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The War of 1848

Sidebar One: A Different America - Transportation and Communication

The US Civil War is a continuing period of fascination for Americans, but that world is rapidly receding for the folks of the twenty-first century.

Recently, Hollywood made a movie set in that period ("Cold Mountain") and they were forced to do some of the scenic shots in Rumania because the US is too built up to emulate the topography of the period.

Just so, the period of 1848 was vastly different from what it would be thirteen years later. This sidebar will deal with two major aspects of that difference - transportation and communication.

One thing people in the twenty-first century have a difficult time getting their hands around was the primitive state of transportation in the late 1840s. Indeed, even if viewed from the 1860s, transportation in the 1840s was difficult by comparison.

In the 1840s "roads" meant one or two lane dirt wagon trails. There were only a few paved roads. The

People in the 1840s were quite attuned to horses and oxen for transportation, particularly for local travel or travel over difficult terrain. Animal power was still very much the dominant form of energy in America. Most rural people (over 90% of Americans) could ride or drive horses or oxen and knew how to care for these animals. The importance of horses was such that the theft of horses generally got one hanged if caught.

In 1848 railroads were just beginning to hit their stride. The steam locomotive had just been introduced in the previous decade. Some southern plantations had had wooden railroads from the plantation to a connection with water transportation as early as the 1790s, but these were ad hoc local things. In 1848 the rush of railroad building was just getting rolling.

In the early 1840s rails were completely made of wood but this was found to be unacceptable because the wood wore so quickly and curled when wet. The curling problem could be cured by heat-drying the rail but the wear problem dictated metal. Most rails in 1848 were heat-dried wood with metal straps screwed on. Even this had its drawbacks. The wood would either come loose from the ties or the metal strapping would come loose from the rail. In either case the weight of the rolling stock tended to make the loose material try to jab itself through the floor off the cars and locomotives. By the mid-1840s it was clear that all-metal rails would be needed. By 1848, this work would be in progress but in the more rustic southern roads, the wood/metal composite rail still dominated.

In 1848 there was absolutely no standardization of track gauge - the distance between rails. As a result, travelers or freight would take one railroad to its terminus and transload onto the next road with its equipment having its peculiar gauge. Standardization of gauge had to wait until the 1860s.

Locomotive technology was moving quickly. The first locomotives were walking-beam engines (vertical cylinders) looking much like this: http://www.sidestreetbannerworks.com/locos/loco80.html

While the link shows a model engine, it shows the working of the locomotive faithfully. These engines were the standard from the mid 1830s (earliest railroads) to the early 1840s but were still in service in some areas in the later 1840s. the next generation of locomotives were the 4-2-0 configuration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-2-0 While this design was dated, it was still the most common on southern and Midwestern roads in 1848. By 1848, the iconic 4-4-0 "American" design was coming on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-4-0 The locomotives of 1848 would be a bit shorter than the locomotives shown in the link. The design was robust enough that it stayed in production for nearly forty years in the US. The design was very tolerant of shoddily-laid track, and had the thermal capacity for great speed. The speed of the "American" effectively ended the day of wooden composite rail. An "American" would roar along at high speed and the composite rail would curl under the load.

A walking beam engine would pull two or three cars (three to five tons) at a top speed of 20 miles per hour over flat terrain and one car at 5 miles per hour over hills.

A 4-2-0 would pull five or six cars on flat terrain at a top speed of 30 miles per hour and two or three cars over hills at 10 miles per hour.

A 4-4-0 would pull eight cars over flat terrain at 45 miles per hour and four cars over hills at 20 miles per hour.

Top speeds aside, allowing for servicing the engine and the limitations of the roadbed ("slow orders") a staff officer of the day could assume a block speed for rail movements of either troops or supplies of four miles per hour. The huge advantage over Napoleon's day is this four mile per hour speed could be pretty much maintained twenty-four hours a day. A train of the day would cover 100 miles per day -an astounding speed in the mid-nineteenth century.

