Halleck’s assessment was consistent with the one he had made at Corinth two months earlier as commander of the combined Union armies in the West. During the Peninsular Campaign “Old Brains” Halleck was again considering every angle, including the illnesses that threatened McClellan’s troops, and determined that discretion was the better part of valor. His comments also make it clear that malaria and yellow fever were significant contributors to Tidewater Virginia’s sickly season, given that some blacks enjoyed limited immunity to both diseases.6 African Americans were just as susceptible as whites to typhoid fever, dysentery, and the other diseases that made life miserable for the Union troops crowded together at Harrison’s Landing. Anopheles and Aedes aegypti had assisted in creating an image of Virginia as an unhealthy region before the war, and the high rate of malaria during the Peninsular Campaign helped expedite the Army of the Potomac’s retreat to Washington. McClellan’s defeat, in part attributable to disease, triggered a sea change in the North’s approach to the war; afterwards it would work to destroy slavery and create a new birth of freedom rather than fight exclusively to preserve the old republic.7
The impact that malaria had on the southern armies that participated in the Peninsular Campaign is less clear. Confederate records on disease casualties are sketchy, but given that one out of every seven sick rebels stationed east of the Mississippi River in 1861–62 was diagnosed with malaria, it is reasonable to assume that the disease also caused considerable misery among the gray armies guarding Richmond. Herbert Nash, an assistant surgeon attached to several Virginia units, remembered that many “unacclimated confederates” suffered the same diseases as McClellan’s troops after “traversing the marshes and slashes of the Chickahominy.” A glance at the statistics compiled by individual Confederate hospitals provides some indication of the problem. Out of 366 cases recorded by Hospital No. 21 in June 1862, there were eighteen cases of remittent fever, seven cases of intermittent fever, and three cases of congestive fever. “Febris” cases, many of which could have been malaria, were not recorded. Hospital No. 18 kept records on 182 patients in August 1862 and saw 5 cases of remittent fever and 11 cases of intermittent fever but did not keep any information on general “fever” cases. But these statistics only include those soldiers who chose to seek treatment. Civil War soldiers usually avoided hospitals whenever possible. And unlike their enemies from New England, most southern boys had grown up in malarial environments and were accustomed to “the chills” to one degree or another. Furthermore, the Confederacy’s supply of quinine was not yet dangerously low in early 1862, and a soldier infected with plasmodium still had a good chance of receiving effective treatment from his regimental surgeon. Although it remained a problem, malaria was less of an issue for the South’s armies during the Peninsular Campaign because of access to ample supplies of medicine and provisions in Richmond and southerners’ long experience with the disease.8
The situation was dramatically different a year later for the Confederates who were tasked with defending Vicksburg from Ulysses Grant’s forces. Grant spent the winter of 1862–63 spinning his wheels in the mud (both literally and figuratively), trying to figure out how to take the Confederacy’s “Gibraltar of the West” out of the war. Rebel cannon protected the river approach to the city, while the surrounding countryside was fortified by thickets of half-submerged trees and alligator-infested bogs. Early in the campaign Grant put his men to work on the canal that Thomas Williams had abandoned a year earlier. Sherman’s troops dug through ankle-deep mud, but the unpredictable ebb-and-flow cycles of the Mississippi River turned the task into another Union exercise in futility. Mississippi’s cooler winter temperatures halted the activity of mosquitoes during this period, but diseases such as typhoid fever and diarrhea were rampant. Undeterred by the canal failure, Grant explored several other water routes through the swamps of Louisiana and Mississippi before settling on a plan that showed the world that he possessed the heart of a gambler.
