Angels of the Battlefield: Catholic Sisters as Civil War Nurses

By Renee Standera, 12-15-13

'They comforted the dying.  Nursed the wounded.  Carried hope to the imprisoned.  Gave in his name a drink of water to the thirsty."-Inscription on the Nuns of the Battlefield Monument, Washington, D.C.

When civil war divided the United States, among those answering the call to serve were nearly 600 Roman Catholic sisters, many of them new residents of the young nation.

War broke out before governments on both sides made detailed arrangements for hospitals and medical care for their soldiers.

Among  some of the sisterhoods who brought their nursing skills to their new communities in the United States were the Sisters of Mercy.

"The Sisters of Mercy fulfilled a very important role with the military on both sides during the Civil War because there were very few trained nurses in those days," said Myra Joines with the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas.

Some of the European sisters learned nursing skills while serving in the Crimean War alongside nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale. For centuries in Europe, members of religious communities visited the sick in their homes.  American communities established as many as 28 hospitals in the United States before war broke out.

"One of the focuses of the Sisters of Mercy since their inception in Ireland was to care for the sick," said Joines.

Officials from both the Union and the Confederacy were hesitant to use female nurses, but they, including President Abraham Lincoln, requested help from the Catholic sisterhoods. In the South, it was considered inappropriate for women to be involved in the physical contact that nursing duties required.

About 9,000 secular women nursed for the Union Army.  The Confederacy recorded the service of about 1,000 women.  The catholic sisters served soldiers from both sides, many times under the same hospital roof.

"They simply did what was needed and without complaint," said Joines. "And they didn't ask for very much in return.  Their needs were very basic.  They worked extremely hard and extremely long hours and did whatever it took, whereas women from other walks of life, first of all, were not used to that type of discipline, those types of demands."

When diseases such as smallpox broke out, even doctors refused to help patients.  Some sisters sacrificed their lives to nurse soldiers suffering from contagious diseases. Others died from exhaustion.

Sisters of Charity from Cincinnati were among the first medical teams to arrive by steamboat at the battle of Shiloh.  The first U.S. Navy hospital ship, Red Rover, was staffed by Sisters of the Holy Cross from Notre Dame, Indiana as the first Navy nurses.  Two days after the Battle of Gettysburg, the Daughters of Charity of Emmitsburg, Maryland traveled the 20 miles from their motherhouse to the battlefield to serve the wounded.  Throughout the war, they asked for nothing other than food and supplies to help the soldiers.

Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy in Charleston, South Carolina, were sent to Greenbrier White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, to manage a hospital there.  Those left behind visited soldiers held as prisoners-of-war. After the war, the Charleston sisters returned home to find their Queen Street convent and school destroyed.

The sisters' war experience led to breakthroughs and innovations in medicine.

"The sisters learned a great deal on the battlefield," said Joines. "One of the things they picked up from nursing the wounded as well as nursing the economically poor was the importance of cleanliness, and that so often what killed people was not so much the wound, but infection from unsanitary conditions."

They also established new roles for women in America's changing society.

"Sister Mary Collette O'Connor, who was Superintendent of Douglas Military Hospital in Washington, D.C. and apparently was not only an extraordinary nurse, but an extraordinary administrator at a time when you didn't find women in those roles," said Joines. "She was so honored by the military that they gave her the rank of Major in gratitude for what she had done on behalf of the soldiers."

Although the nation's Irish population was familiar with the works of the Catholic sisterhoods in the mid-19th century, they were sometimes the victims of anti-Catholic prejudice.  The sisters' service to the sick, wounded and dead, no matter their race, religion, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or the uniform they wore, helped alleviate some of the prejudice that victimized them.

"It was very unpleasant for a number of Catholics in this country," said Joines. "But because of the compassion they showed to the soldiers, whether the soldiers were Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, had any religious affiliation, that touched the hearts of a lot of those men, as well as the hearts of their families."

"When the ministries were established in the 1800's, no one was doing that kind of work," Joines said. "So it was extraordinary for anyone to do it.  It was unbelievable pioneering for women to do it."

After the war, the surviving sisters returned to their communities.  Some continued nursing in hospitals, some returned to teaching, some headed west to establish new communities, and some cared for the widows and orphans of the soldiers they nursed.

"To Bind Up the Wounds", Catholic Sister Nurses in the U.S. Civil War by Sister Mary Denis Maher was used as a resource for this story.

Image: John Hauser's copy of painting, "Consolation," commissioned by Abraham Lincoln to Florence Meyer (Source: Myra Joines)

From: wistv.com

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Sister-Nurses Honored for Military Service

From: cscsisters.org

Memorial Day, observed this year on May 28, commemorates all the men and women who have died in military service for the United States. Flags traditionally fly at half-mast from dawn until noon, and volunteers often will place an American flag on the graves of veterans.

At Saint Mary’s in Notre Dame, Indiana, we remember our deceased sisters who served as nurses in the military. This military service actually began in 1861, six months after the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, when Holy Cross sisters responded to the request of Indiana Governor Oliver Morton to care for Indiana soldiers then serving in Kentucky. Although they had no training as nurses, six sisters, led by Mother M. Angela (Gillespie), journeyed to Paducah, Kentucky, to tend the sick and the wounded. Many more sisters followed, and others went to hospitals in Illinois, Tennessee, Missouri and Washington, D.C.

On Christmas Eve 1862, three Holy Cross sisters boarded the U.S. Navy’s first hospital ship, the Red Rover, to serve as nurses for the wounded on both sides of the war. They traveled the Mississippi River carrying sick and wounded soldiers to various military hospitals. In so doing they became what U.S. naval history today hails as the forerunners of the United States Navy Nurse Corps. Before the conflict ended, 65 of the 160 Sisters of the Holy Cross in the United States would serve in the Civil War, and another 13 sisters would serve in the Spanish-American War.

Each sister-nurse received a military pension, and the Navy honored these sisters with a special headstone placed on their graves in the congregation’s Our Lady of Peace Cemetery at Saint Mary’s.

The Sisters of the Holy Cross are among 12 congregations of religious women who are depicted on the Nuns of the Battlefield monument, erected in 1924 in Washington, D.C. The inscription reads: “To the memory and in honor of the various orders of sisters who gave their services as nurses on the battlefields and in hospitals during the Civil War. They comforted the dying, nursed the wounded, carried hope to the imprisoned, gave in His name a drink of water to the thirsty.”

Image: Novices Callista Tetteh, Grace Kitinisa and Jessica Brock stand at the headstone of Mother M. Augusta (Anderson), who served as a Navy nurse during the U.S. Civil War.

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The Hospital of the Sisters of Charity

From: beckerexhibits.wustl.edu

In the late fall of 1828, four members of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent De Paul traveled the 1,500 miles from their convent in Emmitsburg, Maryland to St. Louis, Missouri, to found the first hospital west of the Mississippi River and the first Catholic hospital in the United States. The American branch of the Daughters of Charity was founded by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and stemmed from the religious order founded by St. Vincent De Paul in 1633 in France.

