Nature's Civil War

Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia

Kathryn Shively

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781469610771
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

In the Shenandoah Valley and Peninsula Campaigns of 1862, Union and Confederate soldiers faced unfamiliar and harsh environmental conditions--strange terrain, tainted water, swarms of flies and mosquitoes, interminable rain and snow storms, and oppressive heat--which contributed to escalating disease and diminished morale. Using soldiers' letters, diaries, and memoirs, plus a wealth of additional personal accounts, medical sources, newspapers, and government documents, Kathryn Shively Meier reveals how these soldiers strove to maintain their physical and mental health by combating their deadliest enemy--nature.
Meier explores how soldiers forged informal networks of health care based on prewar civilian experience and adopted a universal set of self-care habits, including boiling water, altering camp terrain, eradicating insects, supplementing their diets with fruits and vegetables, constructing protective shelters, and most controversially, straggling. In order to improve their health, soldiers periodically had to adjust their ideas of manliness, class values, and race to the circumstances at hand. While self-care often proved superior to relying upon the inchoate military medical infrastructure, commanders chastised soldiers for testing army discipline, ultimately redrawing the boundaries of informal health care.

1


Health and the American Populace before 1862

In their wartime journals and correspondence, soldiers fixated upon cataloging their natural environments. Pvt. William Randolph Smith of the 17th Virginia, for example, wrote in March 1862, “There is the finest pine timber on the road I ever saw. . . . The farms are also fine and fertile. . . . From Robison River to the Rapidan is the finest country I ever saw. The land is easily cultivated and is splendid.” He also recorded the weather with painstaking precision: “We had some fine weather on the march, but some very bad. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the 11th, and 12th, and 13th were very fine. Then it was rainy and quite disagreeable camping out without any protection, from the rain until the 16th when we had some fine days until the 19th when the Equinoctial rains commenced and continued without remissions until the 2nd when it cleared away, and the weather is now clear and cool.” On March 28, he lowered his keen gaze earthward. “The ground is full of stumps but lays well, and have an abundance of water, which is so essential to the soldiers health.”¹ Such fastidious (even tedious) detail is not simply an idle soldier’s Civil War Era small talk—it presents continuity with his farming roots. Smith identified land that could be easily cultivated, catalogued the exact dates of precipitation, and connected environment to human health. Like Smith, the majority of soldiers were farmers with extensive experience observing nature, because environmental circumstances shaped their livelihoods and, they believed, their health.² They connected the visible changes in nature, which governed planting and harvesting, to the invisible worlds of their bodies and minds. Even the smaller population of Americans who grew up in cities was accustomed to the idea that environment—the crowds and filth by which urbanites were surrounded—contributed to diseases.

Explaining disease origins based on observation and experience made more sense to average Americans than parsing out new, often conflicting scientific theories. While most Americans were literate and could read about the scientific debates raging among orthodox physicians and middle-class reformers, they exhibited a clear preference for self-reliance typical of the Jacksonian era.³ After all, the 1840s push toward medical professionalization, epitomized by the establishment of the American Medical Association in 1847, did not mean doctors proved better at rescuing Americans from the clutches of death. Historian Mark Schantz estimates that the quarter century preceding the war actually brought a dip in life expectancy; average Americans only lived to their mid-forties.⁴ Doctors provided diagnoses and medications but left comfort and care to one’s family members. Furthermore, access to professional physicians was limited, particularly in rural and developing areas, such as the South and the West. For these reasons, antebellum laypeople interacted infrequently with medical experts and developed their own means of transmitting medical knowledge, but the Civil War would usher in a cultural shift that pushed common soldiers into contact with physicians, reformers, and hospitals.⁵ Because soldiers in 1862 attempted to retain and recreate prewar health ideas and care networks in the midst of great challenges to civilian norms, it is important to understand the antebellum health experience before turning to the war.

DISEASE ENVIRONMENTS OF THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

While there was a dizzying array of hypotheses about what caused mental and physical sickness, historian Conevery Bolton Valencius has identified common ground among Jacksonian Americans when it came to conceiving of disease environments. Prevailing ideas followed several trends. First, different geographic regions produced distinctive diseases, which also varied based on the seasons and weather. The surest way to avoid an environmental illness was to physically relocate, if one were able. Second, bodies underwent a process of seasoning, or bodily adjusting to a new climate when one moved, which is something most soldiers would experience in wartime. Because migration characterized the antebellum period as well, Valencius explains that Americans frequently discussed the salubrity of places, considering the seasoning process “debilitating and disorienting.”⁶ Sometimes entering a new area could so profoundly upset the body as to trigger mental infirmity—“hysteria, hypochondria and insanity,”—as one medical journal cautioned.⁷ Accordingly, itinerant Americans were well schooled in examining the weather, water, air, and ecological markers of a place. Third, specific terrain features within a certain area influenced disease but could potentially be altered to mitigate their impacts. Americans used agricultural and irrigation techniques to assert control over potentially hostile environments. Farmers were instructed to drain marshes and wetlands and to allow trees to stand by lakes, rivers, and ponds as barriers against miasmatic air.⁸ Indeed, taming the wilderness to disarm its threats had been a theme of American settlement for hundreds of years.⁹

