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

Preface

p r e f a c e “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”1 Thus Robert Benchley advised his readers in an essay on procrastination and accomplishment. He had five tasks to do, and he put writing a newspaper article at the top of the list. He spent the rest of the day not working on the article, but he finished the other four tasks with splendid ease. The pages that follow this preface are one more illustration of how much you can get done if you work hard enough at not doing the assignment boldly printed (and underlined in red) at the top of your list. In my case, the oªcial task was writing a history of medicine in the U.S. Civil War, and, more particularly, the war’s e¤ect on American medicine . I had grants with which to do that; I had a sabbatical during which to do that; I had a lovely oªce in the National Humanities Center in which to do that. But I haven’t done it—at least not yet. Instead, that envisioned book’s chapter on black soldiers nibbled that seductive cake labeled “eat me” and morphed into a monograph all its own. A major distraction from my stated purpose was Ira Russell, a Civil War physician whose writings abound in the papers of the United States Sanitary Commission, a voluntary organization that functioned something like the American Red Cross would in later wars. Russell was a compassionate physician who became engrossed with the cause of the black Civil War soldier and his health. He had first cut open a black body in 1843 or 1844 as a medical student in New York City, where many of the bodies intended for dissection were shipped in barrels from the South. After returning home to New England and settling in Natick, Massachusetts, he probably saw few African Americans in his practice. But he was no doubt aware of the rising abolitionist sentiment roiling the state, and he became friends with Henry Wilson, later a firebrand senator from Massachusetts who defended the rights of black people during and after the war. When men from Natick formed a regiment in response to Lincoln’s call for troops, Russell joined as well. The medical department ultimately promoted him to running general hospitals, first in Arkansas and later in St. Louis. There Russell watched as trainloads of black men arrived, ragged, hungry, and half frozen, to be mustered into newly forming black regiments . Russell watched, too, as the men grew feverish, needed hospital beds, and were denied them by a “Copperhead quartermaster.” He wrote to Wilson, who shamed the army on the Senate floor for its inhumane treatment of its newest soldiers. Russell had acquired a new vocation: the care, defense, and study of the black soldier’s body.2 Letters and reports by Russell and others reveal a deep fascination with the workings of the black body among northern physicians newly exposed to black men in hospital and camp.3 The Civil War brought the fate of African Americans to the center of American consciousness. There were some 4 million slaves in the South; by 1863 it was clear that these people might soon be free and perhaps heading for the northern states. Would they be law abiding? Would they work without coercion? Were they healthy enough and smart enough to survive on their own? These questions were intense and immediate for many northerners, especially ones who had seen little of these dark-skinned people in the years before the war. Russell and like-minded physicians saw in the vast experiment of recruiting black men into the Union army an opportunity for scientific study and medical progress. The Sanitary Commission surveyed doctors who had treated large numbers of black soldiers, inquiring into areas of di¤erence. Black soldiers were measured, weighed, and tested when they left the army and were compared to white men. With great interest, northern physicians, including Russell, dissected the black body for clues as to its distinctiveness. And they had many bodies to explore, for poor treatment led to high rates of disease and death among black troops. Russell loudly protested the mistreatment—and was overtly proud of his autopsy work. x Preface This book follows Russell and his colleagues as...