Joseph Burdick lay in a hospital at Haynes Bluff, just north of Vicksburg, Miss., as his brothers-in-law Isaac Saunders and Abel Kenyon marched off with the rest of the 7th Rhode Island Infantry to capture Jackson, the state capital. By the time they returned, Burdick, a native of Hopkinton, was dead. He wasn’t the victim of shot or shell, but of a more insidious killer — disease.
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