At the end of October 1862, the steward gave Ropes new cause for indignation when he struck a young soldier with a chisel and then imprisoned him in the hospital’s guardhouse. The steward was taken aback when the boy’s father arrived from Philadelphia the next day, in response to a telegram from Ropes, and demanded his son. Later that day, another man appeared and, without identifying himself, asked why the steward had jailed the boy. The steward swore at him and told him it was none of his business. The man walked past him into the ward, asked another patient for the names of the steward and the head surgeon, and wrote them down. When he shoved the note in his pocket, “his shabby coat fell open, revealing a General’s strap!” General Nathaniel P. Banks, at the time in charge of the defense of the capital, then asked to speak to his old friend Hannah Ropes. She couldn’t help gloating in a letter to Alice, “The cup of chagrin to the steward seemed full!”41 It would shortly overflow.
The next day the steward chose to torment a different man, this one with no inconvenient relatives to pull strings on his behalf. He put a young German soldier named Julius, “who had no father, no mother and no friends in this country,” into “the hole,” a portion of the cellar partitioned off to hold soldiers for disciplinary purposes. As soon as one of the other nurses came to tell her, Ropes pulled on her bonnet and went in search of help. Instead of appealing to Dr. Clark, she went first to General Banks’s headquarters. When she discovered Banks was in New York, she decided to pay a personal call to Hammond, who seems to have been unaware of her political connections. She sat in a stiff wooden chair outside Hammond’s office and watched as he walked by without “the courtesy of a look or a nod, or even the old time civility of raising the hand to his hat.” She asked for an immediate meeting, but Hammond’s assistant put her off. Enraged, Ropes wrote in her diary: “Two rebuffs seemed about enough for a woman of half a century to accept without compromising her own dignity.”42
Instead of waiting to see Hammond, Ropes took the problem straight to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, where her reception was very different. Within ten minutes, she was at his desk and telling him her story. Stanton, whose dislike of Hammond was well known, was more than ready to investigate Ropes’s charges. He called for the provost marshal, the officer with responsibility for investigating charges against army personnel. Before Ropes “got hold of the importance of the order,” Stanton ordered the provost marshal to accompany her to the hospital and arrest the steward. Over the next four days, Ropes’s complaints against the steward received as much attention as she could have wished: “Straps and buttons have been hurrying through the halls, wise looking men in long boots have stood about; and legal people have been into my rooms to take testimony.” Even Thomas Perley, the medical inspector general, at whose home Ropes often attended Sunday dinner, made a perfunctory appearance. Dr. Clark was also arrested and held over the weekend. Anticipating possible reprisals against her, Stanton issued an order that the chief surgeon could not remove Ropes from her place in the hospital, a precaution that proved necessary after Clark’s release.43
Ropes’s diary entry the next day began, “Today the whole house began to brighten.”44
Amy Morris Bradley Reforms Camp Misery
In December of 1862, Amy Morris Bradley took on the role of patient advocate for the more than fifteen hundred men interned at Camp Convalescent, known to its inhabitants as Camp Misery.
Established in August 1862 just outside Arlington, about a mile from Mansion House Hospital, the camp was intended to solve the problem of soldiers not yet well enough to rejoin their regiments but too well to continue to take up a hospital bed. Under the control of the Army of the Potomac rather than the Medical Bureau, the camp rapidly degenerated into what Clara Barton described as “a sort of pen into which all who could limp, all deserters and stragglers, were driven promiscuously.”45 Located at the foot of a long slope that drained into the camp, it was damp even in dry weather. Rain turned it into a quagmire. The men were housed in torn and dirty tents without floors or fires and given standard army rations of salt pork, beans, and hardtack, which they were obliged to cook themselves over wood for which they scavenged as best they could. Little or no medical attention was provided to track the course of their convalescence. The strongest recovered without aid and went back to their units. The weakest began to die off as the temperatures dropped, with several freezing to death. Those who remained succumbed to the combination of exposure and filth and fell ill once more. Sanitary Commission agents began “kidnapping” the worst cases and taking them back to the hospitals.
