Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War

8 Telling the Story

c h a p t e r e i g h t Telling the Story The most curious feature of postwar accounts of the black soldier’s body is the missing perspective of the sympathetic physician. Ira Russell published two papers based on his experience at Benton Barracks, but their critique of the overall treatment of the black soldier is fairly mild and makes no direct charges of abuse. Instead, the point of view that the black soldier was inherently inferior was allowed to stand and was even codified by anthropometric statistics that emerged from the war. Sanford Hunt published Russell’s autopsy data, and he cast it in terms expressive of the innate shortcomings of the African soldier. By the 1890s many had forgotten that the black man served at all in the Union armies, and those who did acknowledge the black presence in war did so only to draw conclusions about the inability of the black body to cope with the strains of army and, by extension, independent life. Russell’s paper on pneumonia at the Benton Barracks begins by noting that there were six regiments of black troops recruited there and that in the winter of 1863–1864 pneumonia was particularly prevalent among them.1 Even in the midst of such misery, Russell maintained his scientific perspective. “I watched the progress of this disease with much interest and care. Autopsies were frequently made, and the morbid appearances carefully noted. I have endeavored to ascertain . . . the causes that operated in producing the disease, and the most e¤ectual mode of combating it.”2 In explaining this wave of illness, Russell noted that the winter was very cold, “the like of which had never been experienced by that important personage, the ‘oldest inhabitant.’”3 The barracks were next described , in calmer language than he generally used in his letters to the Sanitary Commission. “One hundred men were crowded into rooms orig- inally meant but for fifty, necessarily rendering the air very impure; and this evil was rendered greater by the faulty construction of the barracks and imperfect ventilation.”4 Finally, some sort of epidemic influence was at work, for hospital attendants who lived in more comfortable surroundings also su¤ered from the disease. It is worth noting that the strongest conclusions drawn in the paper are not ones about which specific data are o¤ered. Russell and his physician colleagues found that a supportive, stimulant plan of treatment, which included tonics, alcohol, and a nutritious diet worked better than heroic therapies such as bloodletting, antimony, and mercury. But there was no attempt here to test one mode of therapy against another. The many postmortems done generated much data on factors such as the weight of the lungs, degree of “hepatization” (a measure of severity), and the presence of e¤usions. He also gathered data on length of hospitalization , yet he does not comment on the practical importance of this information . Russell does draw some general conclusions about “the characteristics of this disease as it a¤ected di¤erent races and classes of persons.” He did not believe that black men were inherently liable to pulmonary disease, as was widely argued. Russell had the opportunity to compare people of roughly the same socioeconomic class—the contraband turned soldier and the poor white refugee. He found that “pneumonia was prevalent among them all. The attacks were not as frequent among the white soldiers , nor were they as fatal. Among the other classes mentioned little di¤erence was observed, except the greater frequency of the disease, and greater mortality among the white refugees.”5 But Russell goes on to emphasize that more pleuritic adhesions and scarring, indicative of old pulmonary disease, was found among blacks than whites (class not speci- fied). Still, those same autopsies showed much less sign of tuberculosis than prevailing opinion would predict. Finally, the healthy black lung weighed four ounces less on average than the white, a fact that might explain , Russell posits, the “inability of the negro to endure forced marches with equal facility with the white soldier, as has been frequently shown during the war.”6 Meningitis was also rampant among the troops at Benton Barracks during those fatal early months of 1864. Russell reported that some fifty Telling the Story 143 cases appeared among the black troops, and half of those patients died. Then it spread to the white...