Death OF the Civil War

[Warph]

Death and the Civil War

How Disease Decimated Black Soldiers in the Civil War

September 2, 2014
By Sean Braswell

Read more: http://www.ozy.com/acumen/how-disease-decimated-black-soldiers-in-the-civil-war/33566?utm_source=Outbrain&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=All%20Clicks%20-%20All%20Devices

Black civil war soldiers with weapons in a line looking at camera

Why you should care because, as Nelson Mandela once said,  "There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere."

By the late summer of 1864, a century and a half ago, more than 100,000 African American soldiers were serving in the U.S. Civil War, providing a much-needed boost to Abraham Lincoln's struggling Union forces. These proud soldiers, many of whom were former slaves, "had been to the armory of God," said one black sergeant, "and had received weapons of the heart, that made them daring and dangerous foes."

The Union's newest enlistees fought courageously, but neither God nor their new employer had equipped them with the armor to fight an even more daunting enemy than the Confederacy: Disease.

According to The Library of Congress, an astonishing 29,000 of those 100,000 black soldiers died from disease during the Civil War. Or, nine times the number that would perish fighting.

Pneumonia, malaria, dysentery, small pox and typhoid fever were the primary culprits, and devastated many black units: One black infantry regiment lost 524 soldiers to disease in a single year, half of its overall numbers. As one lieutenant stationed in Louisiana wrote: "The mortality in our Regt. beats anything that I ever saw. They frequently drop dead in the streets."

The Civil War was the greatest biological crisis of the 19th century. Unsanitary camps, unburied bodies and inadequate medical care contributed to the deaths of over 400,000 soldiers from disease. According to historian Glenn W. LaFantasie, author of Gettysburg Requiem (2006), "[d]isease and primitive medical knowledge were the Civil War soldier's worst enemies. For every soldier killed in battle, two died of disease."

The camp conditions confronting the average soldier were appalling. For black soldiers, it was even worse. Those who became ill "died at a rate two and a half times higher than their white counterparts," according to The Library of Congress.

Discrimination led not only to unequal pay and poorly-provisioned regiments, but grossly deficient medical care. Many white medical officers were unwilling to treat black units, one white doctor observing that "[v]ery few surgeons will do precisely for blacks as they would for whites." And there were only three black physicians serving the Union Army's 166 black regiments.

Emancipation and the long war caused severe dislocation in black communities, disrupting kin networks, and leaving millions without adequate shelter, food or access to medical care. And things would only get worse: Sickness and disease threatened the lives of 3.5 million freed slaves after the war ended.

Prior to the Civil War, the great orator, journalist and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, had argued, "let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."

By the time the 14th Amendment finally granted citizenship to freed slaves in 1868, the combination of disease, war, discrimination and unthinkable hardship had taken a massive toll on black soldiers and communities, but there was, as Douglass had predicted, no question that they had not just earned citizenship but also deserved the eternal respect and admiration of a nation.


http://books.google.com/books?id=-pSJxZ9wqt4C&pg=PA145&lpg=PA145&dq=%22They+had+been+to+the+armory+of+God,%22&source=bl&ots=om6DUP9aCC&sig=K2t35A12BUddeRf0IUOEBHIB-bs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0KX7U-XyLa_ksATMg4L4Cw&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=7svFnyOLknUC&pg=PA637&dq=black+soldiers+civil+war+died+from+disease&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ac8EVKSKIYzzgwTenYC4BQ&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=black%20soldiers%20civil%20war%20died%20from%20disease&f=false

[...]

The Civil War By the Numbers

From 1861 to 1865, the Civil War ravaged America. It still holds several notorious records, such as the highest number of average deaths per day (504). Read more of the shocking statistics from the War that divided our nation.