The first concept—that certain regions produced certain diseases—requires a bit more explanation, as it would prove vastly influential upon Civil War soldier thinking. Not only were all people considered products of their particular environment—and thus seasoned to a specific geography and population density—but most soldiers would ultimately be stationed in the South, and in this study, in Virginia. Chilly, mountainous regions (such as those common to the North) were considered detrimental to the respiratory system, harming sufferers of tuberculosis or pneumonia. Alternatively, lowland, hot, and humid areas with truncated winters and swamps (such as those common to the South) earned reputations even by residents as particularly conducive to “fevers”—a generic category that encompassed a number of diseases that produced the symptom, such as malaria and typhoid—and bowel disorders. Modern historians have likewise noted the “epidemiological distinctiveness” of regions where diseases of African origin, such as multiple malarial parasites, yellow fever, and hookworm, flourished.¹⁰ Contemporarily, Hippocrates’s On Airs, Waters and Places had long postulated that the air of wet, poorly drained terrain conducted disease, and the related miasma theory suggested that swamps emitted harmful vapors that could be identified by their putrid smells.¹¹ When ill, Southerners of means often traveled in search of cooler climes to foster recovery.¹² Avoiding dank areas could be surprisingly effective given that this reduced exposure to malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Thus, positive health results appeared to confirm the miasma theory and had kept it alive for centuries. The miasma theory certainly appeared substantiated when soldiers descended upon Virginia in 1862, resulting in massive outbreaks of malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery, and diarrhea. Indeed, Confederates hoped that their acclimated bodies would prove stronger than those of unseasoned Federals, but they were wrong.¹³

In prewar Virginia, life-threatening malaria tied the border area in with the Deep South rather than the Northern states. There are actually four types of plasmodia that cause malaria—vivax, falciparum, malarie, and ovale—and the most common, vivax, could thrive to some degree in both cool and warmer climes. Its symptoms included the telltale fevers and potential anemia common to all types of malaria. While it lay dormant in the liver and could recur indefinitely, its ultimate consequences tended to be relatively minor. Mortalities usually occurred only among the immune-compromised or malnourished. In contrast, the deadliest form of malaria, produced by the falciparum plasmodia, lived exclusively in climates south of Pennsylvania. It was carried to America in the bodies of Africans, perhaps a quarter of whom had a sickle-cell trait that granted them diminished susceptibility and lower mortality rates, leading to a widespread belief that enslaved people could better endure the Southern climate.¹⁴ Besides producing fevers and anemia in its host, the Falciparum plasmodium could trigger epilepsy, blindness, cognitive impairment, behavioral disturbances, coma, and even death in twenty-five to fifty percent of victims if left untreated. Once cured, however, victims completely recovered and enjoyed future immunity, again appearing to confirm the idea of seasoning.¹⁵ Because malaria was so common in Virginia, the state gained a reputation as a potentially fearsome disease environment, much like its Southern neighbors. Once war enveloped the area, Virginia’s variable weather and large expanses of swamp would further conduct the diseases common to armies, such as typhoid fever, transmitted through feces-contaminated water.

There was also an antebellum conception of the city as a sicklier environment than the country. One 1840 newspaper article, “Importance of Pure Air,” explained that parents should take special care to help their children avoid crowds. “At this tender and susceptible period of life, the rapid influence of the atmosphere in which we live, in deteriorating or improving the health, is very remarkable, a change of a few weeks from the country to a large town being sufficient to change the ruddy, healthy child into a pale, sickly-looking creature.” Indeed, “Children should never be reared in large towns when this can be avoided; and, when unavoidable, they should be sent during a part, at least, of every summer into the country.”¹⁶ Americans who had grown up in cities had very often been seasoned by childhood diseases, such as scarlatina or diphtheria, and epidemics, such as cholera, consumption, and yellow fever. Their resulting vast experience with death and its accompanying piles of fly-speckled bodies lining the streets prompted historian Mark Schantz’s comment that “such scenes of mass death, burial trenches, and refugees call to mind parallels with Civil War battlefields.”¹⁷ The nuances of the urban-specific disease environment actually produced considerable confusion once the Civil War came. Many soldiers predicted that country boys would prove heartier than city boys, when in fact rural Americans were exposed for the first time to crowd diseases, making them more likely to become ill than those who had survived epidemics as children.

All soldiers and caretakers involved in the Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns would have to confront their preconceptions about disease regions contained in Virginia. Before the war, Virginia was largely rural, but during the war it would be experienced as an urban environment. Before the war, the Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley environments were also considered distinct—the Peninsula a hazardous swampland and the Shenandoah Valley a fertile agricultural landscape. During the war they would become comparably insalubrious.

