Skirmishes continued throughout the region well into the spring. By February 25, von Olnhausen was able to report with satisfaction: “I have had my hands full of wounded at last.” She was particularly excited about one case: a Confederate soldier with “a good Union ball through his lung.” He was gaunt, haggard, and emaciated, a physical type she believed was peculiar to North Carolina, though it is probable that the poverty of the Confederate army was actually to blame. He was also filthy, very grateful, and very sick. She had him washed and clothed as the first step to tending his wounds, in his case having evidently made an exception to her prejudice against caring for Confederate soldiers.18
In May, Morehead City once again feared a Confederate attack. The train line and telegraph wires were severed. With no news, rumor claimed that the garrison at New Bern was fighting hard. Instead of being attacked by the dreaded Confederate soldiers, Morehead City was invaded by refugees driven from their homes by the fighting. Three hundred and fifty women and children occupied two of the hospital’s barracks, giving von Olnhausen a new population to care for. They had received only an hour’s notice of attack, and few of them escaped with as much as a change of clothes. Worse, they reported that the men who fell into rebel hands were marched out in squads, made to dig their own graves, and then shot. Von Olnhausen told the ladies of Lexington, “I never before knew anything of war horrors.”19 Quite a statement for someone who had been an army nurse for two years.
Yellow Fever
An epidemic of yellow fever swept New Bern in 1864. Spread by the bite of infected mosquitos, yellow fever is a viral disease that begins with the sudden onset of fever and chills, accompanied by headaches, muscle aches, nausea, vomiting, and fatigue. In severe cases of the disease, patients develop a high fever, jaundice (hence the name yellow fever), and eventual liver and kidney failure. The distinctive symptom is black vomit, a sign of gastrointestinal hemorrhaging. Even today, between 20 and 50 percent of the people who develop a severe case of yellow fever die, and there is no known treatment for the disease.
In the nineteenth century, people feared yellow fever for the rapidity with which it spread and its high death rate: an outbreak in New Orleans in 1853 claimed nine thousand lives, 28 percent of the city’s population. More than 50 percent of those who contracted the disease died within a few days. Coastal cities in North America suffered epidemics of the fever every summer. Doctors inaccurately believed the disease was spread through direct contact with those already infected and attributed the annual epidemics to the arrival of infected seamen on ships from tropical ports. In the years before the Civil War, Southern ports established periods of quarantine for ships from tropical ports, often as long as three or four weeks, before crew and passengers were declared free of disease and allowed to come ashore. When the “Yellow Jack” appeared, anyone who could flee a town would run; entire blocks of houses were burned in an attempt to stop the disease from spreading. Whole families would lie dead in their homes, decomposing in the summer heat. Those who remained would pray for frost and the end of the disease.
The citizens of New Bern at first denied that yellow fever had hit the town, calling the cases of illness “congestive fever,” an old term for malaria, another and less deadly mosquito-borne disease marked by fever.
Von Olnhausen first reported rumors of yellow fever in New Bern on September 18, noting that so far everyone who came down with the disease died quickly and that it seemed to be confined to the civilian population. A week later, Dr. Bellangee went to New Bern to take charge of the health department, where he began sweeping changes intended to correct the public health errors of his predecessor, whom von Olnhausen claimed had neglected his responsibility and allowed filth to accumulate to a horrifying degree. The cisterns and latrines had never been drained, not even those at the hospital. Dead animals drifted down the sluggish Neuse and Trent Rivers, got caught in the town’s piers, and rotted away. The Union army not only did nothing to solve the problem, it contributed to it: the quartermaster filled a square of the dock with barrels of condemned beef, pork, and vegetables, covered them with three feet of dirt, and left them to contaminate the neighborhood around them. At a time when the cause of yellow fever was unknown it seemed entirely plausible that such conditions were the source of the epidemic.