The “Sisters Hospital” was opened in a three-room log cabin, a building that had been donated by St. Louis cotton merchant John Mullanphy. By 1832, the small hospital could no longer accommodate the growing number of patients, and a 3-story brick building was constructed. At the request of the St. Louis mayor, Dr. William Carr Lane, the Sisters’ Hospital operated as the official City Hospital until a municipal hospital was built in 1846. In 1861 Dr. Simon Pollak opened the first eye and ear clinic west of the Mississippi River in the Sisters’ Hospital. He was also the first to hire a woman physician, Dr. Nancy Leavell, as his assistant in the clinic. During the Civil War, the Sisters Hospital staff cared for both Union and Confederate soldiers.

A third and larger hospital was constructed in 1874 at Montgomery and Bacon Streets in north St. Louis. In recognition of the continued financial support of the Mullanphy family, the hospital was called the St. Louis Mullanphy Hospital. In 1894 the hospital opened its Training School for Nurses. The main structure, with its east and west wings, was a 4-story, red-brick building that could accommodate 300 patients.

During World War I, one wing of Mullanphy Hospital was set aside as an isolation ward for treatment of soldiers with influenza. Much of Mullanphy Hospital was destroyed in 1927 when a tornado swept through St. Louis. A new hospital building was constructed on North Kingshighway Blvd. at Wabada Avenue, and opened in 1930. This new hospital was named DePaul Hospital, after the sisters’ founder. Resident training was approved and started in 1931. In 1954 an 8-story nursing school and residence was built adjacent to the hospital. DePaul Hospital became the first hospital to inaugurate rooming-in and family-centered maternity care in 1961. In 1963 an intensive care unit was opened.

As the population of St. Louis shifted out of the city and into the surrounding St. Louis County, DePaul Hospital broke ground in Bridgeton in 1972 for a large, modern medical center, which was opened in 1975. The 450-bed DePaul Health Center continues in operation today as part of the SSM Health Care system.

Image 1: The Hospital of the Sisters of Charity, ca. 1854. At the time the 3-story hospital was located facing Spruce Street, between 3rd and 4th Streets.

Image 2: Mullanphy Hospital, 1874-1927

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Immigrant Nurse Reports on Civil War Hospital Organized by Nursing Nuns After Shiloh Battle

By Patrick Young, Esq. - January 27, 2016

Nursing Nuns, many of whom were immigrants, played an important role in hospital care.

The Confederate medical disaster in the aftermath of the Battle of Shiloh resulted in many deaths from neglect of the wounded according to Scottish immigrant nurse Kate Cumming. Even the upper-class women who volunteered to help at the hospitals often only contributed to the disorder. Many of them stayed only briefly, and some seemed more concerned with their personal property than with the men they cared for.

Cumming watched one group of women head home after only a couple of weeks of working; “This morning, while the ladies were preparing to leave, as their goods and chattels were all mislaid, much noise prevailed in finding them. I was annoyed, as I knew that many of the wounded were within hearing.” Cumming said that their behavior convinced her that “it was not strange that surgeons should prefer to have Sisters of Charity to nurse their sick.”

Hospitals had to care for men long after the moment of their wounding.

The Sisters of Charity are an order of Catholic religious sisters, of nuns, that began to send nurses to care for the Civil War wounded of both sides from the early days of the war. These nursing nuns were disproportionately immigrants from Ireland, Germany and France.

Cumming, who had seen the worst disorder in the Confederate hospitals sent up at Corinth after the fighting at Shiloh, visited many of the make-shift hospitals filled with thousands of patients. The only one that reassured her was College Hospital. Cumming wrote “When we arrived at the hospital, we were charmed with the cleanliness and neatness visible on every side. The Sisters of Charity have charge of the domestic part, and, as usual with them, everything is parfait. We were received very kindly by them. One was a friend of Mrs. G. She took us through the hospital. The grounds are very neatly laid out.”

Kate Cumming was impressed by the work of the Sisters, but she was far from the only one. Many doctors preferred the Sisters as nurses because they were disciplined and hardworking. North and South, nursing nuns made up a significant, if too often forgotten, part of the medical corps.

Jane Schultz, a leading expert on Civil War nurses, warns that because most of the Southern women who published books about their nursing experiences after the war, historians concluded, “perhaps too hastily, that elite Southern women made up a significant percentage of all Confederate female hospital workers.” In fact, in both the Union and Confederate armies, immigrants and African Americans were heavily represented among nurses, matrons, cooks, and laundresses.

According to Union Army records, there were 6,284 women serving as nurses during the war. Contrary to popular belief, only 6% of these were appointed by the notorious Dorothea Dix, who refused to employ black women and discriminated against Catholics. Several hundred black women were hired as nurses outside of Dix’s purview. 250 Catholic Sisters of Charity also served in the hospital nursing corps as did approximately 200 Sisters from other orders.

The nuns became key components in military medical care just after the great anti-immigrant Know Nothing surge of the 1850s. Catholic convents had been a particular target of Know Nothing broadsides. Viewed as secretive brothels for priests, the convents themselves were sometimes targeted for physical attack. Catholic Sisters knew that they were representing a discriminated minority under scrutiny by White Nativist America.

Some groups of nursing nuns showed their selflessness by not accepting even the meagre pay offered to women by the army. Historian Jane Schultz has written of a group of twenty-three Sisters of Charity who ran a Louisville hospital without compensation.

Religious Sisters also had an inherent advantage over their lay peers. Women who volunteered to nurse often did so over the objections of their families, who saw them as defying female norms. They arrived in a hostile environment where male doctors often dismissed their skills and intelligence. They typically had no female friends from home with them and had to build intra-gender relationships with people they did not know before these times of traumatic stress. Subject to sexual harassment by doctors and officers, they had no networks to turn to, or systems of female support.

Nuns came in groups from existing convents. They worked beside other sisters they had lived with in community before the war. If they encountered problems in the field or hospital, they could appeal to the women in their order to use their influence with the government for correctives. Nuns, ironically, were often less isolated than the lay women nurses adrift in a sea of men.

Many of the women who nursed during the war had a strong ideological commitment to the side they were working for. Kate Cumming, for example, was a dedicated Confederate before she became a nurse. Some of these women refused to care for enemy prisoners. Catholic Sisters, on the other hand, insisted that they be allowed to care for the wounded of both sides. This sometimes led them into conflicts with the officers in charge of the hospitals where they worked. In one case, a Union surgeon ordered Sisters in Maryland not to treat four hundred Confederates they were aiding. This was the only thing that could keep them from their mission of humanitarian care.

Nuns were also known for nursing patients whom no one else would attend to. The majority of Civil War soldiers who died during the war were killed by diseases, not bullets. While a nurse could be relatively safe treating a man taken off a battlefield, she faced illness and death if she served a patient with a contagious disease. Sisters were particularly appreciated by the men for their willingness to bathe and feed smallpox victims and others with deadly diseases. Sisters died in places as diverse as Memphis, Philadelphia, Paducah, Washington, and Point Lookout from the contagions passed on by the men they were aiding.

In the South, where respectable woman risked having suspicions raised about their chastity if they served as nurses, Catholic Sisters became so revered that they were held to be without blemish doing the same work prohibited to laywomen. This created a double standard, according to Jane Schultz, in which Southern men did not disparage the nuns whom they had once viewed as sexually suspect, while they impugned the morals of lay women nurses. Kate Cumming, who greatly appreciated the work of the Sisters, wrote that “it seems strange that [Catholic Sisters] can do with honor what is wrong for other Christian women to do.” The rules of patriarchy bent for the Sisters but not for women from the native-born Protestant elite.

