Living Hell Read online

  By August 1862, William Chunn of the 40th Georgia, serving in the western regiments, had decided that there existed “no beauties in the preparation for the whole sale slaughter of the human race. I see no glory in numbering those on the battlefield slain. It is nothing but horror from beginning to end.” Elisha Stockwell believed himself to be the only survivor of Company I, 14th Wisconsin, at bloody Shiloh, April 6, 1862. Cowering under shellfire, his mind drifted “back to my home, and I thought what a foolish boy I was to run away to get into such a mess I was in.”8

  Fighting no longer seemed the answer for Theodorick Montfort, a lieutenant in the 25th Georgia, who watched as the surgeon lay out his grisly instruments in anticipation of Yankee warships beginning the bombardment of Fort Pulaski, Georgia, on March 31, 1862. “What a calamity is war,” he moaned. “When will men cease to fight, & love their neighbors as themselves?” Captured when the fort fell, Montfort died in a Union prison that September.9

  William B. Greene of the 2nd United States Sharpshooters had enlisted in a flush of patriotic fervor at seventeen. He quickly became disillusioned with the hard routine of army life, and discovered the actual experience of combat appalled him. At Cedar Mountain, on September 7, 1862, his unit was stationed in a copse. Rebel artillery shells smashed the treetops, bringing down vicious splinters of wood upon the sharpshooters. “Canister,” containing “pieces of shell, railroad spikes, small bullets, etc.,” made up some rounds. Terrified, Greene burrowed into the earth, later writing his mother that “the marks where I stuck my face into the ground” must still be visible. Although unwounded, he now started feigning illness to get a discharge and narrowly escaped trial as a deserter. A comrade unsuccessfully attempted suicide with his bayonet in a drastic bid to escape the service.10

  Long casualty lists from unexpectedly bloody fields, amplified by soldiers’ letters vividly describing combat and the death of friends, doused home front enthusiasm. Due to advances in photography, civilians could virtually experience the horror by peering at plates of the bloated dead displayed in store windows. You might examine corpses in 3-D by purchasing a stereoscopic viewer. The photographer, said the New York Times, October 20, 1862, “has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it.”

  Soldiers widely interpreted civilian disillusion, even though it largely mirrored their own, as cynical avoidance of service to make money while soldiers risked their lives for less pay than a streetcar driver. By mid-1863, the Union Army of the Potomac’s General Alpheus T. Williams thought that veteran resentment of civilian selfishness hurt re-enlistment. Georgia Private William Suttwell wrote from Fredericksburg, Virginia, in August 1863, that greed and godlessness undermined the cause: “We seek the creature and not the creator.” As early as 1861, prominent Northern literary figure Henry Tuckerman had predicted glumly that idealism would wane in the face of fever-ridden camps, along with “a material prosperity that set new records for extravagance” and renewed political quarreling.11

  The fading sacrificial spirit indicated that unity, initially fragile, had begun to fracture among civilians and soldiers. Confederate Colonel Williams C. Wickham, anticipating combat at Fredericksburg, December 1862, thought it a damned shame to die “for a cause of which I do not approve.” Charles B. Haydon of the 2nd Michigan, serving in Virginia in late 1862, overheard rival pickets agreeing the fighting made no sense; why not “throw our guns into the river & end the d——d war!”12

  The Richmond government’s steady encroachment on states’ rights antagonized Southerners, while the Emancipation Proclamation divided the North. Officers resigned commissions; some were cashiered, like Tennessean General James G. Spears, a brigade commander in the Union Army of the Ohio, broken for threatening to change sides, swearing “God damn the government, let her go to hell.” Men who expected the military to rise above the petty squabbles of civil life became disaffected when promotion failed to recognize merit; passed-over officers, such as Ella Thomas’s husband, Jefferson, who in 1861 thought it noble to serve in a Virginia regiment, resigned in high dudgeon the following year. Disgust with dissension in the high command furthered disaffection. Lack of success among Confederate generals in the west and Union commanders in the east bred recrimination and infighting. Captain William Lusk of the 2nd New York, furious at antagonisms among generals that helped cause Union defeat at Second Bull Run, a debacle in which he participated, complained that “there is no head on the field,” only “lying reports,” and “Old Abe makes a joke.”13

