The Glowing Wounds of the Battle of Shiloh

By Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, 4-2-12 The Battle of Shiloh was a major Civil War battle that occurred on April 6 and 7 of 1862 in Hardin County, Tennessee. The battle occurred when 40,000 Confederate soldiers led by General Albert Sidney Johnston clashed with a line of Union soldiers occupying ground near Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. The Confederates drove the Union troops from their camps and slowly surrounded, captured, killed or wounded most of them. The following day, a large number of Union reinforcements arrived and completely overwhelmed the weakened Confederate troops, forcing them to flee the battlefield. After the battle...

Read More

Home, Sweet Home

By Susan J. Matt, 4-19-12 In October 1861 Alfred Lewis Castleman, a surgeon in the Fifth Regiment of the Wisconsin Volunteers, described the first death in his regiment. It was not from battle. “The poor fellow died of Nostalgia (home-sickness), raving to the last breath about wife and children,” he wrote. “Deaths from this cause are very frequent in the army.” While today “nostalgia” is used to describe the longing for a lost time, the word originally signified acute homesickness, a condition widely regarded as a dangerous and often deadly illness. Doctors maintained that it could kill, either by worsening existing maladies or by causing...

Read More

History of the Dog Tag

From: 173rdairborne.com The Civil War provided the first recorded incident of American soldiers making an effort to ensure that their identities would be known should they die on the battlefield. Their methods were varied, and all were taken on a soldier's own initiative. In 1863, prior to the battle of Mine's Run in northern Virginia, General Meade's troops wrote their names and unit designations on paper tags and pinned them to their clothing. Many soldiers took great care to mark all their personal belongings. Some troops fashioned their own "ID" (identification) tags out of pieces of wood, boring a hole in one end so that they could be...

Read More

Walt Whitman—The Civil War’s One-Man Sanitary Commission

By Roy Morris, Jr., 5-31-15 During the American Civil War, great American poet Walt Whitman was a sort of one-man Sanitary Commission—not that he would have put it that way. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, the great American poet Walt Whitman was a man on the skids, personally and professionally. His revolutionary book of poems, Leaves of Grass, had been largely overlooked, and Whitman was spending most of his time drinking with his fellow bohemians at Pfaff’s beer cellar in New York City. Things changed dramatically in December 1862, after Whitman’s younger brother George was wounded while fighting in the Union Army at Fredericksburg,...

Read More

Minds at War

By Jeffrey Allen Smith and B. Christopher Frueh, 3-20-13 Any attempt to calculate the carnage of the Civil War, the number of sick, wounded, dismembered and dead, leaves one numb in the struggle to make sense of it all. The conditions and horrors faced by those who fought the war exacted a horrific toll. One would assume that the physical price paid by the men who fought in the war would have a rough equivalent in the mental price, that the experience of that terrible war would have left countless survivors with horrible psychological scars. But that may not actually be the case: according to official Union war records, adverse psychological...

Read More

A Nation At War: Armed With New Tools and Tactics, Doctors Head to the Battlefield

By Gina Kolatamarch, 3-30-03 From redesigned first-aid kits to a radically new kind of surgery on the front lines, battlefield medicine has changed markedly and, as a result, doctors in the war in Iraq hope to significantly reduce the death rate from battlefield wounds -- a rate that has not budged for 150 years. Since the Civil War, experts in military medicine say, one of five wounded soldiers has died, half from profuse bleeding. Pentagon doctors hope to change that, and have mobilized an array of innovations. Some, like putting pressure bandages in first-aid kits, are drugstore cheap. Others, like a new anticlotting drug for internal...

Read More

The Artificial Leg, 1846, by Benjamin Franklin Palmer

From: artofinvention.tripod.com This artificial leg introduced a new concept in prosthesis. The articulated joints at the knee, ankle and toe began the concept of natural-looking movement in artificial limbs. Palmer instituted the idea of eliminating large unsightly gaps between the various components of his leg and of putting springs and movement limits into the limb to give the appearance of natural movement. Palmer's artificial leg received an award at the first World's Fair at the Crystal Palace in London England in 185...

Read More

My Heart Toward Home: Letters of a Family during the Civil War

Eliza Woolsey Howland & Georgeanna Woolsey Bacon This is the story of a remarkable family during the Civil War. Seven daughters, one son, and their mother contributed their services to the Union cause. The book, based on the personal letters and diaries of the Woolsey family of New York, was written by Eliza Howland and Georgeanna Woolsey in 1898 but has never been published until now. "My Heart Toward Home: Letters of a Family During the Civil War, is an important new source for Civil War reenactors and researchers. Based on the letters and journal entries of the Woolsey family of New York, it is a treasure-trove of primary source material." Robin...