The relative freedom the Sisters enjoyed from immediate male control prompted envy among some Nativist nurses. Some also looked askance at the daily devotions the nuns were allowed to take time off from work to perform. According to historian Jane Schultz, “National anti-Catholic prejudice…did little to raise the sisters in the esteem of laywomen.” She writes that it hurt the pride of “Protestant women that so many surgeons had gone on the record preferring the services of nuns-many of whom were immigrants-to the native-born.”

Resource: Excerpts from Kate Cumming Journal after Battle of Chickamauga.

Note: I use the terms “Nun” and “Sister” interchangeably because that is common usage in the United States.

Image 1: Sister Verona

Image 2: Memorial to Sisters of Providence who helped organize a hospital for the wounded in Indianapolis. One patient told a reporter that “next to home it was the sweetest, quietest spot he had ever found.”

From: longislandwins.com

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Private William McCarter of the Irish Brigade Hospitalized After Fredericksburg

By Patrick Young, Esq., 1-4-13

Private William McCarter was badly wounded during the Irish Brigade’s disastrous attack on the stone wall during the Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia. He lay bleeding on the field for hours before nightfall made possible his still-dangerous escape to the rear.

The Northern army had a medical corps consisting of doctors and assistants, but most of the wounded were brought off the field by members of their own regiments who went back to try to collect friends. These Union soldiers would often pass by other wounded men, reserving their aid for men of their own units alone. McCarter was helped by two Irish Brigade comrades who recognized him in the dark. They put him on a horse-drawn ambulance. The ambulance was overloaded with twelve men when it took off to try to find medical care. The men were offered no first aid and two of them died before the vehicle reached the city of Fredericksburg, a short ways away.

When McCarter got to Fredericksburg, Union soldiers were wandering about aimlessly in the streets. Some broke into houses and looted them. A number were getting drunk on whiskey they had stolen. McCarter was dropped off at a house that served as a make-shift hospital. More than fifty “mangled victims” of the fighting were in the one room. The men did not see a doctor until the next morning. By then, a wounded man lying near McCarter had died.

A severely overworked doctor was finally able to see McCarter. He dug the bullet out of the soldier’s shoulder, but first he had to cut away much of McCarter’s uniform to get at his wound. When McCarter had to evacuate north by foot the next day, he did so with his wounded arm naked and exposed to December’s cold. He and thousands of other wounded men walked to a rail depot where they waited hours without shelter for a train to take them north. “[T]he wounded men crouched and huddled together and…some of them died from the exposure,” he recalled.

McCarter next went to a makeshift hospital made up of a collection of tents. There was so much blood and so many severed body parts that he later described it as looking like a “village of butcher shops.”  The surgical tent left a lasting impression:

Lying around were cases of ugly looking surgical tools, including the saw and the knife. In the back end of each tent a hole was made. Through it amputated arms or legs were thrown out upon the ground outside.

When trains finally arrived, the wounded rushed to get on. There was no order to the loading and the healthier men shoved aside the severely wounded. “It was simply every man for himself,” McCarter wrote, “I saw three men killed by falling under the car wheels as a locomotive began to move.” When McCarter was finally evacuated he was taken by a four hour train ride to Aquia Creek. Along the way, nine of McCarter’s wounded comrades died.

McCarter and hundreds of other wounded men on the train were taken off and hauled onto a steamship that was to take them to Washington. Few comforts were provided the suffering men and McCarter was forced to rest on the cold floor of the ship, when an unexpected source of comfort came to him. A woman, a Catholic nun, a Sister of Mercy comforted him, fed him and found him a warm place to sleep. This was McCarter’s first experience with these women, many of whom were immigrants like himself.

As he soon found out, the Sisters of Mercy had volunteered to take over the care of the men on the ship. McCarter remembered that during the trip they did “everything in their power to alleviate the terrible sufferings of the cargo of our wounded, sick and dying soldiers.” Over the coming weeks he would be cared for by many Sisters of Mercy. Their ministrations would be offered to native-born and immigrant soldiers alike of all religious backgrounds.  In coming articles, we’ll look at how these immigrant religious women helped create the nursing profession in the United States and changed attitudes about women in medicine.

Image: Field hospital at Savage’s Station in 1862.

From: longislandwins.com

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Sisters of the Holy Cross, Civil War Nurses, 1861-1865

From: in.gov/history

In response to Governor Morton’s call of 1861, eighty Sisters of the Holy Cross under the leadership of Mother Angela served as military nurses. The Sisters became the forerunners of the Navy Nurse Corps in 1862 when they boarded the Red Rover, the navy’s first hospital ship.

Report
The majority of the marker text is correct, but primary sources are lacking regarding the Sisters’
service at various hospitals. While more research is needed, the following report provides contextual
information about the need for nurses, specifically Sisters, as well as the role of hospital boats in the
Civil War.

According to Peggy Brase Seigel’s 1990 Indiana Magazine of History article, while visiting Indiana
Civil War hospitals and camps to supply soldiers, Governor Oliver P. Morton witnessed poor medical
treatment and general negligence, convincing him that “systematically organized medical care should be greatly expanded.”1

Primary and secondary sources confirm that this expansion included the Sisters of
the Holy Cross, St. Mary’s Academy, Notre Dame.2

In Nuns of the Battlefield, Ellen Ryan Jolly states that while more than eighty sisters served, the
War Department recorded only sixty-three.3 Governor Morton requested that the Sisters first report to Paducah, Kentucky.4

The Sisters also served at hospitals in Tennessee and Illinois. According to Jolly, the Sisters that served at the Mound City Hospital in Illinois encountered 1,000-14,000 wounded soldiers.5

Jolly states that although some of the wounded were prisoners of war, to the Sisters “there was no
distinction of North and South in the wards of the soldiers.”6

In memoirs regarding his time as a surgeon at Mound City Hospital, Dr. John H. Brinton noted a
concern common in the Civil War period that civilian women were unsuited to serve as nurses.7 Dr.
Brinton lamented that female nurses produced “nothing but complaints . . . This female nurse business was a great trial to all the men concerned, and to me at Mound City soon became intolerable.”8

As a result of this debate, Dr. Brinton successfully solicited the help of the Sisters of the Holy Cross at Mound City Hospital.9 He praised their humility and ability to quickly assume nursing skills, stating “the sick patients gained by the change.”10 Dr. Brinton implied that the public initially considered the employment of Sisters as nurses controversial, stating that “for a few days I was the most abused man in that department, for the newspapers gave me no mercy.”11

The marker text correctly states that Mother Angela Gillespie served as a Civil War nurse and led
other Sisters in service as nurses. Sources such as the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion and the Life of Charles Henry Davis, Rear Admiral, 1807-1877 verify that after service at stationary hospitals, Sister Angela volunteered the help of the Sisters on the USS Red Rover. 12 In a June 20, 1862 letter, Flag Officer C.H. Davis, U.S. Navy, Western Flotilla, wrote that Sister Angela, “has kindly offered the services of the sisters for the hospital boat of this squadron when needed.”13