Railroads initially served as adjuncts to ports, moving goods from the hinterland to the ports. By 1848 there were no railroads over the Appalachian Mountains although some were under construction.

http://www.catskillarchive.com/rrextra/abonw248.Html

http://cartweb.geography.ua.edu:9001/StyleServer/calcrgn?cat=Special%20Topics&item=Railroads/Railroads1848a.sid&wid=500&hei=400&props=item(Name,Description),cat(Name,Description)&style=simple/view-dhtml.xsl

As one can see the railroads had reached Lake Erie, and Wheeling (actually Benwood), Virginia (on the Ohio) and a line had been run from Sandusky (on Lake Erie) to Cincinnati, but no railroad had yet reached Pittsburgh. In the south railroads ran from Charleston and Savannah to northern Georgia (with construction going on to Nashville. Another line ran from Washington, DC to Wilmington, NC. Other than a spur from Vicksburg to Jackson Mississippi, and some construction from Mobile north, that was the extent of it.

The period between the War of 1812 and the Mexican war had been the golden age of canal building. There were numerous canals throughout the country but by 1848 most had been put out of business by the railroads. Canals could carry more tonnage but were slow and very capital-intensive. By 1848, the only canals that mattered were the Erie Canal (still in limited use today), The Chesapeake and Ohio canal from Washington DC to Cumberland, Maryland, and the James River Canal from Richmond to Buchanan, Virginia. Of the three only the Erie Canal was very important. It carried almost all the freight going up the Mohawk Valley west of Albany. Not until the late 1850s did the railroads surpass the throughput of the Erie Canal. The C&O Canal was used mainly to move coal out of northwest Virginia and the James River canal served almost exclusively to move iron ore from the mines in Botetourt County to the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond.

The lion's share of long-haul transportation fell to water. Water transportation fell into two classes: coastal and riverine. Coastal traffic was classic seaborne traffic. Ships moving from one port to another over coastal oceanic paths The US in 1848 had seven major ports: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. In addition there were minor ports at Providence, Richmond/Hampton Roads, Wilmington (DE), Wilmington (NC), Apalachicola, Mobile and Galveston. By 1848 there were a handful of high-speed steamships operating but problems with fuel capacity dictated that almost all long-haul ships operated mostly on sail. A steam plant might enable moving contrary to the wind or when becalmed and gave valuable steerageway in confined waters but out on the ocean most ships still relied on the wind. A whole class of ships evolved for the coastal trade. In the light and variable winds in the lee of the North American continent, it had been found that fore-and-aft rigging worked best. Square rigged ships still were best for trans-Atlantic work, but schooners required only a small crew and could point surprisingly well into the wind. Steam tugs were in use at all ports to facilitate getting ships in and out of the harbor. At this time the US merchant marine was exceeded only by that of Great Britain.

In the East riverine traffic was confined to the Hudson and competed for traffic going across the mountains by use of the Erie Canal. In the west (including the South and Old Northwest) riverine transportation dominated the region. There was really no other way to get people and goods moved, given the lack of roads and railroads.

From the earliest days of settling the West, there had been a lively trade of goods moving downstream on flatboats and keelboats. A flat boat would simply drift with the river current and the crew used poles and oars to keep the boat clear of obstacles. A keel boat was smaller and had a limited capability for being poled upstream, although mostly these too were downstream vessels. Once the flatboat got to New Orleans it would generally be broken up and the crew would find other ways back upriver. Historically, 1848 was the all-time peak year for flatboat/keelboat traffic.

