Living Hell Page 6
Other preserved foods, more readily available to Northern than Southern troops, included condensed (dubbed “condemned”) milk and desiccated (“desecrated”) vegetables that came in brick-sized blocks. Both supplied vital nutritional elements. But the vegetables required long boiling in plenty of water; frequently, neither liquid nor cooking time was available. The boiling had to be done cautiously, for the fibers swelled alarmingly during the rehydration process, overflowing coffee pots and other impromptu cooking vessels. The reconstituted plants often became mushy or tough, tasting like “a lot of rags,” recalled Private Joseph E. Crowell, 13th New Jersey. Canned and dried legumes contained important protein but, when not part of a balanced diet, caused intestinal problems. Private John D. Billings, 10th Massachusetts Artillery, described Sibley tents filled with the “nauseating exhalations from the bodies of twelve men.” It is also likely that lead-soldered seams on canned goods helped to produce the metal poisoning found in some volunteers.11
Sutlers’ wares, such as pies, pickles, and oysters, when available, enriched diets; but they were for individual purchase, and not all soldiers could afford them. Pay often showed up late or had to be sent home for essential family support. Lonely men eagerly anticipated packages from home, providing variety to the diet and comforting treats, but the parcels could arrive crushed or decayed. Captain Thomas N. Stevens, 28th Wisconsin, received “bread, cakes, pies, turkeys, cheese, &c. &c. moldy & rotten—whew!” Joseph H. Twichell, chaplain of the 72nd New York, in winter camp at Falmouth, Virginia, eagerly awaited his December 1862 Thanksgiving box from home, only to find it contained mince pie growing a crop of blue mold and a chicken pie “fast returning to dust.”12
An inferior diet low in vitamins and minerals resulted in scurvy, an ugly, painful, and energy-sapping disease that increased as the war lengthened. In 1861, the Union reported five cases per one thousand; by 1864 more than twenty. Enlightened officers tried to obtain citrus fruits, onions, sauerkraut, fresh apples, and greens to combat the disease. They sometimes encountered push-back from citizen soldiers who wrongly associated fresh produce with cholera epidemics, and adequate supplies proved hard to find. Often, the only available course was to commandeer all produce grown near the line of march, stripping farm crops, and then sending out foraging parties to gather wild greens and onions.13
Even foraging could have deleterious results, as in Lee’s 1862 Maryland campaign, where the general received criticism for marching north before the crops along his route fully ripened. The commander erred in “starting off with us before the corn was fit to eat,” wrote North Carolina veteran Berry Greenwood. When the Army of Northern Virginia outran its supply lines, thousands of famished soldiers fell out or tried to march on green corn and sour apples. Mary B. Mitchell, a Maryland housewife, described Rebels gaunt from starvation begging food, always with the same explanation: “I’ve been a-marchin’ and a-fightin’ for six weeks stiddy, and I ain’t had n-a-r-thin’ to eat ’cept green apples and green corn.”14
The consequent chronic dysentery thinned Lee’s ranks. A Northern civilian who walked the Antietam field shortly after the battle said the Rebel lines could be traced “by the thickly strewn belt of green corn husks and cobs,” with “a ribbon of dysenteric stools just behind.” Malnutrition and diarrhea gravely impaired the efficiency of the armies, causing depression, lethargy, night blindness, muscular debility, neuralgia, and susceptibility to major diseases. Finally, emaciated men could not march or fight and died.15
Just as the armies stripped the countryside of food, with deprived civilians cursing them as a plague of locusts, the troops also ruthlessly drained the water supply. Men and beasts needed water to drink, a resource also essential for much cooking; for cleaning bodies, clothing, and utensils; and for washing medical equipment and operating tables. While surgeons might be criticized for lax sanitation, they often did not have water to clean instruments or their patients’ blood-and-dirt-encrusted bodies. The needs of the martial city-on-the-march became so rapacious that desperate civilians disabled their water supply to avoid being left with none. “As we approached,” recalled Confederate Colonel Marcus Stephens of campaigning in rural Mississippi, mid-1863, “the good people would remove the buckets, ropes, and Pumps from their wells or cisterns and no water could be had.”16
