INTRODUCTION
1. Mark F. Boyd, “An Historical Sketch of the Prevalence of Malaria in North America,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine 21 (March 1941): 234; H. H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 191; Joseph Janvier Woodward, The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion,pt. 2, vol. 1: Medical History (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1879), 1–2, 401–2, 799–800; George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 202.
2. Charles E. Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 12–13; John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820–1885 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), viii–x, 91.
3. Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson: Galen Press, 2002), 58–59.
4. Warner, Therapeutic Perspective, 38.
5. Warner, Therapeutic Perspective, 87 (quotation).
6. Dale C. Smith, “The Rise and Fall of Typhomalarial Fever: 1. Origins,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 37 (1982): 182–220.
7. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1976); Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001).
8. James I. Robertson Jr., Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988).
CHAPTER 1: AEDES, ANOPHELES, AND THE SCOURGES OF THE SOUTH
1. Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis: American Patriot, 1808–1861 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 79–104; Haskell M. Monroe Jr. and James T. McIntosh, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, vol. 1: 1808–1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 407–32 (quotation); Zachary Taylor to General Jesup Thomas Sidney, December 15, 1820, Zachary Taylor Papers, 1820–1850, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress; Trist Wood, “Jefferson Davis’ First Marriage,” New Orleans Daily Picayune, August 28, 1910; Varina Davis, Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America: A Memoir by His Wife (New York: Belford Co., 1890), 165–71.
2. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly 41 (April 1984): 213–40; Daniel Drake, A Systematic Treatise, Historical, Etiological, and Practical, on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America, as They Appear in the Caucasian, African, Indian, and Esquimaux Varieties of Its Population, ed. Norman D. Levine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 703–11; J. D. Rumph, “Thoughts on Malaria, and the Causes Generally of Fever,” Charleston Medical Journal and Review 9 (July 1854): 439–46; William Webb, “On the So-Called Malarious Diseases. A Paper Read before the St. Louis Medical Society,” St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal 12 (December 1854): 481–85.
3. Perfect diagnoses in the absence of laboratory tests are of course impossible, but the location, time of year, and symptoms make it highly probable that the Davises were suffering from Plasmodium falciparum. Robert E. Sinden and Herbert M. Gilles, “The Malaria Parasites,” in Essential Malariology, 4th ed., ed. David A. Warrell and Herbert M. Gilles (London: Arnold, 2002), 8–13; Hisashi Fujioka and Masamichi Aikawa, “The Malaria Parasite and Its Life-Cycle,” in Malaria: Molecular and Clinical Aspects, ed. Mats Wahlgren and Peter Perlmann (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1999), 19–20; S. F. Kitchen, “The Infection in the Intermediate Host: Symptomatology, Falciparum Malaria,” in A Symposium on Human Malaria with Special Reference to North America and the Caribbean Region, ed. Forest Ray Moulton (Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1941), 196–207; Carol A. Butcher, “Malaria: A Parasitic Disease,” American Association of Occupational Health Nurses Journal 52 (July 2004): 302–9; Sharon Parmet, “Malaria,” Journal of the American Medical Association 291, June 2, 2004, 2664.
4. Donald J. Krogstad, “Plasmodium Species (Malaria),” in Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, 5th ed., ed. Gerald L. Mandell, John E. Bennett, and Raphael Dolin (Philadelphia: Churchill Livingstone, 2000), 2817–29; Margaret Humphreys, Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 9; Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, “Of Agues and Fevers: Malaria in the Early Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (January 1976): 31–60; Michael Colbourne, Malaria in Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 13–16; Richard F. Darsie Jr. and Ronald A. Ward, Identification and Geographical Distribution of the Mosquitoes of North America, North of Mexico (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 286–97; N.R.H. Burgess and G. O. Cowan, Atlas of Medical Entomology (London: Chapman & Hall Medical, 1993), 11–14.
5. Elisha Bartlett, The History, Diagnosis, and Treatment of the Fevers of the United States (Philadelphia: Blanchard & Lea, 1852), 347–99; Edwin Samuel Gaillard, An Essay on Intermittent and Bilious Remittent Fevers: With Their Pathological Relation to Ozone (Charleston: Walker & Evans, Stationers and Printers, 1856), 17–18; Fr. Xavier DeRolette, Lecture on the Fever & Ague and Other Intermittent Fevers (Pittsburgh: A. A. Anderson & Sons, 1865), 5; Drake, Treatise, 703; A. P. Merrill, Lectures on Fever, Delivered in the Memphis Medical College, in 1853–6 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1865), 98; John Duffy, “The Impact of Malaria on the South,” in Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, ed. Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 29–54.
6. Dale C. Smith, “The Rise and Fall of Typhomalarial Fever: 1. Origins,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 37 (1982): 182–220.
7. The same process can be seen today in South America. In Peru, for example, rainforest destruction is causing an explosion in the number of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. See Anne Underwood, “Tracking Disease,” Newsweek 146, November 14, 2005, 46–48; Erwin H. Ackerknecht, Malaria in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1760–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1945); Milo Milton Quaife, ed., Growing Up with Southern Illinois, 1820 to 1861, from the Memoirs of Daniel Harmon Brush (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1944), 15–24 (quotation).
8. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, ed. Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin, 2000), 190–91 (quotation); Samuel Thompson, “Malaria and Its Relation to the Existence and Character of Disease,” North-Western Medical and Surgical Journal 3 (May 1850): 19–43; C. Handfield Jones, “Considerations Respecting the Operation of Malaria on the Human Body,” Association Medical Journal 187 (August 1856): 668–70; W. H. Martin, “Various Forms of Intermittent Diseases,” Illinois and Indiana Medical and Surgical Journal 2 (1847–48): 407–9; F. P. Leavenworth, “Malaria,” St. Louis Medical & Surgical Journal 12 (January 1854): 35–58; Hiram Nance, “Retrospect of Miasmatic Diseases for a Few Years Past,” North-western Medical and Surgical Journal 3 (February 1854): 54–57; J. R. Black, “On the Ultimate Cause of Malarial Disease,” St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal 12 (July 1854): 353–63.
9. Other diseases such as typhoid fever contributed to the fever season in the South and were frequently misdiagnosed as malaria by physicians. See Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young, eds., Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988); A. Cash Koeniger, “Climate and Southern Distinctiveness,” Journal of Southern History 54 (February 1988): 21–44; Humphreys, Malaria, 11–13; Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. (New York: Random House, 1984), 182–83 (quotation); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 84–91. For additional information on African genetic immunity to malaria, see Christopher Warren, “Northern Chills, Southern Fevers: Race-Specific Mortality in American Cities, 1730–1900,” Journal of Southern History 63 (February 1997): 23–56; and Kenneth F. Kiple, “A Survey of Recent Literature on the Biological Past of the Black,” Social Science History 10 (Winter 1986): 343–67.
10. Bartlett, History, 388–89; Drake, Treatise, 704–11; Black, “Ultimate,” 358–59; John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Farewell,” quoted in Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, with an introduction by Peter J. Gomes (New York: New American Library, 1997), 60.
11. “Address of Dr. S. S. Satchwell, on Malaria” in Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of North Carolina, at Its Third Annual Meeting Held in Wilmington, N.C., May, 1852 (Wilmington: T. Loring, 1852), 39–62; Ackerknecht, Malaria, 19; Bartlett, History, 388; Edward Warren, “Observations on Miasmatic Diseases,” American Medical Monthly 2 (October 1854): 241–53; Drake, Treatise, 713; Thompson, “Malaria,” 20–21; Duffy, “Malaria,” 38.
12. William Pepper, On the Use of Bebeerine and Cinchonia in the Treatment of Intermittent Fever (Philadelphia: T. K. and P. G. Collins, 1853), 8–14; James O. Breeden, “Disease as a Factor in Southern Distinctiveness,” in Savitt, Disease and Distinctiveness, 9–11; Rene LaRoche, Pneumonia: Its Supposed Connection, Pathological and Etiological, with Autumnal Fevers; Including an Inquiry into the Existence and Morbid Agency of Malaria(Philadelphia: Blanchard & Lea, 1854), 57, 407–8; Koeniger, “Climate,” 35; David R. Goldfield, “The Business of Health Planning: Disease Prevention in the Old South,” Journal of Southern History 42 (November 1976): 557–70; Richard D. Arnold, An Essay upon the Relation of Bilious and Yellow Fever, Prepared at the Request of, and Read before the Medical Society of the State of Georgia, at Its Session Held at Macon (Augusta: J. Morris, 1856), 4–5; William R. Horsfall, Medical Entomology: Arthropods and Human Disease (New York: Ronald Press Co., 1962), 340.
13. The last yellow fever outbreak to occur north of Virginia happened in New York City in 1822. John Duffy, “Yellow Fever in the Continental United States during the Nineteenth Century,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 44 (June 1968): 687–701; K. David Patterson, “Yellow Fever Epidemics and Mortality in the United States, 1693–1905,” Social Science and Medicine 34 (1992): 855–65; Jo Ann Carrigan, “Yellow Fever: Scourge of the South,” in Savitt, Disease and Distinctiveness, 55–78.
14. Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 4–5; S. Rickard Christophers, Aedes Aegypti: The Yellow Fever Mosquito (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 57; Thomas M. Rivers, Viral and Rickettsial Infections of Man, 2nd ed., (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1952), 538–44; Andrew Spielman and Michael D’Antonio, Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 54–61.
15. John Duffy, “Medical Practices in the Ante Bellum South,” Journal of Southern History 25 (February 1959): 53–72; Patterson, “Yellow Fever,” 858; New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 2, 3, and 7, 1853; Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power, and Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 243–44; Spielman, Mosquito, 63; William L. Robinson, The Diary of a Samaritan. By a Member of the Howard Association of New Orleans (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1860), 121, 259.
16. Savannah Daily Morning News, September 12, 19, 20, 28, and 29, 1854; Charleston Daily Courier, September 16, 1854.
17. D. J. Cain, History of the Epidemic of Yellow Fever in Charleston, S.C., in 1854 (Philadelphia: T. K. & P. G. Collins, 1856), 7–9; Charleston Courier, September 14 and 15, 1854; Savannah Morning News, September 19, 1854; W. L. Felder, “Observations on the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1854, in Augusta, Ga.,” Southern Medical and Surgical Journal 11 (October 1855): 598–608; Patterson, “Yellow Fever,” 858.