The other way of getting around on the western rivers was the river steamboat. Steamboats first appeared on the western rivers after the War of 1812. Early steamboats looked like ocean-going ships but of smaller scale. As time went on the steamboat evolved into a specialized river craft. A river steamboat prized shallow draft to maximize the operating season, maneuverability to avoid obstacles like snags and (obviously) capacity and speed. For a person used to looking at seagoing ships riverboats look frail. Their shallow draft, width, length and low freeboard make them look unseaworthy. Indeed they were unseaworthy, but they never went to sea. When the weather kicked up they would simply flee to the other side of the river and take shelter until the weather blew past. Their hulls were impossibly light because they used iron chains as tensioning members to keep their hulls from hogging and sagging. Likewise their superstructures were very lightly built to minimize top-heaviness. Their beam gave them additional resistance to rolling. All the same, the hulls had a limited service life. Often a boat would wear out its hull and a yard would take the boilers and engines and put them into another hull. Usually the boat would have two engines, each one driving one paddle wheel. Engines could be reversed to allow the boats to turn about their own yaw center. Once out in the channel and under way, the wheels would be momentarily stopped and a sprag would link the two paddlewheels together for easy handling. Most riverboats in 1848 were sidewheelers. Sternwheelers did not find favor (except as tugboats) until much later when barge handling became the main means of river transportation. A sidewheeler was far more maneuverable than a sternwheeler. Sixteen miles an hour was the theoretical top speed for paddlewheel boats, but rarely did they exceed eight miles per hour. A steamboat could go forty to sixty miles upriver on a load of firewood. Wood (generally fairly green) was the only fuel used. Coal requires more air flow than steamboats' stacks could develop. Firewood was readily and cheaply available along the western rivers. Almost every riparian plantation had a "landing" that offered wood to steamboats.

The western rivers and in particular the Mississippi below Memphis were very dynamic and complex. No captain could know the river so a whole class of river pilots sprang up. These pilots would intimately know a stretch of river, generally twenty-five miles or so and would guide the master (often called "Captains") through "his" section of the river. A steamboat would stop to drop off and pick up pilots about twice as often as they stopped for wood. If there were no towns, riparian plantations would offer quarters for pilots. Pilots were bringers of prosperity for river folk.

A pilot would guide steamboats past two major types of obstacles: sand bars and snags. The rivers of this period were not the dammed-up and tamed waterways of today. The water level and the amount of debris in the river varied according to rainfall. The eastern portion of the US is very well-supplied with rainfall, averaging between 45 to 60 inches a year of rain. But this rainfall was not a constant. In normal years the rivers were only considered navigable nine months a year. Generally, flooding in February and March made the rivers impassable. Not only was the current so swift that the most powerful steamboats could make no headway, but flooding forced the logistical support (wood and pilots) and markets to high ground. In December and January, ice often disrupted river traffic upstream of Cairo, Illinois. Further, in August annual dry months would make the rivers too shallow for navigation, particularly above Memphis (the Mississippi is tidal to Memphis). Even in "navigable" months lower-than-average rainfall might lower water levels to the point that natural sandbars became a navigational hazard. Pilots had to know where the sandbars were or their clients would run aground on them. Steamboats were built to take a degree of grounding as even in big port cities, there were no piers. The steamboats merely nosed into the shore and tied off the stern against the current. But hitting a sandbar at normal speeds could break the hull of a steamboat.

Snags were accumulations of driftwood. In the early days of river traffic, the snags were enormous and often ancient. There was an ancient snag at the mouth of the Red River that was believed to be there from the time of DeSoto until Henry Shreve and the Corps of Engineers cleared it in the late 1830s. Smaller snags could be expected after every flood season. Pilots had to know where these snags would be. Snags easily holed wooden hulls and indeed were the major cause of riverboat sinkings until steel hulls became common in the early twentieth century.

In the early days of river travel boats - flatboats, keelboats, and steamboats - would tie up for the night. The river was simply too dangerous to travel at night. As snags were reduced and pilots with local knowledge became more common, steamboats began moving at night, albeit at a lower speed. By 1848 steamboats proceeded at night at about 50% of daylight speed. Flatboats and keelboats always stopped for the night.

Steamboats operated in two classes. Packet boats operated between two set points (say Memphis to Louisville) and did not stop except for wood and pilots along their route. Packets hauled mostly passengers and some high-value freight. Most boats operated as tramps, stopping wherever they could get loads. Most freight moved downriver but passengers tended to be mostly upriver. Many steam boats seasonally backhauled keelboats and some flat boats. This was the predecessor of the barge trade.

Steamboats at this time usually had two full decks with a truncated third deck. The maindeck held the engine and boilers (the shallow draft did not allow for lower decks) and freight. This deck usually had its ceiling ten to twelve feet above the deck to allow for stacking of low-density freight (cotton bales). Sometimes low-fare passengers would stay on this deck. There were a few steamboats specially fitted out for livestock or slaves, but generally such cargo traveled in regular boats with some improvisation. The main deck (usually at the stern) also provided firewood storage for the boilers.

