Mosquito Soldiers

by Bell, Andrew McIlwaine

  Dysentery and the suffocating summertime humidity of Arkansas wreaked further havoc on the health of Steele’s men. Lacking a steady supply of freshwater, thirsty soldiers dipped their canteens in stagnant bogs and puddles where hogs had wallowed. By the first week of September the army was at Brownsville, where it again was “encumbered with a large number of sick—near 700.” Steele was forced to detach two brigades of cavalry to guard these ailing troops and keep his supply lines open. Despite these setbacks, the general drove the remainder of his army across the Arkansas River and into Little Rock. Outgunned, outflanked, and anxious to avoid Pemberton’s fate, Price hastily withdrew his forces sixty miles southwest to Arkadelphia. Steele’s exhausted cavalrymen only gave brief chase before retiring. In the end only 136 men in the Army of Arkansas were killed or wounded during the series of skirmishes which constituted the campaign for Little Rock, while at least 1,000 were incapacitated by disease. These results are consistent with the Union army’s experience in Arkansas as a whole during the war. Thousands of northern men were poured into a state that was plagued with malaria and played only a small role in the success of the Union war effort. Far more soldiers stationed in Arkansas were prostrated by anopheles mosquitoes than were killed or wounded in battle. Between July 1863 and June 1865 over 70,000 Union troops were diagnosed with either intermittent or remittent fever, while hundreds of others contracted typho-malarial fever. Among the various Union departments that existed during the war, Arkansas was the most malarious.5

  The prevalence of mosquito-borne disease may help explain why Steele’s troops did almost nothing to impede the Confederate invasion of Missouri which went ahead in the autumn of 1864. Led by Price, this raid was designed to draw Grant’s and Sherman’s men away from Petersburg and Atlanta and encourage Missourians to vote the Democratic ticket in the November presidential election. At both the beginning and end of the unsuccessful campaign, the lion’s share of Price’s forces crossed the Arkansas River unmolested by Steele’s Federals, a failure that caused “great dissatisfaction” in Washington City. Steele thought the small size of his force and the vast size of the surrounding territory made it impossible for him to bag Old Pap. A report on the department’s troop strength issued at the end of October shows that only 17, 618 out of the 44,506 soldiers the general had on paper were actually available to fight. Most of the others were ill, chiefly with malaria and diarrhea.6

  Few regiments serving in the region suffered more from malaria than the Third Minnesota. After Steele’s army was routed in the early spring of 1864 while taking part in Nathaniel Banks’s ill-fated Red River Campaign—a disastrous expedition but one that was not seriously affected by mosquito-borne illness—the Third was sent to garrison Pine Bluff, forty miles south of Little Rock.7 All summer long Minnesota boys accustomed to the comfortable temperatures of the Old Northwest labored in the sweltering southern heat to erect fortifications in case of a Confederate attack. The regiment’s surgeon, Dr. A. C. Wedge, was soon faced with a “violent epidemic of malarial fever,” which he blamed on a “south wind” that brought in “miasma” from a nearby bayou. Wedge’s analysis was probably not far from the truth; in all likelihood the breeze was extending the flight range of an untold number of female anopheles hatched in the bayou which were searching for a blood meal. Many of the men in the Third had spent the previous summer in the Yazoo River Valley with Grant’s army and participated in Steele’s march from Helena, so they were probably already infected with plasmodium parasites by the time they got to Pine Bluff. A contingent of “several hundred” fresh recruits arrived from the North in April, and soon 80 percent were severely ill with “malarial fever.” Wedge was without quinine, so the unit continued to suffer until Minnesota authorities intervened (after a series of letters were sent to the state’s governor and senator) and sent down a large supply of the drug. The Third likely suffered from gastrointestinal ailments at the same time given that the local water supply was deemed filthy. When several companies were furloughed in mid-August and arrived in De Valls Bluff on the way home, Brigadier General Christopher Andrews described the scene as “touching.” “Most of them looked pale and thin,” he recalled. When the regiment continued to waste away in the Arkansas swamps for another eight months, Minnesota’s governor, Stephen Miller, penned a strongly worded letter to Major General Edward Canby on their behalf, requesting a transfer. “For more than eighteen months the regiment has been engaged upon fatigue duty on fortifications and railroads,” he complained. “During that time 150 of their number have died of the fever incident to that terrible climate, and the survivors and their executive now ask that they may have an opportunity to die at the post of honor.” The men of the Third never got another chance to die honorably. Five days after Miller wrote his letter, Lee surrendered at Appomattox.8