Soldiers suffering dehydration, made worse by eating dry hard biscuits and salty bacon, resorted to desperate measures, routinely drinking foul water. Private Levi Ross, 86th Illinois, wrote of drought in Kentucky during the October 1862 Perryville campaign: “Much of the water we drink is mixed with the filth of the mules, hogs and goose.” Confederate Private James Houghton confided to his diary, in the broiling heat of July, 1863, that his unit had taken stagnant water from a ditch: “we poaked the Skum one side with our cups then gave the water a spat to scare the bugs and wiglers to the bottom.” No water could be rejected in extremity. Maine Private John Haley, camping on the 1863 Chancellorsville grounds a year after the battle, noted that water drawn from sources in proximity to hastily-dug graves had “a most horrible flavor,” the water table being contaminated.17
Ignorance, slackness, and bad practice added to the inherent dangers of the situation. During the June 1862 heat in the western theater, Colonel William Camm of the 14th Illinois complacently watched his boys cracking jokes and singing as they filled their canteens from a brook. Turning in the saddle, he glanced upstream to where a dead mule lay in the water, covered with “millions of flies.” The disconcerted officer had himself just enjoyed a careless drink from the same contaminated stream. Private C. W. Kepler, 4th Ohio, noted that a regiment in his brigade had been reduced to 185 men. They had camped downriver from other units, taking water from a stream “used as a latrine by the army, and … where lay in putrescent death horses, mules, and horned cattle.”18
Thirsty soldiers greedily sucked up mud holes, bloody pools, and swamp water, inevitably encouraging disease. For example, bad water spread typhoid fever through both armies during the baking Atlanta campaign of summer 1864. Overall, the Union army formally recorded nearly 149,000 typhoid cases, of whom close to 35,000 died. The Confederates faced similarly severe losses. Bad food and water also helped keep dysentery and diarrhea as leading illnesses, causing close to 1,800,000 cases in the Federal army alone, with over 44,500 deaths. Intestinal pain could be so acute that victims like Texas State Trooper Jack Iago committed suicide (by slitting his wrists).19
Water remained essential not only for drinking but washing. Soldiers became filthy from dust in summer and mud in winter; the dirt lay on them like a crust. Private Wilbur Fisk, 2nd Vermont, wrote from Gaine’s Mill, Virginia, in June 1864, that the earth comprised piles of dust that got into clothes, coffee, blankets, haversacks. “It is universal, and there is no getting rid of it.” That same month and place, Union nurse Cornelia Hancock wrote, “The weather is intensely hot, the suffering intensely great.” Flies swarmed and “We have had scarcely one drop of rain for two weeks, the dust is shoe top deep.”20
Mixed with water, dust became mud. Georgia Private Matthew Nunnally, enduring trench warfare at Yorktown, Virginia, during spring 1862 floods, noted, “We were on duty every other day and sometimes every day in the trenches up to our knees in mud, frequently without a morsel to eat for thirty-six hours, had but little sleep.” Elisha Hunt Rhodes, 2nd Rhode Island, recorded in late November 1863: “It is raining, and we all live in mud, sleep in mud, and almost eat in mud.” Another sufferer assured his brother he had now become expert on a rich assortment of mud, “from that kind of which you take up a ton every time you lift your boot, to that gayer and more sportive compound which spirts upon your knees, as you tiptoe through it. It is over-shoe everywhere.”21
Captain Charles Minor Blackford, 2nd Virginia Cavalry, wrote from the field, October 1863, that it had been raining incessantly, “the air so dark and dank that it may be cut with a knife,” the ground knee-deep in mud and slush. “I am stiff and cold and every joint is painful w
ith aches and suffering.” Tar from pine-tree fires added a piquant variety of filth, stickily coating hands, faces, and clothes. Only scrubbing with soap and water could remove the goo, and soldiers saw little of either solvent. The sweat of battle, powder smoke, and gunpowder residue from bitten cartridges provided a final touch of misery, dyeing faces and tongues indigo blue. Veterans in the field might resemble tramps. Tally Simpson, 3rd South Carolina, wrote from Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862: “I am very ugly, my beard is shaggy, teeth black, clothes dirty and worn, finger nails long and black, nose little inclined to drip—I am a hard looking case.”22
