The portable house must necessarily be as small as possible, and must be
made to give its occupants the smallest endurable space. The English
bell-tent contains 512 cubic feet, and lodges twelve to fifteen men,
when on march, and eight to twelve men in camp, affording 34 to 64 feet
of breathing-space for each. Quartermaster-General Airey says this is
the best tent in use.
The American tents are of many varieties in shape and size. The Sibley
tent gives 1,052 feet to seventeen or eighteen, and sometimes to twenty
men, being 53 to 62 feet for each. The Fremont tent is somewhat larger,
and, as used in the cavalry camp at Readville, gave the men more air
than the Sibley. Both of these have means of ventilation. The
wedge-tent, being the simplest in structure, is most easily pitched,
struck, and packed by the soldiers, and therefore used by 58 per cent,
of the regiments of the Union army, six me sleeping in each. But as
occupied by two of the regiments in Massachusetts, in the summer of
1861, it was the most crowded and unhealthy. Those used by the Second
Regiment at West Roxbury, and the Ninth at Long Island, (in Boston
Harbor,) were twelve and a half feet long, eight feet wide, and six feet
high to the ridge, and held twelve men. Each sleeper had 8-1/3 square
feet of floor to rest upon, and 25 cubic feet of air to breathe through
the night, with no ventilation, except what air passed in through the
door-way, when left open, and through the porous cloth that covered the
tent. Some of the tents of one of the regiments encamped at Worcester
had 56 feet of floor-surface, and 160 feet of air, which was divided
among six men, giving each 27 feet of air.
In all the camps of Massachusetts, and of most armies everywhere,
economy, not only of room within the tents, but of ground where they are
placed, seems to be deemed very important, even on those fields where
there is opportunity for indefinite expansion of the encampment. The
British army-regulations prescribe three plans of arranging the tents.
The most liberal and loose arrangement gives to each soldier eighty
square feet of ground, the next gives forty-two, and the most compact
allows twenty-seven feet, without and within his tent. These are
densities of population equal to having 348,000, 664,000, and 1,008,829
people on a square mile. But enormous and incredible as this
condensation of humanity may seem, we, in Massachusetts, have beaten it,
in one instance at least. In the camp of the Ninth Regiment at Long
Island, the tents were placed in compact rows, and touched each other on
the two sides and at the back. Between the alternate rows there were
narrow lanes, barely wide enough for carriages to pass. Thus arranged,
the men, when in their tents, were packed at the rate of 1,152,000 on a
square mile, or one man on every twenty--two square feet, including the
lanes between, as well as the ground under, the tents.
The city of London has 17,678 persons on a square mile, through its
whole extent, including the open spaces, streets, squares, and parks.
East London, the densest and most unhealthy district, has 175,816 on a
mile. Boston, including East and South Boston, but not Washington
Village, has 50,805 on a mile; and the Broad-Street section, densely
filled with Irish families, had, when last examined for this purpose, in
1845, a density of population at the rate of 413,000 on the same space.