When Brigadier General William H. C. Whiting arrived in mid-November 1862 to take charge of Wilmington’s Confederate forces, he found the city’s defenses in disarray. Rebel troops had evacuated the town itself, leaving “many important points neglected.” Whiting feared that the Federals would take advantage of the chaos to launch an attack the moment the first frost appeared. “Preparations have been suspended, the garrison reduced and withdrawn, the workshops deserted, transportation rendered irregular and uncertain, provisions, forage, and supplies exhausted,” he worriedly wrote to Secretary of War George Randolph. “Unless therefore more speedy measures for reenforcement and relief be adopted I have great apprehensions of a successful coup de main on the part of the enemy.” U.S. Navy commander William Parker had just such a notion in mind and wanted to launch an attack in December while the Confederates were still weak, but his commanding officer, Major General John Foster, was more interested in leading an expedition against Goldsboro, with the objective of destroying the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, Richmond’s link to the Carolina coast. Of course, it is entirely possible that Foster was simply unnerved by Wilmington’s epidemic. Two years later, as commander of the Department of the South, he refused to enter Charleston Harbor under a flag of truce when rumors circulated that a yellow fever epidemic was raging in the city.29 Had Parker’s plan been implemented, Wilmington might have fallen under Union control in the winter of 1862. Instead, it served as an important Confederate supply hub for two more years. Whiting claimed that “even one or two” Union vessels would have posed a serious threat to the city in the immediate aftermath of the epidemic.30
By the end of November cold weather halted the activity of the city’s Aedes aegypti population, and the epidemic ceased. Emotionally exhausted survivors wondered if Wilmington would ever be the same. “What a change there will be in our community,” wrote one resident who had fled to Greensboro to escape the pestilence. He was not sure if the town could ever find “peace and quiet” again and lamented the painful memories that would linger for years to come. The Wilmington Journal, which had temporarily suspended operations during the outbreak, recognized that it would take a while before the town could “recover from the effects of the destroying pestilence.” Mary Ann Murphy’s brother returned to Wilmington in November and was greeted by both black and white residents who were glad to see a familiar face. After exchanging pleasantries, they told him that more people had died than the papers reported. According to the statistics compiled by the Journal, 650 of the roughly 4,000 people who remained in Wilmington during the epidemic died. Other sources place the number as low as 450 and as high as 1,200. Whatever the exact figure, the residents of Wilmington were traumatized by the event. For many of their friends and family members death came not from the muzzle of a Yankee rifle but from the proboscis of a female mosquito. Their plight also sent shockwaves through Washington which reverberated for the duration of the war. Both the Wilmington epidemic and one that simultaneously struck Hilton Head, South Carolina, sent Union military planners a strong message about the dangers of the Carolina sickly season.31
The Wilmington epidemic was the largest of a series of yellow fever outbreaks that occurred along the South’s coastline during the sickly summer and fall of 1862. Union naval commanders tasked with implementing Winfield’s Scott’s “Anaconda Plan” found themselves battling a disease that was as terrifying as anything the Confederacy could throw at them. In Texas Aedes aegypti mosquitoes created a biological shield that helped thwart the navy’s plans to seize southern ports, a task deemed necessary to shut down the illicit international trade that supplied Confederate armies. The same insects attacked Union garrisons in Florida and South Carolina and even killed the commander of the Department of the South, Major General Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel. Butler’s sanitation and quarantine measures, in addition to luck, allowed the nonimmune northern troops stationed in New Orleans to avoid the pestilential nightmare that southerners had predicted would send them to an early grave. But occupying coastal port towns was not enough to bring the recalcitrant South to heel. Victory could only be achieved by sending U.S. troops into the southern interior to occupy Confederate territory and crush its armies. Millions of anopheles mosquitoes awaited the Federals.
