Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia, 1864–1865 413
fill the ranks of the 117th USCI. The purpose of raising the regiment, he wrote,
seemed to have been “to enable the Kentuckians to avoid the draft, and it has done
more service in filling the [state’s draft] quota than it will in filling the army.” He
blamed sickness in the regiment on “excessive exposure in the wet and the cold of
the last month,” and recommended that pickets be allowed to build fires in “severe
weather” and that “new troops be relieved from fatigue duty in excess that exhausts
their strength, . . . and depresses their power of resisting disease. The health of the
troops appears to be in direct proportion to the intelligence of the men and the care
taken by the Company Commanders.” 78
While one of the division commanders in the XXV Corps worried about the
effect of fatigue assignments and picket duty during the winter on the health
of black soldiers (“the . . . consequence of this exposure in the Negro is Pneumonia”),
the other expressed more concern about rations, and the “total and
sudden change of [the troops’] habit of life.” “The derangement of the physical
system by a change of food without any transition is the abundant cause of
sickness among those new to the army,” wrote Brig. Gen. Edward A. Wild, who
had been a physician before the war.
It seems to be well established, that those recruits whose food had been for some
time the same as that used by soldiers do not suffer much from sickness. The
men who have labored in large numbers under contractors on the public works
soon enjoy the immunity of the veterans. . . . A larger mortality occurs among
the young men who come from our northern farms; but the severest effects are
witnessed among the class known as ‘contrabands,’ the freedmen from the rebellious
or the border states, who do not obtain in the army a single article of
their usual diet. Habituated to subsist on corn meal, fresh fish, yams, potatoes
and on the varied vegetable products of their garden patches, they have suffered
greatly from being placed suddenly under the regimen of the army ration. 79
Both generals were justified in their concern. During the last year of the war, the
likelihood of a black soldier contracting pneumonia was nearly four times greater
than that of a white soldier and the mortality rate among black soldiers was more
than 19 percent higher than among whites. The incidence of diarrhea and dysentery
was more than 36 percent higher in black regiments than in white, and black sufferers
were 25 percent more likely to die. The state of medical knowledge at the time was of
little help in treating these ailments: the surgeon general classed diarrhea and dysentery
with malaria and yellow fever as “miasmatic diseases” caused by unhealthy air.
Not until 1886 did medical research identify the organism that causes pneumonia. 80
Early that spring, with Sherman’s army on the move and Union troops in the
Carolinas moving inland from the coastal enclaves that they had so long occupied,
Mobile under siege, and a strong cavalry raid headed toward central Alabama,
78 Asst Surgeon A. A. Woodhull to Surgeon G. Suckley, 31 Jan 1865, Entry 517, pt. 2, RG 393,
NA.
79 Brig Gen E. A. Wild to Capt I. R. Sealy, 18 Jan 1865 (“the . . . consequence”), Entry 518, XXV
Corps, Misc LR, pt. 2, RG 393, NA; Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, pp. 135–37.
80 Medical and Surgical History, vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 637, 639, 710–11; William Bulloch, The
History of Bacteriology (London: Oxford University Press, 1960 [1938]), p. 237.