18. William McCraven, “The Epidemic Yellow Fever of 1859, in Houston, Texas,” New Orleans Medical News and Hospital Gazette 7 (April 1860): 105–10; Ashbel Smith, “On the Climate, Etc., of a Portion of Texas,” Southern Medical Reports 2 (1850): 453–59; Houston Telegraph, October 13, 1858.
19. Report on the Origin of the Yellow Fever in Norfolk during the Summer of 1855. Made to the City Councils by a Committee of Physicians (Richmond, Va.: Ritchie & Dunnavant, 1857), 20–38; George D. Armstrong, The Summer of Pestilence: A History of the Ravages of the Yellow Fever in Norfolk, Virginia, A.D. 1855 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1856), 94–100; Report of the Portsmouth Relief Association to the Contributors of the Fund for the Relief of Portsmouth, Virginia, during the Prevalence of the Yellow Fever in That Town in 1855 (Richmond, Va.: H. K. Ellyson’s Steam Power Presses, 1856), 129–30; Patterson, “Yellow Fever,” 858.
20. Report of the Philadelphia Relief Committee Appointed to Collect Funds for the Sufferers by Yellow Fever, at Norfolk and Portsmouth, Va., 1855 (Philadelphia: Inquirer Printing Office, 1856), 5–17: Savannah Morning News, September 15, 23, and 30, 1854; Moncure D. Conway, The True and the False in Prevalent Theories of Divine Dispensations (Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Maury, 1855), 17 (quotation); Carrigan, “Yellow Fever,” 60–61; Richard S. Storrs, Terrors of the Pestilence: A Sermon, Preached in the Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn, N.Y., on Occasion of a Collection in Aid of the Sufferers at Norfolk, Va., September 30th, 1855 (New York: John A. Gray, 1855), 20 (quotation).
21. Alexander F. Vaché, Letters on Yellow Fever, Cholera, and Quarantine; Addressed to the Legislature of the State of New York (New York: McSpedon & Baker, 1852), 7–17; Edward Jenner Coxe, Practical Remarks on Yellow Fever, Having Special Reference to the Treatment (New Orleans: J. C. Morgan, 1859), 9–10; Thomas Anderson, Handbook for Yellow Fever: Describing Its Pathology and Treatment (London: Churchill & Sons, 1856), 10–14; Thomas Y. Simons, An Essay on the Yellow Fever, as It Has Occurred in Charleston, Including Its Origin and Progress up to the Present Time (Charleston, S.C.: Steam Power– Press of Walker and James, 1851), 10–23; New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 4, 1853; Humphreys, Yellow Fever, 8; “The Annual Report of the Board of Health, for the Year 1850, as Required by Law,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 8 (March 1851): 590–91.
22. Although modern-day historians disagree over whether or not African immigrants possessed genetic immunity to yellow fever, nineteenth-century physicians were convinced that slaves were immune to the disease. See Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 48–49; Carrigan, “Yellow Fever,” 59–63; Humphreys, Yellow Fever, 6–7; H. R. Carter, Yellow Fever: Its Epidemiology, Prevention, and Control (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914), 14; Watts, Epidemics, 217; “Yellow Fever Vaccine,” World Health Organization Weekly Epidemiological Record 78 (2003): 349–59; Samuel A. Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” in Arthur L. Caplan, H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr., and James L. McCartney, eds., Concepts of Health and Disease: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1981), 314; Kenneth F. Kiple, “Black Yellow Fever Immunities, Innate and Acquired, as Revealed in the American South,” Social Science History 1 (Summer 1977): 419–36; Wood, Majority, 80–82.
23. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 51, ser. 1, pt. 1, 369–70, hereafter referred to as OR; Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson: Galen Press, 2002), 289–90.
24. Montgomery Meigs Diary (copy), March–September 1861, in John G. Nicolay Papers, box 13, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
25. “Urban” yellow fever requires a substantial and concentrated human population to survive and therefore most frequently appeared in cities. Sylvatic, or “jungle,” yellow fever exists among tree-dwelling mammals in tropical ecosystems and is transmitted by Haemagogus mosquitoes. Thomas T. Smiley, “The Yellow Fever at Port Royal, S.C.,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 67, January 8, 1863, 449–68 (quotation); John Ordronaux, Hints on the Preservation of Health in Armies. For the Use of Volunteer Officers and Soldiers (1861; rpt., San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1990), 85–86 (quotation); “Yellow Fever on the Southern Coast, and How to Avoid It,” New York Times, May 18, 1862; “The Fate of Virginia,” London Review, July 6, 1861 reprinted in Living Age 70, August 10, 1861, 374–75 (quotation); OR, vol. 51, ser. 1, pt. 2, 550; H. H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 191; Mark F. Boyd, “An Historical Sketch of the Prevalence of Malaria in North America,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine 21 (March 1941): 223–44.
CHAPTER 2: GLORY OF GANGRENE AND “GALLINIPPERS”
1. H. H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 5; Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson: Galen Press, 2002), 283–375; George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 3. “Malingering,” or feigning illness, was also common in Civil War armies.
2. These numbers include “typho-malarial,” “intermittent,” “remittent,” and “congestive” fever. The Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War, vol. 5 (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1991), 77–78, hereafter referred to as MSH; Bollet, Medicine, 289; Cunningham, Gray, 191; H. H. Cunningham, “The Medical Service and Hospitals of the Southern Confederacy” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1952), 159; Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943), 253.
3. At the bottom of the medical corps’ chain of command were regimental surgeons who were supported by assistant surgeons and private contractors known as “acting assistant surgeons.” Each brigade, division, army, and department also had its own medical officer, all of them under the supervision of the surgeon general. Michael A. Cooke, “The Health of the Union Military in the District of Columbia, 1861–1865,” Military Affairs 48 (October 1984): 194–99; United States Sanitary Commission Records, ser. 7: Statistical Bureau Archives, Camp Inspection Returns, 1861–64, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Geo. B. Willson, “Army Ambulances—Cases in the Hospital of Richardson’s Brigade,” Boston Medical & Surgical Journal 65 (January 1862): 542–44 (quotation); Charles S. Tripler to General George B. McClellan, February 7, 1863, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 5, ser. 1, 76–93 (quotation), hereafter referred to as OR.
4. John Duffy, “Medical Practice in the Ante Bellum South,” Journal of Southern History 25 (February 1959): 53–72 (quotation); Joseph Janvier Woodward, M.D., Outlines of the Chief Camp Diseases of the United States Armies as Observed during the Present War (1863; rpt., San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1992), 14–17.
5. Bollet, Medicine, 9–12, 227; “Rules for Preserving the Health of the Soldier. Report of the U.S. Sanitary Commission.” Harper’s Weekly, August 24, 1861, 542; United States Sanitary Commission Records, ser. 7: Statistical Bureau Archives, Camp Inspection Returns, 1861–64, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
6. John Brinton, Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton, Major and Surgeon U.S.V., 1861–1865 (New York: Neale Publishing Co., 1914), 60–61; United States Sanitary Commission Records, ser. 7; Henry H. Wright, A History of the Sixth Iowa Infantry (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1923), 30–31 (quotation).
7. Paul F. Eve, “Answers to Certain Questions Propounded by Prof. Charles A. Lee, M.D., Agent of the United States Sanitary Commission, Relative to the Health, &c., of the Late Southern Army,” Nashville Journal of Medicine and Surgery 1 (July 1866): 12–32 (quotation); Bollet, Medicine, 270–71; Edward Porter Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 35–36 (quotation); Margaret Humphreys, Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001),14; John Duffy, “The Impact of Malaria on the South,” in Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, ed. Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 29–54.
8. William T. Sherman to G. Mason Graham, March 1, 1860, in Walter L. Fleming, ed., General W. T. Sherman as College President (Cleveland: Arthur M. Clark Co., 1912), 183–84 (quotation); Benjamin Butler, Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benja-min F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War, vol. 2 (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 112–13, 272 (quotation); Alfred L. Castleman, The Army of the Potomac. Behind the Scenes. (Milwaukee: Strickland & Co., 1863), 110; William C. Holton, Cruise of the U.S. Flag-ship Hartford, 1862–1863 (1863; rpt., Tarrytown, N.Y.: W. Abbatt, 1922), 39.
9. Richard Everett Wood, “Port Town at War: Wilmington, North Carolina 1860–1865” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1976), 176; OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 144–45, 815–17; Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 6.
10. Wiley, Johnny Reb, 249; J. H. Johnson to “Dearest Wife,” April 16, 1863, Jonathan Huntington Johnson, The Letters and Diary of Captain Jonathan Huntington Johnson (n.p.: Alden Chase Brett, 1961), 112 (quotation); Junius N. Bragg to “My Dear Wife,” July 19, 1863, J. N. Bragg, Letters of a Confederate Surgeon, 1861–65 (Camden, Ark.: Hurley Co., 1960), 158–62 (quotation); Terrence J. Winschel, ed., The Civil War Diary of a Common Soldier: William Wiley of the 77th Illinois Infantry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 130 (quotation); Michael B. Ballard, Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 375 (quotation); T. H. Barton, Autobiography of Dr. Thomas H. Barton, the Self-Made Physician of Syracuse, Ohio, Including a History of the Fourth Regt. West Va. Vol. Infy. (Charleston: West Virginia Printing Co., 1890), 157–58 (quotation); Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 95–96.
11. Albert Theodore Goodloe, Confederate Echoes: A Voice from the South in the Days of Secession and of the Southern Confederacy (Nashville: Smith & Lamar, 1907), 248–49; Henry Warren Howe, Passages from the Life of Henry Warren Howe, Consisting of Diary and Letters Written during the Civil War, 1861–1865 (Lowell, Mass.: Courier-Citizen Co., Printers, 1899), 127 (quotation); Isaiah Price, History of the Ninety-seventh Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, during the War of the Rebellion, 1861–65, with Biographical Sketches (Philadelphia: By the Author for the Subscribers, 1875), 127 (quotation); “Medical History of the Seventeenth Regiment Mass. Volunteers,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 68 (February 1863): 136–41.