  Other regiments also wasted away in Arkansas, especially those stationed in Helena. The Sixth Minnesota was made up of more than 900 healthy soldiers when it left Cairo, Illinois, for Helena in June 1864, but by September only 144 men were fit enough to fight. The regiment was camped on the banks of the Mississippi River and surrounded by muck-covered marshes that served as breeding pools for mosquitoes. Two weeks after the Sixth arrived, the hospitals at Helena were overflowing with patients. The unit’s surgeon, Dr. W. P. Belden, described many of the men he treated as “jaundiced and sallow” and recommended that the camp be moved to a healthier location. Hundreds of men who never fired a shot on a battlefield were evacuated to Union hospitals in Memphis and St. Louis. Dysentery and malaria were rampant and continued to erode the health of the regiment until it was granted a furlough at the end of September. Charles Johnson was a soldier with the Sixth. Twenty-five years after the war ended, he was still angry with the army for its decision to send his unit to Helena. Johnson thought it a “monstrous outrage” to send any “unacclimated Northern regiment” to such an unhealthy post. The appalling numbers of sick reveal the source of Johnson’s lingering resentment. Every month from July to October 1864 at least 400 of his comrades were ill, and during September—the time of year when mosquitoes were most active in many regions of the South—the number peaked at 654. Alfred J. Hill was a soldier with Company E who watched disease turn the Sixth into a “shadow of its former self.” He remembered the pitiful look of “the companies as they marched to dress parade,” many with only “half a dozen men in line.” Malaria and other maladies inflicted more damage on the regiment than Rebel minié balls and limited its combat readiness. When the infamous Confederate raider Joseph Shelby and a group of southern cavalrymen began murdering black soldiers and plundering plantations near Helena in August, the Sixth and another Union unit from Missouri could only find 400 men healthy enough to respond.9

  Black troops stationed in the area also suffered from disease. The Fifty-sixth U.S. Colored Infantry was stationed in Helena for over a year, with many of its companies camped close to the brushy ravines and stagnant pools that surrounded the city. A physician sent by the U.S. Sanitary Commission to inspect the area found that most of the seventy patients in the general hospital were suffering from malaria. The men of Company D pitched their tents near a marsh and were devastated by remittent fever; forty-six of the seventy-nine soldiers in the company fell ill. Bacteria-infested water, unsanitary conditions, and mosquitoes continued to make life miserable for the Fifty-sixth even after Union commanders recognized the extraordinary sickliness of the post. In January 1865 Halleck advised the commander of the Department of Arkansas, Major General Joseph J. Reynolds, to abandon Helena “both on account of its unimportance and its unhealthiness.” Unfortunately for the troops in the area, Halleck’s advice was either overlooked or disregarded, and the post remained occupied for the duration of the war.10

  Although records for the Confederate armies that operated in Arkansas are incomplete, the available evidence suggests that malaria was also a significant problem for the southern troops assigned there. Early in the war John Walker’s Texans spent time near
Clarendon and were hit hard by “fever and ague.” Over 50 percent of the division fell ill, and “several regiments” could not even muster enough men for guard duty. Junius Bragg was a surgeon for a Confederate unit stationed along the Arkansas River. “This Ark. Post is a vile place,” he wrote to his future wife, Josephine. “It is so unhealthy here in the summer season, that nothing can live except mosquitoes. I am credibly informed by the oldest ‘inhabitant’ that the snakes have chills here in the summer.” In 1863 Bragg was sent to Pine Bluff, where nearly “every one” under his care contracted “chills.” The doctor himself also fell ill with malaria. Nor was he the only southern physician in Arkansas to be infected with the disease. Dr. William McPheeters was with Theophilus Holmes’s force when it launched an unsuccessful attack against the Union garrisons at Helena—a campaign intended to draw northern troops away from Pemberton’s forces at Vicksburg—and developed intermittent fever on the retreat back to Little Rock. His ailment periodically returned and at one point forced him to spend an entire day in bed.