  Discipline quickly made soldiers who had anticipated heroic escapades feel more like prisoners than some legendary Achilles. The boys “counted the days yet remaining before they would be discharged, the same as a convict does the remaining days of his imprisonment,” confided Private Crowell. Soldiers had “little more freedom than the slave” swore New York Private Charles Gould. Similarly, from camp at Fort Bliss, Texas, June 1861, a Rebel cursed his captain as “a surly dictator” who “treats us more like slaves than anything else.”14

  Drilling elicited derision, as did wood cutting and digging latrines. “Spit and polish,” scouring equipment with saliva and dust, seemed servile. Army life “comes hard sometimes for young men who have been raised to do no menial labor,” admitted Georgia Private Theodore Fogle, slaving away in Richmond, Virginia, in July 1861. Nurses, too, became disenchanted, emptying slop pails instead of tending wounded gallants. John H. Brinton, a Union surgeon stationed at Cairo, Illinois, for much of 1861, said that many females flouted rules and expected dining service. He groused uncharitably, “Can you fancy half a dozen or a dozen old hags … surrounding a bewildered hospital surgeon, each one clamorous for her little wants?”15

  Comparisons to slavery were not hyperbole; many military penalties echoed the degrading inflictions that marked the plantation and jail. Punishments included hanging by the thumbs, toes barely touching the ground; bucking and gagging, being trussed like a turkey with a bit cutting the mouth; spread-eagling on a spare wheel, mocking crucifixion; flogging; and branding. The horror of being ordered to brand a deserter during the 1864 Virginia Wilderness campaign permanently unhinged Union Surgeon William Chester Minor.16

  Severity of punishment often appeared disproportionate. General Samuel Heintzelman spread-eagled an orderly on an artillery wheel simply for not removing his hat. This caused excruciating pain, according to Private Frank Wilkeson, 11th New York Artillery, Army of the Potomac. The victim’s agony increased if tied horizontally, the body “pulling heavily and cuttingly on the cords that bound his upper arm and leg to the wheel.” Soldiers felt officers habitually abused rank by bullying. A pilferer hit by General George Gordon Meade swore, “If it warn’t for them shoulder straps of your’n, I’d give you the dam’dst thrashing.”17

  Harshness invited retaliation. Men of the 40th New York, en route to the front in Virginia, September 1861, endured frequent bucking and gagging at the hands of their colonel. Outraged, they “openly swear that they will shoot him the first time they have a battle with the enemy.” When Lieutenant P. T. Keyes, 16th U.S. Infantry, Army of the Ohio, struck a straggler, the victim pledged, “I’ll shoot you the first chance I get.” The officer died in the next action.18

  Officers often deemed severe discipline a necessity and in the soldiers’ interest, for disobedience threatened life and health. In September 1861, Robert E. Lee wrote that many trainees had smallpox and measles. “They bring it on themselves by not doing what they are told. They are worse than children, for the latter can be forced.” Other officers did not “spare the rod and spoil the child,” forcefully confronting insubordination, especially in incidents involving alcohol and firearms. On April 12, 1863, Union General Michael Corcoran shot a drunken sentry who four times called him “a Goddamned Irish son of a bitch.” Captain Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, commanding the 5th Kentucky Battery (U.S.) during the 1
862 defense of Cincinnati, Ohio, knocked flat one of his men, “a bully of women and a drunkard,” who had attacked him while resisting arrest. Shaler spread-eagled the gunner on a wheel until, when nearly dead, he “says he’ll soger.”19

  For heinous crimes, soldiers faced execution. James Preble of the 12th New York, guilty of rape, caught drunk “with his Privates hanging out,” was shot. Vice proved a bane of army life, even though officers, surgeons, families, ministers, and community leaders urged soldiers to adhere to a regimen of moral and physical cleanliness. Victorians preached the concept of death before defilement. Harriet Beecher Stowe felt happy that boys embraced war “as a bride, and are ready to die,” but she fretted about her son Fred’s exposure to soldier sins.20