12. MSH, 5:78; Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951), 133 (quotation); Cunningham, Gray, 190; MSH, 3:142, 180, 186 (quotations); E. Andrews to “Messrs Editors,” August 9, 1862, in Chicago Medical Examiner 3 (August 1862): 479–84 (quotation).
13. Some historians have argued that quinine rationing had a negligible effect on the health of troops, but the existing evidence suggests otherwise. Soldiers who received regular prophylactic doses of the drug were healthier than those who did not. Also, by the mid-nineteenth century most professionally trained physicians knew how much quinine was needed to check intermittent and remittent fevers. See Dale C. Smith, “Quinine and Fever: The Development of the Effective Dosage,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 31 (July 1976): 343–67; and Samuel Logan, “Prophylactic Effects of Quinine,” Confederate States Medical & Surgical Journal 1 (June 1864): 81–83. During the first year of the Civil War the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) published reports endorsing the use of quinine as a prophylactic. Unfortunately, the USSC was only an advisory body and could not enforce its recommendations. See Report of a Committee Appointed by Resolution for the Sanitary Commission, to Prepare a Paper on the Use of Quinine as a Prophylactic against Malarious Diseases (New York: Wm. C. Bryant & Co., 1861); and “Rules for Preserving the Health of the Soldier,” Harper’s Weekly, August 24, 1861.
Michael A. Flannery, Civil War Pharmacy: A History of the Drugs, Drug Supply and Provision, and Therapeutics for the Union and Confederacy (New York: Pharmaceutical Products Press, 2004), 143–44; Bollet, Medicine, 236–38; Samuel Logan, “Prophylactic Effects of Quinine,” Confederate States Medical & Surgical Journal 1 (June 1864): 81–83; Stephen Rogers, Quinine as a Prophylactic or Protective from Miasmatic Poisoning, A Preventative of Paroxysms of Miasmatic Diseases (Albany, N.Y.: Steam Press of C. Van Benthuysen, 1862), 4; “On the External Application of Oil of Turpentine as a Substitute for Quinine in Intermittent Fever, with Reports of Cases,” Confederate States Medical & Surgical Journal 1 (January 1864): 7–8; “A Startling Fact!” Harper’s Weekly, September 17, 1864 (quotation); Surgeon Geo. Hammond to the Surgeon General’s Office, May 2, 1863, Letters and Endorsements Sent to Medical Officers, Sept. 1862–Sept. 1872, 4:35, Records of the Office of the Surgeon General (Army), Record Group 112, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
14. Letters and Endorsements Sent to Medical Officers, Sept. 1862–Sept. 1872, 4:175, (quotation); Charles McGregor, History of the Fifteenth Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers, 1862–1863 (Concord, N.H.: Published by Order of the Fifteenth Regiment Association, 1900), 261 (quotation); James W. Wheaton, comp., Surgeon on Horseback: The Missouri and Arkansas Journal and Letters of Dr. Charles Brackett of Rochester, Indiana, 1861–1863 (Carmel: Guild Press of Indiana, 1998), 177 (quotation); Minetta Altgelt Goyne, Lone Star and Double Eagle: Civil War Letters of a German-Texas Family (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1982), 140.
15. Hospital Tickets & Case Papers, Mississippi Squadron, 1862–64, Record Group 52, National Archives (quotation); Hospital Tickets & Case Papers, Pinkney Hospital, Memphis, 1863, Record Group 52, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (quotation); The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, vol. 10, ser. 1, 735–36, hereafter referred to as ORN.
16. Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care during the American Civil War (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 135–36 (quotation); Richard D. Arnold, An Essay upon the Relation of Bilious and Yellow Fever (Augusta, Ga.: J. Morris, 1856), 7–8; Medical Journal U.S.S. Colorado, June 4, 1861, to February 5, 1864, Record Group 52, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (quotation); MSH, 5:681 (quotation); G.R.B. Horner, M.D., “Notice of the Yellow Fever as It Occurred in Key West and in the U.S. East Gulf Blockading Squadron, in 1862,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 92 (October 1863): 391–98.
17. MSH, 5:678–82 (quotation); Bollet, Civil War, 235; Stanley B. Weld, “A Connecticut Surgeon in the Civil War: The Reminiscences of Dr. Nathan Mayer,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 19 (July 1964): 272–86; Joseph Janvier Woodward, M.D., Outlines of the Chief Camp Diseases of the United States Armies as Observed during the Present War (1863; rpt., San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1992), 160–61 (quotation); Flannery, Pharmacy, 131.
18. Alfred Jay Bollet, M.D., Plagues & Poxes: The Impact of Human History on Epidemic Disease (New York: Demos, 2004), 37.
CHAPTER 3: MOSQUITO COASTS
1. Shelby Foote, The Civil War, a Narrative: Fort Sumter to Perryville (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 369–71; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 419–20; David J. Eicher, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 239–42; Gerald M. Capers Jr., “Confederates and Yankees in Occupied New Orleans, 1862–1865,” Journal of Southern History 30 (November 1964): 405–26.
2. K. David Patterson, “Yellow Fever Epidemics and Mortality in the United States, 1693–1905,” Social Science and Medicine 34 (1992): 855–65; John Duffy, “Yellow Fever in the Continental United States during the Nineteenth Century,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 44 (June 1968): 687–701; Jo Ann Carrigan, The Saffron Scourge: A History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana, 1796–1905 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1994), 82; Jo Ann Carrigan, “Yankees versus Yellow Jack in New Orleans, 1862–1866,” Civil War History 9 (September 1963): 248–61; M. Lovell to Thomas O. Moore, May 12, 1862, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 15, ser. 1, 733–34, hereafter referred to as OR; Harper’s Weekly, 17 May 1862.
3. Benjamin F. Butler, “Some Experiences with Yellow Fever and Its Prevention,” North American Review 147 (November 1888): 525–41; Carrigan, “Yankees versus Yellow Jack,” 250–53; Benjamin Butler, Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 2:112–13.
4. Elisha Harris, M.D., “Hygenic Experience in New Orleans during the War: Illustrating the Importance of Efficient Sanitary Regulations,” Southern Medical and Surgical Journal 21 (July 1866): 77–88 (quotation); Butler, Private and Official Correspondence, 342; OR, vol. 2, ser. 3, 634–35 (quotation); New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 6, 1862; Harper’s Weekly, August 16, 1862, and January 17, 1863.
5. Butler’s policies did not eliminate all of the mosquito’s potential breeding sites. Nineteenth-century New Orleanians kept their water in above-ground cisterns (wells are impractical in an area that rests below sea level), which may have also contained Aedes aegypti eggs. Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 104–5. Robert S. Holyman, “Ben Butler in the Civil War,” New England Quarterly 30 (September 1957): 330–45; Michael A. Ross, “Justice Miller’s Reconstruction: The Slaughter-House Cases, Health Codes, and Civil Rights in New Orleans, 1861–1873,” Journal of Southern History 64 (November 1998): 649–76; New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 28, 1862.
6. L. Pierio to Andrew J. Hamilton, December 9, 1862, in Salmon P. Chase, Diary and Correspondence of Salmon P. Chase (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1903), 428 (quotation); Brownsville Flag article reprinted in Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, November 12, 1862; Brownsville Flag editorial reprinted in Galveston News, October 8, 1862 (quotation); Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, vol. 19, ser. 1, 289–91, hereafter referred to as ORN; John Carrier, “Medicine in Texas: The Struggle with Yellow Fever, 1839–1903,” Texas Medicine 82 (November 1986): 62–65; Bellville Countryman, October 18 and 25 and November 1, 1862; Galveston Weekly News, October 22, 1862; D. G. Farragut to Gideon Welles, October 9, 1862 (quotation), H. French to D. G. Farragut, September 18, 1862 (quotation), D. G. Farragut to H. French, October 7, 1862 (quotation), ORN vol. 19, ser. 1, 265, 289–93.
7. D. G. Farragut to W. B. Renshaw, September 19, 1862 (quotation), W. B. Renshaw to D. G. Farragut, October 8, 1862 (quotation), ORN, vol. 19, ser. 1, 213, 255–60; Charles C. Cumberland, “The Confederate Loss and Recapture of Galveston, 1862–1863,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 51 (October 1947): 109–19; Peggy H. Gregory, comp., Record of Interments of the City of Galveston, 1859–1872 (Houston: privately printed, 1976), 28–29, in Rosenberg Library, Galveston; David G. McComb, Galveston: A History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 74–76.
8. Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, October 1 and 3 and November 7 and 10, 1862 (quotation); Galveston Weekly News, September 17, 1862; ORN, vol. 19, ser. 1, 260–61; H. P. Bee to Samuel Boyer Davis, November 15, 1862 (quotation), OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 181–83; Kevin R. Young, To the Tyrants Never Yield (Plano, Tex.: Wordware Publishing, 1992), 123–27; Austin State Gazette, November 12, 1862.
9. Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, October 3 and 27 and November 3 and 7, 1862; W. T. Block, “Yellow Fever Plagued Area during the 1860s,” Beaumont Enterprise, August 7, 1999; Galveston News, September 17 and 24, 1862 (quotation); Natchitoches Union, September 18, 1862; Andrew Forest Muir, “Dick Dowling and the Battle of Sabine Pass,” in Lonestar Blue and Gray: Essays on Texas in the Civil War, ed. Ralph A. Wooster (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1995), 190; Bellville Countryman, September 6, 1862 (quotation); “Autobiography of Mrs. Otis McGaffey, Sr.,” Yellowed Pages 28 (Fall 1998): 1–14 (quotation); Edward T. Cotham Jr., Sabine Pass: The Confederacy’s Thermopylae (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 29; Alwyn Barr, “Texas Coastal Defense, 1861–1865,” in Wooster, Lonestar, 161; OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 144–45, 813–15.
10. Lewis W. Pennington to William B. Renshaw, September 29, 1862, ORN, vol. 19, ser. 1, 219–24; Galveston Weekly News, October 15, 1862 (quotation); X. B. Debray to P. O. Hébert, September 28, 1862, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 815–17; Rodman L. Underwood, Waters of Discord: The Union Blockade of Texas during the Civil War (London: McFarland & Co., 2003), 83.
