March 27, 1861 (Wednesday)

Rained during the night
and into the morning hours....

 

   Harper's Weekly, March 23, 1861, has a number of articles relating to Fort Sumter.  "The March 23, 1861 edition of Harper's Weekly featured a stunning portrait of Major Anderson's command at Fort Sumter.  The paper also features important news associated with the opening days of the Civil War.  The issue also features a portrait of Abner Doubleday, popularly remembered as the inventor of baseball, on the cover."


From Son of the South, an interesting article on "Civil War Medicine."  An excerpt below...very informative about the lack of sanitation and what was done about it...

"The state of medical knowledge at the time of the Civil War was extremely primitive.  Doctors did not understand infection, and did little to prevent it.  It was a time before antiseptics, and a time when there was no attempt to maintain sterility during surgery.  No antibiotics were available, and minor wounds could easy become infected, and hence fatal.  While the typical soldier was at very high risk of being shot and killed in combat, he faced an even greater risk of dying from disease.

Twice as many men died of disease than of gunshot wounds in the Civil War.  Dysentery, measles, small pox, pneumonia, and malaria were the soldier's greatest enemy.  The overall poor hygiene in camp, the lack of adequate sanitation facilities, the cold and lack of shelter and suitable clothing, the poor quality of food and water, and the crowded condition of the camps made the typical camp a literal breeding ground for disease.  Conditions, and resulting disease, were even worse for Civil War prisoners, who were held in the most miserable of conditions."   (Many more details at the link above.)


An article by Gene Dattel, "When Cotton Was King," Disunion--New York Times, March 26, 2011.   

" 'Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country,' opined Oliver Ellsworth, a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention.  Indeed, it was that assumption that allowed the anti-slavery delegates to cede easily to a compromise in writing the Constitution:  slavery would never be mentioned, but it would be given legal protection.  Founding a nation, Ellsworth and others decided, was more important than eradicating a 'moral anachronism.'

That assumption, however, proved disastrously wrong, thanks to a new, much more valuable cash crop then still on the horizon:  cotton.  Over the next 70 years this new cash crop would revolutionize the American economy and breathe new life into the institution of slavery.  On the eve of the Civil War, far from facing imminent decline, slavery, and the cotton economy that depended on it, was going strong."  (Read all the details on the interaction of slavery and cotton in the years leading up to the Civil War at the link above.)