“I am extremely sorry to inform Congress our troops are very sickly,” Washington wrote Hancock in early August. Of his 17,225 privates, only 10,514 were present and fit for duty; many were unfit, as an ensign informed his diary, because “a dysentery prevails considerable in the army at this time.” Typhoid and typhus also prevailed; the diseases, respectively spread by fecal contamination and by lice, would not be distinguishable until the next century.