11. “Autobiography of Mrs. Otis McGaffey, Sr.,” 7–8 (quotation); Francis Lubbock, Six Decades in Texas or Memoirs of Francis Richard Lubbock, Governor of Texas in Wartime, 1861–63, ed. C. W. Raines (Austin: Ben C. Jones & Co. Printers, 1900), 415; A. W. Spaight to R. M. Franklin, September 29 and October 2, 1862, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 145–47 (quotation); W. T. Block, “Yellow Fever Plagued Area during 1860s,” Beaumont Enterprise, August 7, 1999.
It should be pointed out that in Spaight’s official report of the battle, he argued that a larger Confederate force would not have made any difference at Sabine due to Crocker’s superior firepower. But with more men he might have at least temporarily resisted the landing. Instead, the U.S. Navy captured the city with no casualties.
12. It is possible that the small Houston outbreak of 1862 was ultimately caused by the larger epidemic that occurred in Sabine City the same year. The October 13, 1862, edition of the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph reported that a man and wife had died of yellow fever after returning from Beaumont, which received several evacuees from Sabine. Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, September 19 and October 22, 24, and 27, 1862; Galveston Weekly News, October 22 and 29, 1862; San Antonio Semi-Weekly News, October 23, 1862.
13. Lewis G. Schmidt, The Civil War in Florida, A Military History, vol. 3: Florida’s Keys & Fevers (Allentown, Pa.: Lewis G. Schmidt, 1992), 254–55; G.R.B. Horner, M.D., fleet surgeon, “Notice of the Yellow Fever as It Occurred in Key West and in the U.S. East Gulf Blockading Squadron, in 1862,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 92 (October 1863): 391–98 (quotation); ORN, vol. 17, ser. 1, 294; ORN, vol. 1, ser. 1, 507–8.
14. The Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1991), 6:676, hereafter referred to as MSH; Emily Holder, At the Dry Tortugas during the Civil War, quoted in Lewis G. Schmidt, A Civil War History of the 47th Regiment of Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers: The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time (Allentown, Pa.: by the author, 1986), 146 (quotation); “The Situation,” New York Herald, September 11, 1862; Horner, “Notice of the Yellow Fever,” 391–98 (quotation); “Our Key West Correspondence.,” New York Times, October 2 and November 12, 1862.
15. Schmidt, History of the 47th Regiment, 145–46; Book Records of Volunteer Union Organizations 90th New York Infantry, Companies A to C, Records of Adjutant General’s Office, Record Group 94, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
16. ORN, vol. 19, ser. 1, 165, 184, 286–87 (quotation); ORN, vol. 27, ser. 1, 455; ORN, vol. 1, ser. 1, 493; Book Records of Union Volunteer Organizations 90th New York Infantry, Order Book, Companies A to F, Vol. 6, Record Group 94, National Archives; MSH, 5:679.
17. MSH, 2:235 (quotation); John N. Maffitt to “My Dear Daughter,” September 8, 1862, and Maffitt to “My dear Florie,” September 19, 1862, John Newland Maffitt Papers, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (quotation).
18. MSH, 5:678; Henry F. W. Little, The Seventh Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion (Concord, N.H.: Ira C. Evans, Printer, 1896), 39–54 (quotation); Thomas T. Smiley, “The Yellow Fever at Port Royal, S.C.,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 67, January 8, 1863, 449–68 (quotation); Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care during the American Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 135–38.
19. Smiley, “Yellow Fever,” 451–52; O. M. Mitchel to Halleck, September 20, 1862, OR, vol. 14, ser. 1, 383–84; F. A. Mitchel, Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel, Astronomer and General: A Biographical Narrative (Boston: Riverside Press, 1887), 358–82; McPherson, Battle Cry, 370–71; Russell McCormmach, “Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel’s ‘Sidereal Messenger,’ 1846–1848,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110, February 18, 1966, 35–47; Eicher, Longest Night, 234–35; Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 206–7.
20. Smiley, “Yellow Fever,” 452–54 (quotation); MSH, 5:678; John Bedel, “Historical Sketch of Third New Hampshire Volunteers,” Granite Monthly 3 (September 1880): 513–34; Peter H. Buckingham, All’s for the Best: The Civil War Reminiscences and Letters of Daniel W. Sawtelle, Eighth Maine Volunteer Infantry (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 206; Herbert Beecher, History of the First Light Battery, Connecticut Volunteers, 1861–1865 (New York: A. T. DeLaMare Ptg. and Pub. Co., 1905), 1:189 (quotation).
21. Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), xvi; Charlotte Forten, “Life on the Sea Islands,” Atlantic Monthly 13 (May 1864): 587–96 (quotation); Charlotte Forten, The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten, with an introduction and notes by Ray Allen Billington (New York: Dryden Press, 1953), microfiche, 197 (quotation).
22. Rose, Rehearsal, 171–72 (quotation); Laura Towne, Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne. Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1884, ed. Rupert Sargent Holland (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 39, 89 (quotation).
23. Elizabeth Ware Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1906), microfiche, 68, 73, 105 (quotation); Rose, Rehearsal, 171–72; Towne, Letters, 89 (quotation).
24. Smiley, “Yellow Fever,” 460 (quotation); Mitchel, Astronomer, 379–82; “Death of General Mitchell,” Harper’s Weekly, November 15, 1862, 723; Isaiah Price, History of the Ninety-seventh Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, during the War of the Rebellion, 1861–65, with Biographical Sketches (Philadelphia: by the author for the subscribers, 1875), 134–43 (quotation); OR, vol. 14, ser. 1, 388–89; Stephen Walkley, History of the Seventh Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, Hawley’s Brigade, Terry’s Division, Tenth Army Corps, 1861–1865 (Hartford, 1905), 65.
25. Precisely when the Kate arrived and whether or not she was quarantined are subjects for debate since the sources provide conflicting accounts. See the Wilmington Daily Journal, September 26, 1862, W. T. Wragg, “Report on the Epidemic of Yellow Fever Which Prevailed at Wilmington, N.C., in the Fall of 1862,” New York Medical Journal 9 (August 1869): 478–96; and an undated account written by Mrs. Charles P. Bolles, Charles P. Bolles Papers, Archives and Records Division, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Raleigh (quotation); letter to A. J. Turlington, September 13, 1862, A. J. Turlington Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C. (quotation).
26. Wilmington Journal, September 13 (quotation) and 27 and November 20, 1862; letters from William, October 23 (quotation) and October 28, 1862, De Rosset Family Papers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Todd L. Savitt, “Slave Health and Southern Distinctiveness,” in Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, ed. Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 123.
27. H. Drane to Mary Lindsay Hargrave Foxhall, October 23, 1862, Foxhall Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Wilmington Journal, October 2, 1862 (quotation).
28. Wragg, “Report,” 478–85 (quotation); William Lofton to mother, October 20, 1862, William F. Lofton Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; E. A. Anderson, “Yellow Fever as It Has Occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, from 1800 to 1872, Being an Examination of the Review of Dr. Thomas, on the Report of Dr. Wragg,” New York Medical Journal 16 (September 1872): 225–59; Wilmington Journal, October 4, 1862; D. MacRae to “Dear Dix,” October 1, 1862 (quotation), D. MacRae to Colonel John McRae, October 15, 1862, MacRae Family Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C.
29. See “Siege Matters—Four Hundred and Seventy-fifth Day,” Charleston Mercury, October 26, 1864.
30. Richard Everett Wood, “Port Town at War: Wilmington, North Carolina, 1860–1865” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1976), 176; W.H.C. Whiting to S. Cooper, January 15, 1863, and Whiting to George W. Randolph, November 14, 1862, OR, vol. 18, ser. 1, 848–49 (quotation), 774–76 (quotation); Wm. A. Parker to J. G. Foster, December 8, 1862, ORN, vol. 8, ser. 1, 263–64.
31. Wilmington Journal, November 27, 1862; Van Bokkelen to Donald MacRae, November 12, 1862, MacRae Family Papers (quotation); I. S. Murphy to Mary Ann Murphy, November 26, 1862, Cronly Family Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; Wood, “Wilmington,” 176; Patterson, “Yellow Fever Epidemics,” 855–65; MSH, 6:679.
CHAPTER 4: “THE LAND OF FLOWERS, MAGNOLIAS, AND CHILLS”
1. T. H. Walker, “Camp Diarrhœa,” Chicago Medical Journal 5 (August 1862): 478–80 (quotation); E. Andrews, “Army Correspondence,” Chicago Medical Examiner 3 (August 1862): 479–84; Peter Josyph, ed., The Wounded River: The Civil War Letters of John Vance Lauderdale, M.D. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1993), 74–77 (quotation); Dr. J. S. Newberry, The U.S. Sanitary Commission in the Valley of the Mississippi, during the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1866 (Cleveland: Fairbanks, Benedict, & Co., 1871), 36–94 (quotation); William W. Belknap, History of the Fifteenth Regiment, Iowa Veteran Volunteer Infantry (Keokuk: R. B. Ogden & Son, 1887), 85.
2. Sherman’s brief description of his bout with “malaria” does not make it clear that he was infected with plasmodium parasites. Because many of his men were infected, however, it is entirely possible that he was too. The Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1991), 5:104, hereafter referred to as MSH; Rachel Sherman Thorndike, ed., The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General Sherman and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), 148; Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War: Natural Biological Warfare in 1861–1865 (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1968), 171–72; William T. Sherman, Memoirs of Gen. W. T. Sherman, Written by Himself (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1891), 1:284; Edward Batwell, “Notes on the Fever That Prevailed amongst the Troops in Camp Big Springs, near Corinth, Miss., in June, 1862,” Medical and Surgical Reporter 13 (December 1865): 364–65 (quotation).
3. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 10, ser. 1, pt. 1, 774–77, 784, hereafter referred to as OR; H. H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 181–82; Kate Cumming, A Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee from the Battle of Shiloh to the End of the War (Louisville, Ky.: John P. Morton & Co., 1866), 18–22 (quotation); MSH, 5:104.
4. OR, vol. 16, ser. 1, pt. 2, 62–63 (quotation).
5. MSH, 5:169, 331; Benjamin F. Butler to H. W. Halleck, October 24, 1862, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 158–60; United States Sanitary Commission Records, Series 7: Statistical Bureau Archives, Camp Inspection Returns, 1861–1864, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; MSH, 1:96–97.