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“THE LAND OF FLOWERS, MAGNOLIAS, AND CHILLS”
WHILE FLAG OFFICER David Farragut was still getting his fleet into position below New Orleans, newly hatched female mosquitoes in western Tennessee were feasting on the Union soldiers following Major General Ulysses Grant up the Tennessee River and into the heart of the South. Grant’s destination was Pittsburgh Landing, a riverside village located just north of the Tennessee-Mississippi border which Henry W. Halleck, the new commander of the Union armies in the West, wanted to use as a launching point for a thrust against the Confederates occupying the important railroad hub of Corinth, Mississippi. Halleck had ordered Don Carlos Buell’s army, then occupying Nashville, to rendezvous with Grant’s forces in order to create a massive northern juggernaut that would ensure a Union victory. But before the two armies could connect, Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston launched a preemptive strike that produced a staggering twenty thousand casualties in two days of vicious fighting. Once the Battle of Shiloh was over and Confederates were beating a hasty retreat to the relative safety of Corinth, Mother Nature continued the killing.
Typhoid fever, malaria, diarrhea, dysentery, and scurvy broke out among the Union ranks, causing tremendous suffering and death. Dr. J. S. Newberry was a member of the U.S. Sanitary Commission in April 1862 and in later years recalled the pathetic scenes of human misery he had witnessed at Pittsburgh Landing. “The pestilential atmosphere of the country about Shiloh was producing an amount of sickness almost without parallel in the history of the war,” he wrote. Newberry and his colleagues worked diligently to evacuate the sick and wounded on hospital ships and provide comfort to ailing northern soldiers. Diarrhea and dysentery were responsible for most of the suffering, but the presence of malaria caused additional medical complications. John Vance Lauderdale, a contract surgeon, knew firsthand about the malaria problem at Pittsburgh Landing. While serving on a Union hospital boat there, he began suffering from regular bouts of “ague.” His fever and chills were present “every day, & a good deal every other day,” making his time on the Tennessee River “drag very heavily.”
As Halleck cautiously moved his army toward the Confederate forces at Corinth in May 1862, plasmodium parasites compounded the suffering of large numbers of his troops, who were dehydrated and disoriented by chronic diarrhea. Dr. T. H. Walker, an army physician, observed the pernicious effect the local fevers had on soldiers who were already sick with other diseases. According to Walker, diarrhea “prevailed as an epidemic throughout the camp,” and “the majority of cases” he saw were “complicated with Intermittent Fever, producing great prostration and difficulty in treatment.”1
Plasmodium vivax by itself was usually not fatal, but in conjunction with the various other maladies encountered by the average Civil War soldier, it could mean the difference between life and death. From April to June 1862 anopheles mosquitoes poisoned the blood of Federal troops who were already exhausted and sickly. In June the Army of the Tennessee, with an average strength of 66,042 soldiers, reported 2,541 cases of “intermittent” fever and 1,574 “remittents,” with the numbers climbing each month through the end of October. These numbers, when added to the disease statistics from the Army of the Mississippi and a few other units (the numbers from the Army of the Ohio are not available), show that malaria was the second most frequent diagnosis in Halleck’s command; only diarrhea and dysentery were more ubiquitous. Thus in May 1862 William T. Sherman, who was not yet a household name, had 10,542 troops on paper, but only 5,289 of them were fit for duty. More than 2,500 of the absent men were too sick to serve. Sherman himself supposedly contracted malaria while destroying Confederate supply trains near Chewalla, Tennessee, just north of Corinth. The so
ldiers of the Fourteenth Michigan Infantry were camped near Corinth and began experiencing “chills and fevers” following a heavy rainstorm that created a plethora of freshwater puddles in the vicinity. The soldiers of the Fourteenth had abandoned their “blankets and overcoats,” along with their tents, during the march through Tennessee and were vulnerable to mosquito bites day and night.2
