In December 1862, as Union and Confederate forces prepared for battle near the Virginia town of Fredericksburg, the civilian residents fled in haste.  Confederate artillery operator Robert Stiles remembers seeing women and children evacuating their homes:

“I never saw a more pitiful procession than they made trudging through the deep snow... little children tugging along with their doll babies... women so old and feeble that they could carry nothing and could barely hobble themselves.  There were women carrying a baby in one arm, and its bottle, its clothes, and its covering in the other.  Some had a Bible and a toothbrush in one hand, a picked chicken and a bag of flour in the other.

Most of them had to cross a creek swollen with winter rains, and deadly cold with winter ice and snow.  We took the battery horses down and ferried them over, taking one child in front and two behind, and sometimes a woman or a girl on either side with her feet in stirrups, holding on by our shoulders.  Where they were going we could not tell, and I doubt if they could.”

Pressed by the costs of the war, both North and South struggled to keep their economies working.  The South, with few financial resources and little industry, suffered more from wartime inflation and critical shortages.  The North, supported by banks and developing industries, responded quickly to the changes brought about by the war.

Southern Shortages, Falling Morale

By the end of 1862, the South’s economy had begun to suffer from the war.  Although many farms had converted from cotton to food crops, the collapse of the South’s transportation system and the presence of Union troops in several important agricultural regions led to severe food shortages during the winter of 1862.

The food shortages hurt Southern morale, and people began to question the sacrifices they were being called upon to make—or to demand of others.  Hearing of the hardships, many Confederate soldiers deserted and returned home to help their families.

In the spring of 1863, the food shortages led to riots.  In several communities, mobs of women armed with knives and guns marched into shops to seize food.  In Richmond, several hundred women broke into shops, yelling, “Bread, bread,” and then began to loot the stores for food, clothing, shoes, and other goods.  The riot finally ended when Jefferson Davis confronted the mob with a company of militia troops and ordered the rioters to disperse.

The Union’s War Boom

In contrast, the North experienced an economic boom because of the war.  Its growing industries supplied the troops at the front with clothes, munitions, and other necessities, while innovations in agriculture helped minimize the loss of labor as men left to fight.

The expanded use of mechanized reapers and mowers made farming possible with fewer workers, many of whom were women.  One traveler in Iowa in late 1862 commented that he “met more women driving teams on the road and saw more at work in the fields than men.”

Women also filled labor shortages in various industries, particularly in clothing and shoemaking factories.  New sewing machines greatly increased the productivity of seamstresses.  As women entered the textile industry, the North produced an abundance of clothes for its soldiers, and the industry profited from government contracts.

Explaining
What were the effects of food shortages on the South?
 

. The Telegraph Invented by Samuel Morse in 1837, the telegraph was indispensable during the Civil War.  It was used to send battle orders and to verify the locations of troops.  With no telegraph in the White House, President Lincoln often visited the War Department’s telegraph room to receive current information.  Telegraph operators sent messages by pressing a key in a pattern of short and long clicks, following Morse’s alphabetic code. How it worked: 1.  The telegraph operator pressed a switch, called the key, breaking an electric current. 2.  The electric current activated a sounder, an electromagnet consisting of coiled wire wrapped around an iron core.  The changing electric current created a clicking sound. 3.  Skilled operators were able to send up to 60 messages each hour, keying a message with one hand while translating incoming messages with the other hand. 4.  Telegraph wires allowed the clicking codes to be transmitted geographically. In what other areas of life was the telegraph useful? .

African Americans in the Military

The Emancipation Proclamation officially permitted African Americans to enlist in the Union army and navy.  Almost immediately, thousands of African Americans, including Frederick Douglass’s two sons, Charles and Lewis, rushed to join the military.  Douglass approved of his sons’ decision.  He believed that serving in the military would help African Americans overcome discrimination:
 

“Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”

Among the first African American regiments officially organized in the North was the 54th Massachusetts.  The regiment fought valiantly at Fort Wagner near Charleston Harbor in July 1863, losing nearly half of its soldiers in the battle.  “Men all around me would fall and roll down the slope into the ditch,” remembered Lewis Douglass.  “Swept down like chaff, still our men went on and on.”

At the end of the war, the New York Tribune declared that the heroism of the 54th Massachusetts regiment forever answered the question of whether African Americans could make good soldiers:
 

“It is not too much to say that if this Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth had faltered when its trial came, two hundred thousand [African Americans] for whom it was a pioneer would never have been put into the field. ...  But it did not falter.  It made Fort Wagner such a name to [African Americans] as Bunker Hill has been for ninety years to white Yankees.”

African American Soldiers
Battery A of the 2nd U.S. Colored Light Artillery was only one of many groups of African Americans who fought for their own freedom.

Military Life

Early in the war, General Irwin McDowell’s troops stopped to pick berries and foolishly wasted water from their canteens to wash them.  “They were not used to denying themselves much; they were not used to journeys on foot,” the Union commander later reflected.  Self-denial and long marches would prove to be only one of the harsh lessons of the war.

