Anyone know a book I could read that goes over this sanitary conditions of the average soldier?
How often they were able to bathe, did they have access to soap, how often did they get to shampoo their hair, etc?
Seeing photos shows that many soldiers grew beards, which had to be disgusting and full of vermin if not washed regularly… Not to mention the greasy feel that hair can get in a couple of days for most people… Add to that the amazing sweat that they all had poring from their bodies in those wool uniforms and kepis and i imagine they were a foul smelling bunch, but i have no feel for it other than what i’ve imagined.
The one book that really got me thinking about this was the “Retreat from Gettysburg”, which focuses in the Confederate army moving out of Gettysburg and back into Virginia. Three days of 90+ degree heat in Pennsylvania humidity, fighting, and then marching back in rain, heat, and god-awful conditions… Not to mention Union calvary shooting at them along the way. There was no time to bathe, yet alone change clothes for over a month for many of the rank and file soldiers. The key word is rank.
Anyone know from their Civil War reading anything they can share, or point me to a book or two covering this topic?
Yeah, I don’t know when the word ‘shampoo’ was even invented. Regardless, unless you were royalty you kind of never washed your hair. I’ve seen hygiene films from the 1950s that talk about only girls washing their hair, and only once a week! As gross as it sounds greasy hair waterproofed it and sort of helped keep it ‘clean’-ish.
And until only VERY recently everyone everywhere stank constantly their whole lives, so your nose didn’t notice it like we do now.
It reminds me of farmers, I remember as a kid visiting a farm for a school field trip and most of the kids were saying ‘this place stinks’ but the kids who grew up on farms and the farmers couldn’t smell anything.
Hail Ants is dead wrong. While different formulation for shampoo was unknown at the time, people definitely used soap on their hair and generally cleaned it.
Certainly cleanliness wasn’t something the average Civil War soldier got to spend a great amount of time upon. However, it probably wasn’t by choice. Bathing wasn’t exactly a frightening mystery to Americans, although few enjoyed hot baths daily. However, people would wash up regularly in civilian life and would have a regular bath. During the war… it didn’t happen. There were no bathing facilities for soldiers unless it was warm enough and there happened to be a halfway clean stream nearby. Men went for months without a decent wash at times.
Of course, soldiers who got a bit too ripe and refused to clean up generally got a thorough and unpleasant wash (and a half-drowning) when their fellow threw them in the nearest pond.
I tried to google the price of soap in 1860 and couldn’t find anything. Civil war soldiers made $10-20/month, so if a bar of soap was a nickel I’m sure a lot would have them. If it was closer to a dollar, I’m sure it would be a lot more rare.
E. L. Doctorow’s The March is a novel, but written with stunning descriptiveness of fine detail. It contains long scenes of, well, marches, with the soldiers stumbling on and on and on, without even time to break stride to let down their pants for necessities. Hey, the enlisted men were known as the “rank” and file, weren’t they? :eek:
They bathed when they could, which was not often. Here’s a photoof some Union troops taking a chance to bathe in the North Anna River during Grant’s Overland Campaign in May 1864. (I had seen the photo before doing research on my great-great-grandfather, who participated in the battle on another part of the river.)
This blog contains accounts of bathing by soldiers, including during the Civil War.
Or, the farm kids, visiting the Big City, thought it stunk. Actually, maybe the Big City just smelled diff’rent but to the farm nose unaccustomed to it, that stunk. A skunk sat on a stump.
The stump thunk the skunk stunk.
The skunk thunk the stump stunk.
Based on my experience hiking in the New Mexico mountains in the summer, your personal stench levels out after about 4-5 days of sweating and not bathing.
So they were rank, but probably not as rank as we think.
Seconding bump - stench does not accumulate like us affluent Westerners think, based on how we smell after a good sweat and some extrapolation. I know semi-primitive folks who dress in historical-style wool clothing and, with no running water, rarely wash up in the winter, and never wash their hair. They have an odor about them that’s kinda hard to categorize, but they most certainly don’t stink anything as bad as potent BO, halitosis etc.
I don’t know. There have been some really nasty smelling rank homeless people that could clear out a subway car in seconds and leave people gagging. It’s probably the worst smell I can remember. It’s way worse than simply sweating and not bathing for 5 days.
Many decades ago I worked in a store that sold clothing. It was next to the kind of bar that had people drinking in it before we opened up in the morning.
One day one of the regulars there came in to buy pants. He stank so badly we could not get within feet of him. We absolutely refused to have anything to do with him, so the owner had to take over the transaction. I’m hoping he just gave the guy pants that fit because nothing he tried on would ever be sellable to someone else.
There’s no comparison to working up a sweat. This is a palpable odor that cannot be handled by people whose noses still work. How and why they let him into the bar left me baffled. We never went in there for any reason.
I’ll bet those semi-primitive types still cleaned themselves well after going to the bathroom. If you stop doing that, any level of awfulness is possible.