Lucky soldiers discovered a pool of dirty water to bathe in or took a plunge in a swamp. If in camp for a while, they would go far and wide for water. “The weather is exceedingly hot—and dusty. We send three miles for water,” wrote South Carolina senator and short-term volunteer, James Chesnut, in the summer of 1861. Officers saw being stationary as a luxury because they might find a bend in the river to bathe away from the bivouac, protocol decreeing they should not wash in view of the men. Hence, they often had particular trouble keeping clean. Union Captain John W. DeForest depicted an officer’s tunic “almost stiff enough to stand alone” with dirt and sweat.23
The pace of active campaigning often meant that soldiers could not clean up for weeks. During Lee’s hard-marching 1862 Maryland campaign, a private in the 15th Georgia calculated that his regiment had not washed their clothes for forty-five days. Frances Peter, a physician’s daughter in Lexington, Kentucky, watched invading gray ranks march by on September 18, 1862, and observed wryly that they looked “as if they hadn’t been near water since Fort Sumter fell” in April 1861. The troops smelled, too, stinking of sweat, excrement, and urine. Dr. Lewis H. Steiner of the U.S. Sanitary Commission said that even pro-Secession citizens admitted to being glad when Lee’s troops left, taking with them “the penetrating ammoniacal smell they brought with them.” In the west, Sergeant Rice C. Bull, 123rd New York, fighting before Atlanta, figured he had neither bathed nor washed his clothing from May 20 to July 12, 1864.24
When opportunity finally allowed personal hygiene to be addressed, the results could be traumatic. As the hair of Union soldiers was cropped during their steamship passage to the Virginia Peninsula, April 1862, Colonel Charles S. Wainwright reported that “the pile of dirt disclosed beneath the earlocks of some must have been accumulating all winter,” and the ship’s pilot said the filth “would grow a hill of corn!” Clara Barton, a Union nurse tending a man whose socks had not been off during a month of campaigning on the Virginia Peninsula, 1862, felt horrified to witness that “his toes were matted and grown together and are now dropping off at the joint.”25
Dirty soldiers also became insect-infested soldiers. Ticks and fleas abounded in warm weather. “The trees are about in full leaf and vermin are becoming altogether too numerous,” wrote Major Charles W. Wills, 8th Illinois, from Georgia, on May 2, 1864. “Every man is a vigilance committee on the wood-tick question.” Chiggers created itchy misery. Union cavalry Captain Robert Burns wrote from before Atlanta that he and his company had become so filthy they might never get clean again. “To crown all, there is a little insect in the woods here called ‘chickar’ or ‘jigger’ which now almost torments us out of our senses. It is so small that it is almost imperceptible. It pierces the skin and makes a terrible itching. My body is covered with the marks of the remorseless little monster.… We are also troubled with the wood-ticks, scorpions, and all sorts of accursed bugs.”26
The men voted lice the most ubiquitous “accursed bugs,” because they colonized the human body by millions, creating a sensation of wretched humiliation so intense that the word “lousy” to describe feeling awful passed into the language. On first discovery of his being plagued by lice, Texas Private William A. Fletcher, 5th Texas, confided, “such a feeling of disgrace one rarely has.” Being personally fastidious proved no deterrent since the close quarters of army living promoted the uninterrupted transmission from body to body. When Captain Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, 5th Kentucky Artillery (U.S.), pictured exhausted soldiers sleeping on a sidewalk, “crammed close as herring in a box,” he was also describing the domain of insects. Lice colonies grew so thick, they could be seen like a blanket crawling over grass and tree trunks. Because they remained especially virulent in previously used campsites, soldiers came to dread old bivouacs. “Here I learned,” said Fletcher, “that in moving and occupying the same grounds occupied by others, that cleanliness was no bar to lice.”27
Lice proved hard to eradicate. When time permitted, soldiers boiled their clothing in soup kettles. But Texan William Lott Davidson, 5th Texas cavalry, decided this served merely to fatten the insects and “make the eggs deposited in the shirt hatch out.” The artful employed another strategy, catching the lice as they wiggled out of clothing seams heated before a campfire, and then cracking them between nail and forefinger. “I have seen fellows so busily engaged in catching them that it reminded me of an old woman knitting,” wrote Private Sam Watkins, 1st Tennessee (C.S.A.). At first, he recalled, the boys acted in a fastidious fashion and “would go off in the woods and hide to louse themselves, but that was unnecessary, the ground fairly crawled with lice.”28
