he wrote to his wife. “Once there I am safe. It is so nicely fitted, round my cot, hanging from the top of my tent.” Brackett considered the item a novelty and suggested that he might “bring one home” to his native Indiana. Southerners who had grown up in mosquito-infested areas did not need a lesson on the importance of bars. When the Confederate government failed to issue one of the devices to a Texas soldier, his mother offered to send him her own. If she ever did, it was not soon enough to prevent an anopheles mosquito from injecting plasmodium parasites into her son’s bloodstream.14
Despite the widespread use of mosquito bars and quinine, malaria plagued both armies during all four years of the war. It also sickened the thousands of Union and Confederate sailors who patrolled the South’s inland waterways and coastal harbors during the war in steam-powered gunboats. These vessels, which contained dense concentrations of sweaty bodies, served as convenient feeding stations for the swarms of mosquitoes that hatched in pools along the shorelines. William Reiser experienced “frequent attacks of severe intermittent fever” throughout the summer of 1862 while serving on board the USS Louisville. His recurring chills and fever periodically kept him from his duties until he was eventually sent to the Union hospital at Mound City, Illinois, for treatment. John Winkleman, a nineteen-year-old German immigrant serving aboard the Cincinnati, also went to Mound City due to a plasmodium infection. He was successfully treated with quinine but developed a cough, severe back pain, and diarrhea while in the hospital, which resulted in his discharge from the navy on December 5, 1862. Erie, Pennsylvania, native Charles Johnson was a “coal passer” for the USS Neosho when he first began showing symptoms of malaria. His fever paroxysms left him so weak
that the Neosho’s surgeon had no choice but to deem him “unfit for service.” Confederate sailors were also plagued by malaria. The disease sickened southern seamen by the boatload and even disabled the James River Squadron at a time when it was involved in a desperate fight to keep Union forces from reaching Richmond.15
But no matter how much suffering malaria caused for Civil War sailors and soldiers, it paled in comparison to the agony endured by those who were unlucky enough to contract yellow fever. The disease flared along the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Texas during the war and burned through a number of U.S. Navy vessels patrolling the waters of the South Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mississippi River. Because the early symptoms of yellow fever mirrored those of a number of other maladies that were common among enlisted men, physicians, especially northern ones, frequently failed to identify the disease until it reached an advanced stage. A group of Union soldiers stationed in South Carolina, for example, was diagnosed with “a nonspecific bilious fever” but were in fact suffering from yellow fever. Doctors realized their mistake only after several of the men died. Patients infected with yellow fever generally experienced headaches, body aches, and fatigue before the telltale signs of the virus—black vomit and bleeding from the nose and mouth— appeared.
Charles Winters, an eighteen-year-old U.S. marine stationed near Mobile, Alabama, was diagnosed with remittent fever after he complained of a headache, fever, and severe pain in his back and abdominal area. Winters was also shaking with chills, and his tongue appeared “coated and dry” to the physician on duty. Within a matter of hours the young soldier was delirious with fever and vomiting blood uncontrollably. He never recovered. Winters’s mate, a twenty-three-year-old Baltimore resident named Henry Gilman, was also misdiagnosed with remittent fever after he was “seized with a chill” and came down with a fever. Gilman was given massive doses of quinine and seemed to be improving for a short while before his condition took a turn for the worse. During the final few hours of his life he groaned in agony between bouts of vomiting and watched helplessly as his muscles twitched involuntarily. Gilman’s surgeon was unable to do anything but “make him [as] comfortable as possible.” He died on the morning of September 2, 1863, four days after his first symptoms appeared. Dr. D. W. Hand lived through an epidemic in North Carolina which killed hundreds of Union soldiers. He noticed that many of his patients first experienced chills, fever, restlessness, and severe back pain before becoming dangerously ill. Most of them also suffered from headaches, which were often concentrated in the area around their eyes. Dr. G.R.B. Horner’s yellow fever patients at Key West, Florida, complained of headaches and pain in their loins. Several had glazed eyes and coated tongues and passed urine that Horner described as dark enough to stain wood.16
Nineteenth-century physicians responded to these symptoms with a variety of treatments, most of which did more harm than good. Hand and his medical team dosed yellow fever patients with calomel (mercury) until their gums turned blue. The doctors were unaware that the element they were using as a medicine is toxic to the human body and destroys healthy mouth tissue if ingested in sufficient amounts. Soldiers overdosed with calomel lost teeth, suffered hideous facial deformities, and sometimes died. Hand also experimented with “acetate of lead” and dispensed opium, morphine, and “iced sherry.” To his credit he recognized that “careful nursing” was a better cure than any medicine, especially when the patient reached the final stage of the illness. Assistant Surgeon W. F. Cornick submerged his patients in hot baths “containing from four to eight ounces of mustard” until they were sweating profusely (or about to faint) and then put them to bed wrapped in blankets. The sick men were subsequently given calomel, castor oil, quinine, and “spirit of nitre” over the next several hours. During a major epidemic Dr. Nathan Mayer dispensed “very large doses of quinine” until he realized that the drug was not helping his patients. In desperation he turned to a remedy once used by English physicians in the West Indies, which called for alternating doses of calomel and castor oil. Such impromptu treatments were no more effective than the ones recommended by the government.