6. Smith had been reinforced since May by Confederate John C. Breckenridge’s divisions from Corinth; Earl Van Dorn assumed overall command. OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 15–19; Bern Anderson, “The Naval Strategy of the Civil War,” Military Affairs 26 (Spring 1962): 11–21; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 420–21; Shelby Foote, The Civil War, a Narrative: Fort Sumter to Perryville (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 547–48.
7. OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 25–26; Charles S. Foltz, Surgeon of the Seas: The Adventurous Life of Surgeon General Jonathan M. Foltz in the Days of Wooden Ships (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931), 243–46; Steiner, Disease, 189; William C. Holbrook, A Narrative of the Services of the Officers and Enlisted Men of the 7th Regiment of Vermont Volunteers (New York: American Bank Note Co., 1882), 21–28 (quotation); Caroline E. Whitcomb, History of the Second Massachusetts Battery (Nim’s Battery) of Light Artillery, 1861–1865 (Concord, N.H.: Rumford Press, 1912), 33; Thomas Hamilton Murray, History of the Ninth Regiment, Connecticut Volunteer Infantry (New Haven: Price, Lee & Adkins Co., 1903), 111.
8. MSH, 1:153–54; Holbrook, Vermont, 22–29; Murray, Connecticut, 109; Harper’s Weekly, August 2, 1862; OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 31–33.
9. T. Williams to C. H. Davis, July 24, 1862, Extract from Diary of Flag-Officer Davis, July 31, 1862, ORN, vol. 23, ser. 1, 239–41, 270–72 (quotation).
10. E. Kirby Smith to Braxton Bragg, July 24, 1862, OR, vol. 16, ser. 1, pt. 2, 734–35 (quotation). The following year Smith informed his subordinate in the Trans-Mississippi Department, Major General John Bankhead Magruder, that “the yellow fever” and “malaria of Lower Louisiana” would pressure the Union forces at New Orleans into launching a campaign up the Red River Valley “with an eye to the establishment of bases of operations against Texas.” Union general Nathaniel Banks led just such a campaign in the spring of 1864 but mainly because of political arm-twisting and pressure from northern manufacturers who wanted access to Black Belt cotton. See E. Kirby Smith to J. B. Magruder, June 11, 1863, OR, vol. 26, ser. 1, pt. 2, 47–48.
11. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 66–68; E. Andrews, “Army Correspondence,” Chicago Medical Examiner 3 (August 1862): 479–84 (quotation);
12. Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Free Press, 1990), 7–8; Benjamin Butler, Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 2:143–44 (quotation)
13. OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 34–39; Salmon P. Chase to Butler, July 31, 1862, in Butler, Private and Official Correspondence, 2:131–32 (quotation); G. Mott Williams, “Letters of General Thomas Williams, 1862,” American Historical Review 14 (January 1909): 304–28 (Williams quoted p. 325).
14. Van Dorn’s confidence stemmed in part from the success of the CSS Arkansas, a Confederate ironclad that had triumphantly engaged Farragut’s fleet during the Vicksburg campaign. Earl Van Dorn to District of Mississippi Headquarters, September 9, 1862, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 15–19 (quotation), 76–81, 1125–26; Ed. Porter Thompson, History of the First Kentucky Brigade (Cincinnati: Caxton Publishing House, 1868), 119, 158; Steiner, Disease, 188; Dr. W. J. Worsham, The Old Nineteenth Tennessee Regiment, C.S.A., June 1861. April, 1865. (Knoxville: Press of Paragon Printing Co., 1902), 57–59 (quotation); Mary Elizabeth Sanders, ed. “Letters of a Confederate Soldier, 1862–1863,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 29 (October 1946): 1229–40.
15. OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 14–19, 76–81; Steiner, Disease, 203; Major John B. Pirtle, “Defence of Vicksburg in 1862—The Battle of Baton Rouge,” in Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 8: January to December, 1880 (Richmond, Va.: Rev. J. Williams Jones, D.D.), 327–28; Worsham, Tennessee, 59; G. Mott Williams, “The First Vicksburg Expedition and the Battle of Baton Rouge, 1862.” in War Papers Read before the Commandery of the State of Wisconsin, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (Milwaukee: Burdick, Armitage & Allen, 1896), 57–61; Holbrook, Vermont, 50; Foote, Sumter, 579; Ira B. Gardner, “Personal Experiences with the Fourteenth Maine Volunteers from 1861–1865,” in War Papers Read before the Commandery of the State of Maine, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (Portland, Maine: Lefavor-Tower Co., 1915), 4:90–113.
16. Foote, Sumter, 580–82; Butler, General Orders No. 57, August 9, 1862, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 15–19, 41–42 (quotation), 76–81.
17. Again, precise diagnoses are impossible without a lab test. MSH, 5:331; G. W. Randolph to R. E. Lee, August 4, 1862, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 794 (quotation).
18. David J. Eicher, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 256–57; Price, Pennsylvania, 127; Herbert Beecher, History of the First Light Battery, Connecticut Volunteers, 1861–1865 (New York: A. T. DeLaMare Ptg. And Pub. Co., 1905), 1:157–70 (quotation); William Todd, The Seventy-ninth Highlanders: New York Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (Albany, N.Y.: Brandow, Barton, & Co., 1886), 144–66; D. Hunter to H. G. Wright, June 27, 1862, OR, vol. 14, ser. 1, 43–47 (quotation).
19. Samuel Logan, “Prophylactic Effects of Quinine,” Confederate States Medical & Surgical Journal 1 (June 1864): 81–83; Todd, Highlanders, 144 (quotation); Beecher, Connecticut, 169; “The Wee Nee Volunteers of Williamsburg District, South Carolina, in the First (Hagood’s) Regiment, by Major John G. Pressley, of the Eutaw Battalion, South Carolina Volunteers,” in Southern Historical Society Papers (Richmond, Va.: Southern Historical Society, 1888), 16:126–52; “Extracts from the Diary of Lieutenant-Colonel John G. Pressley, of the Twenty-fifth South Carolina Volunteers,” in Southern Historical Society Papers (Richmond: Rev. J. William Jones, D.D., 1886), 14:35–62; T. A. Washington to J. C. Pemberton, April 2, 1862, OR, vol. 6, ser. 1, 423–24.
20. W.H.C. Whiting to Seddon, May 30, 1863, OR, vol. 18, ser. 1, 1081; Mark F. Boyd, “An Historical Sketch of the Prevalence of Malaria in North America,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine 21 (March 1941): 223–44 (quotation); George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 243; D. W. Hand, Extracts from Reports Relative to the Operations of the Medical Staff in the Department of North Carolina, from August, 1863, to the Close of the War, in MSH, 2:238–41(quotation); “Medical History of the Seventeenth Regiment Mass. Volunteers,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 68 (February 1863): 136–41 (quotation); Thomas H. Parker, History of the 51st Regiment of P.V. and V.V. (Philadelphia: King & Baird, Printers, 1869), 120–25 (quotation); Stanley B. Weld, “A Connecticut Surgeon in the Civil War: The Reminiscences of Dr. Nathan Mayer,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 19 (July 1964): 272–86 (quotation).
21. The importance of McClellan’s defeat during the Peninsular Campaign cannot be overstated and is best described by the country’s preeminent scholar on the Civil War era, James M. McPherson, who believes “this Confederate success convinced Lincoln to ‘take off the kid gloves’ in dealing with slavery and to adopt emancipation as a means of weakening the Confederacy and strengthening the Union cause.” James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), xvi; OR, vol. 14, ser. 1, 528–49; OR, vol. 28, ser. 1, pt. 2, 444–45; OR, vol. 53, ser. 1, 300; Dan L. Morrill, The Civil War in the Carolinas (Charleston: Nautical & Aviation Publishing Co. of America, 2002), 187.
22. Joseph K. Barnes, The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865. Part First (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1870), 55, 192; Steiner, Disease, 75; Robert E. Denney, Civil War Medicine: Care & Comfort of the Wounded (New York: Sterling Publishing, 1994), 174; John H. Dirckx, ed., Stedman’s Concise Medical Dictionary for the Health Professions, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins, 2001), 159; Adams, Doctors in Blue, 201.
23. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray, 191; Joseph I. Waring, A History of Medicine in South Carolina, 1825–1900 (Charleston: South Carolina Medical Association, 1967), 127–39; Logan, “Prophylactic,” 83; MSH, 5:104–5.
24. O. M. Mitchel to H. W. Halleck, October 24, 1862, OR, vol. 14, ser. 1, 144–47; F. A. Mitchel, Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel, Astronomer and General: A Biographical Narrative (Boston: Riverside Press, 1887), 370; Eicher, Longest, 235; Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 199–200.
CHAPTER 5: “THE PESTILENT MARSHES OF THE PENINSULA”
1. Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, “Of Agues and Fevers: Malaria in the Early Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (January 1976): 31–60; Wyndham B. Blanton, Medicine in Virginia in the Nineteenth Century (Richmond, Va.: Garrett & Massie, 1933), 258–59; J. Bankhead Magruder to S. Cooper, August 21, 1861, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 51, ser. 1, pt. 2, 246, hereafter referred to as OR.
2. Regis De Trobriand, Four Years with the Army of the Potomac (Boston: Ticknor & Co., 1889), 221–36 (quotation); J. Theodore Calhoun, “The Chickahominy and Seven Pines,” Medical and Surgical Reporter 9 (March 1863): 399–400 (quotation); Francis J. Parker, The Story of the Thirty-second Regiment Massachusetts Infantry (Boston: C. W. Calkins & Co., 1880), 51–57 (quotation); William Child, A History of the Fifth Regiment New Hampshire Volunteers (Bristol: R. W. Musgrove Printer, 1893), 60–96 (quotation).
3. Thomas P. Lowry, ed., Swamp Doctor: The Diary of a Union Surgeon in the Virginia and North Carolina Marshes (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2001), 226 (quotation); George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 71; OR, vol. 11, ser. 1, pt. 1, 201–2; Calhoun, “Chickahominy,” 399–400; Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War: Natural Biological Warfare in 1861–1865 (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1968), 108; G. W. Randolph to A. T. Bledsoe, August 26, 1861, OR, 51, ser. 1, pt. 2, 251.
