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c h a p t e r s e v e n Death on the Rio Grande Noah Davis had traveled many miles since those exciting days in the fall of 1863, when he joined the 8th U.S. Colored Infantry regiment at Camp William Penn, near Philadelphia. His regiment first moved to Hilton Head, South Carolina, and then marched into Florida, where it saw battle at Olustee. Back in Virginia, Noah had the satisfaction of watching Petersburg and Richmond fall to Union troops, and was at Appomattox when Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia on 9 April 1865. Like many soldiers he probably thought the war was nearly over and that he would soon return to civilian life. But Noah had signed up for three years, so when the order came for his regiment to board ships for Texas, he had little choice but to go. On 24 May 1865 his regiment left City Point, Virginia, for the three-week trip around the tip of Florida and through the Gulf of Mexico, bound for a little barrier island near Brownsville called Brazos Santiago. Noah and his comrades were not in the best of health. They were tired of the army fare and welcomed the canned fruits occasionally provided by the Sanitary Commission. But there was little forage left in the warravaged countryside of Virginia, and many nights Noah went to bed hungry . It was getting harder to chew the hardtack crackers, for his gums were sore and his teeth loose. The voyage was particularly tedious, as there were no supplements to salt pork, hardtack, and co¤ee, morning, noon, and night. Noah was thirsty, too. The water ration on board was carefully doled out, and there was never enough to wash down the salty fare. Arrival in Texas brought no relief. The food was the same. The water was worse. There was no fresh water on the island, so the men relied on a strange contraption that took salt out of the ocean water and delivered a barely drinkable brackish brew, steaming hot, to quench their thirst while laboring under the summer sun. As more and more regiments arrived, the water ration was cut and cut again. Finally, the men could bear it no more, and Noah’s oªcers announced that they were moving about a hundred miles up the Rio Grande to the Ringgold Barracks. Noah agreed with his friends that the river water tasted nasty, but at least there was plenty of the muddy liquid to go around. Noah managed to stay on his feet until the regiment arrived at Ringgold but then could go no further. He entered the hospital there, diagnosed with scurvy. By now Noah’s gums bled at the lightest touch, his legs were swollen and ulcerated, and diarrhea plagued him. His doctors prescribed pulque, a drink made from the mashed leaves of the Agave Americana plant, which grew nearby in abundance. A cousin of a plant that is a key ingredient in tequila, Agave Americana was rumored to be a good treatment for scurvy. Noah drank it as ordered but felt no better. He grew weaker over time, and when his regiment was mustered out in October, Noah was transferred instead to the army’s hospital in Brownsville. There he died on 7 December 1865.1 Noah died of a disease whose causation and cure were well understood in his own time. Why did he develop scurvy? And why, when hospitalized, did he receive such inadequate care that he died of the disease? His was not an isolated case. Rather, his story is the one surviving case report of a major outbreak of scurvy that is illustrative, if nothing else, of how not to feed and support an army. Hundreds of men died without seeing a single hostile action, and the army’s response was to deny and cover up its oªcers ’ obvious malfeasance. The poor planning and execution of the deployment in Texas had its origins in inexperience and inadequate knowledge about the physical environment, but its taproot was a callous disregard for the 25,000 black men transferred there without adequate food or water. The Invasion of Texas “Where did the Civil War end?” a colleague asked me shortly after I came to Duke University. “Why, at Appomattox, when Lee surrendered, sometime in April 1865,” I answered. “Wrong!” he crowed. “It ended 120 Intensely Human [3.129.70.63] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 00...

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