The second deck, called a hurricane deck, had the accommodations for passengers and crew. This deck also had accommodations for dining, drinking, gambling and other vices. In many respects, the hurricane deck was a major profit center for many steamboats.

Right around 1846, boats began to sport what was called the texas deck (lower case), so named because Texas joined the nation about that time. This deck would have the wheelhouse, an office, and small staterooms for the captain and mates. The texas deck staterooms were small because anything at this height tended to make the boat top-heavy and added sail area for crosswinds. By putting the captain and mates off the hurricane deck, more space was available for profitable hurricane deck activities.

A 1848-vintage steamboat would sport at least one and maybe as many as four boarding gangplanks (30 to 48 inches wide) suspended off the bow. In port, the boat would nose into the mud flats. The planks would be lowered and four deck hands would run mooring lines to shore anchoring points and the boat would be held in place against the current. Passengers and freight would be loaded and unloaded off the boarding planks once the mooring lines were set.

Major river ports like New Orleans, St. Louis, Memphis, Louisville, and Cincinnati, as well as some smaller ports like Evansville, Pittsburgh, Natchez, and Vicksburg would have extensive repair and storage yards for riverboats. Usually in late January and late July, all the steamboats would layup for maintenance and avoiding the non-navigable months. Crews would be laid off if not involved in maintenance. Even with regular maintenance, boats of this period would wear their hulls out in six or seven years. The engines and boilers were the expensive parts of the boats and might be expected to be "recycled" through three or four boats over the years. Cincinnati had a number of yards that specialized in removing engines and boilers from aging boats, reconditioning the equipment, and installing them in new hulls. To some degree, the massive boatyards above New Orleans did this as well. Louisville, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Memphis, and New Orleans were also major sources of new hulls. In 1848, boilers and engines came from Pennsylvania, New York, and Great Britain.

Given the absolute dominance of water transportation and the primitive road and railroad nets in the south and old northwest, it would be nearly impossible to maintain an army of over 15,000 more than twenty miles from the major waterways for more than a few weeks. Thus the War of 1848 would be a struggle for the waterways.

Another realm where most people's concept of the times is inaccurate in 1848 is communications. Samuel F.B. Morse's telegraph had only been invented a few years before and was by no means universal in the US in 1848. This map shows the degree of telegraph development in the US.

http://www.telegraph-history.org/map.htm

As one can see, there was a degree of telegraph communications between major cities although telegraph messages were very expensive. By July 1848 I am assuming that the lines indicated as "under construction" on the map were completed and the "proposed" lines would be under construction and probably complete by January 1849. The lack of telegraph communication to major naval and military bases and forts would give one a good idea how these installations could be seized by surprise.

Beyond the limited telegraph system, America used the classic mail delivery system as its major form of communications. Like everything else, mail moved mostly by water. Rail was used if available and some routes required riders to move information.

The War of 1848

Sidebar Three: A Different America - Economics

America in 1848 was still a very much agrarian nation. Over 90% of all labor was involved in feeding people. This meant farming, and fishing for the most part. There was a lot of hunting done on a subsistence basis. Ranching was a feature only of parts of Texas and the rest of the recently conquered territory taken from Mexico.

While recreational and subsistence fishing was done in large parts of the country, commercial fishing meant New England. The Grand Banks and other Atlantic shallows were very productive and in 1848 the cod fisheries were under no real pressure. Sail fishing boats would leave places like Gloucester and range far out to sea, almost invariably bringing in holds filled with tasty, nutritious and easily preserved cod. There were literally thousands of small fishing operations and an entire culture of Anglian English people inured to the rigors of following the sea.

The great estuary of the Chesapeake Bay produced blue crab (aka "jimmy") and oysters in prodigious quantity. To a lesser extent, the Delaware Bay and the sounds of North Carolina produced commercial quantities of shellfish.

Lobster was not considered fit for anything but slave food during these years. It gained popularity only in the late 1850s when it was found amenable to canning.

The shellfish would be consumed locally, but the cod would be salted for sale throughout the coastal regions and for export.