•4:1               The ratio of people who attended church weekly to those who voted in the 1860 election
•2.5               Approximate percentage of the American population that died in the Civil War
•7 mil           Number of Americans lost if 2.5% of the population died in war today

•2.1 mil        Number of Northerners mobilized to fight for the Union army
•880,000    Number of Southerners mobilized for the Confederacy
•50                Estimated percentage of Civil War deaths that occurred in the last two years of the War
•40+             Estimated percentage of Civil War dead who were never identified
•66                Estimated percentage of dead African American Union soldiers who were never identified
•2 out of 3   Number of Civil War deaths that occurred from disease rather than battle
•68,162        Number of inquiries answered by the Missing Soldiers Office from 1865-1868

•4 mil           Number of enslaved persons in the U.S. in 1860
•180,000     Number of African American soldiers that served in the Civil War
•1 in 5           Average death rate for all Civil War soldiers
•3:1               Ratio of Confederate deaths to Union deaths
•9:1               Ratio of African American Civil War troops who died of disease to those that died on the battlefield, largely due to discriminatory medical care
•200             Number of African American soldiers massacred following their surrender at Ft. Pillow, Tennessee on April 12, 1864

•100,000+  Number of Civil War Union corpses found in the South through a federal reinterment program from 1866-1869
•303,356     Number of Union soldiers who were reinterred in 74 congressionally-mandated national cemeteries by 1871
•0                  Number of Confederate soldiers buried in those national cemeteries
•58                Number of Confederate bodies thrown down a local farmer's well on a federal burial detail in
1862

•1,733           Approximate number of American battlefield deaths in the Mexican War, 1846-1848
•900             Approximate number of battlefield deaths in 12 hours at the Battle of Bull Run
•3,000         Estimated number of horses killed at the Battle of Gettysburg

[...]

Death and the Civil War

Three months into the American Civil War, on July 21, 1861, more than 60,000 men charged into each other on a field outside the Virginia town of Manassas. It was the War's first major land battle, and in just 12 hours, 900 men were killed and 2,700 wounded. At the Battle of Bull Run, the terrible reality of the War had come crashing down. Though universally predicted to be a brief and bloodless military adventure, the Civil War dragged on for four dark years, killing an estimated 750,000 men -- nearly 2.5 percent of the American population. The impact permanently altered the character of the republic, the culture of the government, and the psyche of the American people for all time.

Woefully unprepared for the monumental work of burying and accounting for the dead, northerners and southerners alike had to find a way to deal with the hundreds of thousands of bodies, many of which were unidentified, and the grieving families who sought information on loved ones who, in the end, would never be found. Following the common Christian notions of the "proper" way to die and be buried was all but impossible for most soldiers on the front. Before the Civil War, America had no national cemeteries; no provisions for identifying or burying the dead, notifying the next of kin, or providing aid to the suffering families of dead veterans; no federal relief organizations; no effective ambulance corps; no adequate federal hospitals.

By the time Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union in April 1865, much of the work of death had only just begun. Tens of thousands of soldiers lay unburied, their bones littering battlefields; still more had been hastily interred where they fell, and hundreds of thousands remained unidentified.

"After the Civil War, the United States thought constantly about the dead, this constituency that was no longer there, and yet was so powerful in the influence it has on our nation, because the nation had to live up to the sacrifice that these individuals represented," says Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering, on which the film is based.

While Congress passed legislation to establish and protect national cemeteries in February 1867, the $4 million program would re-inter the bodies of only the Union Soldiers in 74 national cemeteries; all 30,000 African American soldiers were buried in areas designated "colored." White southerners channeled their deep feelings of grief, loss, rage and doubt into reclaiming the bodies of hundreds of thousands of their dead loved ones, abandoned by the federal government. The refusal of the victorious North to attend to the vanquished southern dead would have powerful consequences for generations to come.

Decoration Day rituals -- placing seasonal flowers on graves sites -- sprang up around the country. In the spring of 1868, General John Logan, officially designated May 30 "for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country." Memorial Day is still celebrated nationally on the day General Logan specified three years after the end of the Civil War. Many southern states recognize Confederate Memorial Day on a different date from the nationwide holiday, reflecting persistent sectional differences among both the living and the dead.

The generation of Americans that survived the Civil War lived the rest of their lives with grief and loss. Some continued to search for information about their missing loved ones until they themselves died. Others were never able to get over the cruel deaths of sons, husbands, or dear friends and lived in perpetual mourning. Their struggle to give meaning to the seemingly senseless deaths of so many still haunts us today.