A similar scenario unfolded in Florida during the same sickly season. The federal government had maintained control of the Keys after Florida seceded and by 1862 was using Key West as a coaling station for its blockading squadron. A yellow fever epidemic began there when the English bark Adventure sailed up from Cuba and landed in distress at Key West on June 20, 1862. Four crewmen showing symptoms of yellow fever were immediately sent to the Marine Hospital, where one of them died, while the ship stayed in quarantine for nearly two weeks. The virus lay dormant until the end of July, when a soldier with the Ninetieth New York Infantry suddenly succumbed to the disease. Soon workmen building nearby Fort Taylor began to die, and by August a full-blown epidemic was under way, which spread to the Union ships and merchant vessels anchored off the Florida coast. The first case the fleet’s surgeon, Dr. G.R.B. Horner, saw was “a young black refugee” named William Talbot, who was on shore leave from the East Gulf Squadron’s flagship, the USS San Jacinto, in late July. After spending some time in Key West, Talbot began suffering from diarrhea and a fever and was admitted to the Marine Hospital, where he was misdiagnosed with typhoid fever until he ejected black vomit. He died from yellow fever on July 30.
Another of the San Jacinto’s crewmen experienced vertigo, a partial loss of vision, and a “severe headache” while on furlough. Somehow he managed to get back to his ship but then developed a high fever, rapid heart rate, and nausea. Although he was fortunate enough to recover, the man’s eyes remained “jaundiced for weeks.” By August 1 the San Jacinto reported nine cases of yellow fever on board (two sailors had already died) and was ordered north to Boston to escape the plague. The ship’s commander, Admiral J. L. Lardner, moved his flag to the St. Lawrence, but neither he nor the crew could escape the pestilence. By the middle of October Lardner was too sick to give orders. Other ships under his command—the Dacotah, the Huntsville, the Rhode Island, the Tahoma, and others—were also infected. Horner counted twenty-four vessels with yellow fever. At a time when northern merchants were writing letters to the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, asking for protection from Confederate privateers such as the CSS Alabama, the navy could ill afford to have so many vessels out of commission or operating with undersized crews.13
Onshore the situation grew dire. In August 153 soldiers stationed in Key West contracted yellow fever, including members of the Forty-seventh Pennsylvania Regiment. In September another 137 fell ill. An unknown number of civilians got sick as well. Surviving accounts suggest that the disease mostly afflicted unacclimated officers’ families and northern workers who were newcomers to the city. One eyewitness claimed that Key West was one “vast hospital” for two months and that 200 deaths occurred within a matter of weeks, while a correspondent for the New York Herald reported 160 people dead a month before the epidemic ended. An outbreak of dengue fever, or “breakbone fever”— another virus transmitted by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes—preceded the yellow fever epidemic. Several soldiers and their families endured its ravages, suffering from intense headaches, rashes, and a painful crushing sensation in their bones.14
As cannons roared in Key West and flaming barrels of tar belched black smoke into the humid air, infantrymen in the Ninetieth New York stationed at nearby Fort Jefferson on the Dry Tortugas Islands began to drop like flies. Lewis Tucker was a twenty-six-year-old bookkeeper from Walworth, New York, who fell ill at the end of August and died just a few days after the one-year anniversary of his enlistment. George P. Crocker was a blue-eyed, brown-haired “vender” who disliked army discipline. Initially given the rank of corporal when he enlisted in September 1861, he was demoted for “bad conduct” by the following January. Yellow fever killed him on September 20, 1862. His comrade, William Gage, was a tall, dark-haired clerk from New York City who had left his job and joined up with the Ninetieth in Brooklyn. He was only nineteen when a mosquito bite in August ended his life.15
As the epidemic raged, the navy began diverting ships away from Key West. Those that had to make brief stops to deliver medicines or pick up important messages were ordered to stay anchored offshore and smoke any “documents, letters, or articles” sent out in dinghies. The whole ordeal created an enormous headache for Secretary of the Navy Welles, who already had his hands full stopping blockade-runners smuggling southern cotton to the West Indies and Rebel steamers that were torching northern merchant vessels. His headache ended when the fever burned itself out in November. But by that time seventy-one soldiers and an unknown number of civilians were already dead.16