The part of the fish catch not considered edible was used as fertilizer for crops.

Fishing was not a large industry in the South. The Continental shelf is steep south of the Chesapeake Bay and the only shallows that were available were the "Sounds" of North Carolina and they were not all that productive. The productivity of the bayous of the southern Mississippi Delta was only known by a small percentage of the locals (mostly Cajuns) and was not heavily fished commercially.

The vast majority of farming was truck farming. Not associated with motor vehicles or parts of railroad rolling stock - "truck" in the slang of the day meant food. Different crops were grown as the climate and soil allowed.

For most of America the major crop was Indian maize, invariably called corn. By this time corn was beginning to be differentiated into sweet corn for feeding people directly and field corn for feeding animals and making into various products. Corn is a very productive crop, but requires fertilization, a lot of rain, and a fairly long growing season. The vast part of America met these needs. Parts of New England and the northern part of the Old Northwest had growing seasons a little too short for corn.

Likewise in parts of the Old Northwest wheat, barley, and rye were competing grain crops. These crops were more tolerant of colder, dryer weather and needed less fertilization (at the time). Wheat also tended to be more easily transportable once dried. As a result people north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers tended to eat wheat and rye bread where southerners tended to eat cornbread. The potato was introduced during colonial times and was another staple of more northerly climates. White and red beans were raised in New England, New York, and around the Great Lakes, providing an alternate source of protein. Some rice was grown, mostly in coastal Georgia and South Carolina, but for the most part, rice was slave food.

Cattle were raised in all areas but in 1848, meat production was dominated by swine. The hog is a more robust creature that can eat nearly everything, and one produces enough meat for a family for a year or so. As a rule, livestock went to the cities on the hoof and was processed for local consumption although hams and bacon could be salted or smoked for transportation. Chickens were also raised for subsistence consumption, but were difficult to transport any distance. Turkeys were not as popular in 1848 as today.

Another huge crop was a function of the mainstay of the transportation system. Horses need hay and oats for useful service and much of the arable land was used for production of these crops.

All of the carbohydrate products (corn, wheat, barley, and rye) were commercially converted into alcoholic beverages like whiskey or beer. In a time of poor transportation and no refrigeration, this made eminently good sense. Whiskey in particularly travels well and given the often poor state of drinking water quality at the time, the stuff did have a certain hygienic value. It killed the bacteria in the water, notably the deadly cholera bacterium.

Soybeans had not been introduced to American agriculture at this time.

Canning, as we know it today, had not yet been invented. Food preservation was mostly limited to drying, smoking, and salting.

In addition to truck farming, American agriculture produced two major cash crops for export: cotton and sugar.

Sugar had become a bit less expensive than at the time of the American Revolution, when the island of Jamaica was deemed more valuable to the British Empire than the sum of the North American colonies. But sugar and molasses were still important exports. Sugar required a lot of water and a long, warm growing season. The Gulf Coast fit this set of requirements perfectly. Cotton had much the same requirements but could be grown on dryer ground. There was a wide swath of land in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, east Texas, and northern Louisiana that was perfect for growing cotton. Eli Whitney's cotton gin reduced the labor needed for the first step of processing - the removal of seeds and boll leaves. Cotton would be harvested and "cleaned" and baled on the plantation and shipped to mills in Great Britain, France, and New England. Cotton and sugar required a lot of back-breaking work throughout the season to get good crops in. Negro slaves - somewhat resistant to malaria and yellow fever and the heat of the region - had proven better than any other group or method for producing these crops. Sugar and cotton were so profitable to raise for cash that it made no economic sense to grow food for local consumption. Particularly in the Mississippi delta, cotton and sugar were the only things grown and food was brought in from states further north. States like Tennessee (except for the far western part), Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio were called "provider" states because they provided food for the cotton and sugar belt. Much of the downriver trade on the Mississippi was food brought in to support the cotton and sugar plantations.

This time was the dawn of mechanization of agriculture. McCormick's first "reaper" was used on wheat farms in Illinois and Wisconsin, and it allowed more wheat, rye, and barley production with fewer farmers but the big surge in productivity came from later models. The wave of Northwest farmers run off the land by efficient reaper owners was a decade into the future. The cotton gin made slavery a viable system and steam engines had begun to replace mules for grinding sugar cane.

