Illness and erroneous beliefs about black men’s resistance to disease
Whereas some black men raised in certain environments had developed immunity to different diseases, the mistaken stereotype that all black men were physiologically more resistant to life in subtropical climates resulted in the deaths of thousands of black men. Of the 179,000 black men who enlisted in the Union army, 33,000 out of the 36,000 who died during the Civil War, died from disease. An example of this mistaken belief is found in a letter from J. G. Foster, the commander of the Department of North Carolina, to Secretary of War Stanton on the 5th May 1863.
Foster requests that the 54th Massachusetts and other “Negro” Regiments relieve white regiments in South Carolina, who are “liable to the malarious influences of the climate, which of course the negro troops can stand.” While Foster’s contention may have been true for some of the black soldiers enlisted in the army, such as those former slaves brought over from West Africa, it spelt disaster for others. Unfortunately for the Union’s black soldiers, Foster was not alone in his belief about their physiological superiority.
The negative effect of excessive fatigue duty on the health of black soldiers is evident in the following unsigned letter to an unnamed official. Its anonymous author explains how “we the 20th U.S. Colored troops got up in the state of New York” are being used solely as labourers. “Instead of the musket,” he says, “It is the spad and the Whelbarrow and the Axe cuting in one of the most horrible swamps in Louisiana stinking and misery.” He says that some men who are “scarc Able to get Along the Day Before” are being put on fatigue duty, and that because of this “meney are throwen Back in sickness wich thay very seldom get over.” He points out the self-defeating nature of the policy, and asks “how can we stand them (the Confederate Army) in A weak and starving Condition.”
In another letter, dated September 13th, 1863, Colonel James C. Beecher, commander of a regiment of former slaves from North Carolina protests against the soldiers being used as military labourers for white regiments. Beecher describes how men that were ordered to Morris Island on fatigue duty, were now “laying out and policing camps of white soldiers on the island,” and that another sixty men sent to New York were also carrying out the labour which should be done by the regiments own soldiers. Beecher writes that “they have been slaves and are just learning to be men,” and by ordering them to carry out the manual work that these regiments should be doing themselves, “simply throws them back where they were before and reduces them to the position of slaves again.”
Progress was eventually made when General Quincy A. Gilmore, commander of the Department of the South issued General Orders, No. 77, which “prohibited the use of black soldiers to prepare camps and perform menial duties for white troops.”