Mary Phinney von Olnhausen came to hate Camp Misery as much as those interned there did. She swore that the convalescents who arrived at Mansion House Hospital from the camp needed more attention than men wounded in battle. She raged against the conditions in a letter dated November 9, 1862:
I wish you could look into my ward tonight and see these miserable sick men who have come in from the convalescent camp during the last week. Such wrecks I never saw, all worn out with fever and diarrhea or some other chronic complaint… Several thousand have been there, just lying on the ground in tents, many without blankets, none with more than one, the worst possible food to eat, and growing sicker and dying every day… One night last week, about nine o’clock, five of these men were sent to me, and I had but three empty beds. Five such objects I never saw,—three with typhoid, one German with shaking palsy, and one with paralysis. They told me they had been pronounced fit for duty and sent out there, where they had been for three weeks or more, every day growing sicker. The night before it had rained steadily and they just lay in pools of mud. What can our government be doing to let such a place exist? Two of them have already died and one of the others, I fear, will.46
Change would come soon, thanks to a tiny, delicate-looking dynamo named Amy Morris Bradley.
Born in 1823 in East Vassalboro, Maine, Bradley was well accustomed to taking on challenges by the time the war began in 1861. Like many single women of the period, she became a schoolteacher, beginning at East Vassalboro, where she taught at the same school she had attended. She was eager to learn more, see more, do more, and earn more. With an eye on teaching in Boston, she saved enough money to pay for one term at a private school in the nearby town of Vassalboro, the last formal schooling she would receive. For the next few years, she made the most of whatever opportunities came her way, teaching wherever a family connection provided an opening, including a brief stint with her brother in Charleston, South Carolina, where she was ill at ease with the luxurious lifestyle enjoyed by her brother’s in-laws and outraged by slavery and the political rhetoric that filled the papers. She returned home for a time to take care of her ailing father. When her father recovered, a sister-in-law who was weak and depressed after childbirth demanded her services. Bradley found herself being sucked into the position of unpaid family caregiver and peacemaker that was often the fate of spinster daughters of the time. When an opportunity to work in Costa Rica as the governess to two young girls arose in 1853, she grabbed it and fled.
The job in Costa Rica was a disappointment. The girls spoke less English than she had been led to expect, and her accommodations were shabby, even by the standards of a cobbler’s daughter from rural Maine. And nothing from her prior experience had prepared her for the fact that the family would treat their governess as a servant rather than a member of the household. Unable to stand it, she borrowed money to repay her employer for her steamship passage, broke her contract, and set herself up as a seamstress. When the American consul came through town, he invited her to travel with his family to San José, where there were more opportunities for an enterprising American woman to make a living. Once in San José, she set herself the task of learning Spanish; within six months she read and wrote well enough to give up dressmaking and work as a tutor. She soon set up the first English-language school in Costa Rica, which was so successful that even the governor of San José enrolled his children there.
She sold the school and returned to the United States in 1857. Family members pressured her for loans and expected her to fall back into the caregiver role. Instead she chose to settle in Boston, where she enrolled in a bookkeeping class, taught Spanish, and enjoyed the cultural and social opportunities of the city. In time, she found steady employment as an English to Spanish translator for the New England Glass Company.