In only a few days, Dr. Bellangee was stricken with the disease and brought back to Morehouse City, where von Olnhausen took personal charge of his nursing care. On September 30, von Olnhausen found his symptoms encouraging and took a moment to report to her friends back home. Her optimism proved to be unfounded; an hour after she mailed the letter, he was taken worse. He screamed with the pain, and nothing von Olnhausen did could ease the pain, not even large amounts of chloroform, which was used primarily for anesthesia in the mid–nineteenth century. His suffering went on for hours, until he finally died at three in the morning. Thinking later about Dr. Bellangee’s death, von Olnhausen came to the conclusion that a patient’s fear added a burden to the suffering caused by the disease itself:
Till you are with it you can have no idea of this dreadful fever; nothing else approaches it except cholera. The effect upon the spirits would alone be distressing enough; but then the agony of the patient, and his consciousness of the danger add so much to the horror. No one expects to live, and when the black vomit comes that look of despair with the “There is no show for me any longer” makes your heart just full.20
Though she had sat with many men while they died, and would sit with many more before the war was over, this was one death scene she would never forget.
Meanwhile, the news from New Bern grew worse each day. The disease continued to spread, and the weather remained hot. The army’s regional medical director, Dr. Hand, was the only surgeon in New Bern who had not yet come down with the disease; he was so exhausted he could scarcely get upstairs to bed after the day’s work was done. The port was closed except for gunboats, and Mansfield Hospital was filled with yellow fever victims from New Bern, though no cases had originated in Morehead City.
On October 14, von Olnhausen took the time to write a letter to her friends. It was the first time she had sat down all day, and she’d had no sleep the night before, so she felt “drowsy and stupid.” With the port closed, she had no idea when she would be able to go home for a visit. She didn’t even know when her letter would reach them, since mail from the stricken region was being quarantined in New York for twenty days for fear of spreading the disease. Even if it were possible to go home, she felt it was her duty to stay where she could help comfort so many. She assured them she was fine, only “a little weaker than usual from being over-tired.”21
That little weakness turned out to be the first symptom of a serious case of yellow fever. Once again, von Olnhausen was one of the lucky survivors. As soon as she was strong enough to travel, her family took her home to rest in the “frosts and healing air” of Lexington.22
Sherman Marches on Mansfield Hospital
A month later, in December 1864, von Olnhausen returned to Morehead City, where she would remain through the end of the war.
During the final four months, Union troops fought in North Carolina in unprecedented numbers. In a two-part amphibious campaign, Union troops conquered Fort Fisher in January, and the port city of Wilmington on February 22, an operation that closed the last important seaport in the South to blockade runners and cut off a critical portion of General Lee’s supply line into Virginia. In March, General William T. Sherman entered the state from the south in pursuit of the Confederate army under the command of General Joseph E. Johnston, fighting critical battles at Averasboro on March 15 and 16, and at Bentonville on March 19 and 20. On April 26, seventeen days after the war officially ended with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Sherman accepted the surrender of Johnston and with him all the Confederate troops in Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas.
During this period, von Olnhausen focused her attention on the day-to-day life of the hospital: the condition of
the men under her care, the scarcity of rags and bandages, her gratitude for a box of food from the ladies of Lexington, a battle for supremacy between the two hospital chaplains, attending a black prayer meeting. She ignored the war being waged around her except when it intersected with her life. She admired the Union fleet in the harbor before it sailed against Wilmington, and wondered at the construction of the iron-clad warship Monadnock: “I don’t see how any thing could hurt her;—four feet of wood, and seven inches of wrought iron, and such turrets, and such guns!”23 She reverted to her old hostility toward Confederate wounded, refusing to allow them in her ward, and speculated on the number of new patients they could expect based on rumors that Longstreet has arrived at Goldsboro with fifteen thousand men.
