p. 109 | The Nation's Scourge

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 2, 1862

The Nation's Scourge.

BAD as matters are beginning to be in the North, it appears that they are immensely worse in the South. A lady who left Richmond on the 12th of Aug., 1862, writes to the N. Y. Times that

“There were never so many human beings in that city before as when she left, but a great proportion of those within the limits of the town are sick and wounded soldiers. The hospitals may be counted by hundreds. She has been in the daily habit, for months past, of going to minister to the sick and wounded. All the ladies in the city did this—the wealthy and high-born, the poor and lowly, all seeming to try their utmost to alleviate the sufferings of the Confederate soldiers. Our informant says she performed her labors from motives of pity for the poor fellows; but if she had been possessed of no feelings of humanity for them, she thinks she would have done something as a matter of policy; inasmuch as if any woman was found to be lukewarm in the cause, she was immediately suspected and closely watched.

“Such is the extremity in which all classes of people are placed, that no considerations, except the great one of life and death, are of any moment. This is the one grand, all-absorbing thought, ‘How shall we prolong our lives until our enemies are overcome?’ Business matters are not thought of, except so far as they tend to the solution of this problem. Famine is staring them in the face, and disease, in the form of a slow fever of the typhoid character, is wasting the army and carrying off daily scores of soldiers and others in the city. The army in and about the capital has been for the last two months upon half-rations, and a sight of the forms of the half-fed, half-clad soldiery is, as she represents it, a pitiable and disgusting spectacle. No attention whatever has for months been paid to the sanitary condition of the city. The habits of a portion of the soldiers are filthy to the last degree, and soap and water are, in most instances, strangers not to be introduced or tolerated in the camps, and too often in the hospitals.

“Added to this there has been for a long time past, a scarcity of provender for the mules and horses connected with the army. Owing to their ill-fed condition, the famished brutes very often drop down in their tracks from sheer exhaustion. Wherever they fall they are permitted to die and decay. No attempt is made to remove them—no effort used to cleanse the streets of that loathsome mass of decaying matter, which thus rapidly accumulates.

“The whole atmosphere in and around the city she represents as highly charged with this horrible malaria, and, to use her own expression, ‘the air seems thick with disease, and heavily laden with death.’ Every tobacco warehouse—and the city is full of them—is used either as a hospital or a prison. In addition to these, a very large number of wholesale stores and other buildings have, since the week’s battles in front of the city, been appropriated to the use of the sick and wounded.

“Food is very scarce and very high. For three months past, no citizen, however wealthy, has been able to procure a particle of fresh meat of any kind; what little of that article could be obtained, was given to the sick soldiers. The only vegetables which our informant has seen there since the beginning of June, were a few half-grown cabbage heads, all of which were readily sold for the sum of $2.50 each. The only kind of meat is salt pork, which, though not really putrid, has a taste so bitter and rancid that no one can eat it unless nearly starved. Tea cannot be had at any price. Three months ago, our informant purchased a pound of ordinary 6 shilling tea for the sum of $15, since which time none could be obtained. There was a little coffee in the market, at from $4 to $6 per pound. The only article of food which can be obtained readily, and at any where near an ordinary price, is flour; but the citizens are in constant fear lest their supply of this be suddenly cut short, in which event starvation and famine will meet them face to face.”