Statistics
tell you information. They tell you simple facts that can frequently be bent to
your will to win an argument or be used the same way to prove you wrong. They
tell you something but they don’t tell you a story.
When
you read that three quarters of all Civil War deaths were due to disease, it
tells you what happened but it does not tell you the story. In today’s
antiseptic world, the idea of that many deaths of young and previously healthy
people to the ravages of disease seems preposterous. But it happened and the
dead piled up. If you accept the death toll of the Civil War as 600,000
soldiers, then roughly 450,000 men died of disease during that conflict.
Hilliard’s
Legion was an Alabama outfit that was raised by Henry Washington Hilliard, a
famous politician of antebellum Alabama. The Legion originally included five
battalions of soldiers, one of which was an artillery unit and another a
cavalry unit. The cavalry battalion was transferred and merged with a Georgia
outfit to become the 10th Confederate Cavalry Regiment and is thus
removed from this discussion.
The
rest of the Legion was raised between March and July of 1862, roughly 3,000 men
split into four battalions. A part of the artillery battalion became an
independent command but the remainder of the artillery battalion fought as
infantry.
And as
soon as they came together in Montgomery, Alabama in the summer of 1862, the
Legionaires started dying.
A
sample from the Third Battalion, one of the Legion’s three original infantry battalions:
Private of Company B Miles Thrower
enlisted April 7, 1862 and died just more than two months later on June 12. Irwin Raley, a private in the same
company as Thrower, enlisted the same day as Thrower but died earlier, on June
7.
Jones Roberts was a Private in Company
C, enlisting April 5, 1862. He died October 20. Jesse Smith was a 23-year-old when he enlisted on May 3 of that
year and was placed in Company C. He died October 25.
Hilliard’s
Legion did not see combat until September 20, 1863 at Chickamauga, about 18
months after the Legion was formed. Plenty of its members died during the
attack on Horseshoe Ridge at Chickamauga but those deaths were different. The
Legion’s dead at Horseshoe Ridge were the result of rifle fire.
The
diseases that thinned the ranks of the Legion and Civil War armies on both
sides were due to poor sanitary conditions and other like issues that we have
mostly eradicated today. The leading killer in Civil War camps was dysentery
and it is difficult to think of a more miserable killer. But there were other maladies
that killed.
Still
in the Third Battalion, Privates James
B. Cox, James M. Graves and Raley
all died of the measles. Private Green
B. Knowles’ cause of death is listed as Brain Fever.
We don’t
have the exact enlistment date for Van
B. Tomme, a Private in Company B, but he enlisted that spring and died the
following June 12. John H. Townsend,
a private in C Company, enlisted in May and died in December.
Your
Loyal Blogger has bolded the names of the soldiers to emphasize the point that
this is a human story. We do not like the Rebel cause today, and for good
reason. But the men on the other side of the Civil War, the soldiers in the
Union army, suffered the same hardships and died of the same diseases.
The
American Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. The war and the
resulting amendments to our Constitution ended slavery in our part of North
America, thank Goodness. Slavery and the end of slavery were the primary cause
and effect of the war. A less-discussed result of the Civil War was a better
understanding of the importance of mass sanitation. Society benefitted from
what we learned about getting rid of sewage and human waste.
It is
true that statistics are facts, but not all facts are statistics. Some facts
are human stories.
Thanks for reading.
