Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
Low-lying Morganza was one of the unhealthiest sites in Louisiana or, for that
matter, the entire United States.
Corps had arrived at Morganza after the failed spring campaign. Its historian, a
staff officer on the expedition, called the site “perhaps the most unfortunate in
which the corps was ever encamped.”
The heat was oppressive and daily growing more unbearable. The rude shelters
of brush and leaves . . . gave little protection; the levee and the dense
undergrowth kept off the breeze; and such was the state of the soil that when it
was not a cloud of light and suffocating dust, it was a sea of fat black mud. The
sickly season was close at hand, and the deaths were many. The mosquitoes
were at their worst.
The brigade of Colored Troops that had accompanied the Red River Expedition
became part of Morganza’s garrison. By summer, another three regiments, the
62d, 65th, and 67th, had joined it to constitute a division that numbered some
twenty-five hundred men in a force of sixty-seven hundred present for duty
there. 18
The force dwindled through the summer as causes arising from the military occupation
itself joined with the heat and mosquitoes to sicken the garrison. By August,
“the stench of decaying bodies” buried only three feet deep necessitated a search for a
new cemetery. The next month, the commissary officer felt obliged to explain that although
humidity imparted “a slight musty flavor” to the dried beans, peas, and hominy
that the troops received and the heat to which barrels of pickled meat were exposed
caused “a taint in the brine,” cooking the rations removed the unpleasant odor and
rendered them fit to eat. “Both officers and men should remember that the Govt. buys
for their use the best stores it can procure, & if by reason of the warm climate, the dis-
18 OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 2, p. 327; Irwin, Nineteenth Army Corps, p. 349 (quotation).