Heroines of Mercy Street

by Pamela D. Toler PhD

  Alcott turns real bureaucratic snarls into comedy, but she was not the only one to experience such problems. Anne Reading had similar difficulties acquiring her transportation pass at the end of her service. She waited for several hours at the Sanitary Commission office while the clerk carried her papers to the surgeon general. He returned with them unsigned; Surgeon General Hammond had examined her papers and refused to sign them because they didn’t specify whether she was a volunteer or a paid nurse, and only paid nurses were to receive free rail passage. Desperate, she went to Dix for help, catching her just as Dix was on the brink of leaving on one of her endless hospital visits. Dix wrote out a certificate stating that Reading was a paid nurse. Reading then hurried back to the Sanitary Commission office, half frozen by the intense cold of the windy March day. The clerk, who seems to have been more obliging than those encountered by Trib Periwinkle, took the papers once again to the surgeon general, who gave the order for her free passage to New York. The clerk brought the papers back to her with his apologies for the delay and the offer of a bottle of sherry to keep her company during the long night of travel. Reading accepted them both with gratitude.

  Even when tickets were in order, travel over what now seems like a short distance could involve a complicated series of transfers. A trip from Boston to Washington could take several days and required taking a train to New London, Connecticut, a steamship from there to New Jersey, then three more trains with transfers between stations in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Sometimes even a complicated series of transfers would have seemed like a luxury. Nurses who worked in field hospitals, in particular, became adept at taking whatever form of transportation presented itself, from ambulance to baggage wagon. Emily Cone, who served in the Cumberland Hospital in Nashville, reported traveling “alone” in a boxcar with three hundred men. Lucy Campbell Kaiser, who worked in various locations in northern Missouri, often traveled by horseback over long distances and, on more than one occasion, talked her way onto a troop transport river steamer.

  The number of women who volunteered tapered off after 1862, but women continued to apply for positions well into 1864. In some cases, a male family member was wounded and needed nursing. Some finally turned thirty. In some cases, a family situation changed. And sometimes, as in the case of Mary Gardner Holland, a woman simply felt she could wait no longer.

  “The first gun fired on Sumter fired every drop of my blood,” Holland wrote in 1895. “Had it been possible I should have made my appearance at the first battle of Bull Run.” But her elderly mother depended on her. Bending to family duty, she worked during the day to support herself and her mother and spent her evenings volunteering for the Sanitary Commission, as thousands of other Northern women did throughout the war. Finally she told her mother that “there were married women, with families of half-grown girls, who could not go to the front, but could do what I was doing.” It was time for her to do more.

  Like the women who first applied for nursing appointments immediately after Bull Run, Holland tried every method she could think of to get an official appointment at the front. In 1864, after exhausting all other options, she came across a copy of Dix’s Circular No. 8, which inspired her to apply for a position through Miss Dix. She had one problem with the listed requirements: giving up her skirt hoops. “I felt as if I could not walk without a hoop.” But determined to nurse, she decided, “Well, if I can’t walk without it, I will crawl; for I must go and I will do the best I can.”

  Soon after that, she read in the paper that wounded troops were flooding into Washington so quickly that more help was needed at once. She wrote immediately to Miss Dix: “I am in possession of one of your circulars, and will comply with all your requirements. I am plain-looking enough to suit you, and old enough. I have no near relatives in the war, no lover there. I never had a husband, and am not looking for one. Will you take me?” She heard back from Dix in a few days: “Report at once to my house, corner of 14th Street and New York Avenue, Washington.”

  Having entered the service late, Holland worked as a nurse in the Washington area for only fourteen months at the end of the war. During the day she was in charge of the linen room. The job was hard. But no matter how tired she was, she spent her evenings and sometimes the entire night doing what she called “real nursing”: taking care of the wounded soldiers.27

  Whether they volunteered within the first weeks of the war or the final months, from a sense of duty or a need for work, Civil War nurses were always clear what the priority was—the soldiers.

  Chapter 4

  Nurses on the Hospital Transport Ships

  “Imagine a great river or sound steamer filled on every deck—every berth and every square inch of room covered with wounded men; even the stairs and gangways and guards filled with those who are less badly wounded; and then imagine fifty well men, on every kind of errand, rushing to and fro over them, every touch bringing agony to the poor fellows, while stretcher after stretcher came along, hoping to find an empty place; and then imagine what it was to keep calm ourselves, and make sure that every man on both boats was properly refreshed and fed.”

  —Katharine Prescott Wormeley1

  Anne Reading’s plans were changed while she was en route to her first assignment from Miss Dix, thanks to the efforts of two doctors who had worked with her at St. Luke’s Hospital.