Veterans usually came to accept living with lice, just as they had to tolerate the millions of flies that accompanied the line of march. To understand why clouds of flies became omnipresent, we should reprise our moving city analogy. Cities must address sewage disposal by some method or other. But often the armies did not have time to dig latrines and, as we have seen, many volunteers ignored the sinks anyway, defecating where they wished, while animals could not use sanitary trenches. Charles Francis Adams Jr. wrote to his father that the army “is a city without sewage,” waste and offal from slaughtered beasts scattered everywhere or hastily buried, “all festering under a mid-summer sun.” Many soldiers with loose bowels from poor food and water defecated around their tents, while army horses indiscriminately dropped twenty to twenty-five pounds of manure a day. Hence the flies.29
S. Walkley, historian of the 7th Connecticut, remembered flies on food and maggot-infested beef. The men drank coffee with their eyes closed. South Carolinian Tally Simpson told his aunt that the flies “light on my face and stick so tight that I can scarcely knock them off with my fist.” In moist conditions, multitudes of maggots squirmed from eggs. When Union General Kenner D. Garrard, campaigning in Georgia, in the summer of 1864, went to get a blanket from a pile that had been put away wet in his headquarters wagon, he disturbed a horde of freshly hatched maggots that groped blindly over his body.30
To be coated with dirt and insects degraded the soldiers’ spirits, inducing low morale and despondency that, if unchecked, could disempower the victims and even end in death. Private Watkins, recalling the Army of Tennessee’s 1864 occupation of Lookout Mountain, wrote, “Never in all my whole life do I remember of ever experiencing so much oppression and humiliation. The soldiers were starved and almost naked, and covered all over with lice and camp itch and filth and dirt. The men looked sick, hollow-eyed, and heart-broken, living principally upon parched corn, which had been picked out of the mud and dirt under the feet of officers’ horses.”31
The world of the army hosted a universe of threatening diseases. Lice and fleas transmitted typhus, also known as jail or ship fever, an epidemic disease that thrived in crowded, unsanitary conditions. The sudden onset of prostration, accompanied by severe headaches, rashes, high fever, and progressive neurological complications, characterized this illness. More frequently, physicians diagnosed diseases transmitted by flies. These flying insects widely spread Salmonella and E coli bacteria, found in contaminated feces, further encouraging typhoid fever and dysentery.32
The passage of the armies dislocated the natural environment. For example, mud can drown but, when disturbed, it also serves as a vector for such bacteria as tetanus and anthrax that live in the soil and enter hosts through cuts, sores, bites, and woun
ds. Army traffic also spawned mosquito-breeding sites by disrupting natural drainage channels, leaving standing water and waste matter. Species of mosquito carried two dreaded diseases, yellow fever and malaria. Yellow fever, although relatively rare in the Northern climate, attacked Yankees serving in Southern theaters. Fevers rose very high as the virus assaulted the organs, and victims vomited black blood; surgeons said that kidneys and intestines looked as though they had been dipped in boiling water. Physicians used calomel to empty bowels and quinine to attack the fever, but the treatments proved largely ineffective.33
Malaria, while less dramatic, proved more common. While physicians diagnosed roughly 1,350 yellow fever cases among Union forces, they found 1.3 million instances of malaria, resulting in over 10,000 deaths. All of the Unted States save a small area of the cooler northern and western states constituted malarious country. Doctors cited bad air as the cause, making a link to stagnant water without understanding that predatory flying insects, not poisonous bog gases, would ultimately prove responsible. Victims suffered incapacitating fevers, violent shivering, delirium, and, in extreme examples, destruction of red blood cells, causing death as the liver and spleen swelled, turning black. The disease punished the victim, recurring without warning. A potent weapon to combat malaria, quinine, had been known since the seventeenth century, but limited supplies existed and not all physicians accepted this prescription, trying ineffective remedies such as whiskey or boiled dogwood bark.34