The Camps of Rot: Disease, Neglect, and the Bureaucratic Collapse Behind the Union Army's Deadliest Enemy.

Two-thirds of Union soldiers who died in the Civil War were not killed by Confederate bullets.

They died in camp.

In mud-soaked encampments outside Washington, in overcrowded winter quarters in Virginia, and in makeshift hospitals where medical supplies sat stranded on rail sidings, disease became the Union Army's deadliest enemy. Dysentery. Typhoid. Measles. Pneumonia. Camp fever.

The Camps of Rot is a forensic reconstruction of how sanitation failures, political patronage, bureaucratic delay...