Grant’s decision to run the Union fleet past Vicksburg’s guns and march an army through the heart of the South without a proper supply line has long been viewed as a bold and brilliant masterstroke. What is often overlooked yet equally remarkable about the 1863 campaign (and speaks volumes about Grant’s leadership) is that it took place during Mississippi’s sickly season. Other generals were unnerved by the prospect of exposing their men to the South’s dangerous diseases during the summer months. Even Robert E. Lee—arguably the greatest military tactician either side produced during the war—thought it highly unlikely that the North would march an army through Mississippi at the hottest time of year. The northern press expressed the same sentiments and argued that a siege against Vicksburg during the sickly months would be suicidal. “The simple substance of it is, that an army of twenty-five thousand men would find their graves between now and the first of October without ever facing an enemy,” opined a correspondent for the Chicago Times. Even if Grant had chosen to ignore the opinions of the press and his superiors, he could not overlook the appalling amount of sickness among the troops under Williams’s command during their failed campaign against Vicksburg.9
Fortunately for Lincoln and the Union war effort, Grant did not let these concerns stop him from launching a successful siege against Vicksburg in the summer of 1863. Again, Grant’s success was in part attributable to his decision to abandon his supply lines and live off the fat of the land—a lesson he had picked up the previous winter, when Earl Van Dorn’s cavalry had ridden around his army during its march against Vicksburg and destroyed the Union supply hub at Holly Springs. What is less well known is that medicine, including quinine, was not one of the articles Grant was willing to part with when he moved into Mississippi. The Federal host that menaced General Joseph E. Johnston’s and General John C. Pemberton’s armies was well stocked with pharmaceuticals and prepared for every conceivable medical emergency. In contrast, their opponents suffered severe supply shortages, which allowed malaria to become pervasive among the Confederate ranks. These deficiencies allowed the anopheles that had inadvertently served as Vicksburg’s guardians a year earlier to become the city’s enemies. Grant’s supplies of medicine were so abundant, in fact, that he could occasionally afford to show mercy toward his enemies. After the Battle of Champion’s Hill—the last major clash between the Yankees and Rebels before the siege of Vicksburg began—he made sure desperate southern doctors were assisted by his medical staff and given whatever supplies they needed. Dr. Thomas Barton was one of the Union physicians who treated Confederate stragglers for intermittent fever.10
Even with its large stockpile of medicines, however, the Army of the Tennessee was hit hard by disease as it marched through the Mississippi swamps. Diarrhea and malaria were the chief scourges, and roughly a quarter of Grant’s forces were sick or incapacitated during the campaign. As early as March, one surgeon reported that the disease rate exceeded “17 per cent” for the troops operating in the vicinity of Vicksburg and that the sickest soldiers were those “camped near the canal” that Williams had started (and Grant failed to finish), where the terrain was “low and partially inundated.” John Sherman Emerson was an assistant surgeon with the Ninth New Hampshire Infantry who watched the “climate and forced marching” wreck the health of the men under his care. By the time the Ninth was transferred to Kentucky, almost every soldier in the regiment had contracted malaria. Emerson’s colleague, George Twitchell, was surgeon-in-chief for two divisions and treated numerous patients whose suffering was “greatly augmented by the fever and malaria.” “Fevers, congestive chills, diarrhœa, and other diseases” made life so miserable for the men of the Fiftieth Pennsylvania Infantry that many simply “sank down upon the roadside” and died. During the siege of Vicksburg, A. J. Withrow wrote to his wife and explained what conditions were like in camp for the Twenty-fifth Iowa Infantry: “I did not get my letter finished the other day, and yesterday I came near shaking my toe nails off, with the ague, and did not feel like writing.” H
is only solace was that the chills only came “every other day” instead of daily. Jacob Ritner was also with the Twenty-fifth but was lucky enough to stay healthy, unlike the other men in his unit who were afflicted by “mostly ‘ague’ and diarrhea.” Despite the widespread sickness, Ritner was optimistic that the campaign would soon end. “Our situation here is very unhealthy, but I believe we will get out of it before too long,” he wrote. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes would continue to poison the Twenty-fifth Iowa and the Army of the Tennessee’s other regiments for another month. Union commanders were also worried about the possibility of a yellow fever outbreak. Orders went out from headquarters for regiments to avoid the “scorching rays of the sun” and “damp and chilly night air” whenever possible as a preventive measure against the disease. Fortunately for Grant, yellow fever never became a problem during the Vicksburg campaign.11
The hardships that malaria caused for the Union army paled in comparison to the misery it produced among Confederates. A third of Pemberton’s force was already ill when the campaign began, and by July the number had climbed to nearly 50 percent. Like the Union army, diarrhea and malaria were responsible for most of the cases of illness, and a large number of the sick were undoubtedly suffering from both diseases at once. Men parched by the broiling Delta heat were forced to drink contaminated water while hungry insects buzzed in their ears day and night. Soldiers on picket duty were especially vulnerable to mosquito bites because they were not allowed to build fires, which might reveal their positions to enemy mortars. One lieutenant with the Thirty-fifth Alabama Infantry who was often assigned to picket duty (and remembered Vicksburg as “a place of flux and mosquitoes”) was bitten so frequently that he found it difficult to sleep when not on watch. A Tennessee soldier named Samuel Swan was also tortured by mosquitoes at night and made numerous entries in his diary about the subject. The parasites spread by these mosquitoes coupled with inadequate supplies of food, clothing, and medicine reduced the Confederates at Vicksburg to an army of scarecrows. The hospitals were soon overflowing with patients. One eyewitness described the Rebels he saw at Vicksburg as sallow-cheeked and sunken-eyed, with an overall appearance that was “haggard & care-worn.”12
A number of these men had only recently been transferred to Pemberton’s army from South Carolina. During the summer of 1863 the Confederate high command in Richmond was again convinced that the sickly season would help protect the Carolina coastline. Coming off his stunning victory at Chancellorsville and planning an offensive that would culminate in the Battle of Gettysburg, Lee pushed Confederate secretary of war James Seddon for a troop transfer from the “southern coast” to the Confederacy’s “northern and western frontiers.” Lee thought that a local, acclimatized force could endure the summer months and was sufficient to take care of any Union recon units foolish enough to go traipsing through the South Carolina countryside in the middle of summer. Seddon did not need convincing and had already been transferring some of P.G.T. Beauregard’s troops from there to Mississippi to help stop Grant’s advance. When he received complaints about the transfers from South Carolina officials concerned about the safety of Charleston, Seddon assured them that the “sickly season” and “sultry weather” would help keep the city safe. Beauregard conceded that he could manage with fewer troops during the summer months.13
As Beauregard’s men moved west to keep the Stars and Bars flying over Vicksburg, black soldiers were proving to a skeptical white public that they were willing to lay down their lives for the Stars and Stripes. In late May African-American regiments participated in an unsuccessful assault on Port Hudson, Louisiana, the only other position on the Mississippi River besides Vicksburg still controlled by southern forces. Although the attack failed, it changed many white northerners’ attitudes toward black troops, who could no longer be written off as second-rate soldiers fit only for garrison duty and manual labor. This newfound admiration became even more pronounced in June, when black regiments helped repel a Confederate assault on Milliken’s Bend designed to sever Grant’s supply line (unbeknownst to the Rebels, Grant had already abandoned the post as a supply hub). Recruited primarily to free up white soldiers for combat, these regiments were under orders “to protect the plantations that were rapidly being leased along the west bank of the Mississippi.” They also may have been sent to Milliken’s Bend under the mistaken assumption by federal officials that blacks were immune to southern diseases.
