Illness a wartime killer
During the Civil War, many would die before ever getting to the battlefield
Published 3:55 pm, Saturday, November 23, 2013
Even in their innocence, the soldiers of North and South who marched off to war 150 years ago were aware of the dangers of the battlefield. As much as they embraced the adventure, there was an awareness of the likely horrors of battle that challenged their heroic visions of war.
Northern soldiers may have believed that they were superior to the poorly equipped Southern rabble, and Southerners may have boasted that one Confederate could kill seven "Yankees," but even in their enthusiastic response to war, the bragging talk was tempered by fears of what lay ahead in combat.
If the soldiers acknowledged this risk, they were less prepared to confront the threat of disease. The soldiers were willing to die in battle and sacrifice their lives for something meaningful, but less aware that for every soldier who would fall in battle, four would perish from disease. Nor did they realize how many would die before ever reaching the front.
In the Town of Bethlehem, where the 16th New York Infantry once camped before leaving for Virginia in June 1861, the shattered gravestone of Pvt. Martin W. Daniels is all that remains as evidence of the Union soldiers who trained here for war. Daniels, who enlisted at Stockholm, in St. Lawrence County, died of disease and was buried here. The family that owned the land recalled how a woman used to visit and place flowers on the grave long into the 1930s, until the visits became fewer and then stopped altogether. A road was eventually constructed through the area and the gravestone tossed aside. Daniels still rests there in some unknown place.
The devastating effects of disease were mostly related to the demographics of the two armies. The average soldier of both sides in the Civil War was a farm boy between the ages of 18 and 21 who had not developed immunities to many common diseases. The men who filled the ranks had never been brought together before in such large numbers. Add to this the privations of diet, sanitation, clothing and shelter, and the result was deadly to thousands. As they trained for war, few could know that many would perish before ever firing a shot in anger.
Germ theory would not be discovered until long after the war, so diseases like dysentery and typhoid cut down the fresh-faced soldiers of North and South more quickly and effectively than bullets. The role of insects and vermin in carrying disease was unknown and diseases like malaria were attributed to "swamp air." Three out of five Union soldiers died of disease and two out of three Confederates. Simple diarrhea was the greatest killer, accounting for 20 percent of all deaths, followed by pneumonia (14 percent) and typhoid (13 percent). In all, about 63 percent of Union soldier deaths (224,586) were due to disease. It is estimated that about 160,000 Confederates died of disease.
The story of Pvt. George Sleezer was typical. Sleezer enlisted in the 20th Illinois Infantry in September 1864 at age 18. He became sick soon after enlisting and died at Springfield, Ill., that November. A photograph taken after Sleezer's enlistment depicts him in full uniform and holding his musket. He never saw a battlefield, and never even joined his regiment in the field.
In the early months of the war, when Union troops came together in the large camps around Washington D.C., many soldiers soon fell sick. Soldiers were drinking water from contaminated sources and suffering in the crammed camps. Capt. Charles Dudley, an officer serving in a regiment stationed near the Capitol, wrote home to his family in Manchester, Vt.: "The weather is cold here. We have had a strong wind all the past day and night and the men are suffering for want of better sleeping blankets... to look on and see others needing comforts, necessaries that cannot be had, makes me sick at heart... many of my company have been sick, some 10 of them very sick... I am sick at heart at times when I go to the hospital and see the suffering ones."
Those camped around Washington, with access to the public buildings now converted to hospitals, may have been the fortunate ones. Some Northern regiments found themselves sent to the Deep South, to the islands scattered along the Carolina coasts, or to the sweltering bayous of Louisiana.
The 177th New York Infantry, a unit known as the "Albany Zouave Cadets", shipped out of Albany in December 1862 and were sent to New Orleans. Once they arrived, the men immediately took ill. Lt. Richard C. Strong, a prominent Albany attorney, served as an officer in the 177th. Strong selflessly exposed himself to his sick soldiers on a daily basis. Ultimately, he too, became ill and died from the effects of typhoid in May 1863. The 177th Infantry lost a total of eight men to the effects of battle and 160 to disease during its service.
The Civil War is remembered today as a conflict of great battles; the names Antietam, Gettysburg, and Shiloh still resonate, and the battlefields of the war have become hallowed ground. But simple remembrance of the battles denies the full meaning of the war. The impact of the Civil War and the legacy of loss that so changed our nation over the course of four years had as much to do with those who suffered and were lost in camp and hospital as those who fell in battle. The war extracted a tremendous human cost from our nation, and those who perished in the conflict from sickness also gave, in President Abraham Lincoln's words, their "last full measure of devotion" to their divided nation.