Day 109. June 17, 1862.
109
you have my shadow that I am forced to call my life….
June Tuesday 17 1862
Somewhat cool this morning. I found myself in the Keystone State at Harrisburg. I stoped at the Bomgardner Hotel. I was through town some. I eat my dinner and at 10oclock I took the train going West for home. I paid $2.20 cts for a ticket to Spruce Creek. I meet Levi [illeg. looks like “Sthal”] in the cars and Lieut Frank Bare formerly of the 110th Regt P.V. I saw some few at Huntingdon that I was acquainted. I arrived at Birmingham at 6oclock in the evenning and I walked over home. I took them by surprise. I found the family and father and mother all well. Mrs Burket was down at Her mothers on a visit. Lee* had growen very much. It was 6 months lacking 5 days
I took them by surprise…. Imagine how excited he was as he “walked over home.” 6 months lacking 5 days. That’s a long time to be gone at war.
Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia Kathryn Shively Meier P. 136
“By June, Jackson’s army appeared to some observers to be self-destructing from exhaustion and exposure. Confederate stragglers scattered the Valley Turnpike, being plucked up by Federals as prisoners of war.
Four hundred miles of active campaigning later, Jackson’s “foot cavalry” disembarked from the Valley on June 17 for the Peninsula and scarcely paused again until July 8.
P. 139
By July 13, President Lincoln took notice of the mass absenteeism in McClellan’s ranks. Lincoln warned, “45,000 of your Army [are] still alive, and not with it. I believe half, or two thirds of them are fit for duty to-day….How can they be got to you? and how can they be prevented from getting away in such numbers for the future?” While McClellan haggled with Lincoln’s numbers, he admitted, “The number…really absent is thirty eight thousand two hundred fifty….I quite agree with you that more than one half these men are probably fit for duty to-day. I have frequently called the attention lately of the War Dept to the evil of absenteeism.”
P. 45
The summer weather had been punishing. Half of the June days were marked by heaving rains, and some of the sultrier days crested at ninety-two degree. July was even more stifling. During at least twenty-two of the days, temperatures soared from eighty to ninety-five degrees, and August brought additional withering heat; twenty-four days of heat that dangled in the upper eighties to mid-nineties. Contemporary sick reports, while vast underestimates, portrayed change over time. By June on the Peninsula, an estimated twenty-four percent of over 100,000 Federal troops were listed as no longer fit for duty; by July, twenty-nine percent were reported as ailing. As early as March 1862, the Army of Northern Virginia’s 49,394 troops had suffered approximately 149,148 cases of illness, and this number rose dramatically throughout the summer. Many of the cases on both sides were diarrhea or dysentery, which carried a ten percent mortality rate.
Men, in fact, spent the majority of their time concerned with the other enemy that had dictated movement and, to their thinking, caused staggering sickness and despondency in the ranks. That enemy was the environment– the weather, climate, seasons, terrain features, flora, and fauna that they could not avoid, exposed as they were by lack of supplies, a pace too quick in the Valley to secure proper protection and too slow on the Peninsula to avoid befouled soil and water, and swarms of disease-bearing insects.
P. 59
The U.S. Medical Department estimated in the Valley from January to June 1862 a total of 18,277 cases of miasmatic diseases, 3,676 cases of digestive organ diseases, 1,979 cases of rheumatism, 344 cases of headache, 6 cases of sunstroke, 34 cases of worms, and 47 cases of scurvy. It is striking that fevers ranked above diarrhea when there is clear evidence that diarrhea was the most common sickness of Civil War soldiers. With a mortality rate of around ten percent, bowel complaints would prove the number-one killer by war’s end.
P. 60
Diarrhea was the most common ailment described for both sides, followed by fevers, then rheumatic aches and pains. Forty-three percent of soldiers from both sides described themselves or their regiments as being in extremely poor health during the campaigns from January to mid-August 1862, meaning they suffered frequent debilitating illnesses or prolonged periods of inefficiency or hospitalization. These soldiers were too sick to be reliable in the ranks, often straggling to rest or seek care, repeatedly reporting to sick call or the hospital, and unable to fulfill their daily duties. Eleven percent of soldiers described their health as fair, suffering several incidents of acute sickness that took them out of duty for days, but they were able to return to effective duty.
Soldiers who self-reported tended to identify weather as the primary contributor to poor health. Exposure couple with exhaustion was probably a greater underlying cause of illness in the Valley tan on the Peninsula. This explains the early spike in disease in the Valley in March, when weather was at its most mercurial.