  The winter after the campaign McPheeters and his fellow surgeons created a military medical association for the purpose of exchanging ideas and information. During their first meeting three papers were presented “on the peculiarities of intermittent fever.” Returns from the Confederate District of Arkansas after the Battle of Helena suggest a high rate of sickness. The three divisions that constituted the district had almost 32,000 troops on paper, but less than half that number were actually available to fight. The returns from the districts of western Louisiana and Texas reveal a similar divide between paper strength and actual numbers of active-duty troops.11 With three times fewer men eligible for military service than the North, the South could ill afford to lose so many soldiers to disease. But for both Confederate and Union forces operations in the trans-Mississippi region during the summer and fall months were risky, in no small part because of mosquito-borne diseases.

  As malaria steadily eroded the health of Steele’s men in Arkansas, Confederates in Texas were dying of yellow fever. During the winter of 1862–63 John B. Magruder had successfully driven off the Massachusetts regiment that had been sent to capitalize on Renshaw’s victory and occupy Galveston once the sickly season was over. Having successfully recaptured the Confederate port city, Magruder proceeded to fortify it with more than three dozen cannon placed in various forts erected on Galveston and Pelican islands and at Virginia Point. Before his troops were decimated by the disease, the Virginia-born general also considered yellow fever to be one of Texas’s military assets. In May 1863 he transferred two thousand troops “from the Rio Grande frontier” to Louisiana, confident that his western flank was safe from attack during the “yellow-fever season.”12

  The following year, however, Magruder learned that the scourge of the South was one of its least dependable allies. By the summer of 1864 conditions inside the city were deplorable. Confederate soldiers were bedeviled by food and supply shortages and were owed back pay. Civilians suffered as well. One Confederate soldier noted in his diary that destitute local children often hung around his camp, begging for something to eat. In August rumors circulated that yellow fever was present in the city, prompting Magruder to quarantine ships arriving from areas known to have problems with the disease, such as the West Indies and Mexico. The scene got even uglier when several hundred frustrated and nervous soldiers mutinied and surrounded a house where Magruder and his officers were being entertained by the ladies of Galveston. The general was able to talk his way out of the situation but was probably relieved when he was transferred later in the month; by the middle of September Galveston was in the throes of a full-blown yellow fever epidemic. The first official death attributed to the disease was that of a forty-year-old minister from Germany who perished on September 5. Soon other men, women, and children, including a substantial number of German immigrants, also died from the disease. The outbreak “caused considerable excitement among the troops,” and “a number of them” tried to desert their posts under cover of darkness on September 16, the night before a lockdown of the island went into effect. Brigadier General James Morrison Hawes, the officer in charge, asked the residents of Houston to send nurses to attend to the sick and dying, but because of an epidemic in their own city, they were unavailable to come.

  By the end of September fifteen cases and three deaths were reported in Houston. A few weeks later more than one hundred people were ill with the disease. To escape the epidemic Major General John Walker—who had replaced Magruder in August as commander of the District of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—hastily moved his headquarters out of the city. But despite the large number of sick people in Houston, few deaths occurred. The local newspaper reported that the disease was “of the mildest type ever known in that city” and that few perished who were able to receive prompt medical attention. The epidemic, however, lasted longer than most. In late November warnings were still being issued for unacclimated people to avoid the city, and a month later the Confederate States District Court was forced to suspend its proceedings because of the disease.