The Surgeon General’s Office endorsed the use of “gentle diaphoretics” (agents that increase a patient’s perspiration), lead, and “blisters or sinapisms” applied to the abdomen, in addition to quinine and mercury. The office also encouraged its physicians to borrow treatment methods from the personal accounts of surgeons who had lived through yellow fever epidemics. Washington never developed a central bureaucratic response to yellow fever because the best scientific minds of the day disagreed on the etiology of the disease. The U.S. Sanitary Commission had its own recommendations. A list of remedies published by the organization in 1862 included lead, creosote, and carbolic acid.17
Given the widespread use of such crude treatments, it is miraculous that any soldiers infected with yellow fever managed to survive. Their comrades who were suffering from malaria, on the other hand, had the advantage of quinine, one of the few drugs employed by Civil War surgeons which actually benefited patients. As a general rule, federal troops enjoyed greater access to the drug than their Rebel enemies, especially during the final months of the war, when the South was suffering from dire shortages of medicines as a result of the Union blockade. But even quinine was not enough to stop plasmodium parasites from sweeping through the ranks of both armies and weakening men who were already suffering from a battery of other diseases. In addition, malaria by itself could kill a soldier. “Congestive intermittent fever,” most likely Plasmodium falciparum, was diagnosed in 1.2 percent of malaria cases among white Union troops and 2.1 percent of cases among black troops.
From the moment they showed up in training camp until they were discharged or died, Civil War soldiers were stalked by harmful microorganisms that thrived in nineteenth-century America’s unsanitary conditions. Few diseases were more pervasive during the conflict than malaria, which was spread by the armies of anopheles mosquitoes which occupied nearly every region of the South. Whether stationed along the Atlantic coast, in the Mississippi River Valley, out West, or in one of the Gulf States, troops sweated and shook with fevers and chills caused by bites from these insects. These regions were also infested with Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which had caused multiple yellow fever outbreaks during the antebellum period. Soldiers were annoyed by the clouds of gallinippers that swarmed their tents and tortured them while they were on picket duty, but they had no way of knowing that these pests would play an important role in several of the war’s military campaigns.18
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MOSQUITO COASTS
THE MOB THAT gathered at the New Orleans waterfront on the morning of April 25, 1862, was not about to accept defeat graciously. It taunted and threatened the Yankee sailors who were hastily mooring their gunboats to the city’s docks after blasting their way past a Confederate flotilla and two heavily armed forts. Behind the mob fires meant to keep cotton and other valuable commodities from falling into Union hands sent plumes of smoke billowing into the warm spring sky. But the demonstration was too little too late. Flag officer David Farragut’s decision to run his fleet past New Orleans’s defenses had proven to be a stroke of genius. The South’s most important and heavily populated commercial port was once again under the control of the United States government. The North’s plan to squeeze the Confederacy into submission with a snakelike naval blockade was working.
Even so, the rebellious spirit of the city was alive and well six days later, when an army of fifteen thousand bluecoats under the command of Major General Benjamin F. Butler arrived to take control. Butler’s troops encountered the same menacing stares and angry insults that Farragut’s men had endured. But while the residents of New Orleans were enraged over the Yankee occupation, they also held out hope that nature, or perhaps nature’s God, might intervene on their behalf.1
They had good reason to be hopeful. Yellow fever outbreaks had swept through New Orleans nearly every year since 1817, killi
ng more than forty thousand people and establishing the city’s reputation as one of the unhealthiest places to live in the United States. The decade just before the Civil War was especially sickly. Back-to-back epidemics in 1853, 1854, and 1855, followed by another one in 1858, produced a staggering eighteen thousand casualties and virtually wiped out the city’s nonimmune immigrant population. New Orleans natives knew that when “yellow jack” appeared in their midst, newcomers were especially susceptible to its ravages, giving rise to one of the malady’s more fitting sobriquets, “Stranger’s Disease.” The thousands of Union soldiers tasked with maintaining order in the city were the perfect target for the virus because none of them had ever lived through an epidemic. Yellow fever might succeed where the Confederate military had failed and rid the city of its occupiers.
The southerner responsible for the defense of the region, Major General Mansfield Lovell, certainly hoped for such an outcome. Having ignominiously abandoned the Crescent City when Farragut’s ships steamed up the Mississippi River, Lovell’s contingency plan included the use of five thousand men to confine “the enemy to New Orleans, and thus subject him to the diseases incident to that city in summer.” Southern newspaper editors gleefully predicted an outbreak that would soon destroy the unacclimated Yankee hordes and liberate lower Louisiana.2
Mosquito Soldiers Page 5
