Wounded at the Battle of Gaines Mill during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign,… (Hampton History Museum,…)
Few American armies have been more humbled by the reality of war than the Army of the Potomac during its summer 1862 march up the Peninsula from Fort Monroe to Richmond.
When its blue-clad legions landed at Old Point Comfort in March, it was the largest army the Western Hemisphere had ever seen — and its advance with 121,500 men, 14,592 horses and mules and 1,224 wagons on Confederate-held Yorktown was described by a British military observer as "the stride of a giant."
But beginning with the May 5 Battle of Williamsburg — and continuing in clash after clash during the struggle for Richmond — the grim ferocity of the rifled musket and .58-caliber Minie ball exacted a toll no one expected. Still more crippling was the fearful number stricken by typhoid, dysentery, malaria and Chickahominy fever, which swept through the Union ranks so relentlessly that the camps of the sick and wounded swelled to 20,000 soldiers.
So dire was this unprecedented medical crisis that Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan plead for help, spawning a fleet of hospital ships that evacuated the sprawling wards on the Pamunkey River first — and then the epic expanses of tents at Harrison's Landing on the James River.
When that flood overflowed the hospitals to the north in early August, the steamers ferried thousands to the east bank of the Hampton River, where hundreds of carpenters labored to complete the vast triangle of wards that soon boasted the second largest number of beds in the North's hospital system.
"The army simply wasn't equipped to deal with such huge numbers of wounded and sick soldiers — and it was quickly overwhelmed," says Dennis Mroczkowski, former director of Fort Monroe's Casemate Museum.
"But it responded in a very short time with a huge hospital and a huge staff that could handle thousands of patients. The hospital at Hampton was a very busy place — and it was very impressive."
So large was the tract of land taken up by the hospital at its height that it stretched from the grounds of today's Veterans Affairs Medical Center to the far side of adjacent Hampton University.
Dozens of buildings housed some 3,500 beds, and a small city of hospital tents pushed that capacity to 5,000 patients. Horse-drawn ambulance cars weaved between these structures, connecting them to the busy Old Point Comfort wharves through a narrow-gauge railway.
Nearly every week the New York Times reported the names of the men who died there, while the American Medical Times described the conditions in the wards and the newest treatments. Illustrations appeared in both Harper's and Leslie's weekly newspapers, while Harper's New Monthly devoted 18 pages to an in-depth feature.
"People have forgotten how large and important this hospital was," says J. Michael Cobb, curator of the Hampton History Museum.
"And when Grant crossed the James River and began the siege of Petersburg in 1864, its location so close to the field of battle made it even more crucial."
Despite its later significance, the Hampton hospital got its start in the small 4-ward clinic that served the garrison of 350 men defending Fort Monroe at the start of the war.
Within days of Virginia's secession, however, the number of troops stationed there grew nearly 10-fold, raising the number of sickbeds needed so quickly that doctors commandeered the Hygeia Hotel and transformed its famous dining room into a surgical ward.
As the Federal presence swelled, so did the need for more hospital space, leading the army to fill the abandoned halls of the 4-story Chesapeake Female Seminary with 500 more stricken soldiers.
That meant the two largest buildings in the region had been seized and repurposed in a desperate response to the unending stream of sick soldiers, Cobb says. But the situation only grew worse with the ferocious Battle of Williamsburg and the campaign that followed.
By early July 1862, the American Medical Times reported the Hampton "hospitals filled to overflowing with the sick and wounded from the 