Many prewar medical journal articles cautioned Americans against even entering Southern swamps, such as those located on the Peninsula. For instance, in June of 1843, several authors from the Western Journal of Medicine denounced Alabamian and Mississippian wetlands. In their month-long travels, they had “snuffed up the exhalations of swamps . . . in sufficient numbers to supply malaria for a continent, and raise a smile of complacent satisfaction on the lip of every advocate of the malarious origin of congestive fever.”¹⁸ Dr. Charles Lucas of the American Journal of the Medical Sciences postulated in the Hippocratic vein that standing water generated miasma. “The sluggish and frequently stagnant waters of these lagoons, exposed to the intense and continued action of a scorching sun, are soon covered with a green scum, are the nidus of myriads of insects, and the surrounding atmosphere speedily becomes offensively tainted.” Lucas went on, in typical fashion for the period, to encode the landscape of health in racial terms. “Negroes . . . reside during the intense heat of summer in the most sickly situations, with the utmost perfect impunity, while the whites are obliged to retire in order to avoid the deleterious influence of the miasms.”¹⁹ During the Civil War, “whites” would not have the option to retreat from the swamps in the summer and fall, forcing them to confront their fears about miasma.

As suggested by Lucas, Americans perceived the environmental dangers of the swamps as being cyclical in nature, a concept seemingly reinforced by the periodic suffering of vivax victims. One doctor who investigated Virginia in 1823 noted that while “tertians” (a term that usually referred to vivax malaria) were frequent in April through October where wet ground was abundant, the winter wind’s “effect was so remarkable in sweeping off these fevers, that it was a common observation when the first north west wind came, to say, the Doctor is come now, and we shall soon get well.”²⁰ The problem in wartime was that most active campaigning would take place precisely during what proved the sickliest months of the year: April to November.

The Shenandoah Valley, which was free from swamps and more mountainous in terrain, was alternatively viewed as a healthful region before the war. Indeed, modern studies suggest there was less diarrhea, only vivax malaria, and no hookworm, if slightly more respiratory ailments.²¹ In one antebellum article promoting the Valley’s salubrity, Dr. James Thomson encouraged more exploration of the Valley’s geography, citing its bounty of medicinal plants, mineral springs, and specifically the “tonic and laxative” waters near Harpers Ferry. As a cure for “bilious cases,” he noted that “these waters have proved highly beneficial—correcting debility by imparting a vigorous tone to the stomach, whose sympathetic influence is speedily felt throughout the system.” Indeed, many healers recommended soaking in the waters of the Valley or breathing in its mountain air. Despite the preference for the Valley’s climate, even it proved occasionally unhealthy in a time when little about disease causation was well understood. Valley residents had recently experienced two “calamitous seasons” of intermittent and remittent fever, which Thomson attributed to “certain changes which take place in the atmosphere, not cognisable to the sense, produced by heat and moisture evolving noxious exhalations, from the decomposition of vegetable matter principally—that these exhalations partake of the nature of the soil, temperature, and seasons in which they are generated.”²² The fact that fevers (and most likely malaria) were not always neatly confined to the lowlands produced some contemporary puzzlement, leading to continued investigation by so-called medical topographers, or physicians who investigated disease landscapes by collecting data through observation and interviews with locals.²³ Thomson, for instance, located miasma not only in the common explanations of swamps and rotting vegetable matter but also in atmospheric shifts (another environmental explanation), which seemed to comport with the variable weather common to the Valley.

Americans of all social classes often subscribed to the concepts of disease environments and seasoning, but the lower classes particularly favored environmental explanations because they seemed to be confirmed by lived experience. While average Americans did not tend to expound upon their medical opinions in the antebellum period, enlisted soldiers would frequently do so during the Civil War, providing a window into popular medical thought that had not previously existed.

AVERAGE AMERICANS AND SELF-CARE

Average Americans developed a discernible set of health-related behaviors and beliefs common to their class that would shape their actions in wartime. For instance, most Americans had rare contact with doctors, especially those from rural areas, while it was a prerogative of the rich to travel for medical advice. Home was the primary venue of recovery in times of illness, where family members, most often mothers, sisters, and wives, provided care rather than cure.²⁴ Historian Jane Schultz encapsulates it best: “Every woman was a nurse.”²⁵ Care was an intimate affair administered in one’s own bed. A sick person engrossed the entire family, who could not escape the sights, smells, and sounds of infirmity.²⁶ Because disease was not well understood, death was a far more common outcome from even moderate illnesses, provoking tremendous anxiety and religious fervor. The prevalence of home care meant that few Americans had experience with hospitals. Hospitals, located almost exclusively in cities, were for the destitute, those who lacked family, or those who were, perhaps, outsiders traveling in a foreign city.²⁷

While achieving good health was in many ways a collective undertaking, there was also a widespread ethos of taking responsibi...