The Red Rover was a ship that served as a “floating hospital,” caring for wounded soldiers and
transporting them to nearby hospitals.14 The Sisters’ duties, particularly when serving on the floating hospital boat USS Red Rover, consisted of cleaning, laundering, administering medicine, nourishing the sick and providing “spiritual comfort for patients.”15 Judith E. Harper states that these floating hospitals “were critical to the survival of fallen Union soldiers in the aftermath of battles.”16 Hospital vessels often rescued fallen soldiers from swamps and rivers.17 The Sisters of the Holy Cross traveled on the Mississippi River aboard the Red Rover, collecting injured soldiers, caring for them aboard the ship and depositing them at hospitals in Memphis, Mound City and Cairo.18 The Red Rover attempted to reach Vicksburg, the “City of the Siege”; after witnessing a boat blockade and firing at Vicksburg, the Sisters helped “lift the bruised and broken soldiers from rivers of blood.”19

While secondary sources state that the Sisters of the Holy Cross were the forerunners of the
Navy Nurse Corps, the Navy Nurse Corps Association makes no mention of the Sisters on their website, nor does the U.S. Navy in their “Navy Medicine Commemorates Nurse Corps’ 105th Birthday.”20

Although the service of Sisters aboard the Red Rover can be substantiated, the claim that the Red Rover was the Navy’s first hospital ship cannot be. IHB now avoids the use of subjective and superlative terms such as ‘first,’ ‘best,’ and ‘most.’ Such claims are often not verifiable and/or require extensive qualification to be truly accurate.

For Further Information
The National Archives has records of the Adjutant General’s Office and the Surgeon General’s
Office that describe the role of female nurses in the Civil War and may contain information about the Sisters’ involvement. Peggy Brase Seigel describes on page 9 of She Went to War that “Alphabetical card files entitled ‘Hospital Attendants, Matrons and Nurses, 1861-1865’ record hospital assignments from muster rolls and payrolls. Records for Union military hospitals included in ‘Monthly Returns of Nurses, 1861-1865’ contain lists of women employed as nurses in military hospitals; and invalid pension applications filed either for women nurses or for their husbands yield invaluable biographical information for sixteen of Indiana’s Civil War nurses.”

Learn more about the nuns who served as nurses in the Civil War at www.CivilWarRx.com

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Sisters of Charity: Nuns, Medicine, and the Civil War

By Dr. William B. Kurtz, assistant editor for Documents Compass, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities

Though the Civil War is one of the largest fields of research in American history, little has been devoted to the study of the role of Catholic women during the war. However, the research of Dr. William B. Kurtz has uncovered a vast number of nuns serving in hospitals in both the Union and Confederate armies. In this single document site, Kurtz here gives insight into a letter written by U.S. Surgeon General William A. Hammond to President Abraham Lincoln that espouses the virtues of having nuns serve in this capacity. Hammond referred to these nurses as "Sisters of Charity," though numerous orders would serve during the war. Kurtz argues that the work of these nuns was crucial in eliminating at least some of the anti-Catholic bias that existed in the United States in the 19th century.

Although the American Civil War is generally regarded as one of the most important events in United States history, surprisingly few scholars of American Catholicism have studied it. Given that most scholarly attention focuses on Irish Catholic men in the Union Army, perhaps the least well-known aspect of the war is the role that Catholic women played in it. At the time, however, Catholic Sisters were well-known for their service as nurses during the war, with perhaps as many as one-fifth of all nuns in the United States serving in Union or Confederate hospitals. They were the only organized group of women in America with any serious amount of medical training. Despite their antebellum service in hospitals across the United States, however, nuns were also the most single vilified group of women during the period thanks to the publication of the notoriously anti-Catholic novel Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed in 1836. Just two years earlier, a mob had burned down the Ursuline Convent outside of Boston, Massachusetts, when similarly scandalous and equally erroneous stories were spread about nuns who had been peacefully running a school for Protestant and Catholic children in Charlestown. Whereas many Irish leaders argued that the Civil War was a chance for them to prove their patriotism in the face of ethnic and religious prejudice, I wondered if the Civil War was a similar opportunity for Catholic women, especially the much maligned nuns.

This letter, from U.S. Surgeon General William A. Hammond to President Abraham Lincoln, I believe, is one of the best proofs that the over six hundred nuns serving as nurses helped change the hearts and minds of Protestants across the nation. While Lincoln’s letter has never been found, it is clear that he wanted Hammond to hire more Protestant nurses, perhaps because of the important role that anti-slavery evangelicals played in his election in 1860. Hammond, a Protestant himself, strongly defended the nuns for their willingness to take orders and to endure great hardships on behalf of Union soldiers across eastern and western theatres. Tellingly, he refers to the nuns simply as “Sisters of Charity,” a common misconception during the war. In fact, many female religious orders served as nurses including the Daughters of Charity, the Sisters of the Holy Cross, and the Sisters of St. Joseph. After the war, some nuns wrote extensively about their experiences in hospitals, hospital ships, and temporary wards set up on battlefields. Their accounts universally agree that their work helped dispel anti-Catholic prejudice. Having a non-Catholic federal official as important as Hammond praise their hard work and dedication during the war strongly suggests that the nuns were correct in believing that their wartime service as nurses was greatly appreciated by many Protestant Americans. (click here to see original copy of Hammond letter)

Certainly the Civil War did not dispel all prejudices against foreign- or native-born Catholics in the mid-nineteenth century. But it is clear that the nuns’ service had a positive influence on most of the Protestant soldiers, officers, and medical workers they encountered. When a statue of Lincoln was unveiled at his grave in Springfield, Illinois, in October 1874, federal and army officials included two Dominican nuns in the ceremony. These two women, again erroneously identified as Sisters of Charity, were given the honor of pulling down the curtain covering the statue at the end of the ceremony. Nuns were later granted pensions for their service and they received special markers for their gravestones thanks to the tireless efforts of Ellen Ryan Jolly, a laywoman, Ancient Order of the Hibernians Ladies Auxiliary member, and author of one of the earliest works on Civil War sister nurses. Finally, in 1924 with the blessing of Congress, Catholic leaders unveiled the “Nuns of the Battlefield” monument outside of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C., commemorating the work of the many female religious orders who served during the war. It was a fitting tribute to the sisters for their hard work and dedication during the war despite all of the past popular misconceptions that plagued their daily lives in nineteenth century America.

Image: Letter from William A. Hammond to Abraham Lincoln

From: cuomeka.wrlc.org

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Nurses and the U.S. Navy, Prior to 1908

From: ibiblio.org

Nursing, in the sense of bedside attendance of the sick and injured, has existed in the Navy from the first. Performed by enlisted crew members, the function was increasingly formalized during the 19th Century as part of the duties of the emerging hospital corpsman rates.

Even in the early 1800s, there was a recommendation that women be employed as Navy nurses. Nothing much came of this until the American Civil War, when Catholic Sisters of the Holy Cross served in Navy facilities and on board the pioneer hospital ship USS Red Rover in the Mississippi River area. This was part of a great endeavor by Religious and lay women during the conflict, an undertaking that led to the post-war establishment of nursing as a real profession requiring formal training -- a profession both open to and dominated by women.

During the 1898 Spanish-American War, the Navy employed a modest number of female contract nurses in its hospitals ashore and sent trained male nurses to sea on the hospital ship Solace. At the same time, the U.S. Army put women nurses on board ship, in its hospital ship Relief, and in 1901 obtained Congressional approval to establish the U.S. Army Nurse Corp (Female).