By the time the Vicksburg campaign got under way, Union colonel S. B. Holabird had already convinced Major General Nathaniel Banks, Butler’s replacement in New Orleans, that blacks were better able to withstand the diseases that plagued the Union forts surrounding the city. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton agreed and in January 1863 issued orders for his officers in New Orleans to raise black Louisiana regiments. Two months later Halleck wrote to Grant encouraging him to use black troops to “hold points on the Mississippi during the sickly season” if Banks’s experiment proved successful. The general-in-chief thought that such a scheme would “afford much relief to our armies.” Surgeon General William A. Hammond agreed. Not long afterward he forwarded Stanton a report from Banks’s department which seemed to prove beyond a doubt that black troops stationed in the Deep South were less vulnerable to malaria than their white comrades. The report was based on a study that had been conducted at Forts Jackson and St. Philip in Louisiana involving the Thirteenth Maine Infantry and a contingent of black Louisiana recruits. Nearly 11 percent of the soldiers from Maine were diagnosed with “intermittent or remittent fever” compared to less than 1 percent of the Louisianans, who likely enjoyed a limited degree of immunity to the local plasmodium parasites. The editors of the American Medical Times interpreted the results as proof that “the argument in favor of the employment of colored troops at the South, if based on their comparative immunity from the diseases peculiar to that region, is conclusive.” For the surgeon general the study confirmed the “well-ascertained fact” that the African was “less liable to affections of malarious origin than the European.” Hammond also believed that blacks possessed unique biological features that allowed them to “work in the rice and cotton fields of the Southern States with impunity” and avoid yellow fever infections. Blacks themselves bought into these ideas. Former slaves living on South Carolina’s Sea Islands warned northern philanthropists about maladies that afflicted only whites, while black journalists pressed Washington to make greater use of “colored” troops who could resist these diseases.14
Northern surgeons treating African-American patients, however, discovered that most of these claims were exaggerated. While traveling with the Seventeenth Regiment Corps d’Afrique from Baton Rouge to Port Hudson, surgeon John Fish observed black soldiers suffering from malaria as well as diarrhea, scurvy, typhoid fever, rheumatism, and pneumonia. The experience challenged Fish’s preconceived notions about African-American bodies. “I had supposed the black man to be peculiarly exempt from diseases due to malarial influences,” he wrote, “but I should not expect to have encountered a greater number of cases of intermittent fever in a body of white troops equaling ours in number than we have actually had.” Another northern surgeon experienced a similar epiphany after examining the data on 7,949 black refugees. He found that 2,776 of them, or 35 percent, had been diagnosed with either remittent or intermittent fever, which was enough to convince him that scientific claims about black immunity to malarial fevers (“so often reiterated in our text-books”) were patently false.15
But these discoveries came too late to convince Union commanders that black and white soldiers should be treated equally, and most African-American regiments sat on the sidelines during the Vicksburg campaign. White units bore the brunt of the fighting and endured the South’s final desperate attacks while waiting for the river fortress to fall. By July 1, with his men wasting away from disease and malnutrition, Confederate lieutenant general John C. Pemberton had a decision to make; he could either surrender both the army and the city and hope f
or decent terms from “Unconditional Surrender” Grant, or he could attempt to shoot his way through the Union lines and live to fight another day. When Pemberton asked his division commanders to find out whether or not their troops were fit enough for the second option, Brigadier General Seth M. Barton reported that only half of his men were healthy enough to fight. “The command suffers greatly from intermittent fever, and is generally debilitated from the long exposure and inaction of the trenches,” he wrote. “Of those now reported for duty, fully one-half are undergoing treatment. These I think are unfit for the field.”16
Mosquito Soldiers Page 11