The Soldiers in the Field

Union and Confederate soldiers suffered many hardships during the long days and weeks between battles.  Some Southern soldiers had to sleep without blankets and tramp the roads shoeless.  Union soldier Elisha Rhodes wrote home that “all that we have to eat is the cattle killed by the way.  No bread or salt in the Regiment and I am most starved.”

Soldiers learned to gulp down tasteless food.  For the Union soldier, meals often consisted of hardtack (a hard biscuit made of wheat flour), potatoes, and beans, flavored at times with dried salt pork (pork fat cured in salty brine).  Confederate soldiers had little coffee, and their bread was usually made of cornmeal.  Whenever possible, soldiers on both sides supplemented their diet with fruit or vegetables seized or purchased from farms they passed.

Battlefield Medicine

When Americans went to war in 1861, most were not prepared for the horrors of battle.

“The sights and smells that assailed us were simply indescribable,” wrote one Southern soldier.  “Corpses were swollen to twice their size, some actually burst asunder ....The odors were so deadly that in a short time we all sickened [and] ...  most of us [were] vomiting profusely.”

Disease was one of the greatest threats facing Civil War soldiers.  In many cases, regiments lost half their men to illness before ever going into battle.  Crowded together in army camps, drinking from unsanitary water supplies, many soldiers became sick.

Smallpox, when it erupted, could be deadly, as could dysentery, typhoid, and pneumonia.  Battlefield physicians also used extreme measures in treating casualties.  Faced with appalling wounds, doctors often amputated arms and legs to prevent gangrene and other infections from spreading to other parts of the body.  As one military officer, General Carl Schurz, commented:

“As a wounded man was lifted on the table, often shrieking with pain ... the surgeon quickly examined the wound and resolved upon cutting off the wounded limb.  Some ether was administered. ...  The surgeon snatched the knife from between his teeth, where it had been while his hands were busy, wiped it rapidly once or twice across his blood-stained apron, and the cutting began.  The operation accomplished, the surgeon would look around with a deep sigh, and then—‘Next!’”

Women helped the war effort at home by managing family farms and businesses.  On the battlefield, women made dramatic contributions to the Civil War by serving as nurses to the wounded.  Before the Civil War, most army nurses were men.  Inspired by the famous British nurse Florence Nightingale, American women took on many of the nursing tasks in army hospitals.

In 1861 Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female physician in the United States, started the nation’s first training program for nurses.  Her work led to the creation of the United States Sanitary Commission, an organization that provided medical assistance and supplies to army camps and hospitals.  Tens of thousands of women volunteered to work for the Commission, raising money to send bandages, medicine, clothing, and food to army camps.

Not all women helping at the front lines were members of the Sanitary Commission.  On her own, Clara Barton decided to leave her job in a patent office to nurse soldiers on the battlefield.  With her face sometimes bluish with gunpowder, Barton fed the sick, bandaged the wounded, and even dug out bullets with her own small knife.

Although Southern women were encouraged to stay at home and support the troops by making bandages and other supplies, many founded small hospitals or braved the horrors of the battlefield.

Kate Cumming of Mobile, Alabama, served as a nurse following the Battle of Shiloh.  In her diary she vividly described a makeshift hospital:

“Nothing that I had ever heard or read had given me the faintest idea of the horrors witnessed here ....  The men are lying all over the house.  ...  The foul air from this mass of human beings at first made me giddy and sick, but I soon got over it....”

Battlefield Medicine
The greatest impact women had on the battlefield was through serving as nurses.  Even with their help, disease and infection claimed many thousands of soldiers.
 

Female Volunteers
Soldiers were not the only ones who experienced the Civil War.  Wives, mothers, and sisters protected their homes from bands of soldiers.
 

Military Prisons

The horrors of the battlefield and danger of disease were not the only hardships endured by soldiers during the Civil War.  Prisoners of war—soldiers captured by the enemy in battle—also suffered terribly during the conflict.

Early in the war, the United States and the Confederacy held formal prisoner exchanges.  After Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, however, the Confederacy announced that it would not exchange freed African Americans for Southern white prisoners.  Instead, it would either re-enslave or execute all African American troops captured in battle.

In response to the South’s treatment of African American troops, Lincoln stopped all prisoner exchanges.  As a result, both the North and the South found themselves with large and growing numbers of prisoners of war.  Taking care of them proved difficult, especially in the South.  While conditions were bad in Northern prisons, the South was not even able to adequately feed their prisoners because of food shortages.

The most infamous prison in the South, Andersonville in southwest Georgia, was an open camp with no shade or shelter for its huge population.  Exposure, overcrowding, lack of food, and disease killed more than 100 men per day during the sweltering summer of 1864.  In all, 13,000 of the 45,000 prisoners sent to Andersonville died in the camp.  After the war, Henry Wirz, the commandant at Andersonville, became the only person executed for war crimes during the Civil War.

Life in the Union and Confederate armed forces during the Civil War was brutally hard.  Both sides, however, were strongly committed to their cause and prepared to endure whatever hardships were necessary to achieve victory.

Summarizing
What medical problems did Union and Confederate soldiers face?