Angel's Glow: The Odd Bacteria that Saved Civil War Soldiers

 

        

        On the banks of the Tennessee River, just outside a small town whose name means place of peace in Hebrew, upwards of fifty thousand blue clad Federal troops are gathered.

These troops are battle hardened veterans who are led by the hardest of Union generals--Ulysses S. Grant.  Already, less than one full year into the War Between the States, Grant has earned a fearsome reputation as one of the north’s most determined battlefield commanders.

It is April 6, 1862 and only two months prior, in February of that year, using the audacity and stubbornness that history will go on to always remember him for, Grant overpowered the vaunted rebel strongholds of Fort’s Donelson and Henry.  In the process he earned himself the nickname of “Unconditional Surrender” Grant in all the newspapers up north.

Now, as dawn approaches on April 6, Grant in command of the undefeated Army of Tennessee, is primed and ready to invade the state of Mississippi and strike a crippling blow at the very heartland of the Confederacy.

But only a few miles away, encamped around the vital railway junction of Corinth Mississippi, is the scrappy Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston and his some forty-thousand regulars, also battle hardened, and grimly determined to defend their homeland against what they perceive to be hordes of malicious marauding yankees.  

Johnston and his homespun wearing rebels are not daunted by Grant’s reputation, or by his gunboats on the Tennessee River, or by the well fed and well armed Federal troops because today the Confederates have a surprise in store for “Unconditional Surrender” Grant and his Union army stationed near Shiloh, Tennessee.

Just as the sun of early morning clears away the fog from the swampland around the Tennessee River, Johnston’s rebel forces launch a ferocious attack before Grant’s planned invasion of the southern heartland can even get underway.

Running with bayonets fixed and screaming the fearsome rebel yell at the top of their lungs, Johnston’s army storms over the union positions and drives Grant’s army all the way to the river itself.  With their backs literally to the water, and with massive artillery support from nearby gunboats and cannon batteries, union resistance stiffens as morning turns to afternoon.

But the Confederates are relentless and just keep on coming.  The armies engage in ferocious hand to hand combat on the bank’s of the Tennessee River, using rifles as clubs to bash in one another’s brains, stabbing each other straight through with bayonets and literally strangling one another with bare hands, all the while, sinking up to their knees in the muck and mud of the Tennessee swampland.

During the first several hours of the battle on the sixth of April it appears as if Grant will, for the first time, be defeated and have to abandon his position, but soon help arrives in the form of reinforcements--twenty thousand fresh Union troops, the Army of Ohio, under command of Don Carlos Buell.  With the arrival of Buell’s forces fortunes begin to change for Grant’s army.

Then once again, this time all morning and afternoon on April 7, the two armies fight one another back and forth across the same swampy blood soaked ground that they had fought over on the previous day.  As the Union forces counterattack and Confederate forces retreat on the second day of battle at Shiloh, soldiers on both sides are forced to climb and stumble over the bodies of dead and wounded friends and foes alike.

Finally, as night falls on the second day of battle, Grant and his Army of Tennessee once again reign victorious as the union controls the field of battle around Shiloh.  But it is a field of battle that has been dearly paid for by both sides.

After two days of fighting over 1,700 Union and 1,700 Confederate soldiers have been killed.  Over 16,000 wounded men are lying on the muddy ground, literally sinking into the fetid swampy morass, around the Tennessee River once the battle is over.  

Some of these wounded men attempt to crawl in their agony, but are soon immobilized and swallowed up by the mud; others cry out in desperation for water, or for their mother, as they wait for stretcher bearers or burial parties to discover them.  Some, simply lay there quietly and wait for the angel of death to take them away.

Civil War surgical tent

For over four days rescue and burial parties will scour the battlefield around Shiloh attempting to save the wounded.  On the very first night, soldier’s will start to notice something very peculiar, almost other-worldly about many of the wounded who are scattered around the battlefield near Shiloh.

Many of the wounded, on both sides, have wounds that glow in the dark.  Some are shot straight through the gut, but still breathing, and some have had legs and arms blown clean off, but the majority of the soldiers who seem to survive their wounds all have one thing in common.  Those who recover all have wounds that, somehow, miraculously glow a phosphorescent bluish green.

In the wake of the battle both Union and Confederate soldiers who observe and experience this phenomenon firsthand will dub it ‘Angel’s Glow’.

If a soldier is lucky enough to be rescued from the battlefield at Shiloh, and his wound glows in the dark, then he is likely to survive, however, if his wound is not glowing then death is almost certain to await that soldier.  It appears, at the time, as if an angel of some sort has truly come down from heaven and marked out those wounded soldiers on both sides who will live and those who will die.  