  Hard drinking headed the sinner’s list. Many older men were habituated boozers. But imbibing also became a form of self-medication to ease miseries of mind and body. For many youngsters away from home constraints for the first time, acquiring the liquor habit made you a bold dog. Keeping the boys from liquor proved almost impossible. Corporal C. F. Boyd of the 15th Iowa, in camp at St. Louis, February 1862, watched his comrades “getting pretty old at the business of running the guard” to reach local saloons. “There seems to be no God here but more than the average amount of Devil,” he said of duty in the city. Nurse Louisa May Alcott characterized D.C. as a city, “half of whose male population seemed to be taking the other half to the guard-house.”21

  The soldiers’ nose for booze appeared uncanny. Despite all precautions, wrote Albert Fall, a gunner in Porter’s Tennessee Battery (C.S.A.), from Bowling Green, Kentucky, December 1861, a sergeant got tight “and was engaged, with his corporal, who was also drunk, in loading and firing a horse-trough.” Desperate officers dismissed sutlers (authorized merchants) and even flogged civilians who peddled liquor, but the flow continued. The concentration of troops in Richmond, the Confederate capital, overwhelmed the provost guard’s resources. In a March 1862 diary entry, Edmund Ruffin, a passionate secessionist, reluctantly admitted that the city seemed reduced to “a sink hole of drunkenness, rowdyism, and crime.”22

  The rough company encountered in the army encouraged other vices, such as gambling and theft. Cornelia Hancock, a Union assistant surgeon with the Army of the Potomac, wrote after having her saddle stolen by soldiers, “The depravity of persons in the army is beyond belief.” But the one abuse that joined alcohol as most damaging to soldiers’ health and efficiency proved to be sexual promiscuity. No certain cures existed for the venereal diseases that, at times, threatened radical consequences, destroying the immune system and attacking the brain. They also proved highly infectious.23

  Mercurial compounds served as the most common treatment, leading to the witticism, “A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.” Syphilis vaccination, created from active matter, proved risky and largely ineffective. Union Colonel John F. Williams reported his unit “so weakened by syphilis (from vaccination) that they cannot furnish many men for scouting purposes.” Without good cures, the regulation of brothels probably proved the best prophylactic, ensuring uninfected women and clean establishments. In Nashville, for example, General R. S. Granger ordered the hospitalization of prostitutes likely to spread disease.24

  The dimensions of the task ensured failure. D.C. alone boasted some 450 brothels with 7,000 women. These houses of ill repute continued to be unhygienic. A provost’s guard raiding “The Hospital,” a bordello near the Capitol, encountered sickening stench, filth, and a soldier in a louse-ridden bed. Prostitutes followed the armies. The Louisiana Tigers brought with them into service “disgusting looking creatures” passed off as ministering angels.25

  The Christian Commission and other benevolent groups helped in the moral struggle, distributing Bibles and cautionary tracts, but the fight continued uphill. Older soldiers got “horny” and virgin youths wanted to experience sex before dying. Said Private Haydon of the 2nd Michigan, in May 1861, “If the men pursue the enemy as vigorously as they do the whores they will make very efficient soldiers.” “Away from the restraints of society, and of home,” observed Private Wilbur Fisk, 2nd Vermont, Army of the Potomac, in late 1863, “it is the easiest thing in the world to drop in with the current, call it the ‘soldier’s style,’ ‘live while you do live,’ and let the end take care of itself.”26

  Probably one in twelve Civil War soldiers contracted a social disease. The Union army alone reported some 73,000 cases of syphilis and 109,400 of gonorrhea. Many hospitals dedicated a ward to VD. The epidemic hurt military functioning. Army of Northern Virginia General A. P. Hill, for example, suffered periodic incapacity due to the “clap,” contracted as a cadet. Lower down the hierarchy, Colonel William Douglas of the 9th Ohio Cavalry, operating under Sherman, 1864, complained of men on sick call, “the result of their own licentiousness.”27

  Debilitation and death through dissipation thinned the ranks. “Whiskey and sexual vices carry more soldiers off than the bullet,” charged Cyrus Boyd, 15th Iowa, an abstemious soldier. A case in point was the 71st New York’s Private Patrick McCarty. Though only twenty, he became an alcoholic after signing up, destroying his immune system. Granted a furlough for re-enlisting, he “spent the whole time in debauch, came back bloated and shaking with incipient delirium tremens, fell sick with typhoid pneumonia and died as an old man dies whose constitution is enfeebled by age—.”28