The sea change in America was coming in manufacturing. Prior to the 1830s almost all artifacts were made close to the market. Indeed in much of the south and inaccessible parts of the Midwest, the "plantation" system was still in use. The "plantation" - whether a southern slave colony or the Northwestern religious enclaves - emphasized self-sufficiency. While this self-sufficiency was comforting to the practitioners it meant that everyone had to be somewhat of a generalist. But specialists in Northeastern factories were often more efficient and usually took all the cash market away from the "plantations."

New England, New York, and Pennsylvania embraced manufacturing through a combination of necessity and opportunity. The agriculture in this section was never anything but a stopgap. As populations increased, food had to be imported into the region. Ever since the early days of the republic large numbers of New Englanders were emigrating to the Great Lakes region to find more productive farming. Manufacturing gave displaced farmers a local alternative. Hilly, well-watered New England, New York, and Pennsylvania had plenty of small rivers to provide water power to turn newly invented mechanical equipment. In the early nineteenth century there was an explosion of technological creativity in New England that took advantage of these assets. When you add in the ability of the Anglian English-Americans to talk to capital sources domestically and abroad, the area was ripe for an economic explosion. Textiles had pioneered the trend but other manufactured goods soon followed.

Two things drove a lot of the manufacturing: The demand of a growing country that was growing in prosperity (an agrarian economy adding lots of arable land) as well as population growth and British capital. A number of economic changes happened in Great Britain (mostly the rise of trade unions and US tariffs) made it easier for British capital to simply move manufacturing to the US, where costs were lower and tariffs would be outflanked. At the same time sufficient mineral deposits were found of metallic ores to support a flourishing metals industry. Iron and copper mines in the Tidewater and Piedmont regions of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York may be forgotten today, but they supported the massive growth of foundries needed for weapons, farm implements, steamboats and railroads in the US.

If one looks at manufactured goods produced in the US in this period, one sees a use of wood/metal composite construction not seen since. The railroad rails of the time were an example. The structure (at this time) was wood but the wear surface was iron. This had a huge advantage: transportation cost. For most of the US, wood was readily available and local mills could produce the structure of the rail and all that had to be moved was the wear surface. Go to the armory museum at Harper's Ferry and you'll see a lot of this in the equipment. Gears in the Blanchard lathe where the teeth are iron but the flange and hub are wood. By 1870, this would be a thing of the past as railroads provided cheap inland transportation and machine parts became all metal. Conversely, machinery fifty years earlier had very little metal and was made locally (in an economy that was much more of the "plantation paradigm") of wood.

The US iron industry was already beginning to modernize. In 1830 almost all iron used charcoal for energy and carbon. By 1845 it had moved to 45 % anthracite (easily available in Pennsylvania and New York). Mining anthracite is far, far less labor and energy intensive than making enough charcoal from trees for the same amount of iron.

The steam engine was beginning to liberate manufacturing from the tyranny of manual and water energy. A steam engine could be put down anywhere and operated. Therefore waterfalls that were the hallmark of the New England mill towns, simply were not needed elsewhere. Water power held on because it was cheap in New England, but as time went on manufacturing could move to the Old Northwest despite its flat terrain, because the steam engine needed no vertical drop to work. The steam engine would not completely supplant water power until the compound engine was developed in the 1870s and was efficient enough to produce cheap mechanical torque on demand.

One thing that was a constant brake on economic growth in the US was that in the mid-1800s the US was totally dependent on specie money. Prior to the Mexican War, the US simply did not have any reasonably large gold or silver deposits, so the money supply could not grow and general economic growth was stunted. Further, in 1836, Andrew Jackson had finally slain Hamilton's central bank once and for all. The nation promptly went into a sharp five-year depression in 1837 due to a bank failure. One failing bank took a number of other banks down with it and the economy generally ground to a halt. A central bank may not have prevented the original bank failure, but it would have prevented a big spread of loss of liquidity. So economic activity was more or less on a cash-and-carry basis (except for the influx of British specie). Even the foreign investment was squeezed because the British wanted dividends paid in specie. In short the US in 1848 did not have the economic flexibility it would have seven years later.

