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Charles Dickens, Mrs. Logan describe Cairo in 1841

By P. Michael Jones
thesouthern.com
Posted: Sunday, December 25, 2011 1:00 am

Editor's note: This continues a series of reports on what happened in Southern Illinois 150 years ago during the Civil War. Reports will appear on days of significance to Southern Illinois - known at the time as Egypt.

On his trip through America in 1841, Charles Dickens described Cairo as: "...a breeding -place of fever, ague, and death...a dismal swamp, on which half built houses rot away...a hot bed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise, a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it."

In the autobiography of Mary Logan, the wife of Col. John A. Logan, Cairo in 1861 was described as still "little better than the doleful picture of it given in Dickens...." She said Cairo was a city often "deluged by overflows, whose waters stagnated in every depression and were soon covered by a green scum ...," a city where, "ague and other diseases from miasmatic influences frightened away" people who came to live there. It was a city of wooden buildings and stagnant water.

While there is little doubt that Cairo had not reached the stature promised to its earliest investors, Dickens and Mary Logan might have exaggerated somewhat as to its dismal nature. John H. Brinton, a well-trained surgeon from an important Philadelphia family, was stationed at Cairo during the first years of the Civil War. In his memoirs he mentions hotels, multi-storied buildings and his "cozy" rented accommodations. This is not to say there was not some truth in Dickens' and Logan's comments. Brinton wrote that his hotel, the St. Charles, was "the only hotel of any size" and complained that his room there was very dirty, dark, and horrid. In addition, he noted that rats were everywhere and that he covered his bed with mosquito netting.

Whatever Cairo had been before April 1861, it soon thereafter became the rendezvous point for many of Illinois' volunteer regiments. Thousands of Union soldiers descended on the small city, building camps, hospitals, and warehouses filled with the materials of war. By December 1861, its population had been more than doubled by Union troops. Cairo had become, for all intents and purposes, a city of tents. Mary Logan wrote that "almost every spot of dry ground around the city was covered with the white tents of the boys in blue."

By December, the mosquitoes were gone. An extremely cold winter had destroyed their dominion over the city. However, the rats had become even more of a problem as their numbers grew, fed by the refuse of the thousands of soldiers. The pools of stagnant water were also gone, but the mud and the dampness that was Cairo remained. It made the cold even more intense, chilling the men to the bone. The cold, the tents, the food, and the sickness made these men's lives miserable. What made these conditions even worse for these novice soldiers was the knowledge that warmth of home and family was not that very far away. Most could be there in a day, two at most, but they could not leave. They had committed the next three years of their lives to saving the Union. They knew that their only way home was through the disgrace of desertion, the heartbreak of disability or death. And this death would be, for the most part, not the noble death of falling in battle but a lingering death brought on by chronic diarrhea, or one of the many diseases that swept through the camps like wildfire. It is in these conditions that many of the men of Egypt spent their first Christmas as soldiers.