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2. At War with Nature
- The University of North Carolina Press
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35 2 At War with Nature Just a few days into first encampment, soldiers had to reexamine the presumption that those raised on the fresh air of country life had superior constitutions to the urban-bred. “Death invaded my camp,” observed Capt. George Clark of Alabama, astonished by the swiftness of this transformation . Predictably, measles, mumps, small pox, scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other communicable disease ravaged approximately half of new recruits, leaving the lucky survivors seasoned by the first transition to army life. Clark had to admit, he was confused: “Remarkable as it may seem, the stout country boys whom it may be supposed could stand all kinds of hardships, were the first to succumb while the city boys as a rule escaped.”1 It slowly dawned on soldiers that armies were cities—large cities. The Union Army of the Potomac would swell to be the second largest Southern metropolis after New Orleans, and the Army of Northern Virginia would reach over twice the size of Richmond. Those men who had been raised among urban crowds and filth were thus better suited to endure army conditions. The transformation from rural to city landscape without sufficient infrastructures occurred right away, wherever armies marched. But from 1861 through 1862, soldiers began to observe an even more marked challenge to their prewar beliefs about seasoning. War had a leveling effect on bodies and disease locales. Southerners and Northerners alike were sick, not just on the Peninsula but in the Shenandoah Valley. Armies fouled water, dug entrenchments, contaminated soil with waste, and died in droves along with their animals, littering the landscape with bodies. This dismal environmental transformation would have been dangerous to health on its own, but soldiers were also supremely exposed to the elements, living almost exclusively outside with little protection. The men’s written accounts were 36 / At War with Nature abuzz connecting environmental phenomena to the sudden proliferation of physical and mental ailments. They tried to make sense of change and continuity with their prewar ideas, growing anxious. They did not want to be one of the unlucky who succumbed to disease. “No one need shun death on the battlefield when such as he so young & full of strength & hope fall by disease,” explained Lt. Charles B. Haydon of the 2nd Michigan.2 Many soldiers tried to dissuade loved ones from joining the ranks where they, too, might experience the terrible vulnerability of army life. “I kno it is the duty of every young man . . . to join the army and help to defend his country. But I wrote to John not to do it until he feels like he is able to stand a camp life. It takes a man who can shoulder his knapsack & musket and march 12 or 15 miles on a stretch as we have been doing for the last week. This is no place for the sick,” explained Pvt. Lewis H. Bedingfield of Georgia to his parents, regarding his brother’s impending enlistment.3 It was only July 8, 1861, when he wrote those words, but Bedingfield was already engaged in the traumatic process of soldier seasoning, involving physical, psychological, and behavioral adaptations to the environment of war. Despite Lewis’s fears, John and their third brother, Robert, did enlist in the autumn of 1861 to eventually participate in the Peninsula campaign. Unluckily, it would be Lewis who fell, mortally wounded at Gaines’s Mill on June 27, 1862, expiring July 3 in a Richmond hospital. Bob would become sick with dysentery that same June, and John would attend to both brothers in their misery—Lewis in Richmond before he died and Bob in Staunton.4 Unlike his brothers who were privates, John enjoyed the flexibility of being a commissioned officer—a first lieutenant—and so could briefly leave the ranks to oversee their health care. Before soldiers could learn to protect themselves from the environment of war, they had to understand it. When they were not engaged in combat (which was most of the time), men, such as the Bedingfields, would devote inordinate amounts of time to observing the connections between their bodies and nature. They believed their lives depended on acquiring such knowledge, and in many cases they were correct. In other cases, such as Lewis’s, death was simply unavoidable. THE CAMPAIGNS AND ENVIRONMENTAL EXPOSURE Before engaging with the soldiers’ environmental descriptions of health, the two campaigns in which they were involved require some introduction . What the particular environments entailed, when and...