In 1848, government sat very lightly on the economy, consuming less than 3% of GDP. Government revenue came mostly from excise (mainly whiskey) taxes and tariffs. Tariffs were routinely protectionist in this mercantilist age. Every port has a government customs house to collect tariffs upon entry. Inland states relied on excise taxes.

In that day a man of average means could easily live his entire life and never interact with government.

The War of 1812

Sidebar Seven: A Different America - Public Health

History is made by people and how they do it is often a function of how they feel. In this respect, America was a very different place in 1848.

Health care and nutrition were nowhere near as good in 1848 as in the twenty-first century. A forty five-year-old in 1848 was on borrowed time. The life expectancy was about forty years for men and maybe thirty-two for women. The big difference from today was the prevalence of disease.

People had to depend on natural defenses against disease. The world of microbes was only dimly perceived. There was some perception that sick people often spread sickness. As a result, almost every port had a quarantine area. In times of epidemic, people would try to get away from each other as best they could. As always, the old, the very young and the poor couldn't and took the brunt of epidemics.

Most of the sickness came from a handful of prevalent diseases.

Smallpox was still a killer, but since Jenner's inoculation, it was on the wane. Even where people could not be inoculated, simply drinking the milk of a cow infected with cowpox was found to provide a fair amount of immunity. In cities there was a market for "pox milk." In rural areas, many families kept a milk cow and one that had or had had cow pox was valued for imparting immunity. The wealthy could afford real smallpox inoculations and most availed themselves. Still, smallpox was still rightly feared. Of course a person who had survived smallpox (you could always spot them because of the facial scars left by the pox) was immune.

Malaria, often called ague, was a huge problem. Oddly enough, malaria was on the wane in America but nobody knew why. It was receding faster in the built up areas than in rural areas. Of course, today we know malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes, and in built up areas their breeding grounds - swamps and wetlands - were being drained, depriving mosquitoes of these breeding grounds. Also, there was usually some effort made to keep infected people away from others. If that isolation meant they were taken to higher ground, that got them away from mosquitoes and the spread of the disease was checked. There are actually two major diseases called malaria. Probably the variety known as plasmodium vivax was the variety found in the US at the time. The other major variety - plasmodium falciparum is so virulent it is today often referred to as "AK-47." The falciparum variety has no doubt been the cause of some unnamed plagues throughout history but it is a clumsy parasite that always kills its host. The human body does not build a immunity to this blood parasite, but quinine, made from the bark of the chichona tree is curative. Malaria survivors often have a degree of jaundice and are often less active than uninfected people.

Yellow fever was a big killer at this time. Like malaria it is carried by mosquito although a different mosquito - aedes aegypti. Unlike malaria, yellow fever (yellow jack, black vomit or el vomíto) is a viral disease. Yellow fever is more virulent. In the 1840s it was fatal about 30% of the time depending on the natural resilience of the victim. There is no known cure but a survivor has a lifelong immunity to another infection. A survivor is usually somewhat debilitated for a year or so. Winfield Scott - a tough man if there ever was one - was infected with yellow fever in Veracruz as he left Mexico. Although it was a close call, he survived but was not fit for duty until March 1849. Yellow fever was a highly seasonal disease. It came with a vengeance in the summer and lay dormant the rest of the year. Summer plagues of yellow jack were common as far north as Baltimore in 1848 and in colonial times as far north as New York. Like malaria, yellow fever was in retreat in 1848 but again nobody at the time knew why. Aedes aegypti is a very finicky mosquito on where she lays her eggs. She prefers cisterns and rain barrels. These were common in coastal cities where ground water tended to be brackish ofr salt. As workable public water supplies became available cisterns and rain barrels went out of use and the mosquito was denied its breeding ground. Also as one went up in elevation, ground water was a viable source of water and nobody kept cisterns. Hence the reason for Scott's hurry to get uphill away from Veracruz as fast as possible in 1847 - getting his army away from el vomíto. Wealthy people tended to have figured this out and usually had summer homes at higher elevations. Yellow jack was the number one health concern in America at the time. The first shipload of Catholic Irish immigrants hit New Orleans in the summer of 1848 right in the middle of a yellow fever outbreak and having no immunity they died like flies.