  The yellow fever outbreak that occurred in Galveston at the same time was much more serious. The disease claimed the lives of the city’s most prominent citizens and its most humble. The Reverend J. M. Goshorn, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, and his wife died the same month that Bend, a thirty-year-old slave, was buried. Inside the city law and order rapidly deteriorated, and thugs took advantage of the confusion to prey upon helpless civilians. Cornelius O’Connor’s house was burglarized while he was away, and the woman he had left in charge of his property was murdered during the robbery. Other murders occurred as well. When an Englishman named Baker shot and killed a Confederate soldier for plundering his chicken coop, the other members of the soldier’s company took revenge by stabbing Baker and hanging his corpse on a post in front of his house. Confederate commanders were eventually able to regain control by instituting regular patrols, but yellow fever, rival attacks by Federal and Rebel forces, lawlessness, and supply shortages made life under the Confederate government worse for most citizens in Galveston than it had been under the old Constitution.

  The chaos afforded the Union fleet patrolling the waters off Galveston an opportunity to recapture the city, but even the toughest salts were not about to expose their crews to the dreaded yellow jack. Rear Admiral David Farragut, in an apparent retreat from his earlier policies, issued orders to his commanders off Galveston to steer clear of the city and to avoid picking up passengers.13

  By the time the first frost had halted the Galveston epidemic in late November, 111 soldiers and 158 civilians were dead. Nearly 20 percent of the casualties in the army occurred among German immigrants who had grown up in areas where yellow fever was nonexistent and as a result had not developed an immunity to it. These were men such as twenty-five-year-old John Eickelberg, who lived in Austin County prior to the war and served as a musician in Elmore’s regiment before a mosquito bite ended his life. Or Private Zitzleman, who died as a member of Wilke’s Battery and was buried in the potter’s field in Galveston. Confederate soldiers from England, France, and Ireland also perished during the outbreak, along with dozens of native Texans. Walker believed the outbreak had been a “great drawback” to his defense strategy for Galveston. His overall plan for Texas depended on occupying key locations and using interior lines to transfer troops to threatened points, but he was forced to pull soldiers from Sabine Pass to prop up the weakened command at Galveston. Fortunately for the Confederates, by the autumn of 1864 Union military planners were uninterested in committing large numbers of men to an area with little strategic value which was periodically beset by dangerous plagues. The attack Walker had prepared for never materialized, but the shock of the 1864 Galveston epidemic lingered after the war was over. Union forces occupying the city during the summer of 1865 instituted a quarantine and strict sanitation measures in much the same way Butler had three years earlier in New Orleans. The next major outbreak in
Galveston would occur two years later and kill more than 1,100 people.14

  Meanwhile, across the Gulf of Mexico yellow jack again hit the Union fleet anchored at New Orleans. This time nearly 200 sailors on 25 different vessels fell ill, resulting in 57 deaths. The entire crew of the USS Tennessee, a captured Confederate ironclad, was evacuated, while repairs on other damaged vessels came to a virtual standstill. The surgeon attached to the USS Ossipee ordered the destruction of all clothing, blankets, and mattresses belonging to a number of crewmen who had come on board from another infected vessel, the USS Union. When yellow fever again surfaced in nearby Pensacola, it was blamed on a steamer that had stopped for coal in Key West, which was experiencing its own outbreak at the time. A handful of workers at the naval hospital in New Orleans also got sick (three died), along with five civilians, but, fortunately for the thousands of Union soldiers stationed nearby, the disease did not spread through the city and died out when cooler weather arrived.15

  While northern sailors were dying in New Orleans in 1864, dengue fever and yellow fever struck Key West and the Dry Tortugas Islands. According to one observer, at least “five hundred” people at Fort Jefferson on the Dry Tortugas were afflicted with dengue fever, which caused a pall of gloom to fall over the community. The sweltering temperatures of southern Florida turned the fort into a giant brick oven that broiled patients who were already burning with fever. In Key West yellow fever was “raging” with such ferocity that supposedly “even the old acclimated residents” fell ill.16