The Confederate troops holed up inside Corinth were even worse off, primarily because of the dirty drinking water and spoiled food they were forced to subsist on. Kate Cumming was a volunteer nurse during the siege who worked tirelessly to ease their suffering. She learned from a Confederate chief surgeon that almost all of the regiments in the city were ill and could easily be defeated if they were attacked. Cumming and “quite a number of the ladies and doctors” at Corinth soon got sick as well. When the town’s wells ran dry, thirsty soldiers were reduced to slurping water from polluted puddles that doubled as cesspools. Dysentery and typhoid fever were rampant, and a lack of vitamin C added scurvy to the list of medical problems. In April 1862 Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard had taken command of the western army after Albert Johnston bled to death from a wound incurred during the surprise attack at Shiloh. By the end of May, fearful that his army would be destroyed by either disease or Halleck’s forces, Beauregard withdrew to Tupelo, a spot he “considered very healthy.” Medical records show, however, that malaria shadowed the Army of Tennessee as it moved deeper into Mississippi. In June 1862, 5,756 of Beauregard’s men, out of a mean strength of 40,675, were officially diagnosed with malaria. On average 80 out of every 1,000 soldiers suffered from “intermittents,” and 61 out of every 1,000 were treated for “remittent fever.” Again, the actual number of malaria infections was probably higher because the troops, most of whom had grown up in endemic areas, were forced to spend countless hours huddled together in relatively small areas where mosquitoes could easily spread parasites from one bloodstream to another.3
Having maneuvered the Confederates out of Corinth, Halleck marched his triumphant but sickly troops into the city. He knew Washington would want him to pursue Beauregard’s army, but he was reluctant to send his men on what he believed would be a suicide mission. “If we follow the enemy into the swamps of Mississippi,” he wrote Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, “there can be no doubt that our army will be disabled by disease.” For the moment Halleck was content to send a “corps of observation” to keep an eye on the enemy. His decision not to pursue Beauregard’s army was a product of his cautiousness. “Old Brains” preferred textbook operations and believed that marching a sick army through the unhealthiest part of the country at the unhealthiest time of year was not a move that Antoine-Henri Jomini would have endorsed. Like most nineteenth-century Americans, he viewed the southern disease environment as dangerous to outsiders. Proof was in the pallid and peaked faces of his men.4
Farther south, Butler was learning the same lesson. With yellow fever hanging over his head in New Orleans like the sword of Damocles, malaria and other diseases steadily eroded the health of his troops encamped in the surrounding countryside. The Fourteenth Maine Infantry pitched its tents near the swamps outside Carrollton, Louisiana, and in September and October 1862 “suffered terribly” from malaria. In less than a month the strength of the command dropped from seven hundred men fit for duty to a scant fifty-six. Butler noticed that Carrollton was especially unhealthy for his troops and was surprised when even a “regiment of acclimated Louisianans” he sent there was decimated by “malarious swamp fever.” These natives, while perhaps accustomed to the local parasites, had no immunity to the new strains of malaria which were being brought in by men from all over the country. Their fellow Federals in the Twelfth Maine Infantry picked up plasmodium parasites in the summer of 1862 while on duty near Lake Pontchartrain and were afflicted by recurring bouts of intermittent fever well into the following winter. Camp Parapet, located seven miles north of New Orleans, quickly became known as an insalubrious location, in part because of malaria. The Eight New Hampshire Infantry was stationed there in June 1862 and suffered from typhoid fever, diarrhea, and “acclimating fever.” Not surprisingly, the prevalence of malaria for the Department of the Gulf as a whole increased as mosquitoes became more active and the sickly season got under way.5
General Winfield Scott’s warning early in the war about the dangers posed by the “malignant fevers” below Memphis was proving prescient for Butler’s troops. But the worst was yet to come. A month after he forced New Orleans to capitulate, Farragut steamed up the Mississippi and ordered the surrender of Vicksburg, one of the last Confederate strongholds on the river. His fleet was rebuffed by Rebel regiments and cannon commanded by Martin Luther Smith, a Mexican War veteran and engineer who had once served under Robert E. Lee. The Lincoln administration, anxious to gain source-to-mouth control of the Mississippi River as quickly as possible, was displeased with Farragut’s failure and pressed him to make a second attempt on the city. The sixty-year-old salt thought an attack on Mobile would be wiser but dutifully followed orders. In late June he took the fleet and three thousand soldiers under Brigadier General Thomas Williams toward the Confederacy’s “Gibraltar of the West.” Awaiting them were ten thousand Confederates and an untold number of anopheles mosquitoes. Both proved to be lethal deterrents.6