When the war came, she was determined to serve as a nurse. She met the qualifications for Dix’s nursing corps: she once described herself as “homely as a stump.”47 But instead of applying via Dix, she began a persistent campaign to serve with the Third Maine Volunteers, many of whom were old friends and former students, including the regiment’s surgeons, Dr. George E. Brickett and Dr. Gideon S. Palmer. Both Brickett and Palmer expressed concerns about the hardness of the life, especially since Bradley had suffered from serious respiratory illnesses her entire life, but ultimately welcomed her into the regiment. Palmer wrote for her to come as soon as possible: “I can assure you that you can do much good here and we should all be very much pleased to see you. I should for one, and what I say, you know I mean… let us know by letter at what hour you will reach Washington and we will send an ambulance—the best mode of conveyance we have—for you.”48
Bradley served with the regiment for eight months. (During that period she visited Mansion House Hospital three times and decided that nursing in a general hospital would be too taxing for her: too many stairs, too many patients, and too much authority to defer to.) After that, she served on the hospital transport ships until they were shut down in August 1862. In September, she accepted the position of supervisor at the US Sanitary Commission Home in Washington, which served as a way station for soldiers in transit who were under financial or physical duress. Her main job was to supervise the staff who cleaned and cooked, care for the men, and help them navigate through the government red tape needed to receive their back pay, return to their regiments, or go home. She also had the authority to visit camps and hospitals as an official Sanitary Commission relief worker. It seemed like a job made to order for Bradley.
On September 23, Bradley made her first visit on behalf of the Sanitary Commission to Camp Misery, where she found a level of suffering she had never seen before. Thereafter she visited on a regular basis to distribute warm clothing, food, and blankets and began an ardent campaign, in conjunction with Sanitary Commission inspector Mary Livermore, to improve conditions at the camp. After several months of determined lobbying by Bradley and Livermore, who even managed a personal interview with President Lincoln on the subject, the authorities agreed to move the camp to higher ground. They also approved Bradley’s appointment as “Special Relief Agent of the US Sanitary Commission at the Convalescent Camp in Alexandria.”
On December 16, 1862, Bradley left the comfort of the Sanitary Commission Home for hardship duty at the convalescent camp. The Sanitary Commission provided her with a horse and ambulance for her personal use and a pass that allowed her to travel back and forth between Alexandria and Washington via the Aqueduct Bridge. She went to the camp armed with two letters from Rev. Frederick Knapp of the Sanitary Commission, with whom she had served on the hospital transport ships and at the Commission Home. One was addressed to the commander of the camp, Colonel J. S. Belknap of the Eighty-fifth New York Volunteers, in which Knapp stated: “Miss Amy M. Bradley returns to your camp as the authorized agent of the Sanitary Commission to endeavor to cooperate with those already engaged in carrying out your plans for rendering comfortable the condition of the sick.” The second was to the chief surgeon of the camp, to whom Knapp introduced Bradley as “an efficient and experienced nurse” who had “come at the suggestion of Col Belknap to render aid to the Union army.” Before night her tent was up, her stove was lit, and she was ready to work.
Bradley took up her duties at the camp as soon as it moved to its new location on higher ground. She had assumed she would be able to build on existing administrative systems, but instead found that no systems existed at all. No barracks had been erected at the new site, and the men were in tents, sleeping on the half-frozen ground. Many had only a single suit of ragged, fever-soiled clothes and one army blanket. The Sanitary Commission sent wagonloads of supplies, but its agents distributed stores of clothing without regard for who needed what. With no laundry in the camp, items were used until soiled, then thrown on the ground and left to rot by the thousands.
Bradley’s first step was to requisition woolen shirts and attend the Sunday-morning inspection with the officer. “On that damp and chilling day, on the banks of the Potomac in mid-winter,” she found seventy-five men with nothing warmer than thin cotton shirts. That problem was easily solved. Next she requested hospital tents with floors and stoves for the sick. She installed a washhouse so clothing and linen could be cleaned and purchased a bathtub, evidently an amenity previously lacking in the camp. Recognizing the value of amusement for men forced to be idle, she brought in playing cards, backgammon boards, checkerboards, chess sets, dominoes, and Chinese checkers sets.