That sense of separation between military hospital and military action vanished when the Union army’s Medical Bureau began to shrink and consolidate its facilities in the region around New Bern. The first change affected von Olnhausen’s hospital in Morehead City. On March 8, General Sherman’s chief quartermaster requisitioned the hospital buildings to serve as Sherman’s main supply depot, just as the Medical Bureau in Washington had claimed Green’s Mansion House for a hospital earlier in the war. Upon learning that Dr. Hand intended to relocate Mansfield Hospital to nearby Beaufort and expand the number of beds, she wailed, “Beaufort is such a flea-y, dirty-smelling hole, and full of Secesh and rum-holes, and gambling of all kinds going on there.”24 Military officers stood in front of the hospital, asking when it would be vacated and talking about what they would do when they got the quarters. If anyone “remonstrated with them” they answered, “We’re from Sherman’s army,” as if that justified all actions. (And perhaps they thought it did, given the “total warfare” policy Sherman exercised on his March to the Sea.) “I am getting about sick of Sherman’s army,” she grumbled in a letter, “if this is the way we are to be treated by them.”25
Worst of all, from her perspective, was the callous treatment of her patients by a system intended to see to their care. Orders for their movement were issued, changed, and changed again. She prepared her patients to leave at eight in the morning, only to be told at four in the afternoon that they would not leave until the next morning, if at all. Some were moved out of the hospital on such short notice that she did not have time to dress their wounds, only to lie packed in train cars for four hours without food or drink before finally leaving for New Bern. When they arrived, the wounded soldiers found there was no room for them in the New Bern hospital. They were left to sleep in churches or anywhere they could settle, most of them without even a blanket. Describing herself as more than discouraged, von Olnhausen railed against an army that would treat its own soldiers with such callous disregard. “If this is justice,” she said, “I hate it forevermore.”26
It’s Not Over ’til It’s Over
For most civilians the Civil War ended with Lee’s surrender. But the war was far from over for the army’s nurses. Thousands of soldiers remained in hospitals or convalescent camps, not yet strong enough to be sent home, and hundreds of female nurses remained at their posts to care for them.
In many ways, the disorganization in these final months reminded von Olnhausen of her early days at Mansion House Hospital. On April 9, she was at Mansfield Hospital’s new quarters in Beaufort, cursing her fate. A month later she was relocated to a temporary hospital at Smithville, near Fort Fisher. Both towns were “cram-jam full of returned Secesh, all swelling about in their uniforms, swaggering as usual, saying the south is not beaten yet,”27 a sight that roused her to sputtering fury. At Beaufort, the hospital was left in the hands of a “drunken, ignorant bad man”28 who did not even bother to make the rounds of the wards. The steward tried to wrest the storeroom key from her control. There were no barracks and no blankets, only seventy tents pitched on sand. At Smithville, she once again faced problems finding a room to call her own. She lived in the hallway in the light-diet kitchen for several days, then moved to a tumbledown house with such a bad rat and bedbug problem that she was happy to return to the cook’s hallway the next day. She shot three marauding pigs from the cookhouse door; the reputation she earned as a no-nonsense sharpshooter later protected her from a brigade of marauding Union soldiers who “broke into houses, smashed ever so many heads, insulted women, stole horses and everything else they could steal.”29
Like the soldiers she nursed, von Olnhausen was ready to put down her burden and go home. At the same time, watching her patients assembled for roll call several weeks after the war’s official end, she swore “I shall stay until the last gun fires if there is anything for me to do.”30
Mary Phinney von Olnhausen stayed at the hospital at Smithville as long as there was need for her services. She received her discharge at the end of August 1865 and returned to her family in Lexington. A letter of commendation from the chief surgeon at Smithville had arrived shortly ahead of her, addressed to her brother-in-law. Dr. Palmer wrote at length about von Olnhausen’s services, but it boiled down to one statement: “She was able to do more good than any nurse I ever knew.”31
On September 11, 1865, Dorothea Dix received notice that the army’s nursing corps was abolished, and all nurses were discharged, effective immediately. The nurses’ war was finally over.
Chapter 10
After the War
“I wonder what I shall do with myself when the war is over. I never can sit down and do nothing… I never expect to live at home again, I shall always be working somewhere or other, I hope. Work is my life. I cannot be happy doing nothing.”
—Emily Parsons1
“The war for the preservation of our Union evidently did much to advance the best interests of women. It created a necessity for her labor in new and untried ways. It gave her an opportunity to prove her ability, and also to cultivate that true courage without which the most capable person may utterly fail of success.”