Before arriving on the twenty-fifth, Williams received orders from Butler to dig a four-by-five-foot ditch across the peninsula opposite Vicksburg with the hope of changing the course of the Mississippi River—a daunting engineering project that, if successful, would allow Union gunboats to bypass the city and gain control of the waterway. The chief result of this endeavor was the spread of disease among the U.S. soldiers and sailors who took part in it. Almost as soon as the Union fleet arrived at Vicksburg, malaria became a problem. The Mississippi River was ebbing after a recent flood and had left behind large puddles “covered with a thick green scum” which served as perfect breeding pools for the local mosquito population. Farragut’s chief surgeon, Jonathan M. Foltz, commented upon the large number of these insects he saw on the way upriver but had no way of knowing they would soon cause his sick list to swell. By mid-July so many members of the Seventh Vermont Infantry were ill with “malarial diseases” that the regiment could barely muster enough men for guard duty. The same month the Second Massachusetts Light Artillery unit had only 21 out of its 140 men healthy enough to take part in a mandatory review and inspection, while their fellow soldiers in the Ninth Connecticut Infantry could not find enough troops to serve as funeral escorts for dead comrades.7
Mosquitoes, dirty water, and poor nutrition were responsible for the malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, and scurvy that broke out among Williams’s regiments, but malaria quickly became the predominant disease at Vicksburg. The disorganization of the Union medical department in 1862 meant that most of the soldiers sent into Mississippi were undersupplied with quinine and ran out of the drug shortly after the campaign began. In at least one case, a request sent to headquarters for more of the antimalarial medicine was turned down on the grounds of “irregularity.” When even the army hospital ran low on quinine and patients began to suffer from “new attacks and relapses,” surgeons resorted to the use of cinchona bark, with successful results. The malaria problem was also exacerbated by the enlistment of several hundred black “contrabands” to assist in the digging of the canal. Having spent most, if not all, of their lives in an endemic environment, these native southerners were almost certainly carrying plasmodium parasites when they were recruited to work alongside Williams’s nonimmune New Englanders. The men of the Thirtieth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment suffered from “a malignant form of remittent fever” after working on the canal, and by the time they left Vicksburg, more than half of them had to be placed on the sick list. Two hundred of the men went to the hospital, and an even greater number were unable to leave their quarters. A shortage of tents, which forced the regiment to sleep in jerry-built lean-tos, compounded the problem by giving the large
number of insects in the area unrestricted access to the men’s bodies at night. The canal project also involved felling trees and excavating earth, two activities that allow mosquito populations to multiply rapidly.8
By the last week of July, with the river falling faster than his sick men could dig, Williams had had enough. He wrote to Flag Officer Charles Davis, who had come down after a successful campaign in Memphis to help with the operation, explaining the reason for his withdrawal. “I will not attempt to disguise that I regret to leave this exceedingly,” lamented the general. “I am really distressed to have effected so little at so much cost to my command in its effective strength, but with an increasing sick list, which must soon, if it has not already, reduced me below the ability for effective service, I have no alternative but to go.” When Williams and Farragut abandoned the campaign at the end of July and retreated back down the Mississippi River to Baton Rouge, 75 percent of the 3,200 troops they had brought up from New Orleans were either dead or hospitalized, primarily because of malaria. Forty percent of Davis’s men were also ill, prompting the naval commander to conclude that the North should “yield to the climate and postpone any further action at Vicksburg till the fever season is over.”9
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