Read More

Angel's Glow at The Battle of Shiloh

From: americancivilwarstory.com At the Battle of Shiloh a strange phenomenon took place which came be known as Angel's Glow... As you may know, the Battle of Shiloh was a very bloody battle. With men desperately contesting the battle non-stop from dawn to dusk, the wounded and dying were left to find their own help. On top of that, neither army's medical services were prepared to deal with this level of carnage. As a result, many men were left lying in the field for days. This was a wet swampy region, which meant many of the wounded spent their waiting hours lying in mud and foul water. To compound their misery, it also rained part of the...

Read More

A Brief History Of The Dog Tag

By Sarah Sicard, 1-15-16 The use of the iconic form of identification has its roots in the Civil War. During the Civil War, the inability of the military to identify battlefield casualties created the need for a soldier identification method. According to the U.S. Army Quartermaster Foundation, prior to the Battle of Mine Run in northern Virginia 1863, Gen. George Meade’s troops wrote their names and unit designations on paper tags and pinned them to their clothing. At the same time, other soldiers created prototype identification tags out of pieces of wood, perforating one end so that they could be worn on a string around their necks. Between...

Read More

In 19th Century,Rabies Was Menacing

By Bill Kemp, Archivist/librarian; McLean County Museum of History 12-5-10 BLOOMINGTON — “Kill your dogs!” declared a panicky Bloomington newspaper in November 1860. “Better every one of them should die than that one human being should suffer.” At issue was an outbreak of hydrophobia (known today as rabies) among the canine and feline populations of the city. The appearance of rabies often sparked such overreaction in the 19th century. A virus usually transmitted via saliva from the bites of infected animals (including people), rabies attacks the central nervous system, and once symptoms appear it’s almost always fatal. The late stages of...

Read More

Elmira Prison

From: nps.gov Elmira, New York, is situated five miles from the Pennsylvania line. In the beginning the camp was used for new recruits, but by May 15, 1864, some of the barracks were set aside for prisoners-of-war. A twelve foot-high fence was constructed, framed on the outside with a sentry's walk four feet below the top and built at a safe distance from the barracks. Housing consisted of thirty-five two-story barracks each measuring 100 by 20 feet. Two rows of bunks were along the walls and as the prison became crowded some prisoners lived in "A" tents. The first group of prisoners, shipped from Point Lookout, Maryland, arrived at Elmira...

Read More

Something Must Be Done: The Construction and Dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg

By Hannah Christensen ’17 Not only did the armies leave something of a state of chaos behind them after the battle of Gettysburg; they also left their dead buried poorly almost everywhere. Within days, the combination of rain and pigs rooting around the battlefield had exposed multiple skeletons and partially-decomposed bodies. The smell was horrendous, and residents and visitors alike were shocked by the state of the burials. Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin was among these visitors. After seeing the state of affairs during his tour of the battlefield on July 10th, Curtin appointed local attorney David Wills to act as his “agent” in affairs...

Read More

The Women of Winchester, Virginia

By Virginia R. Bensen, 11-30-11 We are happy to welcome guest author Virginia R. Bensen. This is the Introduction to a series of articles that will follow over the next few months about the Civil War women of Winchester, Virginia. What is interesting about these women is each represents either a Unionist or Secessionist perspective. The articles in this series will sometimes focus on just one woman from Winchester or Frederick County, Virginia. In other articles, there will be a bantering of diary entries between two or more women. At first I thought I would write about all Secessionists, and then all Unionists, or all about the younger...

Read More

War Surgery

From: bhatmanjim.weebly.com The U.S. Army had more doctors than it needed prior to the Civil War.  Surgeons and their assistants found themselves working in remote outposts, spread throughout the country and on the Western Frontier.  Their patients were a small numbers of soldiers who saw little conflict.  Only diseases such as malaria and yellow fever were troublesome.  Surgeons were rarely involved with such diseases however. As the Civil War approached the quality of medical training had decreased tremendously.  These inexperienced, unknowledgeable surgeons and doctors soon found hundreds of injured and dying men...

Read More

Letter from Charles Francis Adams, Jr. to Abigail Brooks Adams, 8 January 1865

From: masshist.org Writing across the Atlantic to his family stationed in Europe, Union soldier Charles Francis Adams, Jr., reports here on his new duties commanding an African-American regiment at the Confederate prisoner-of-war hospital in Point Lookout, Md. With his own health nearly broken by a recent bout with malaria, Adams struggles to professionalize his new corps. And, as the conflict winds to a bloody close, Adams reassures his mother that Southern prisoners are receiving adequate treatment from a federal government still capable of "Christian spirit & forbearance." Knowing that "war is cruel in all its parts," Charles was determined...

Read More

Dead Cattle and Greek Fire

By Jeffrey B. Roth, 3-25-14 The American Civil War was a conflict that sat astride two phases in military history: It began with generals on both sides employing timeworn Napoleonic-era strategies and ended with horrific trench warfare and violence against civilian populations that foreshadowed World War I. It was also a crucible in which new combat technologies were tested, among them ironclads, machine guns and submarines. And while scientists had not yet fully grasped the germ theory of disease, it was also one of the first conflicts to see chemical and biological agents tested, and even used, as weapons. Disease was everywhere during...

Read More