Farther north, along the Florida panhandle, Aedes aegypti and anopheles mosquitoes were also tormenting soldiers and civilians. In June 1862 dengue fever appeared among the Union garrisons occupying Pensacola and was “a troublesome complaint” for “the remainder of the season.” Physicians worried that the disease portended a yellow fever outbreak, which was rumored to be raging in nearby Mobile. In reality Mobile’s residents would only narrowly avert an epidemic in September, when the CSS Florida arrived from Cuba at the end of a harrowing high seas chase involving a score of Union blockade ships. The crew was still recovering from a severe bout of yellow fever that had broken out while the vessel was in the West Indies. Even the ship’s commander, John Maffitt, was so ill he “could hardly stand,” having forced himself off of his sickbed in order to guide the Florida into port. Although infected ships running the blockade were responsible for the epidemics that were occurring in other areas of the South, the citizens of Mobile seemed oblivious to the danger they were in and showered Maffitt with flowers, “jellies, cakes and delicacies” for his heroic escape. Luckily, their city escaped an outbreak.17
Meanwhile, the epidemic in southern Florida spread to the Sea Islands of South Carolina, which had been captured in November 1861 by Union forces searching for a naval fueling station between Florida and Virginia. At the end of the summer the USS Delaware arrived at Hilton Head from Key West carrying a detachment of soldiers from the Seventh New Hampshire Infantry. They were “broken down in constitution,” having spent too much time in the Florida heat. The entire Seventh had enjoyed the early part of the summer on the Dry Tortugas Islands “rowing for exercise,” “fishing,” and “cooking gull eggs” while ostensibly guarding a Union supply hub, but the men aboard the Delaware were suffering from an unidentified fever when they arrived in August. Because yellow fever was known to be raging in Key West, the sick soldiers were quarantined for twelve days before being sent to a nearby military hospital for treatment. The doctors on duty diagnosed “ordinary bilious fever of a mild type” until one private suddenly expired, and an autopsy revealed black vomit in his stomach. Other men soon began dying as well.18
A few days later, however, the department’s medical director was hopeful that the disease had burned itself out. It had not spread to any other regiments, and the surviving men of the Seventh had been transferred out of the area. This information was passed on to the commander of the Department of the South, Major General Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel, who felt confident that he could proceed with his plans to harass enemy forces operating near Charleston and Savannah without further interruption. Mitchel, who had been a nationally renowned astronomer and math professor at Cincinnati College before the war, possessed a razor-sharp intellect as well as a reputation for taking risks. His audacious invasion of northern Alabama several months earlier and bold but unsuccessful attempt to sever the southern railroad linking Chattanooga and Atlanta (an event later dubbed the “Great Locomotive Chase”) captured the attention of Union officials. From Washington’s perspective he was just the sort of man who could get the ten thousand northern soldiers stationed on the Sea Islands into the fight. Mitchel urged the War Department not to let concerns over disease keep it from sending reinforcements. “The health of the officers and soldiers I find to be generally good,” he wrote General-in-Chief Henry Halleck on September 20.19
After dark on October 9 Dr. Thomas Smiley arrived at the Hilton Head hospital and examined a patient from the Quarter
master’s Department who was complaining of a headache, nausea, and abdominal pain. By candlelight Smiley could see that the man’s face was “bloated and red” and that his eyes were “deeply congested.” Learning that his patient was coming off a three-day drinking binge, the doctor assumed the problem was alcohol related and went home for the night. When he returned the next morning, he was surprised to find the man violently ill and spewing black vomit. Within a matter of hours his patient was dead. A few weeks later the virus that killed him spread through Hilton Head, causing intense anxiety, suffering, and death. In the end forty soldiers on the island would contract yellow fever, and twenty-five of them would die from it. Those who did not get sick were seized with fear. Men who had proven themselves fearless in combat worried incessantly about coming into contact with the sick. Union supply vessels stopped making deliveries, and mail service ceased. The supply disruption even caused suffering for the horses, which were let loose to graze due to a lack of forage. By one soldier’s account the department “was virtually isolated.”20
