Salisbury Prison

From "Stories from the Civil War", an online course for teachers. Provided by North Carolina Museum of History. During the early days of the Civil War, the Confederacy, unprepared to confine Northern prisoners of war and deserters or Southern deserters and dissenters, housed these men in jails and abandoned buildings. In July 1861 the Confederate government appealed to the states for a prison. North Carolina, the only state to offer a prison, suggested the site of a former cotton factory in Salisbury. Its location on a rail line would facilitate prisoner movement. The main structure, a four-story brick factory, and accompanying wooden buildings...

Read More

Soldiers' Food

By John Heiser, Gettysburg National Military Park. By far, the food soldiers received has been the source of more stories than any other aspect of army life. The Union soldier received a variety of edibles. The food issue, or ration, was usually meant to last three days while on active campaign and was based on the general staples of meat and bread. Meat usually came in the form of salted pork or, on rare occasions, fresh beef. Rations of pork or beef were boiled, broiled or fried over open campfires. Army bread was a flour biscuit called hardtack, re-named “tooth-dullers,” “worm castles,” and “sheet iron crackers” by the soldiers who ate...

Read More

Something to Eat

Major General Bryan Grimes to his daughter, April 16, 1862, in the Bryan Grimes Papers, North Carolina State Archives. Yorktown — Va April 16, 1862 My Dear Little Darling, Your letters Cannot find me So I will write to you in order that you may know where to direct your letters.… at present I am stationed at Yorktown with the enemy in front of us not more than 1200 yds distant who are continually shoveling their big shot at us/ just as I had written that Sentence a large bomb in weight much heavier than you, Came rushing through the air which made us all drop flat upon the ground and fell within our regimental Camp not more than thirty or...

Read More

Life in Camp

Walter Waightstill Lenoir to Selina Louisa Avery Lenoir, March 2, 1862, in the Lenoir Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Camp Lee, S. C., Mch. 2d 1862 Dear Mother, As I write so many letters home to let you all hear from me and brother Tom, I will commence by telling you something about myself and him. I continue in very fine health, with my digestion improved, and hardly ever deranged now, even by my hearty meals which are always somewhat in excess. But I enjoy Uriah’s coarse corn bread & wheat bread & fried midling & rice & potatoes, so much so that it is hard to stop...

Read More

A Plea for Supplies

Lt. Col. S. H. Walkup to Gov. Zebulon Vance, October 11, 1862, in the Governors Papers, North Carolina State Archives. Camp Near Winchester Va. Octr 11th, 1862. (This letter from Lt. Col. S. H. Walkup to North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance describes the pitiful situation of Confederate troops in the fall of 1862. From the beginning, the Confederacy was ill prepared for war. The Confederacy did not have a large supply of arms or ammunition and hoped to import the necessary tools of war from Europe. Most Confederate soldiers brought their own guns to war. The South also lacked factories for producing clothing or shoes, and by the middle of...

Read More

Enduring Amputation

Letter from Walter Waightstill Lenoir to Thomas Lenoir, April 8, 1863, in the Lenoir Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Walter Waightstill Lenoir was born in 1823 into the wealthy Lenoir family. He attended the University of North Carolina and practiced law in North Carolina before the Civil War. Although Lenior opposed slavery and disagreed with secession, he joined the Confederate army in January 1862. In September 1862, Lenoir was injured and his right leg was amputated. He returned to his family and moved to Haywood County, where he became a farmer. In 1883, he was elected as a...

Read More

Civil War Army Hospitals

From "To Bind Up the Nation's Wounds: Medicine During the Civil War." Provided by National Museum of Health and Medicine. Nearly 200,000 men lost their lives from enemy fire during the four years of the war. However, more than 400,000 soldiers were killed by an enemy that took no side — disease. From our modern perspective, medicine during the Civil War seems primitive. Doctors received limited medical education. Most surgeons lacked familiarity with gunshot wounds. The newly-developed minie ball produced grisly wounds that were difficult to treat. The Northern and Southern medical departments were ill-prepared for removing wounded men from...