In 1902 the Navy's Surgeon-General proposed a similar arrangement for the sea service. Five years later, he reported to the Congress that "The Government supplies physicians and surgeons, splendidly equipped hospitals, and complete emergency facilities on every ship. The most serious omission in this excellent establishment is the want of that skilled nursing which civil institutions enjoy".

Image: Mother Angela Gillespie Founder of the Holy Cross Nursing Sisters. She was supervisor of the eighty Holy Cross Sisters who served as military nurses during the Civil War. Courtesy of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, 1965. U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph.

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Nuns Were Best Civil War Nurses at Gettysburg

By Jamie Davis, 7-10-13
 

The history of nursing is often focused on the nurses who served during wartime. The founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale, began her nursing career in the hospitals of the Crimean War. I found a great article recently on some unsung heroes of nursing history from the U.S. Civil War, nuns from numerous catholic orders.

Sisters’ Care Renowned Among Union Generals

The nuns of the Daughters of Charity, Sisters of Mercy and other orders were much sought after by Union generals and federal officials during the civil war for their nursing knowledge and hospital administration skills. According to the article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the nuns had been acting as nurses for hundreds of years. Over that time, they had developed best practices that included cleanliness and increased food quality. This was well before there was widespread understanding of germ theory or nutrition.

These nursing nuns were active on and near the battlefields on both sides of the conflict. They provided holistic care as we see it today, providing both traditional nursing care, as well as spiritual support, helping to write letters home and preparing healthy meals and serving them to the wounded.

Nurses Early Hospital Administrators

They also administered numerous hospitals, from the set up of the facilities, to their long term, day to day operations.

Image: Courtesy, Sisters of Mercy, Baltimore

From: nursingshow.com

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Memorializing the Past: Historical Marker Honoring Holy Cross Sisters Rededicated, 10-4-13

From: cscsisters.org

Originally located on Madison Street and Notre Dame Avenue in South Bend, Indiana, a historical marker that pays tribute to the Sisters of the Holy Cross was erected in 1965 by the Indiana Civil War Centennial Commission. That marker, which was moved this year to the campus of Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center, Mishawaka, Indiana, recognizes the Holy Cross sisters who served as nurses during the U.S. Civil War.

It now stands in a place of honor outside the medical center’s main entrance.

On September 9, under a bright and cloudless sky, the memorial was rededicated in a ceremony
witnessed by nearly 150 people, including Sisters of the Holy Cross, alumnae of Holy Cross School of Nursing and Saint Joseph’s Hospital School of Nursing, associates and other guests.

Albert Gutierrez, the medical center’s president and CEO, welcomed those present and stressed his
obligation to protect the mission and values of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, who founded the hospital in 1882. Following his comments, an honor guard was presented and the crowd recited the Pledge of Allegiance. The singing of the national anthem, led by the Loretto Choir, followed.

Before giving the invocation, Sister Ruth Marie Nickerson, Area of North America coordinator, spoke briefly about the history of the congregation’s involvement in the Civil War. In 1861, six months after the war’s outbreak, Indiana Governor Oliver Morton asked the congregation to send sisters to Kentucky to care for wounded troops. Eventually, 65 of the 160 Sisters of the Holy Cross in the United States at that time would serve as military nurses, though none of them had formal nurses training. Four of these sisters served on the Red Rover, the first Navy hospital ship, which traveled up and down the Mississippi River carrying the sick and wounded from both sides of the war to the various military hospitals. These four Holy Cross sisters have been recognized as the forerunners of the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps.

“After returning from the Civil War, the sisters recognized the need for hospitals and trained nurses,
thus opening our school of nursing here and many others throughout the country,” said Rosalie Campanale, a graduate of Holy Cross School of Nursing who represented both Holy Cross and Saint Joseph Hospital School of Nursing. “This was the beginning of the long history of the congregation’s health care ministry. Mount Carmel College of Nursing [in Columbus, Ohio] and Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, continue that nursing tradition today.”

Rosalie added that in 1965, Sister M. John Francis (Hilleke), a faculty member at Holy Cross School of Nursing in South Bend, contacted Indiana Congressman John Brademas and asked for his help in having the Sisters of the Holy Cross recognized as the forerunners of the Navy Nurse Corps. On October 31, the historical marker was dedicated and placed on the street near the then Saint Joseph Hospital.

Following these introductory remarks, the rededicated historical marker was unveiled and blessed by Father Aloysius Ezenwata, MSP, supervisor of clinical pastoral education at Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center. At the conclusion of the program, many attended a noon Mass in the medical center’s Lady of Fatima Chapel offered for the intentions of the Sisters of the Holy Cross.

Image: On Monday, the St. Joseph Regional Medical Center honored Holy Cross nurses who cared for injured soldiers during the Civil War with a historical marker.

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Sisters of the Holy Cross: Archives and Records History

From: cscsisters.org

The Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross traces its origin to Le Mans, France, when in 1841 four women received the religious habit from Father Basil Moreau, founder. In 1843 some sisters arrived at Notre Dame, Indiana, to assist the Holy Cross priests and brothers, and to begin their ministry of education. Later their ministries expanded to include health care when in the Civil War, 64 of the 160 sisters in the United States nursed the sick and wounded primarily in the Midwest. Their services were again called for during the Spanish-American War when 12 sisters served in the Army camps in Kentucky and Georgia. In subsequent years the missions of the Sisters of the Holy Cross expanded to include not only many parts of the United States, but also Bangladesh, Brazil, Ghana, India, Mexico, Peru and Uganda.

The archives of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, located at Saint Mary’s, Notre Dame, Indiana, include records from 1843 to the present date. The early records are sketchy, but around 1889 an attempt was made to recapture communal memories including missions in the United States and service of the sisters in the Civil War. Records for the sisters’ services in the Spanish-American War are quite complete.

The archives department is the repository for official documents pertaining to the Congregation. It keeps all records of significant events in the lives and ministries of the sisters, narratives sent each year by the local communities, and official documents from general and regional administrations. It is also the repository for student records from Congregation-sponsored educational institutions that have closed.

In addition to the special collection of emergency services of the sisters in the Civil War, Spanish-American War, and Refugee Nursing with Cambodian and Laotian refugees in Thailand, the archives is the repository for official documents of the Holy Cross History Association. These include papers delivered at the annual Holy Cross History Conferences. From 1982 to 2009 approximately 260 papers have been given. The purpose of the association is “to promote and stimulate historical study of and research on those religious communities (priests, brothers and sisters) which trace their origins to the Father Basil Moreau of Le Mans, France.”

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Cincinnati's Sister Anthony O'Connell: "Angel" of the Civil War Battlefield

By Howard Wilkinson, 2-26-15

Throughout the Civil War, on the bloody battlefields and in the hospitals overflowing with the wounded, many a mortally wounded young soldier left this life looking into the kindly face of a nun from Cincinnati.

“Lord have mercy on his soul,’’ were the last words he heard, and a promise from the woman dressed in black that she would tell his mother that he died bravely.

She was Sister Anthony O’Connell, known throughout the Union Army as “the Angel of the Battlefield.”

With Sister Anthony as their leader, 42 nuns of the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati left their peaceful home at Cedar Grove in Price Hill, where Elder and Seton high schools now stand, to travel the country, from Tennessee to Maryland, to treat the wounded and comfort the dying.