Mitchel’s soldiers were not the only northerners in the area at risk. In the wake of the Union’s military successes along the Atlantic coast, the U.S. Treasury Department had allowed northern benevolent organizations to dispatch teachers and humanitarian relief aid to blacks living on the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Most of the instructors attached to these groups were women who had never been exposed to either yellow fever or malaria but were willing to hazard their health in order to assist former slaves. When Charlotte Forten, an African-American schoolteacher from Philadelphia, arrived in Hilton Head in late October 1862, the yellow fever epidemic started by the Seventh New Hampshire Infantry was still raging. She and her party “immediately” took a boat to the healthier town of Beaufort (an antebellum summer resort for wealthy Charlestonians), where Union soldiers, feeling antipathy toward any program designed to educate blacks, warned them “that the yellow fever prevailed to an alarming extent” and that “the manufacture of coffins was the only business that was at all flourishing at present.” Forten refused to be intimidated by these reports and remained in the area for over a year. In that time she experienced periodic bouts of sickness and was eventually forced to return north until the “unhealthiest season” had passed.21
Local blacks warned the philanthropists that the summer and fall months in the Sea Islands were dangerous for whites, but many chose to stay anyway. Arthur Sumner wondered why all the northern men who lived together in a house close to a swamp were sick with the local fevers. Sumner’s confusion stemmed from his belief that the summer “sun and wind,” both of which were blocked by a cluster of trees next to the house, were the chief threats to the men’s health. Laura Towne, a teacher and nurse, dismissed warnings from slaves on St. Helena who told her whites needed to go “North or to Beaufort in summer.” She thought her proximity to the ocean’s breezes would keep her safe and believed the danger was exaggerated. A number of her black patients developed “chills and fever,” which she considered “easily managed.” Towne herself managed to stay healthy.22
Others were not so fortunate. One volunteer, who also thought the disease threat was overstated, became “dangerously ill” and was forced to return north for several weeks to recover. Samuel Phillips, the nephew of abolitionist Wendell Phillips, died of disease during his first sickly season in the South. Typhoid fever and other maladies worked in conjunction with the region’s endemic malaria to wreak havoc on the health of the unacclimated newcomers. New England missionaries were living and working alongside locals who had been repeatedly infected with plasmodium parasites, which were easily spread by the swarms of mosquitoes that inhabited the Sea Islands in the 1860s. Missionaries were shocked by the numbers of these insects they encountered. “The mosquitoes are so horrible that we cannot, generally, write at all in the evening,” complained Laura Towne in August 1862. She gave up trying to pen letters underneath the security of a mosquito net after twice setting it on fire with her candle. Another volunteer was miffed that the insects found a way underneath her netting and constantly woke her “with their singing and stinging.” Luckily, the volunteers discovered that moving their quarters closer to the ocean improved their health. Stiff sea breezes and saltwater kept anopheles swarms at bay and provided the northern civilians with a respite from the plasmodium parasites that plagued the interior of the islands. Even so, malaria, together with other ailments, helped limit the effectiveness of the Port Royal experiment by either killing volunteers outright or forcing them to flee north to recover their health.23
Ormsby Mitchel never managed to escape the pestilential atmosphere of the Sea Islands. The general watched in anguish as four of the five members of his personal staff fell ill during the Hilton Head yellow fever outbreak and decided to move his headquarters to nearby Beaufort with the hope of avoiding more deaths. Mitchel himself soon showed symptoms of yellow fever, however, and after four days of tossing and turning in his bed in agony, stoically resigned himself to his fate. “The struggle of death has passed,” he told an aide, “God has called me, and I cheerfully obey the summons.” The general’s passing brought mourning from the troops, who were convinced they had lost “an efficient leader” and “distinguished commandant.” Flags flew at half-mast, gun salutes thundered at every post in the department, and the officers of the Tenth Corps wore mourning badges for thirty days. In the absence of an equally aggressive commander, the department lapsed back into apathy. Mercifully, the epidemic was over by the beginning of November.24