  Reading was scheduled to take the train on May 5, 1861, to Baltimore, where she was to receive her travel passes and assignment from Miss Dix. Two days before her departure, the two doctors, Dr. Watts and Dr. Peters, received their own summons for service on the Ocean Queen, one of the newly established hospital transport ships run by the United States Sanitary Commission. The doctors were authorized to bring several nurses with them, male or female, and they tried to convince Reading to accompany them. She refused, pointing out that she had been hired by Dix through the Women’s Central Association of Relief (WCAR) as part of the army nursing corps and that they were working for the Sanitary Commission. Since Dix and the Sanitary Commission worked separately, she could not simply move from one job to another. (The relationship between Dix, WCAR, and the Sanitary Commission was complicated. The WCAR screened potential nurses for Dix for a time, but she was never part of the Sanitary Commission and found herself increasingly at odds with the commission’s leaders as the war continued.) Reading pronounced herself satisfied with her job arrangements, but the doctors insisted they would try to get her transferred to their ship once they reached Baltimore

  The doctors pulled strings, but they didn’t achieve quite the results they desired. When Reading arrived in Baltimore on May 6, she met with Miss Dix, who gave her a transportation pass to Fort Monroe, located at Hampton Roads, Virginia, near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, and the site of a major Union hospital where Reading expected to work. Pass in hand, she joined a group of twenty women headed to the same destination. Once at Fort Monroe, Reading’s traveling companions chose to rest while they waited for further orders; Reading chose to visit the military hospital instead, a former hotel now under the army’s control.

  Reading’s busman’s holiday to the military hospital was probably the last quiet moment she would enjoy for some months. When she returned to her traveling companions, she found they had all received orders to proceed to Yorktown, which the Confederate army had abandoned on May 4. The Union troops, having taken possession of the city, were in pursuit of the retreating rebel army, leaving behind the sick and wounded. Nurses and surgeons were needed immediately.

  In Yorktown, Reading discovered that unbeknownst to her she had been transferred from Dix’s nursing corps to the Sanitary Commission’s hospital transport ships, where the need for nurses was critical. The Ocean Queen, with Dr. Watts and Dr. Peters, was at Yorktown when Reading and her companions arrived the next afternoon. The nurses assigned to the ship, including Amy Morris Bradley, had begun to load sick and wounded soldiers, about a thousand in all, many of them ill with typhoid fever. When Reading arrived at th
e ship, Dr. Watts hurried over to tell her how glad he was that she was there and how desperately she was needed on the Ocean Queen. His satisfaction lasted only until Frederick Law Olmsted, the Sanitary Commission’s treasurer and the organizing force behind the hospital transport fleet, came on board and claimed Reading. The Ocean Queen would be sailing back to New York soon with its passengers; Reading could not be spared.2

  The next day Reading set out on her first assignment as a member of the hospital transport service, traveling to West Point on the steamer Wilson Small to pick up a group of wounded soldiers. She would spend the next four months moving from one steamship to another, caring for the casualties produced in General George McClellan’s disastrous Peninsular Campaign.

  The Formation and Mission of the

  United States Sanitary Commission

  The United States Sanitary Commission had its roots in the ladies’ aid societies that women across the Northern states formed for the support of the Union’s soldiers after the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861.

  Perhaps as many as ten thousand local aid societies were formed in the first year of the war alone. Modeled on the mission aid societies common at the time, their purpose was to make and collect food, clothing, and medical supplies for the Union’s soldiers. They turned homes, schools, and churches into small-scale factories and shipping warehouses.

  Over the course of the war, the aid societies would provide millions of dollars of much needed supplies and much appreciated luxuries for the troops, but their initial efforts were sometimes as chaotic as the new army itself. With no understanding of how the still-developing military distribution system worked, their boxes were often literally sidetracked at the rail yards to make way for troops and army stores—leaving cakes to mold and jars of jelly to ferment and explode. Some groups produced goods that betrayed a fundamental ignorance about soldiers’ needs. The most dramatic example of this was the early enthusiasm for making “havelocks,” white cloth cap covers with long tails that covered the back of the neck and shoulders. Made popular by British general Sir Henry Havelock in India four years earlier, the caps were intended to protect men who fought in hot climates from suffering sunstroke. From the perspective of ladies in Maine, Virginia in the summer was as tropical as Madras. In fact, soldiers complained the havelocks made them even hotter because they blocked the air from circulating around their heads and faces. Since havelocks weren’t standard uniform issue, many soldiers abandoned them as useless. More ingenious, or thriftier, men kept them to use as gun patches, dishcloths, and coffee strainers.

  Disturbed by the waste of time, energy, and material symbolized by mistakes like the ill-fated havelocks and the rush of overzealous and undertrained nursing volunteers, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first licensed female doctor, and Rev. Henry Bellows, a popular Unitarian minister, arrived independently at the idea of uniting the hitherto independent ladies’ aid societies into a central organization. On April 25, 1861—just six days after Dorothea Dix’s meeting at the White House—Blackwell called an informal meeting at the New York Infirmary for Women of women with experience in reform work to discuss the possibility of forming a Women’s Central Association of Relief. A notice of the meeting accidentally found its way into the New York Times; instead of a small meeting of known organizers, “the parlours of the infirmary were crowded with ladies, to the surprise of the little group of managers.”3 At the meeting, Blackwell outlined three objectives for the proposed WCAR: managing the efforts of existing ladies’ aid associations and encouraging the creation of new local associations; coordinating with the army’s Medical Bureau about the needs of the rapidly growing army so members’ efforts weren’t wasted; and creating a system for selecting and training volunteer nurses. Two men, Rev. Bellows and Dr. Elisha Harris, superintendent of Hospitals at Staten Island, also attended the meeting. Both would play critical roles in the creation of the United States Sanitary Commission, an organization that would go well beyond the scope of the ladies’ aid societies from which it sprang.

