Originally aired on August 08, 1997 - In part 154 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson shares stories told by soldiers about their constant battle with insects.
#154 – Vermin
Summertime brought a host of hardships to the men of blue and gray. There was, of course, the ordeal of battle with its imponderables of wounds, capture, and death. When soldiers were in camp, they also had to confront a large number of vexations. Soap, and opportunities for bathing, were scarce. The resultant, contaminated atmosphere became a haven for mosquitoes, flies, lice and fleas.
Rare indeed was the Civil War soldier not infested with such vermin. Johnny Rebs and Billy Yanks always had things to say about insects. Most of it was a split between exasperation and exaggeration.
A New Yorker once wrote his sister that the mosquitoes around camp were “as thick as the hair on a dog…If you was to stay here for one Knight, you would want the patience of Job to stand it.” An Illinois soldier swore that mosquitoes around Suffolk, Virginia, were so large that “instead of humming they brayed like mules”. A Union officer confessed in a letter: “I have to stop after every sentence to scratch myself and drive off the bugs”, while a Confederate noted that the mosquitoes “seemed resolved to take me dead or alive”.
Flies were equally as bad. In June, 1862, a North Carolina soldier informed a lady friend: “I get vexed at them and commence killing them, but as I believe forty comes to every one’s funeral, I have given it up as a bad job.”
Some of the tallest tales were directed at lice, which were always present in epidemic numbers. Embarrassment was the initial reaction from a man who found himself infested with lice; but as time passed, the lice persisted, and the soldier learned that all of his compatriots were similarly afflicted, he came to live with the nuisance.
A favorite pastime in camp was the sight of soldiers, their shirts in their laps, attentively going through each square inch of cloth in search of lice. Others learned how to take a stick, hold their shirt over a fire, a listen to the vermin incinerate as if corn were popping. Lice had no respect for rank or station. A brigadier general (and future President of the United States) once was observed hiding behind a tree and feverishly engaged in chasing lice along the seams of his clothing.
At the midway point of the war, a Giles County soldier swore he found a louse on whose back were the letters “I. F. W.” – signifying that it was “In for the War”. A Pennsylvanian matched that story when he told his brother: “Lice are the most cunning and most impudent of all things that live…I woke up the other night and found a regiment of them going through the manual of arms on my back.”
When lice did not command attention, fleas did. At the 1862 battle of Glendale on the Virginia peninsula, a Union colonel was seen standing in the saddle, waving his men into action with a sword in one hand, and earnestly scratching himself with the other. An Old Dominion soldier on duty in South Carolina asserted that “miserable fleas devour my hide like a mangy cur would a nice slice of old Virginia ham.”
Fleas became so bad in one Federal division that the major general posted this notice outside his headquarters: “All persons carrying uncles and aunts about their person are requested to keep away from this tent.” However, the most baffling of all commentaries about fleas came from Alabama soldier Joel Puckett. Writing to his wife, he estimated that at least 50 fleas were on his body. Puckett may have intended to be romantic when he added: “May, I have thought of you often while mashing fleas.”
A Massachusetts foot soldier spoke for all in that embattled age when he stated from camp in eastern Virginia: “Every species in the bug and insect line that can kick, jump, bite, or sting, is here represented in astonishing numbers.”