4. Dale C. Smith, “The Rise and Fall of Typhomalarial Fever: I. Origins,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 37 (April 1982): 182–220; Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care during the American Civil War (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 70; Steiner, Disease, 124–25; Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (: Galen Press, 2002), 276–77.
5. OR, vol. 11, ser. 1, pt. 1, 82–84, 181, 210–20; Steiner, Disease, 124; Jonathan Letterman, Medical Recollections of the Army of the Potomac (1866; rpt., Bohemian Brigade Publishers, 1994), 6–14; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 525; OR, vol. 11, ser. 1, pt. 3, 313–14, 331–33; George Meade, The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, Major-General United States Army (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 302–3.
6. Many blacks developed a limited immunity to the local malarial parasites in their neighborhoods through repeated infections and/or possessed “innate immunities based on inherited hemoglobin variants.” Nineteenth-century physicians noticed that blacks were less likely to die from yellow fever. Modern historians disagree over the causes of this immunity. Some believe people of African descent inherited a genetic resistance to yellow fever, while others argue that blacks’ frequent contact with the disease in southern towns gave them acquired immunity. Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 49–50, 84–85 (quotation).
7. OR, vol. 16, ser. 1, pt. 2, 62–63; McPherson, Battle Cry, 488–89.
8. H. H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 157, 191; Medical Department Register of Patients, General Hospital No. 21. Richmond, Virginia, 1862. Chapter VI, Volume 253, Record Group 109, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Medical Department [Confederate] Register of Patients, General Hospital No. 18 Richmond, Virginia, 1862–1863. Chapter VI, Volume 217½, Record Group 109, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Herbert M. Nash, M.D., “Some Reminiscences of a Confederate Surgeon,” Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 28 (Philadelphia: printed for the College, 1906): 122–44 (quotation).
9. See Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960); R. E. Lee to James A. Seddon, May 10, 1863, OR, vol. 25, ser. 1, pt. 2, 790; Chicago Times article reprinted in Wilmington Journal, September 4, 1862.
10. McPherson, Battle Cry, 517; Frank R. Freemon, M.D., “The Medical Challenge of Military Operations in the Mississippi Valley during the American Civil War,” Military Medicine 157 (September 1992): 494–97; OR, vol. 24, ser. 1, pt. 3, 357–58; Report of Surgeon Madison Mills, June 20, 1863, United States Sanitary Commission Records, ser. 7: Statistical Bureau Archives, Camp Inspection Returns, 1861–64, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Captain Joseph Edward King, “Shoulder Straps for Aesculapius: The Vicksburg Campaign, 1863,” Military Surgeon 114 ( March 1954), 216–26; T. H. Barton, Autobiography of Dr. Thomas H. Barton, the Self-Made Physician of Syracuse, Ohio, Including a History of the Fourth Regt. West Va. Vol. Infy. (Charleston: West Virginia Printing Co., 1890), 151.
11. For more information on Grant’s attempt to finish Williams’s canal, see David F. Bastian, Grant’s Canal: The Union Attempt to Bypass Vicksburg (Shippensburg, Pa.: Burd Street Press, 1995); Freemon, “Medical Challenge,” 495; Frank R. Freemon, M.D., “Medical Care at the Siege of Vicksburg, 1863,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 67 (September–October 1991): 429–38; H. S. Hewitt to Madison Mills, March 16, 1863, United States Sanitary Commission Records, ser. 7: Statistical Bureau Archives, Camp Inspection Returns, 1861–64, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (quotation); Granville P. Conn, History of the New Hampshire Surgeons in the War of the Rebellion (Concord, N.H.: Ira C. Evans Co., Printers, 1906), 209 (quotation); Lewis Crater, History of the Fiftieth Regiment, Penna. Vet. Vols., 1861–65. (Reading, Pa.: Coleman Printing House, 1884), 42 (quotation); A. J. Withrow to Libertatia Withrow, June 3, 1863, Withrow Papers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (quotation); Charles F. Larimer, ed., Love and Valor: Intimate Civil War Letters between Captain Jacob and Emeline Ritner (Western Springs, Ill.: Sigourney Press, 2000), 173–74 (quotation); Thomas H. Parker, History of the 51st Regiment of P.V. and V.V. (Philadelphia: King & Baird Printers, 1869), 322.
12. Freemon, “Medical Care,” 432; George C. Osborn, ed., “A Tennessean at the Siege of Vicksburg: The Diary of Samuel Alexander Ramsey Swan, May–July, 1863,” Ten-nessee Historical Quarterly 14 (December 1955): 353–72; Rev. Albert Theodore Goodloe, Confederate Echoes: A Voice from the South in the Days of Secession and of the Southern Confederacy (Nashville: Smith & Lamar, 1907), 248–49; Kenneth Trist Urquhart, ed., Vicksburg, Southern City under Siege: William Lovelace Foster’s Letter Describing the Defense and Surrender of the Confederate Fortress on the Mississippi (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 1980), 35.
13. Some historians have suggested that Lee was either ignorant of the conditions in the Deep South or using the “sickly season” as an excuse to swell the size of the army protecting his native Virginia. But this theory ignores his prewar experience as an army engineer in coastal Georgia and the fact that many other Civil War commanders, both Union and Confederate, shared his assessment of the southern climate. See Richard M. McMurry, “Marse Robert and the Fevers: A Note on the General as Strategist and on Medical Ideas as a Factor in Civil War Decision Making,” Civil War History 35 (September 1989): 197–207; Lee to Seddon, June 8, 1863, OR, vol. 27, ser. 1, pt. 3, 868–69; Seddon to W. Porcher Miles, May 13, 1863, OR, vol. 14, ser. 1, 940; Edward Younger, Inside the Confederate Government: The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean, Head of the Bureau of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 63; Beauregard to Seddon, May 11, 1863, OR, vol. 14, ser. 1, 933–35.
14. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 67–70; Martha M. Bigelow, “The Significance of Milliken’s Bend in the Civil War,” Journal of Negro History 45 (July 1960): 156–63 (quotation); OR, vol. 24, ser. 1, pt. 3, 156–57 (quotation); “The Week,” American Medical Times 7, August 8, 1863, 65–66 (quotation); William A. Hammond, A Treatise on Hygiene with Special Reference to the Military Service (1863; rpt., San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1991), ix–x, 70 (quotation); Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), xvi; Humphreys, Intensely Human, 45, 105.
15. The Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1991), 5:85 (quotations), hereafter referred to as MSH.
16. S. M. Barton to C. L. Stevenson, July 1, 1863, OR, vol. 24, ser. 1, pt. 2, 347.
17. A. Cumming to C. L. Stevenson & A. W. Reynolds to C. L. Stevenson, July 1, 1863, OR, vol. 24, ser. 1, pt. 2, 348–49; Freemon, “Medical Care,” 434; John C. Pember-ton, Pemberton: Defender of Vicksburg (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 222–24; Judith Lee Hallock, “‘Lethal and Debilitating’: The Southern Disease Environment as a Factor in the Confederate Defeat,” Journal of Confederate History 7 (1991): 51–61.
18. Freemon, Gangrene, 225; Freemon, “Medical Challenge,” 495;William T. Sherman, General Orders, No. 69, August 30, 1863, OR, vol. 30, ser. 1, pt. 3, 225–26 (quotation); Report of Medical Inspector E.O.F. Roler, September 27, 1863, United States Sanitary Commission Records, ser. 7: Statistical Bureau Archives, Camp Inspection Returns, 1861–64, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
19. J. H. Clarke, “Yellow Fever in New Orleans,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 59, November 12, 1863, 303–4; H. H. Bell to N. P. Banks, October 23, 1863, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, vol. 20, ser. 1, 638, 650–52 (quotation), hereafter referred to as ORN; ORN, vol. 25, ser. 1, 461–62; Jo Ann Carrigan, “Yankees versus Yellow Jack in New Orleans, 1862–1866,” Civil War History 9 (September 1963): 256.
20. Clarke, “Yellow Fever,” 303; ORN 20, ser. 1, 603; Hospital Tickets and Case Papers, Naval Hospital, New Orleans, 1863, Record Group 52, National Archives (quotation); Naval Hospital New Orleans, La., Hospital Tickets and Case Papers, 1863, Record Group 52, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
21. B. F. Gibbs, “Account of the Epidemic of Yellow Fever Which Visited Pensacola Navy Yard in the Summer and Autumn of 1863,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 61 (1866): 340–51; George F. Pearce, Pensacola during the Civil War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 193; William C. Holbrook, A Narrative of the Services of the Officers and Enlisted Men of the 7th Regiment of Vermont Volunteers (New York: American Bank Note Co., 1882), 134–35 (quotation).
22. H. H. Bell to John P. Gillis, September 11, 1863, ORN, vol. 20, ser. 1, 509–10, 566–67 (quotation), 581–83, 637–38, 708; ORN, vol. 21, ser. 1, 240–43, 284, 328, 679, 692; ORN, vol. 27, ser. 1, 595–96; Holbrook, Narrative, 134–35 (quotation); letter to Louis James M. Boyd, November 5, 1863, Louis James M. Boyd Papers, State Archives of Florida, Tallahassee (quotation); Jo Ann Carrigan, “Yankees versus Yellow Jack in New Orleans, 1862–1866,” Civil War History 9 (September 1963): 256; Elisha Harris, M.D., “Hygiene Experience in New Orleans during the War: Illustrating the Importance of Efficient Sanitary Regulations,” Southern Medical and Surgical Journal 21 (July 1866): 86; Jo Ann Carrigan, The Saffron Scourge: A History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana, 1796–1905 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1994), 82.
23. See Allan Nevins, The War for the Union: The Improvised War, 1861–1862 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959); and The War for the Union: The Organized War, 1863–1864 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971); Adams, Doctors, 31–34; Bollett, Medicine, 236–37.