With the men adequately clothed and fed and the sick among them made as comfortable as possible, she turned her attention to “another wretched class”: men who had “proved incapable of service on account of chronic ailments or feeble constitutions,” but who had not yet received honorable discharges or their arrears of pay. In some cases their papers had waited for several weeks in the surgeon’s office, “while they were too weak or ill-clad to go out in the cold and stand till their turn came.” Bradley brought these men to her hospital tents, where they were warmed, fed, and clothed; she then applied for their papers, arranged their transportation orders, and sent them to Washington in her ambulance “where they could take the proper train, go home and die among friends.”49
Between May 1 and the end of December 1863, she traveled to Washington with almost every discharged soldier, settled him in the Commission Home, and walked him through the process of “obtaining a prompt and satisfactory settlement of [his] account with the government,” almost 2,000 soldiers in total. She also helped reinstate some 150 soldiers on the army’s records so they could receive their back pay. She noted with justifiable pride that “the sum total of the moneys thus paid in settlement to soldiers whose accounts were placed in my hands during the years, is between seven and eight thousand dollars,”50 the equivalent of between $136,000 and $156,000 today.
When Bradley was sent to Camp Misery, she was asked what she wanted to accomplish. Her answer was “Ultimately to break up the camp,”51 and she succeeded. On January 14, 1864, thirteen months after she arrived, the army issued Special Order No. 20, which provided that “Camp Convalescent will hereafter be known as ‘Rendezvous of Distribution’ and the place from which all men fit for field duty arriving at the Department of Washington will be distributed to their regiments. In future, none but men fit for field service, and deserters, will be sent to Rendezvous.”52 Bradley’s last task at Camp Convalescent was to organize the transfer of the remaining convalescents to hospitals or their homes.
Before Camp Convalescent was disbanded, its men and officers presented Bradley with a gold watch in appreciation of her services, an acknowledgement of her extraordinary accomplishment.
The newspapers of the time referred to Clara Barton as “the soldier’s friend,” but she was not the only nurse to deserve the title.
Soldiers and their families regularly thanked the “friends” who nursed them back to health or eased their way into death. Amy Bradley’s receipt of a gold watch from grateful soldiers was unusual, but it was not unique; Cornelia Hancock received a silver medal from the wounded soldiers of Third Division Second Army Corps inscribed Testimonial of regard for ministrations of mercy to the wounded soldiers at Gettysburg, Pa. -—July 1863.53 Other nurses received smaller tokens: a hand-carved ring, a picture frame made from a cigar box, a spun-glass ornament, an ivory cross. In one case, a grateful father offered to take his son’s nurse home with him to be his daugh
ter.
The most common tributes, and perhaps the most valued, were the letters from the boys themselves: “To our soldiers’ friend… You will please excuse a Soldier for writing a few lines to you to express our thankfulness for your kindness to our pour wounded comrades after the late battle.”54
As far as their soldier patients were concerned, the nurses had become indispensable indeed.
Chapter 8
Leaving Mansion House Hospital
“I shall not come home, unless I get sick, while this hospital lasts.”
—Cornelia Hancock1
Civil War–era hospitals were breeding grounds for contagious diseases, including smallpox, measles, pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, typhoid, and yellow fever. Typhoid and what Civil War doctors loosely termed “diarrhea and dysentery” were the most widespread. Malarial diseases came in a close third for Northern soldiers with no immunity against the malaria endemic to the Southern marshlands.
Of the three, typhoid was the most deadly and most feared. It accounted for 17 percent of patient deaths in 1861; by 1865 that percentage had increased to 56 percent.2 The bacteria that cause typhoid, Salmonella typhi, live in the human bloodstream and digestive tract. The only way to catch the disease is to eat or drink something contaminated by the virus, which can happen if someone carrying it handles food, or if sewage contaminated with it gets into the water used for drinking or cooking. Once the bacteria are in the body, they spread into the bloodstream from the digestive tract. At first the body responds to the presence of the bacteria with fever and fatigue, accompanied by headaches, diarrhea, loss of appetite, and, in the most severe cases, intestinal perforation. Some patients have a rose-colored rash. The infection can also travel to the lungs, causing pneumonia. Intestinal bleeding and pneumonia were the cause of most typhoid deaths in the days before antibiotics.
Heroines of Mercy Street Page 15
