This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [67]
Hospitals were especially dangerous places, and nurses, matrons, and other medical workers often contracted illnesses from the patients they attended or from the polluted water supply they all shared. Union general Francis Barlow’s wife, Arabella, died of typhus as a result of her service in the hospitals of the Army of the Potomac. In both North and South nurses—Louisa May Alcott prominent among them—regularly fell victim to typhoid, smallpox, and even heart failure brought on by the conditions and demands of their employment. When Wilmington, North Carolina, was taken by Union forces, prisoners released from Andersonville and Florence crowded its hospitals, spreading new waves of epidemic disease. Of five “lady nurses” from the North, three sickened and two died, along with a chaplain and other medical attendants. Residents of the long-suffering town cannot but have been affected as well. No statistics or systematic records document the impact of war-engendered disease on noncombatant populations, but citizens, especially in the South, had few doubts about its effects.7
The enormous battles—engagements like Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, the Wilderness—that constituted the central theater and focus of war often overshadow the widespread and persistent small-scale encounters, guerrilla actions, and civic unrest that inevitably involved and threatened civilians. One set of such hostilities grew naturally out of the causes of the conflict. On farms and plantations across the South, the disruptions of war encouraged slaves to challenge their subordination as they witnessed erosions of white control and anticipated the possibility of freedom. Some masters died at the hands of slaves seeking vengeance or asserting a new sense of empowerment. Mary Chesnut described the horror that swept through the highest circles of South Carolina society when the elderly Betsey Witherspoon was smothered by her slaves. In Virginia a sixteen-year-old slave girl, determined not to be whipped, killed her mistress by hitting her with a fence rail and then choking her to death. As they struggled to maintain control, masters, in turn, killed slaves. Near Natchez anxious whites hanged thirty slaves suspected of using war’s disruptions to plan an uprising against their owners. A northern woman working in the Nashville hospitals learned of a “negro boy of about nine years old who died from blows received from his mistress.” She was beating him because of her “anger that his mother had run away in search of freedom.” More commonly masters exacted retribution upon wives left behind by male slaves who had fled to join the Union army. Slaves suspected of helping the Yankees became particular targets of white southerners’ wrath. A young slave girl in Darlington, South Carolina, was hanged for yelling, “Bless the Lord the Yankees have come!” when Sherman’s troops arrived in town. Across the South slaves and masters battled over the future of the peculiar institution in a warfare, both overt and hidden, that yielded its own unacknowledged list of casualties.8
Racial violence was not confined to the South. Northern resentment at the human and financial cost of the war disturbed the public peace, most dramatically in the New York City riots that followed the introduction of a draft lottery in July 1863. White citizens were angry that the recently enacted federal conscription law would lead them off to battle in a war now explicitly committed to emancipation, and they expressed their fury in vicious attacks that were directed at first against government buildings but soon focused upon African American residents of the city. Five days of violence resulted in the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum, the lynching of eleven black men, and more than one hundred deaths.9
Violence invaded everyday life in other parts of the nation as well, especially in locations where political