But as Mitchel lay dying, a much worse yellow fever epidemic was killing hundreds of people nearby in Confederate-controlled Wilmington, North Carolina. In the late summer of 1862 the blockade-runner Kate steamed up the Cape Fear River loaded with “bacon and other food supplies” and disgorged its smuggled cargo at the city’s water-front. The Kate was arriving from Nassau, where a yellow fever outbreak was under way, and had at least one sick sailor on board. Other crew members soon fell ill, along with a few of Wilmington’s residents. Rumors spread faster than the disease, which was said to be “raging” in the city in early September.25
Hoping to stave off a public panic, the city’s mayor launched an investigation into the matter and was relieved to discover that only five people had died. He and the editors of the local newspaper believed the rumors of an epidemic were “exaggerated” and confidently informed their fellow citizens that the worst was over. By the end of the September, however, the number of cases mushroomed, and Wilmington’s physicians were quickly overwhelmed with patients. Panicked families hastily gathered up belongings and fled to the countryside. Those who remained in the city were disproportionately poor or black. The De Rosset clan, whose patriarch was a successful Wilmington businessman, evacuated the city but left behind a number of their slaves. Several of these men and women contracted yellow fever, and one, a literate slave named William, wrote to his masters about the suffering they were enduring at home. “I hav never bin [so] sick in my Life Bee fore,” he reported. Ill for over a month, William was forced to nurse other sick slaves while battling his own infection. He found solace in his faith and believed his life had been spared “for sum good purpis.” The high rate of sickness among Wilmington’s slaves must have surprised many whites who had previously believed that blacks were immune to yellow fever. Before the epidemic ended, as many as 150 African Americans had died.26
A number of physicians, ministers, and nurses risked their lives to provide comfort to the sick and occasionally fell prey to the disease themselves. An Episcopal priest named Robert Drane, one of only a handful of clergymen who remained in Wilmington during the epidemic, died of a mosquito bite after ministering to scores of hapless yellow jack victims. Drane’s untimely demise prompted an outpouring of grief from Wilmington’s residents, who sent his son letters expressing their gratitude for the rector’s gentle counsel. Another casualty was James Dickson, a local doctor who also died in the line of duty. Dickson’s peers considered him “a
physician of the highest character and standing,” and the community mourned his loss. Volunteers from South Carolina also put themselves in harm’s way. Nuns from the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy in Charleston served as nurses, while P.G.T. Beauregard, who had only recently come back to South Carolina after serving in Mississippi, sent several of his surgeons to dispense advice and medicines.27
The streets of Wilmington were silent except for the crackling of countless fires that burned “in every street and yard” to ward off the pestilence and produced a thick cloud of smoke which hung over the city. The landscape was dotted with ponds created by heavy summer rains, which had also filled cellars and the spaces beneath floorboards with stagnant water. Train service stopped, hotels and businesses were shut down, and trash of every description littered the city’s wiregrass lots. Behind closed doors sick men and women endured a level of suffering which was shocking even during an era when disease-related fatalities were common. Georgia Weeks was staying at “a house of ill-fame” when she first showed symptoms of yellow fever. She experienced headaches, back pain, and profuse vomiting for two days before a physician arrived. Unfortunately, the doctor could do nothing to alleviate her agony, and she died the morning after his departure. Robert Smith was a butcher who had been drinking for several days when he first felt sick. During the final twelve hours of his life Smith’s skin turned yellow, his hands and feet became cold as ice, and he ejected black vomit. Another businessman named Dix decided to stay in town and face danger rather than allow his operation to shut down. His partner, Donald MacRae, fled the city but agreed to let the firm remain open. In early October MacRae sent a letter listing a number of items for Dix to purchase, which also contained a sober caveat. “I do not wish you to let these or any other orders induce you to expose yourself to the yellow fever,” he warned. “I am still of [the] opinion that you had better keep out of town until frost.” Unfortunately, MacRae’s words were not enough to prevent an infected Aedes aegypti mosquito from sending Dix to an early grave.28
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