Another big killer in rural areas was cholera. Cholera is a waterborne bacterial disease that wrecks the body's water balance. Quite often it could kill a person in a day. Cholera, depending on the availability of clean water was fatal about a third of the time, but if no clean water were available its fatality moved up sharply. The disease is transmitted through fecal material in water. As such, cholera was the major scourge of immobile armies well into the twentieth century. Cholera was a major cause of alcoholism among old soldiers. Whiskey killed the bacterium to some extent, so alcoholics tended to not get cholera. Cholera was a big killer in the unsettled West, where water supplies were chancy.

Typhus was a disease of cities. While no one of the time knew what caused it, many people had a suspicion that lice played a part. "Lousy" had been a pejorative since Washington's time and in America - with plentiful water - bathing was known to keep down typhus. Typhus was however quite virulent.

Pneumonia was a common death sentence. With a variety of ways to be transmitted, no seasonality, and no known cure or prevention, it killed thousands every year. As a rule the victim simply drowned in his own fluids as a result of the disease. Survivors of pneumonia were almost unheard of. The disease remained a major scourge until the 1940s when penicillin became common.

In this period, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease were considered ailments only of the very old.

On the whole, people in America ate fairly well and got plenty of exercise. In a largely agrarian country, food was very reasonably priced and most people did quite a bit of subsistence farming, fishing, and hunting. Refined sugar was still expensive. Obesity was rare. Their big problem was actually the opposite of inactivity. Many people worked themselves to the point they could work no more.

A very high percentage of Americans either smoked or chewed tobacco. Cigarettes had not yet been invented in 1848, so smoking was done with a pipe or (rarely) cigars. At the time, chewing tobacco was the lower-grade stuff that could not be sold for smoking, and was mostly done by lower-class rural folk.

Alcoholism was a very widespread problem. Nearly everyone drank to some extent.

Another common drug was laudanum. This is dilute morphine and it pain-dulling properties made a great favorite among women and the elderly. Most of the quack "patent medicines" of the day were laudanum diluted in ethanol. They did relieve pain but were very addictive.

Cocaine was around but it was a vice of the very wealthy.

Although cities were beginning to get clean water supplies (the coming of the railroads brought clean water as the Iron Horse needed cleaner water than people did and in huge amounts) cities were all-around unhealthy places to live. The air was foul. Everyone heated with firewood and the manure of animals gave the place a peculiar aroma. People piled on top of each other spread diseases like wildfire.

These took a while to write. I had to write them as I realized that the "world" had changed since the Revolutionary War/War of 1812 period and had to do a lot more changing to hit the world of the OTL American Civil War. This world is one in rapid transition, especially in terms of technology.

All of us are so familiar with World War II that an author could write any old thing and everybody is comfortable with the "background." Pretty much the same could be said of World War I, and to a lesser extent the American Revolution/War of 1812. NG's tales of ships of the line in the War of 1812 fit as comfortably as an old shoe. The world of 1848 - 'tain't so.

Needless to say, with the primitive land transportation infrastructure of the time this war had to be naval in nature, so it was perfect for this board.

I have always liked how jim picked exactly the right time frame for Letterstime. Any later, and the advantages of the Entente would have piled up so much that the whole story would be too implausible. Whether jim picked his time by design or accident, who knows? And really, who cares? But the timing is everything.

The War of 1848 (I couldn't think of a better name for it) is the product of casual conversations and reading over a period of years. I have talked to professional military and naval men (officers and senior enlisted), historians (both standard and technological), engineers, economists, public health specialists, and others and have come to the conclusion that 1848-49 were the last years the South could have had a chance. Whether they win or not…stay tuned.

I have a few more of these "sidebars" in process. I'll post them as needed.

The basic story line has become humongous. I can't get the damn thing to taper down. After a while, this story line can support a bunch of side stories. The good thing is if you read the side bars, you have largely read my notes.

The story is a mix of (much junior) historical characters and fictional characters. My 'Jutland' analog is a hum-dinger.