CHAPTER 6: “THE ROUGHEST TIMES ANY SET OF SOLDIERS EVER ENCOUNTERED”
1. Reid Mitchell, The American Civil War, 1861–1865 (Harlow, Eng.: Pearson Education, 2001), 56; Charles W. Johnson, “Narrative of the Sixth Regiment” (1891), in Min-nesota in the Civil and Indian Wars, 1861–1865 by Minnesota Board of Commissioners on Publication of History of Minnesota in Civil and Indian Wars (St. Paul, Minn.: Pioneer Press Co., 1890–93), 300–328 (quotation); Charles H. Lothrop, M.D., A History of the First Regiment Iowa Cavalry Veteran Volunteers (Lyons, Iowa: Beers & Eaton, 1890), 130; Illinois at Vicksburg (published under the authority of an act of the Forty-fifth General Assembly by the Illinois-Vicksburg Military Park Commission, 1907), Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 141–312; E. B. Quiner, The Military History of Wisconsin (Chicago: Clarke & Co., Publishers, 1866), 760–66; C. C. Andrews, “Narrative of the Third Regiment,” in Johnson, Minnesota, 165–67; Frederick Steele to John Schofield, September 12, 1863, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 22, ser. 1, pt. 1, 474–77, hereafter referred to as OR (quotation).
2. John Scott, Story of the Thirty-second Iowa Infantry Volunteers (Nevada, Iowa: John Scott, 1896), 59; Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 2:702; A. F. Sperry, History of the 33d Iowa Infantry Volunteer Regiment, 1863–6 (Des Moines: Mills & Co., 1866), 37–41 (quotation).
3. Frederick Steele to Stephen A. Hurlbut, August 23, 1863, Steele to John Schofield, September 1, 1863, OR, vol. 22, ser. 1, pt. 1, 472–74; Leander Stillwell, The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861–1865, 2nd ed. ([Erie, Kan.]: Franklin Hudson Publishing Co., 1920), 157–58 (quotation).
4. Joseph R. Smith to J. K. Barnes, January 20, 1866, Sanitary Report of the Army of Arkansas for the Last Quarter of 1863, U.S. Surgeon General’s Office, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Md. (quotation); The Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1991), 2:343–46 (quotation), hereafter referred to as MSH.
5. Scott, Iowa, 59–61; Sperry, 33d Iowa, 42–43 (quotation); Frederick Steele to H. W. Halleck, September 12, 1863, OR, vol. 22, ser. 1, pt. 1, 474–82 (quotation); Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War: Natural Biological Warfare in 1861–1865 (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1968), 218–19.
6. H. W. Halleck to E.R.S. Canby, November 12, 1864, OR, vol. 41, ser. 1, pt. 4, 529 (quotation); F. Steele to J. M. Thayer, November 12, 1864, OR, vol. 41, ser. 1, pt. 4, 535; “Report of Troops Serving in the Department of Arkansas,” October 31, 1864, OR, vol. 41, ser. 1, pt. 4, 341; Steiner, Disease, 219.
7. See Surgeon Eugene F. Sanger, “Extracts from the Report of the Medical Director of the Nineteenth Corps, for April, 1864,” in The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1861–1865) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1870), 335.
8. Confederate successes kept Steele from reinforcing General Nathaniel Banks, who also suffered a humiliating loss during the Red River Campaign of 1864. A. C. Wedge quoted in C. C. Andrews, “Narrative of the Third,” in Minnesota, 174–75; Christopher C. Andrews, Pioneer in Forestry Conservation in the United States: For Sixty Years a Dominant Influence in the Public Affairs of Minnesota: Lawyer: Editor: Diplomat: General in the Civil War. Recollections: 1829–1922, ed. Alice E. Andrews (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1928), 191 (quotation); Stephen Miller to E.R.S. Canby, April 4, 1865, OR, vol. 48, ser. 1, pt. 2, 31–32.
9. OR, vol. 41, ser. 1, pt. 2, 711–16; W. P. Belden to Stephen Miller, October 29, 1864, reprinted in Johnson, “Narrative of the Sixth Regiment,” 322–26 (quotation); OR, vol. 41, ser. 1, pt. 3, 502; Arthur M. Daniels, A Journal of Sibley’s Indian Expedition during the Summer of 1863 and Record of the Troops Employed by a Soldier in Company “H,” Sixth Regiment (Minneapolis: James D. Thueson Publisher, 1980), 151; Alfred J. Hill, History of Company E of the Sixth Minnesota Regiment of Volunteer Infantry (1899; rpt., St. Paul, Minn.: Budd Parrish, 1992), 28 (quotation); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 72–75, 86; OR, vol. 41, ser. 1, pt. 1, 190–91.
10. Dr. Benjamin Woodward to Dr. Elisha Harris, September 15, 1865, United States Sanitary Commission Records, Series 1: Medical Committee Archives, 1861–1866, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; H. W. Halleck to Reynolds, January 26, 1865, OR, vol. 48, ser. 1, pt. 1, 649.
11. Joseph Palmer Blessington, The Campaigns of Walker’s Texas Division (Austin: State House Press, 1994), 42 (quotation); Junius N. Bragg to “My Dear Josephine,” December (?), 1862, and Bragg to “My Darling Wife,” August 18, 1863, in J. N. Bragg, Letters of a Confederate Surgeon, 1861–65 (Camden, Ark.: Hurley Co., 1960), 101–4, 169 (quotation); William M. McPheeters, I Acted from Principle: The Civil War Diary of Dr. William M. McPheeters, Confederate Surgeon in the Trans-Mississippi, ed. Cynthia Dehaven Pitcock and Bill J. Gurley (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002), 41–63, 94–95 (quotation); OR, vol. 22, ser. 1, pt. 1, 439.
12. J. Bankhead Magruder to J. F. Belton, May 7, 1863, OR, vol. 15, ser. 1, 1078–79 (quotation).
13. Austin State Gazette, September 28, October 12 and 26, November 23, and December 7, 14, and 24, 1864; Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, November 16, 1864; “The Diary of H. C. Medford, Confederate Soldier, 1864,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 34 (1930): 106–40; Peggy H. Gregory, comp., Record of Interments of the City of Galveston, 1859–1872 (Houston: privately printed, 1976), 34, Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Tex.; Charles W. Hayes, History of the Island and the City of Galveston (Austin, Tex.: Jenkins Garrett Press, 1974), 2:625–26; Charles C. Cumberland, “The Confederate Loss and Recapture of Galveston, 1862–1863,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 51 (October 1947): 118; Alwyn Barr, “Texas Coastal Defense, 1861–1865,” in Lonestar Blue and Gray: Essays on Texas in the Civil War, ed. Ralph A. Wooster (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1995), 14–15; David G. McComb, Galveston: A History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 79; H. C. Medord, “The Diary of H. C. Medford, Confederate Soldier, 1864,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 34 (1930): 106–40; Austin State Gazette, September 21 (quotation) & October 12, 1864; Charles W. Hayes, History of the Island and the City of Galveston (Austin, Tex.: Jenkins Garrett Press, 1974), 2:623–25; OR, vol. 41, ser. 1, pt. 2, 1020; D. G. Farragut to W. E. Le Roy, September 21, 1864, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, vol. 21, ser. 1, 655, hereafter referred to as ORN.
14. Austin State Gazette, December 7, 14, and 24, 1864; Galveston Interment Records, 43–49; J. G. Walker to W. R. Boggs, October 26, 1864, OR, vol. 41, ser. 1, pt. 4, 1014–15 (quotation); Hayes, Galveston, 649–51; K. David Patterson, “Yellow Fever Epidemics and Mortality in the United States, 1693–1905,” Social Science and Medicine 34 (1992): 858.
15. ORN, vol. 27, ser. 1, 595–96; Jo Ann Carrigan, “Yankees versus Yellow Jack in New Orleans, 1862–1866,” Civil War History 9 (September 1963): 256; Elisha Harris, M.D., “Hygenic Experience in New Orleans during the War: Illustrating the Importance of Efficient Sanitary Regulations,” Southern Medical and Surgical Journal 21 (July 1866): 86; Jo Ann Carrigan, The Saffron Scourge: A History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana, 1796–1905 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1994), 82; U.S. Navy, 1775–1910, Special Reports, Epidemics, Special Incidents, Etc. 1830–1910, Record Group 45, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
16. Fort Jefferson continued to experience yellow fever epidemics after the war was over. Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who famously set John Wilkes Booth’s leg after the Lincoln assassination, was imprisoned in the fort and aided victims during an 1867 outbreak. Emily Holder, At the Dry Tortugas during the War, quoted in Lewis G. Schmidt, The Civil War in Florida: A Military History (Allentown, Pa.: by the author, 1992), 3:868–69 (quotation); “The Situation,” New York Herald, November 2, 1864.
17. New York Times, August 31, 1864 (quotation); John A. Wilder to mother, June 19, 1864, and Wilder to brother-in-law, August 2, 1864, in Millicent Todd Bingham, ed., “Key West in the Summer of 1864,” Florida Historical Quarterly 43 (1965): 262–65 (quotation); Book Records of Union Volunteer Organizations, Second USCT Infantry Regimental Order, Letter, Endorsement, Deaths, Discharges, and Miscellaneous Book, Record Group 94, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Book Records of Volunteer Union Organizations, Second USCT Infantry Descriptive Book, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, Record Group 94, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
18. ORN, vol. 21, ser. 1, 277, 601, 614–15: ORN, vol. 27, ser. 1, 625, 629; Theodorus Bailey to Gideon Welles, July 27, 1864, Welles to Bailey, July 19, 1864, ORN, vol. 17, ser. 1, 723, 733, 737 (quotation); Schmidt, Civil War in Florida, 860; Edward S. Miller, “A Long War and a Sickly Season,” Blue & Gray Magazine 9 (June 1992): 40–44.
19. James O. Breeden, “A Medical History of the Later Stages of the Atlanta Campaign,” Journal of Southern History 35 (February 1969): 31–59; C. S. Frink, “Extracts from a Report on the Operations of the Medical Department of the Third Division of the Twenty-third Corps from June 11, to September 10, 1864,” in The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1861–1865) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1870), 318 (quotation); Jasper E. James, Letters from a Civil War Soldier, ed. Vera Dockery Elkins (New York: Vantage Press, 1969), 52 (quotation); Stephen Davis, Atlanta Will Fall: Sherman, Joe Johnston, and the Yankee Heavy Battalions (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2001), 33–34.
20. MSH, 5:105; W.A.W. Spotswood to S. R. Mallory, November 30, 1863, ORN, vol. 2, ser. 2, 559–61; Dabney H. Maury to S. Cooper, November 10, 1864, OR, vol. 39, ser. 1, pt. 3, 910–11 (quotation); James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 761; Confederate Medical Department, Register of Patients, Ross Hospital, Mobile, Ala., 1863–65, Record Group 109, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Foote, Civil War, 3:967.