  Encouraged by the enthusiasm of the initial meeting, Dr. Blackwell called an open meeting four days later at the much larger Cooper Institute, to be presided over by Rev. Bellows. The hall was packed: New York papers estimated the attendance at between two and three thousand. Repeated waves of applause interrupted Bellows’s speech, in which he praised the outpouring of aid for the troops and then called for New York’s aid societies to gather under what he described as “an appropriate head” designed to “give explicit answers to the ten thousand questions everywhere arising.”4 Dr. Blackwell and her associates followed Bellows’s speech with a presentation of the WCAR plan and the election of a board of managers for the new umbrella relief organization, made up of twelve men and twelve women. The board then elected Dr. Valentine Mott, a founding faculty member of the university medical college of New York, as president and Bellows as vice president—a shrewd recognition on Blackwell’s part that, while the women of the WCAR were more than capable of managing the grassroots support efforts, the organization was unlikely to succeed in its efforts to build a relationship with the Medical Bureau without a male spokesman.

  On May 15, Rev. Bellows and three doctors associated with the WCAR boarded the first train to travel from New York to Washington since the Baltimore riots on April 19. Their goal was to learn firsthand what the relief associations could accomplish and how they could work with the Medical Bureau. Bellows would later say that “the first idea of a Sanitary Commission, which certainly had not entered my head when we left New York, was started between us in the cars twixt Philadelphia and Baltimore—in a long and earnest conversation.”5 Over the course of the thirteen-hour train ride they discussed the question of how to safeguard the health of soldiers on and off the battlefield. They hoped to avoid repeating the British experience in the Crimean War, where inadequate supplies and medical care killed more British soldiers than were lost on the battlefield. Once in Washington, the committee toured military camps and hospitals with the help of Dorothea Dix, giving Bellows his first look at the inadequate arrangements made to house and care for the troops, wounded and sound alike, who arrived in the capital every day. Bellows wrote home to his wife that “the amount of sickness and suffering among the troops forbids my neglecting anything I can possibly do to bring the matter home to the Government.”6

  Over the course of several days, as Bellows met with Acting Surgeon General Colonel Robert C. Wood, generals, cabinet members, and President Lincoln himself, his goals changed from formal recognition of the WCAR’s three-part plan to the creation of a civilian sanitary commission that would focus on the broader questions of army health that the army itself was prone to forget; this was a change that not only bypassed the efforts of the WCAR, but that Bellows presented as a way to control the extent to which the efforts of ladies’ aid societies and volunteer nurses disrupted the army’s systems. In a letter to Secretary of War Simon Cameron, dated May 18, Bellows and his fellow committee members offered themselves as members of a sanitary commission who would serve as advisors to the government with a mandate to inspect military camps and hospitals and the power to enforce sanitary regulations for the benefit of the soldiers. The proposal made no mention of the WCAR, which had paid to send the committee to Washington in the first place, and reduced the question of female nurses to a side issue. On June 9, Cameron approved the creation of “a Commission of Inquiry and Advice in respect of the Sanitary Interests of the United States Forces,” soon to be known as the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC). President Lincoln signed the order four days later with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, remarking that he feared the commission would be “a fifth wheel to the coach,”7 an awkward addition to the Union’s improvised and rickety war machine. Certainly the army’s Medical Bureau viewed the creation of a civilian body with a mandate to ask questions and make improvements in matters of the army’s health with suspicion, if not outright hostility. But whether the army liked it or not, the United States
Sanitary Commission was now official and ready to begin work.

  Rev. Bellows was named president of the commission, but its secretary, Frederick Law Olmsted, was responsible for the group’s real achievements. Best known as the landscape architect responsible for designing New York’s Central Park, Olmsted had already demonstrated a talent for organization. Under his leadership, the Sanitary Commission became a flexible and powerful agency for the care of suffering soldiers. The executive board of the commission was all male, but women continued to dominate the organization at the regional and grassroots level. Twelve regional branches of the commission—located in New York, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Louisville, New Albany, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh—coordinated and directed the activities of the thousands of local societies that chose to come under its umbrella. Not all aid societies chose to join forces with the Sanitary Commission. Some local societies, such as those that allied themselves with Clara Barton, remained independent. In addition, two other large-scale relief organizations competed with the USSC for volunteers and resources: the St. Louis–based Western Sanitary Commission, which served regiments in the western campaigns, and the YMCA’s United States Christian Commission, which focused on caring for soldiers’ souls as well as their bodies. Nonetheless, historians conservatively estimate some 7,000 local ladies’ aid societies allied themselves with the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War; the commission itself was more generous in its estimate. In 1865, the USSC Bulletin claimed 32,000 affiliated aid societies.8