Today, next to the Sisters of Charity Motherhouse in Delhi Township, they rest in peace in the religious order’s cemetery, high atop a hill overlooking the Ohio River. You can pick out their grave sites because they are marked not only by the headstone cross but a second marker – one that says “U.S. Army Nurse.”

“They were better trained than any other nurses in the Civil War,’’ said Sister Judith Metz, the archivist of the Sisters of Charity. “This was a time when many believed that women were not fit to be nurses, not capable of doing the job.”

But Sister Anthony was the director of nursing at St. John’s Hospital in Cincinnati, which was run by the order and later became Good Samaritan Hospital. All of the sisters were trained in medicine by the doctors there.

The Civil War mission of Sister Anthony  began in May 1861, about a month after the war started.  At Camp Dennison in northeast Hamilton County, about 12,000 recruits were training for service in the Union Army. A measles epidemic had broken out in the camp; and men were dying in large numbers.

Archbishop John Purcell and George Hatch, then the mayor of Cincinnati, went to Sister Anthony and asked if a group of sisters could go to Camp Dennison to tend to the sick.

Sister Anthony said they would; and about half of the sisters of the order volunteered to go, taking the railroad line along the Little Miami River to the camp.

From Camp Dennison, the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati traveled with the Army throughout the war, from Tennessee to Maryland, treating and comforting wounded soldiers on battlefields and in hospitals behind the lines.

And their work was not limited to wounded Union soldiers. They treated many Confederates as well, especially those who had been taken prisoner.

“Most of these young soldiers were Protestants, from small towns and farms, and many of them had never seen a nun before,’’ Sister Judith Metz said. “They weren’t comfortable with it at first. They called them ‘Holy Marias’ and a whole lot of other names. But it didn’t take long for the kindness and compassion of the sisters to win them over.”

That was evident in the diary of one Union soldier who was treated by Sister Anthony on a hospital ship anchored on the Tennessee River during the bloody battle of Shiloh in April 1862.

“Amid this sea of blood, she performed the most revolting duties for those poor soldiers,’’ he wrote. “She seemed like a ministering angel and many a young soldier owes his life to her care and charity.”

Sister Anthony, Sister Judith Metz said, “was a natural born leader.”

She was born Mary O'Connell in Limerick, Ireland in 1814, migrating to Massachusetts with her family as a young girl.

At the age of 21, she became a nun, joining the Sisters of Charity founded by St. Elizabeth Seton in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

Two years later, the order sent her to Cincinnati to open an orphanage and she ended up as the head of nursing at St. John’s Hospital, which was located at Third and Plum streets downtown.

In the spring of 1862, Sister Anthony and a group of Sisters of Charity boarded a hospital ship in Cincinnati and made the long journey to Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. There, just beyond the river bank, the battle of Shiloh was raging. News reports of the carnage at Shiloh was the event that convinced most Americans, both North and South, that this war was going to be a long and bloody war.

Sister Anthony wrote in her diary of the horrors of the battle.

“At Shiloh, we ministered to the men on what were popularly known as floating hospitals,’’ Sister Anthony wrote. “We were often obliged to move further up the river, being unable to bear the stench from the bodies of the dead on the battlefield.”

She wrote, too, of “one poor fellow, whose nose had been completely shot off, and was nearly missed by the stretcher bearers. When found, the young soldier was placed in a hog pen, the only place of shelter and repose remaining.

“Before he could be brought to the boat, he had lost blood enough one would think to cause death; his clothes were saturated and the blood even reached his boots,’’ she wrote.

He became one of hundreds of wounded soldiers brought back to Cincinnati and treated at the Burnet House, a luxury hotel converted temporarily into a hospital, and other area hospitals.

Sister Anthony returned with them, working at the Burnet House. One day, she said, an “old gentleman” came to the hospital, saying he had heard his son might be there.

She walked him through the wards, without finding his son, when it occurred to her that the boy with the missing nose might be his son. The father could not recognize the boy because of the disfigurement of his face, but he looked at the soldier's hands and found a scar between his fingers that he recognized.

“Soon, father and son were locked in a fond embrace,’’ Sister Anthony wrote. “He took his darling back with him to his home.”

Sister Anthony and the other Sisters of Charity moved from place to place during the war – working in hospitals in Cumberland, Md.; Nashville, and Richmond, Ky. After the Richmond battle in August 1862, a Union defeat, 40 horse-drawn ambulances were sent to the Kentucky battlefield from Cincinnati, along with six Sisters of Charity. They treated wounded soldiers in the field; and brought hundreds back to Cincinnati to receive care.

Sister Anthony and the Sisters of Charity had good relations with the Union leadership, who needed all the help they could get with a strained Army medical corps that depended largely on volunteer nurses, often the wives of soldiers. In all, over 600 nuns from a multitude of religious orders served as nurses during the war.

“The sisters were highly regarded because they did not have to be taught,’’ Sister Judith Metz said. “They had skills that few of the other nurses had.”

At Nashville, when Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman visited the hospital where the Sisters of Charity were working, he joked with the soldiers about the black-clad women who were treating them.

Sister Mary Ann McCann, in her 1917 book, “The History of Mother Seton’s Daughters,’’ quoted Sherman as saying, “Come on, boys. You are only foxing (faking) it to get all the good things that these kind sisters prepare for you.”

At the end of the war in 1865, Sister Anthony and the other sisters returned to the order, which moved its Motherhouse to Delhi Township in the 1880s.

Sister Anthony went on serving after the war, tending to the poor and sick at Good Samaritan Hospital and the St. Joseph Infant and Maternity Home. She died on Dec. 8, 1897 – her 83rd birthday.

Archbishop William Elder asked that her funeral be held at St. Peter in Chains Cathedral downtown; and every seat was taken, with hundreds unable to get inside, standing on the cathedral steps. Many of the mourners wore the emblem of the Grand Army of the Republic – the organization of Union veterans of the Civil War.

Today, at the Motherhouse, her belongings are cherished by the sisters – the battered medical kit she carried throughout the war, along with her eyeglasses, her rosary, a small pair of scissors and a pocket knife.

“The fact that these things survived and are preserved tells you something,’’ Sister Judith Metz said. “It is a testimony to how highly she was thought of. And always will be.”

Image: "Angel of the Battlefield" painting which hangs in the Sisters of Charity's Motherhouse

From: wvxu.org

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Nation’s Needs Spark a Health Care Ministry

From: cscsisters.org

Six months after the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, the Sisters of the Holy Cross responded to the request of Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana who asked the congregation if it could spare sisters to care for the Indiana soldiers then serving in Kentucky. Although they had no training as nurses, six Holy Cross sisters, led by Mother M. Angela (Eliza Gillespie), volunteered to journey to Paducah, Kentucky, to tend the sick and the wounded. Many more sisters followed. Simon Cameron, President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War, asked them to take over the nursing at a government hospital in Louisville, Kentucky; others went to hospitals in Illinois, Tennessee, Missouri and Washington, D.C.

On Christmas Eve 1862, three Holy Cross sisters boarded the U.S. Navy’s first hospital ship, the Red Rover, to serve as nurses for the wounded on both sides of the Civil War. They traveled the Mississippi River carrying sick and wounded soldiers to various military hospitals. In so doing they became what U.S. naval history today hails as the forerunners of the United States Navy Nurse Corps. Before the conflict ended, 65 of the 160 Sisters of the Holy Cross in the United States would serve in the Civil War, and another 13 sisters would serve in the Spanish-American War.

