How Yankees Fostered Southern Disease

In August of 1862, two years before his infamous ‘March to the Sea’, General William T. Sherman declared, “Salt is eminently contraband.” The Southern leaders’ positioning of the South’s economy as dependent on cash crops created well-known shortages of many sorts. One aspect of this approach concerned the use of money acquired from cash crops to purchase food and salt. This failure and refusal to embrace a diverse, self-sufficient economy was a weakness seized upon by the Union that led to hunger and a return to a traditional but less healthy diet reliant on meat, meal, and molasses.[1] Opportunistic infections of many kinds present in the disease-infested South aggravated the plight of an already hungry and malnourished people. Many combinations of infections and conditions were far worse than the mere sum of the symptoms of those infections and conditions.

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