21. Alfred Jay Bollet, M.D., Plagues & Poxes: The Impact of Human History on Epidemic Disease (New York: Demos, 2004), 37; Margaret Humphreys, Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 11–13; Steiner, Disease, 219.
CHAPTER 7: BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
1. New York Times, May 30, 1865 (quotation); William A. Tidwell, James O. Hall, and David Winfred Gaddy, Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 186–87.
2. Nancy Disher Baird, Luke Pryor Blackburn: Physician, Governor, Reformer (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979), Tidwell, Retribution, 185; Edward Steers Jr., “Risking the Wrath of God,” North & South 3 (September 2000): 59–70.
3. Edward Steers Jr., “A Rebel Plot and Germ Warfare,” Washington Times, November 10, 2001; Ben. Perley Poore, ed., The Conspiracy Trial for the Murder of the President, and the Attempt to Overthrow the Government by the Assassination of Its Principal Officers (Boston: J. E. Tilton and Co., 1865), 2:409–19 (quotation).
4. Blackburn was not the only Confederate interested in using yellow fever against northerners. Early in the war a Louisianan named R. R. Barrow advocated sending blankets infected with yellow fever into New Orleans in order to trigger an epidemic that would end the Union occupation there. See R. R. Barrow to D. F. Kenner, September 11, 1862, John T. Pickett Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; “The Soiled Clothes Investigation in St. Georges,” Bermuda Royal Gazette, April 25, 1865 (quotation); Steers, “Wrath,” 64–67; John W. Headley, Confederate Operations in Canada and New York (New York: Neale Publishing Co., 1906), 264–65; Tidwell, Come Retribution, 186; Baird, Blackburn, 8; K. J. Stewart to Jefferson Davis, November 30 and December 12, 1864, Prison Pens, Canada Raids, Secret Operations, 1864, Record Group 109, chap. 7, vol. 24, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
5. Thomas J. Farnham and Francis P. King, “‘The March of the Destroyer’: The New Bern Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1864,” North Carolina Historical Review 73 (October 1996): 435–83; Stanley B. Weld, “A Connecticut Surgeon in the Civil War: The Reminiscences of Dr. Nathan Mayer,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 19 (July 1964): 284–85; Sheldon B. Thorpe, The History of the Fifteenth Connecticut Volunteers in the War for the Defense of the Union, 1861–1865 (New Haven, Conn.: Price, Lee & Adkins, 1893), 233; The Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1991), 5:679–682, hereafter referred to as MSH; James Gifford to Parents, September 26, 1864, James Gifford Papers, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
6. Alan D. Watson, A History of New Bern and Craven County (New Bern: Tryon Palace Commission, 1987), 408–9; Thomas Kirwan, Memorial History of the Seventeenth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Old and New Organizations) in the Civil War from 1861–1865 (Salem, Mass.: Salem Press Co., 1911), 247–51; Thorpe, History of the Fifteenth Connecticut Volunteers, 234–36; MSH, 2:239; Farnham and King, “March,” 456–60; Judkin Browning and Michael Thomas Smith, eds., Letters from a North Carolina Unionist: John A. Hedrick to Benjamin S. Hedrick, 1862–1865 (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 2001), 227–28; MSH, 5:679; W. S. Benjamin, The Great Epidemic in New Berne and Vicinity, September and October, 1864, by One Who Passed through It (New Bern, N.C.: Geo. Mills Joy, 1865), 16–19.
7. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, vol. 8, ser. 1, 263–64, hereafter referred to as ORN; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 35, ser. 1, pt. 2, 310–11, hereafter referred to as OR; Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1997), 215; Charleston Daily Courier, October 5, 11, 18, and 20, 1864; Charleston Mercury, November 7 and 8, 1864; OR, vol. 42, ser. 1, pt. 3, 1151–53; Grant to General Ruger, July 7, 1865, OR, vol. 47, ser. 1, pt. 3, 675–76.
8. Farnham and King, “March,” 435–483; Benjamin, Great Epidemic, 10–11; “The Yellow Fever Plot: Newbern, N.C., May 31, 1865,” Bermuda Royal Gazette, June 13, 1865 (quotation).
9. Morphine (pain reliever), ether, and chloroform (anesthetics) were also in high demand across the South. Michael A. Flannery, Civil War Pharmacy: A History of Drugs, Drug Supply and Provision, and Therapeutics for the Union and Confederacy (New York: Pharmaceutical Products Press, 2004), 193; William Diamond, “Imports of the Confederate Government from Europe and Mexico,” Journal of Southern History 6 (November 1940): 470–503; Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 11, 120; Norman H. Franke, “Rx Prices in the Confederacy,” Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, no. 12 (December 1961): 773–74; Joseph Jacobs, “Some of the Drug Conditions during the War between the States, 1861–5,” Southern Historical Papers 33 (Richmond, Va.: Southern Historical Society, 1905), 175.
10. Francis B. Simkins and James W. Patton, “The Work of Southern Women among the Sick and Wounded of the Confederate Armies,” Journal of Southern History 1 (November 1935): 475–96; Louise Llewellyn Jarecka, “Virginia Moon, Unreconstructed Rebel,” Delphian Quarterly 30 (January 1947): 17–21 (quotation); Elizabeth D. Leonard, All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 72, 82 (quotation); Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 105–6; Alan Axelrod, The War between the Spies: A History of Espionage during the American Civil War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992), 32; J. Hampton Hoch, “Through the Blockade,” Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association 12 (December 1961): 769–70.
11. OR, vol. 2, ser. 2, 329 (quotation); OR, vol. 4, ser. 2, 880–85 (quotation); Willard Carver, Fourteenth Regt., Maine Infantry. Roster of Survivors with Abstract of Regimental History (1890), 2 (quotation), Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Joseph H. Parks, “A Confederate Trade Center under Federal Occupation: Memphis, 1862 to 1865,” Journal of Southern History 7 (August 1941): 289–314.
12. Yellow fever occasionally disrupted the activities of these runners (and the Federal ships that hunted them) because they operated out of ports where the disease was endemic. The 1864 outbreak in Bermuda, for example, prompted the U.S. consul there to declare the island’s “blockade-running business … to be at an end for the season.” See ORN, vol. 3, ser. 1, 161–63 and 447.
13. Frank E. Vandiver, Confederate Blockade Running through Bermuda, 1861–1865: Letters and Cargo Manifests (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1947), 109; Thomas E. Taylor, Running the Blockade: A Personal Narrative of Adventures, Risks, and Escapes during the American Civil War (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995), xxvi, 18, 65; Wilmington Daily Journal, October 1, 1863; Flannery, Pharmacy, 200 (quotation); Massey, Ersatz, 115.
14. OR, vol. 1, ser. 4, 1041; H. H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederates Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 29, 146–48; Francis Peyre Porcher, Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests (1863; rpt., New York: Arno Press, 1970), 38–411; OR, vol. 2, ser. 4, 1024; George Worthington Adams, “Confederate Medicine,” Journal of Southern History 6 (May 1940), 151–66; Charleston Daily Courier, August 11, 1862; Massey, Ersatz, 120.
15. Flannery, Pharmacy, 227; New Orleans Daily Picayune, August 4, 1861; Guy R. Hasegawa, “Pharmacy in the American Civil War,” American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy 57 (March 2000): 475–89; Anna DeWolf Middleton to Anna E. Marston De-Wolf, September 19, 1864, Nathaniel Russell Middleton Papers, in Records of Ante-bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War, ed. Kenneth M. Stampp, microfilm (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1985–2000), ser. J, pt. 3.
16. OR, vol. 2, ser. 4, 1024; OR, vol. 35, ser. 1, pt. 2, 592–93; Cunningham, Gray, 157, 191; Harper’s Weekly, August 27, 1864, 547; David J. Eicher, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 723; Herbert M. Nash, M.D., “Some Reminiscences of a Confederate Surgeon,” Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 28 (Philadelphia: printed for the College, 1906), 135–36; ORN, vol. 10, ser. 1, 350–53, 730–50; OR, vol. 42, ser. 1, pt. 2, 1271.
17. These percentages include cases of “remittent fever,” “quotidian intermittent fever,” “tertian intermittent fever,” “quartan intermittent fever,” and “congestive intermittent fever.” “Other diseases of this [Miasmatic] Order” (447 cases) are not included. MSH, vol. 1, 174–78, 490–91; Harper’s Weekly, March 11, 1865, 149; George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 104; OR, vol. 17, ser. 1, pt. 2, 640.
18. Flannery, Civil War Pharmacy, 163–68; Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War: Natural Biological Warfare in 1861–1865 (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1968), 22.
EPILOGUE
1. OR, vol. 14, ser. 1, 539; OR, vol. 25, ser. 1, pt. 2, 790. See also Alexander H. H. Stuart to George W. Randolph, April 28, 1862, OR, vol. 51, ser. 1, pt. 2, 550–51.
2. K. David Patterson, “Yellow Fever Epidemics and Mortality in the United States, 1693–1905,” Social Science and Medicine 34 (1992): 855–65; Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 60–64.
3. Scientists are only now beginning to understand the extent of genetic diversity within the Plasmodium genus. See “Genetic Map Offers New Tool for Malaria Research,” Science Daily, December 12, 2006, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061211092750.htm (January 20, 2009).
4. John Duffy “The Impact of Malaria on the South,” in Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, ed. Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 29–54. For more information on New England’s postwar epidemic, see “The Increase of Malaria,” Boston Daily Advertiser, June 22, 1882; and “Malaria. By a Massachusetts Physician,” Boston Congregationalist, January 14, 1886.
5. Leslie Poles Hartley, The Go-Between (London: H. Hamilton, 1953).
6. Christian F. Ockenhouse, Alan Magill, Dale Smith, and Wil Milhous, “History of U.S. Military Contributions to the Study of Malaria,” Military Medicine 170 (April 2005): 12–16; Ashley M. Croft, Alicia H. Darbyshire, Christopher J. Jackson, and Pieter P. van Thiel, “Malaria Prevention Measures in Coalition Troops in Afghanistan,” Journal of the American Medical Association 297, May 23–30, 2007, 2197–99; Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949).