P. 61
According to the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, from January to June in the Shenandoah Valley U.S. soldiers suffered 118 reported cases of nostalgia. It is important to note that these cases were severe to the point of complete debilitation and removal from the front lines; those suffering from lesser cases of homesickness or melancholy would not have been reported. In addition, nine cases of insanity and at least one suicide appeared in the records. For the Army of the Potomac on the Peninsula during this same period, 133 were reported as suffering from nostalgia, 174 from insanity, and 12 ended their lives voluntarily. The numbers so vastly underrepresented self-reported low morale that official records might be useful only to suggest that the U.S. Medical Department acknowledged that mental afflictions existed.
Approximately twenty-two percent of the men expressed frequent homesickness, loneliness, melancholy, and despair in 1862, resulting in significant impairment to army operations.
As Pvt. Gerald Fitzgerald of the 12th Massachusetts put it to his sweetheart, “I hardly know why I take my pen uninspired to write to you unless to provoke an answer for, as I suppose I must have often told you, letters are all I have….For news of me take blank and divide by ten and you have my shadow that I am forced to call my life.” He could scarcely remove himself from his tent to attend to duties. “We of the Army of nothing and nobody, Head Quarters to no-where, on duty against the Commissary Department, may afterall, settle the ‘on to Richmond’ clamor by obeying the ‘Vox Populi.'”
Terrible Swift Sword Bruce Catton P. 345
“These absentees represented a problem the War Department was never able to solve. Comparatively few of the missing 45,000 were actually deserters; mostly, they were men who had fallen ill and had been transferred to hospitals in their home states, the theory being that they would recover more rapidly in familiar surroundings. They theory was sound enough, but the home-state hospitals were entirely under the control of home-state politicians, and the army had no way to reclaim a man who got into one of them. McClellan once estimated that not more than a tenth of the men who were sent to these hospitals ever returned to duty, and neither he nor any other army commander was able to do anything about it. To the end, the army carried on its rolls the names of thousands of men who never fought.”
J.W. Naff
Do They Miss Me in the Trenches?
“Do they miss me in the trench, do they miss me?
When the shells fly so thickly around?
Do they know that I’ve run down the hillside
To look for my hole in the ground?
But the shells exploded so near me,
It seemed best for me to run;
And though some laughed as I crawfished,
I could not discover the fun.
I could not discover the fun.
I often get up in the trenches,
When some Yankee is near out of sight,
And fire a round or two at him, (Take that Yank!)
To make the boys think that I’ll fight.
But when the Yanks commence shelling,
I run to my home down the hill;
I swear my legs never will stay there,
Though all may stay there who will,
Though all may stay there who will.
I’ll save myself through the dread struggle,
And when the great battle is o’er,
I’ll claim my full ration of laurels,
As always I’ve done heretofore.
I’ll say that I’ve fought them as bravely
As the best of my comrades who fell,
And swear most roundly to all others
That I never had fears of a shell,
That I never had fears of a shell.”
Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War Jonathan W. White P. 182-183
“….some soldiers experienced a sort of physical restoration from battle wounds in their dreams. Col. Henry Shippen Huidekoper of the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers lost his right arm at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. In the immediate aftermath of the amputation, he often inadvertently attempted to use his missing arm. “At home, I drove every day while regaining strength,” he wrote. When a gust of wind would blow his straw hat off his head, he would “involuntarily” attempt “to catch my hat with my right hand.” Eventually these phantom feelings became less frequent (although he continued to feel his fingers in a partially clenched position), but his missing hand still came back to him in his dreams.
In 1906, Huidekoper wrote to S. Weir Mitchell, a Philadelphia physician who was conducting research on the neurological effects of amputations:
I was 24 years old when I lost my arm, and am now 67. Almost two-thirds of my life has passed without thought of the possible use of my right arm, and yet never have I dreamed once, that I was not without two arms, and only last night I dreamt that I was holding a paper up with my two hands. When I ride, or drive, or cling to [a] limb on the trees, or write, in my dreams, I always have the use of both of my hands….I write often in my dreams, but always with the right hand I used over forty years ago. To do this, I attempt to use the tendons which would hold and guide the pen, and this is done with so much fatigue…that I suffer great pain in my finger tendons, even to wakening me up from the most profound sleep, because of the pain in the lost hand.
“Thus,” he concluded, “in my dreams, I remain a man with a perfect frame, but while awake, I never think of myself otherwise than a one-handed being. And this after two-thirds, (and that of course the last two-thirds,) of my life had fully accustomed me to being with one hand only.’”
Note: “There is nothing like the sight of an amputated spirit. There’s no prosthetic for that.” Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman
Note: Jackson, just past midnight into the 18th, leaves Weyer’s Cave and hikes along Browns Gap Turnpike across the Blue Ridge Mountains, toward Richmond, a 120 mile march. This was the area Lee told his men that if he could make it to, he could hold out for 20 years. This dog’s still having it.
I took them by surprise….
There’s the moment here; pay attention to it. There’s a saying about letting sleeping dogs lie. He will not go back to Virginia, Perhaps not ever again. Likely not ever again. Enough’s enough.
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