—Vesta M. Swarts2
“Thank Heaven the War is over. I would that its memories also could pass away.”
—Dorothea Dix3
Speaking at a Memorial Day event in 1888, Clara Barton told her audience that as a result of the Civil War women had advanced at least fifty years beyond the position they would have held had the country remained at peace.4
The Civil War was a pivotal experience for many of the women who served as nurses, as well as their counterparts in the United States Sanitary Commission, whether they served for three weeks or three years. For many it was their first time away from family and home, and their first step outside the narrow framework of what society expected from them. They learned not only new skills but also new confidence. Whether in the immediacy of letters at the time or with the distance of memory, they expressed deep satisfaction with the work and the way of life, though they often groused about a particular detail. Katharine Prescott Wormeley, who served first on the hospital transport ships and later as the matron for a hospital for convalescent soldiers in Rhode Island, claimed to speak for the army nurses as a whole: “As for the ladies among whom my luck has thrown me, they are just what they should be,—efficient, wise, active as cats, merry, lighthearted, thoroughbred, and without the fearful tone of self-devotion which sad experience makes one expect from benevolent women. We all know in our hearts that it is thorough enjoyment to be here,—it is life, in short; and we wouldn’t be anywhere else for anything in the world.”5 Emily Parsons, who served as a nurse for two years at a variety of hospitals despite being blind in one eye, partially deaf, and lame, took the sentiment one step further: “I should like to live so all the rest of my life.”6
Parsons, like most of the women, and the soldiers they cared for, went home at the war’s end. Nursing had been a temporary part of their lives, just like being a soldier was a temporary part of the lives of most of the men who served in the war. They stepped back into their old lives as daughters, seamstresses, schoolteachers, wives—and reformers. Some made a living writing. The most famous of these was Louisa May Alc
ott, whose account of her Civil War experience, Hospital Sketches, was the first work she published under her own name. A few women who served as nurses during the war went on to earn medical degrees. Vesta Swarts, for instance, was a high school principal in Auburn, Indiana, before the war. She nursed at Louisville, Kentucky, from sometime in 1864 until March 1865, when she was honorably discharged, a fact she mentions with pride in an essay she wrote on her war work.7 After the war, she became a physician, still a challenging proposition for women, and returned to Auburn, where she practiced medicine with her husband for the next thirty years.
Many of the middle-class women who volunteered as nurses or worked in some capacity for the Sanitary Commission were part of the large and varied community of American reformers before the war. Their wealthier counterparts often came from families who expected them to take part in high-profile charity work. After the war, both middle-class reformers and wealthy philanthropists used their newfound experience at organizing, political activism, and manipulating their way through male-dominated bureaucracies to expand their influence. Some took on new leadership roles at the local level. Parsons, for instance, organized a campaign to open a charity hospital for women and children in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, where she then worked as matron and nurse—one of the few women to work as a nurse after the war. A few, particularly those who served as leaders of the larger branches of the Sanitary Commission, used their experience as a springboard to national leadership roles, founding groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, the American Social Science Association, and the American Red Cross. They involved themselves in opening schools, reforming prisons and asylums, improving conditions for women and children, “saving” unmarried mothers and their children (both in moral and practical terms), and providing vocational training for girls. Some became active in the labor, women’s rights, and temperance movements, which expanded after the war to fill the political and emotional space previously occupied by abolition. Others spearheaded social welfare programs designed to alleviate the human misery left by the war. They formed relief funds for war widows and orphans, and programs to settle unemployed veterans on farmland in the West, and schools for former slaves. Cornelia Hancock, for instance helped found a freedman’s school in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, where she taught ex-slaves for a decade. At one point those who objected to the concept of education for black children riddled the schoolhouse with fifty bullets. Several decades after the war, they used those same skills to advocate for themselves. Arguing that they too had served their country, they successfully pushed through the Union Army Nurses Pension Act of 1892, which provided government pensions for army nurses similar to those given to Union soldiers.
Heroines of Mercy Street Page 19