Although, today we know from so many recorded accounts that the phenomena of Angel’s Glow for wounded soldiers in the aftermath of the Battle of Shiloh was definitely a real occurence witnessed by tens of thousands--what the heck it actually was would not be explained for another one hundred and thirty nine years until a very enterprising seventeen year old high school student happened across the scene of the battle.

In 2001 a seventeen year old high school student named Bill Martin tours the battlefield at Shiloh with some of his friends and hears about ‘Angel’s Glow’ from one of the tour guides.

When Martin arrives home from his trip he tells his mother about what he has learned on the trip to the battlefield, specifically the anecdote related to him about the phenomena of ‘Angel’s Glow”.  Young Bill Martin and his friend Jonathan Curtis have an avid interest in the Civil War and his mother Phyllis, just happens to be a microbiologist and she is very much intrigued by what her son relates.  So, Phyllis Martin, decides to investigate the historical mystery of ‘Angel’s Glow’ and she enlists the help of many of her friends in the microbiology community.

Bill and Phyllis Martin will discover the answer to a mystery that had befuddled historians for nearly one hundred and forty years.  The answer that Phyllis and Bill Martin come up with is, to  date, the most plausible explanation for the glowing wound phenomena that Civil War era soldiers described as Angel’s Glow.

It would appear in their research that Angel’s Glow is caused by a bioluminescent bacterium that is able to flourish in the springtime climate of Tennessee.  This bacterium called Photorhabdus Luminescens cannot normally live in a host as warm as human flesh, however, the Martin’s theorized, that on cool nights such as those in April of 1862, the overnight temperature would have dropped low enough to cause hypothermia to set in for many of the wounded soldiers left on the battlefield.

As their wound’s cooled, the temperature of their flesh would have become ideal for hosting Photorhabdus Luminiscens, and that bacterium would have in turn burrowed into the blood vessels of their wounded flesh enabling the soldier’s wounds to better stave off infection, but also causing them to glow bluish green from the bioluminescence of the beneficial bacteria.  At least, roughly, that’s the most widely accepted scientific theory used by science to explain the phenomena of Angel’s Glow, and it is the theory that was advanced by Bill Martin, his friend Jonathan Curtis and his microbiologist mother Phyllis.

In essence, the fact that wounded soldiers developed hypothermia actually saved many of their lives in the aftermath of the Battle of Shiloh.

Wounded amputees recovering outside hospital

        Perhaps, there was nothing truly angelic about the odd and life saving phenomena of Angel’s Glow.  Maybe, science can be used to explain why some soldiers survived grisly wounds in the aftermath of one of the Civil War’s most deadly battles while others did not.  But before we explain away Angel’s Glow as purely the work of nature, and abandon the role of chance or fate in saving lives altogether, it is best to first take a look at the state of battlefield medicine during the war itself.

During the American Civil War a wounded soldier’s chance of survival was very slim.  In the 1860’s, medical science was just coming out of the speculative era and moving into the scientific era.  Theories of the germ transmission of disease and illness were still not universally accepted nor even widely understood.  For that reason, Civil War hospitals were breeding grounds for disease and death causing infection.  If a soldier didn’t die of his wounds before he got to the hospital he was more than likely to die from them once he got there.

Though doctor’s did have access to chloroform and other drugs to alleviate pain and suffering, sanitation was non existent, as was the ability to prevent any type of infection once a wound had been treated.  Therefore, when it came to treating any type of wound, Civil War era surgeons universally resorted to amputation in an effort to sacrifice a limb and save a soldier.  A doctor’s kit, with its various hacksaws and jagged knives, more closely resembled the tools used by a modern day woodcutter than it did those used by a modern day surgeon.

In Civil War hospital tents severed limbs could often be seen stacked six feet high as doctor’s amputated limb after limb in vain attempts to treat the wounded.  Often, wounded soldiers on the battlefield would attempt to minimize the severity of their own wounds knowing full well that a trip to the hospital would almost certainly result in the loss of an arm or leg and more than likely result in a loss of their own life from disease or infection as well.

It is no surprise then that Civil War soldiers would have thought that wounds that glowed in the dark and seemed, almost as if by magic, to heal themselves were angelic in nature.  It is no wonder that word of the Angel’s Glow witnessed on the battlefield after the bloodshed at Shiloh spread so quickly across the north and the south alike and is still remembered with wonder today.

Shiloh National Battlefield Cemetery