Read More

William Hammond and the End of the Medical Middle Ages

By Pat Leonard, April 27, 2012 While other events of April 25, 1862, dominated the nation’s headlines — most notably the Confederate surrender of New Orleans — perhaps the most significant single event in the life of the average Union soldier was a presidential appointment that day that was hardly noticed outside Washington. Over the objection of Edwin Stanton, his secretary of war, President Lincoln named William Alexander Hammond as surgeon general of the Army. Hammond was the preferred candidate of Gen. George B. McClellan and the handpicked choice of the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization created to improve Army...

Read More

Civil War Era Photographs: Retinal Tissue

From: museumofvision.org One of the least generally known uses of early medical photography was the work of New York surgeon Reed Brockway Bontecou, who photographed wounded Civil War soldiers between 1864 and 1865. He provides the earliest records of wounded and healed-state conditions of ocular injuries. Bontecou’s images are significant documents of pre-antiseptic era infection states and many of his cases were reproduced as engravings by the Surgeon General’s Office. Photographs of retinal tissue, both gross and microscopic views, were important research tools used to identify retinal cell components and disease states. Budding ophthalmologists...

Read More

The End of the Gutbuster

By Pat Leonard, July 5, 2012 July 4, 1862, was hardly a day of celebration for the soldiers of the Union’s Army of the Potomac. Having been routed during the recent Seven Days battles by their new lead adversary, Robert E. Lee, the demoralized men in blue were left clinging to a scrap of the Virginia Peninsula, their earlier cries of “On to Richmond!” now just a bitter memory. The soldiers could not have known then, and would not know until years later, the immense impact on their lives that would be wielded by the single unassuming officer who entered their camps that day. Thousands of these men (and their eventual replacements) would perish...

Read More

The Minister of Death

By Carole Emberton, August 17, 2012 From April 29 to May 30, 1862, some 300,000 men — including my great-great grandfather, Pvt. Edward Willis — converged at the tiny railroad depot of Corinth, in northern Mississippi, where they laid siege to the Confederate forces under Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard. The Union soldiers scarred the landscape with miles of earthen fortifications. But the trenches could not protect Edward and his fellow soldiers from what Thomas Macaulay called “the most terrible of all the ministers of death,” a predator that craved those close, confined spaces, where men’s blood, breath and spit mingled freely. Although they fought...

Read More

Under the Knife

By Terry L. Jones, November 17, 2012 On Aug. 28, 1862, Maj. Gen. Richard S. Ewell’s Confederate division was fighting desperately in the fields and pine thickets near Groveton, Va., during the Second Bull Run campaign. Heavy fire was coming from unidentified soldiers in a thicket 100 yards in front. To get a better look, Ewell knelt on his left knee to peer under the limbs. Suddenly a 500-grain (about 1.1 ounces) lead Minié ball skimmed the ground and struck him on the left kneecap. Some nearby Alabama soldiers lay down their muskets and hurried over to carry him from the field, but the fiery Ewell barked: “Put me down, and give them hell!...

Read More

Brother Against Microbe

By Terry L. Jones, October 26, 2012 On Oct. 27, 1862, the Confederate cavalry commander Jo Shelby filed a report on his brigade’s recent operations in Missouri. The colonel concluded with a sobering assessment of his troopers’ physical condition. “Our men, from being so poorly clad, and owing to the excessive duties that they have been compelled to perform, are rapidly becoming unfit for service,” he wrote. “Our brigade reports now some 500 sick. We have a great many men without a blanket, overcoat, shoes, or socks.” When the brigade was first organized, he went on, it numbered 2,319 men, and “the greater portion were reported for duty until...

Read More

Counting the Costs of the Civil War

By Jeffrey Allen Smith and B. Christopher Frueh, November 7, 2013 While the desire to document military exploits and wars is as old as writing itself, the recording of military medical data is a relatively modern phenomenon. Although some initial attempts to chronicle the health of troops occurred in the first half of the 19th century, the first large-scale, wartime medical and behavioral health surveillance effort was conducted during the American Civil War. This is partly a reflection on the dismal state of the medical profession before the mid-19th century. By the Civil War era, medical practice had improved markedly over the previous...

Read More