In the decades that followed, Holy Cross sisters continued to respond to the unmet health needs of people across the developing frontier by establishing 19 hospitals over 133 years, serving as administrators, nurses and chaplains. In 1979 the congregation brought together its remaining eight congregation-sponsored hospitals to form Holy Cross Health System. In 2000 this health system consolidated resources with Mercy Health Services to create Trinity Health. Sponsored by Catholic Health Ministries, Trinity Health is one of the largest Catholic health care systems in the United States.

Today, Holy Cross sisters continue to minister in a variety of health care settings worldwide.

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Sisters’ Nursing Ministry Begins With Civil War

By Sister Margaret Mary Lavonis

It should not surprise anyone who knows the mission of the Sisters of the Holy Cross — to discern the needs of the times and respond appropriately — that the congregation said yes to Indiana Governor Oliver P. Morton’s request to Father Edward Sorin to send sisters to care for the wounded troops then serving in Kentucky during the Civil War. His request came on October 21, 1861, six months after the war’s outbreak.

The next morning, Mother M. Angela Gillespie and six sisters (none of them trained as nurses) departed for Cairo at the southern tip of Illinois, 500 miles from Notre Dame, Indiana. There General Ulysses S. Grant assigned them to the military hospital in Paducah, Kentucky. Thus began the congregation’s ministry in health care.

Paducah was only the beginning. The sisters served so well in Paducah that Secretary of War Simon Cameron asked the congregation to take over the nursing at a government hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. And more sisters were sent to care for the wounded at a newly opened hospital in Mound City, Illinois.

Hospital conditions

The conditions in all of these hospitals, often quickly converted warehouses or factories, were deplorable. They were unsanitary which caused outbreaks of typhoid, smallpox and other diseases that not only affected the wounded but also family members and the medical personnel. The sisters addressed these problems the best they could.

Sister M. Paula Casey describes her first visit to a military hospital in Cairo in December 1861 as a fearful experience: “Every room on the first floor was strewn with human legs and arms. As the wounded were brought in from the battlefield, they were laid anywhere, and amputations took place. Some of the wards resembled a slaughter house, the walls were so splattered with blood.”

After a tour of the hospital given by William Burke, the doctor in charge, Sister Paula and companions Sister M. Augusta Anderson and Sister M. Isidore Conlin immediately pinned up their habits and wept and scrubbed the hospital wards until they were clean. Actions such as this helped to alleviate the fear the soldiers and the sailors had of military hospitals.

The living quarters of the sisters were primitive at best. Sister M. Callista Pointan describes the conditions upon moving into the hospital at Mound City, Illinois, in 1861: “We found a very miserable barracks of a place, an unfinished warehouse without even the common necessities of life. One bed and one chair had to do service for five sisters. Mother Angela and I slept on a table on some clothes which had been sent to be washed.”

First hospital ship

In June 1862 several sisters were asked to serve as nurses aboard the USS Red Rover, the first Navy hospital ship that went up and down the Mississippi River carrying the sick and wounded of both the North and the South to the various military hospitals. In so doing they became what U.S. naval history today hails as the pioneers or forerunners of the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps. They also were the Navy’s first paid women employees, with historical records showing that Sisters Callista, Sister M. Veronica Scholl, and Sister M. Adela Moran earned two dollars a day.

Sister Adela reflects upon her experience: “In company with two or three other sisters I was sent on board the Hospital boat called the Red Rover, which carried the sick and wounded to the hospitals. I never left the boat till the close of the war. We were near Vicksburg when it was taken, could hear the firing, and see the boats running the blockade.”

Work in other hospitals

In addition to serving on the Red Rover and the hospitals in Illinois and Kentucky, the sisters staffed hospitals in Tennessee, Missouri and Washington, D.C. As the number of hospitals confided to their care by the federal government increased, more and more sisters were sent to serve. Before the war ended, 65 of the 160 Sisters of the Holy Cross in the United States would serve as nurses in the western theater of the war and in the nation’s capital.

Each sister nurse also received a military pension, which helped pay for Bertrand Hall, now the congregation’s administration building at Saint Mary’s, Notre Dame, Indiana. The Navy has honored these sisters with a special headstone placed on their graves in the congregation’s Our Lady of Peace Cemetery at Saint Mary’s.

The Sisters of the Holy Cross are among 12 congregations of religious women who are depicted on the Nuns of the Battlefield monument, erected in 1924 in Washington, D.C. The inscription reads: “To the memory and in honor of the various orders of sisters who gave their services as nurses on the battlefields and in hospitals during the Civil War. They comforted the dying, nursed the wounded, carried hope to the imprisoned, gave in His name a drink of water to the thirsty.”

From: cscsisters.org

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The North vs. the South: Conditions at Civil War Hospitals

By Barbra Mann Wall, Kathleen Rogers, and Ann Kutney-Lee

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
The American Civil War resulted in the death of nearly one million Americans  At the beginning of the war, both Union and Confederate medical departments entered the conflict unprepared. Initially, care was provided in existing buildings such as schools, churches, almshouses, hotels, and homes; but as the war progressed, the armies constructed new hospitals. Poor diet, lack of ventilation, inadequate clothing, exposure, and unsanitary conditions all contributed to high rates of disease and poor patient survival rates. Yet some hospitals—on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line—had remarkably better outcomes than others. In this article, we provide explanations for these healthcare differences. We also examine the critical role that nurses played in achieving the best success rates for patients. Clearly, though, many factors affected soldiers’ health, including a hospital’s location, patient acuity, and the availability of supplies.

Our essay focuses on selected hospitals in both the North and South, and we use the Daughters of Charity as our primary group of nurses. This Roman Catholic religious community is especially relevant to our study since the sisters worked in both Northern and Southern hospitals, and their efforts help us to compare and contrast large military hospitals from Richmond, Virginia, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We examine other hospitals as well, including Robertson Hospital in Richmond, which was famous for its low mortality rates and privately established and administered by a remarkable individual, Sally Louisa Tompkins (1833-1916). We have relied on primary sources from the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, the Provincial Archives of the Daughters of Charity in Emmitsburg, Maryland, the Museum of the Confederacy and Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, and the Civil War Richmond online research project. These various archives house letters, diaries, newspapers, and hospital records central to our inquiry. Our work also was informed heavily by the memoir of Phoebe Yates Pember (1823-1913)—chief matron of the Second Division at Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond—and the diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut (1823-1886). These two works, well-known to historians of Southern and Civil War history, provide invaluable insights into daily life at the Richmond hospitals during the war.

