“You can’t carry on war without blood-letting,” said Lincoln one day.
The President, although almost feminine in his kind-heartedness, knew
not only this, but also that large bodies of soldiers in camp were at
the mercy of diseases of every sort, the result being a heavy casualty
list.
Of the (estimated) half-million men of the Union armies who gave up
their lives in the War of the Rebellion--1861-65--fully seventy-five
per cent died of disease. The soldiers killed upon the field of battle
constituted a comparatively small proportion of the casualties.