  Unfortunately for moral cleanliness advocates, however, dissipation in fact caused only a minority of the many deaths from disease. In the British army during the Crimean War, 1854–56, disease produced four of five deaths, often from postoperative infection. Although the Civil War’s two to one mortality rate of disease to wounds showed improvement, illness remained a personal tragedy and a problem for commanders. In 1861, 20 to 50 percent of men in any unit fell sick at one time, afflictions running the gamut. In August 1861, for instance, 645 of the 7th Louisiana’s complement of 920 men reported sick. Complaints ranged from acute diarrhea, the commonest problem, to VD, metal poisoning, epilepsy, and mental instability.29

  The high sick rate resulted partly because physicians, keen to get bodies into the building armies, passed men as fit whose physical condition warranted rejection; inferior specimens, they would fail the challenges of camp life. Private Boyd, the Iowa volunteer cited above, alleged that “the surgeons are not all particular as the government wants men,” and so passed all the boys. Another recruit, Alfred Bellard, 15th New Jersey, recalled that when inducted in 1861, he underwent no examination at all and only had to answer a few questions: “Were you ever sick in your life, have you got the rheumatism, have you got varicose veins …?”30

  Medical ignorance of the causes of disease and infection helped promote sickness. Volunteers’ ungovernable behavior became another huge ingredient in fostering ill health. Short-term enlistees followed the sloppy example of citizen soldiers in the Mexican War of 1846–48, when disease boosted the U.S. death toll to 104,556. By 1861, the democratic people’s army still often refused to be told where to defecate and when to wash. Even the well bred sloughed off, adopting the laxness of a hunting trip. Billets remained unclean. Private Rice C. Bull of the 123rd New York found the Soldiers’ Rest in D.C. “the most filthy place I was ever in,” and “crawling with vermin and rats which scampered in all directions.”31

  Exacerbating volunteer unruliness, the volume of recruits needing to be accommodated often overwhelmed quartermasters, leading to gross overcrowding. Marcus Woodcock of the 9th Kentucky (U.S.), Army of the Ohio, hospitalized for measles, November 1861, found two patients per bed. “The stench was horrible,” resulting from the only sanitary arrangement provided, straw piled around the walls.32

  Country boys found packed-in living particularly hard. Unused to cramped conditions, they fell prone to childhood diseases that men from congested urban areas had survived in youth. Mumps, measles, and chicken pox became virulent. Georgia General John B. Gordon recalled, “It was amazing to see the large number of country boys who
never had the measles. They ran through the whole category of complaints that boyhood and babyhood are subjected to.”33

  Diarrhea and dysentery constituted the commonest diseases, attacking soldiers of all ages and backgrounds; 700 of 1,000 men might have this at a time, physicians treating almost 500,000 cases per year. Causes included poor food, water, and sanitation, so that “vast acreages were essentially giant cesspools and garbage dumps.” Officers did not always understand the sanitary aspect of their jobs. One report on the state of Union troops in camp at Cairo, Illinois, 1861, stated, “the company and regimental officers did not know how to care for the men, and the men themselves seemed to be perfectly helpless.”34

  Neglect caused needless deaths. New York Private Charles Gould’s foot turned septic from an untended cut made while chopping wood; he died of blood poisoning complicated by typhoid fever. Sometimes, failure to seek medical aid came about because field officers distrusted surgeons who, taken on during initial army expansion, revealed their inexperience, even incompetence. The surgeon of the 31st Indiana, for example, treated cases of mumps with a futile application of a “caustic” solution to the back of the throat, using his swab repeatedly, guaranteeing transmission of the infection from man to man.35

  Most physicians understood the inadequacy of their medical assets. Confederate assistant surgeon W. H. Taylor, on duty at a hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia, February 1862, recalled ruefully his only prescriptions for most complaints: “In one pocket of my trousers I had a ball of blue mass [a mercury compound], in another a ball of opium. All complaints were asked the same question, ‘How are your bowels?’ If they were open, I administered a plug of opium; if they were shut I gave a plug of blue mass.” Drug supplies could run short but, in the North, medicines usually remained available, partly due to the efforts of the Women’s Central Association of Relief and the U.S. Sanitary Commission. The South suffered a sustained drug shortage, partly due to the Union blockade targeting medical imports.36