Nurses included men as convalescent soldiers; women and men slaves or escaped slaves; free blacks; and women members of aid societies, the US Army, religious congregations, and various plantation and farmers’ families. A key group of women nurses in the Civil War included the Daughters of Charity—established in America by Elizabeth Ann Seton in Emmitsburg, Maryland, in 1809. This congregation was founded in 1633 in France by Saints Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac to work among the sick poor. De Paul’s 1655 Common Rules of the Congregation of the Mission stipulated that in any war, the sisters were not to prefer one side or the other. Accordingly, during the Civil War, the Daughters of Charity’s religious superior, Father J. Francis Burlando, wrote a letter to the sisters on September 15, 1861, directing them to “refrain from uttering Political sentiment. . . . They have no Enemy but pride and the evil spirit—North, South, East or West are alike to them; every afflicted member of society is their friend and an object of their Solicitude. . . . ”

Thus, the Daughters of Charity worked in both Northern and Southern hospitals. In sum, more than 600 Catholic sisters worked as nurses during the war, but the largest number were by far the Daughters of Charity: 232 nursed at one time or another in general hospitals, in field hospitals, and on hospital ships (Jolly 83). They also nursed on the battlefields at Antietam and Boonsboro, Maryland, and Vicksburg, Mississippi, and worked on hospital ships up and down the Mississippi River, the Potomac, and in the Chesapeake Bay, plus rode with the ambulance corps at Manassas, Virginia, and Harpers’ Ferry, West Virginia. In addition to Philadelphia and Richmond, the Daughters served at hospitals in several other locations, including Washington, DC, and St. Louis, Missouri. The Daughters were also present in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which was only about fifteen miles...

From: The Southern Quarterly/Volume 53, Numbers 3/4, Spring/Summer 2016/pp. 37-55

From: muse.jhu.edu

Image: Daughters of Charity Nursed Wounded Civil War Soldiers at West Philadelphia hospital (Philadelphia Archdiocesan Historical Research Center)

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Nurses From the Holy Sisters and Nuns: Angels in War

By John E. Carey, The Washington Times

The Roman Catholic nuns who went to war (American Civil War 1861-1865) to help out as nurses were the most highly praised and prized of the female attendants.

Doctors, Sanitary Commission members and the men themselves generals to privates commented on the efficiency of the nuns.

Many of the nuns did not come from nursing backgrounds or formal nursing training, but they had learned the “basics” of care in their large Catholic families. Many were fairly well educated, for women of the time. Some were teachers.

Above all, the nuns were quiet, cooperative and, to use a more modern term, “low maintenance.” Some women who volunteered as nurses from civil life did not adapt easily to a demanding and regimented military environment.

At the Mound City, Ill., military hospital, Dr. John Brinton called most female volunteers “terrible, irritable and unhappy.”

The work was tough, disgusting and fatiguing. Brinton heard about the Catholic nuns and asked if any could assist him:”In answer to my request to the Catholic authorities of South Bend, Indiana, a number of sisters were sent down to act as nurses in the hospital. Those sent were from a teaching and not a nursing order, but in a short time they adapted themselves admirably to their new duties.”

The sisters were from the Holy Cross Order of Catholic nuns at St. Mary’s College at Notre Dame. Brinton continues: “When I asked the Mother [Superior] who accompanied them, what accommodations they required, the answer was, ‘One room, Doctor,’ and there were, I think, fourteen or fifteen of them.”

The nuns shared the bed, sleeping in shifts and sometimes on the floor.

More than 600 Catholic nuns went to war as nurses, including in the Confederacy, from 21 different religious communities and 12 different orders. They almost always took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. They had a deep sense of duty and worked long hours without complaint.

This certainly is not to denigrate the contributions of so many other women during the war.

British observer George Augustus Sala called the Civil War “a woman’s war.” Thousands of women contributed by sewing, making bandages, cooking and providing food, and in other ways. When it came to nursing, however, discipline and a keen understanding of medicine was in order.

Union nurse Jane Woolsey said the problem was that often volunteer groups of eight to 20 slightly educated women were turned loose in a hospital without guidance or supervision. Some had questionable motivations.

The famed Dorothea Dix tried to correct this problem by creating standards for the nurses. The “fine print” in Dix circulars seeking nurses included the paragraph: “No women under thirty need apply to serve in the government hospitals. All nurses are required to be plain looking women. Their dresses must be brown or black with no bows, no curls, no jewelry and no hoop skirts.”

In 1921, Rhode Island Rep. Ambrose Kennedy referred to, “the ‘nuns of the battlefield,’ whose services were not only conspicuously national; they were also singular and unique.” This is high praise, but usually the nuns were in hospitals. Perhaps less than one in five saw battlefield conditions, in which soldiers usually assisted the doctors.Confederate nurse Kate Cumming said, “It seems strange that [the sisters] can do with honor what is wrong for other Christian women.”
A painting of cornette-wearing Daughters of Charity by Armand Gautier (1825–1894)

Above: A painting of cornette-wearing Daughters of Charity by Armand Gautier (1825–1894)
The nuns came from a church that was a male-dominated hierarchical organization not unlike the military. The nuns could take orders and were used to the gradations of place and status rank in the military culture.

The first nurses at sea served aboard a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Red Rover, a specially configured hospital ship operating in the Mississippi River and Western theater of war.

The nuns, also from St. Mary’s College, established a military-style “chain of command.” They answered to the ship’s captain for routine items, to the chief surgeon for medical matters and to their order for religious issues.

They established the nursing routine in the ship and organized the black women who assisted them as attendants. They were Sister Mary (often abbreviated as M.) Adela (Catherine Morane), Sister M. Callista (Esther Pointan), Sister M. John of the Cross (Catherine McLoughlin) and Sister M. Veronica (Regina School).

After the Civil War, The Rev. William Corby, chaplain to the Irish Brigade during the war and later president of the University of Notre Dame, wrote a tribute honoring the Sisters of the Holy Cross, of St. Mary’s Convent at Notre Dame, and to the Sisters of Charity.

This tribute is published in “Our Army Nurses: Stories From Women in Civil War,” edited by Mary Gardner Holland (Edinborough Press, 1998 and 2000).”Sixty Sisters of the Order of the Holy Cross from Saint Mary’s convent … went out under the intelligent Mother Mary Angela as superioress. These sisters volunteered their services to nurse the sick and wounded soldiers, hundreds of whom, moved to sentiments of purest piety by the words and example of their angel nurses, begged to be baptized in articulo mortis’ at the point of death.

“The labors and self sacrifices of the Sisters during the war need no praise here. Their praise is on the lips of every surviving soldier who experienced their kind and careful ministrations,” Father Corby continued.”Many other Orders made costly sacrifices to save life and to save souls, notably the noble Order of the Sisters of Charity. To members of this Order I am personally indebted. When prostrate with camp-fever [malaria], insensible for three days, my life was entrusted to their care. Like guardian angels, these daughters of Saint Vincent watched every symptom of the fever, and by their skill and care I was soon able to return to my post of duty.”

* John E. Carey is a frequent contributor to The Washington Times.

Image: Nuns turned nurses put together the first hospital ship, USS Red Rover

From: civilwarstoriesofinspiration.wordpress.com

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Catholic Sisters and the American Civil War

By Pat McNamara, 5-30-2011

On the battlefields and in the hospitals, soldiers on both sides of the Civil War owed their consolation, and sometimes their limbs or their very lives, to the Catholic Nun.

In Washington, D.C., across from St. Matthew's Cathedral (the site of President John F. Kennedy's funeral Mass), a monument stands to the women religious who ministered to wounded and dying soldiers, North and South, during the American Civil War. Unveiled on September 20, 1924, the inscription reads:

They comforted the dying, nursed the wounded, carried hope to the imprisoned, gave in his name a drink of water to the thirsty -

To the memory and in honor of the various orders of Sisters who gave their services as nurses on battlefields and in hospitals during the Civil War.

Between 1861 and 1865, approximately 640 women from twenty-one different religious communities volunteered their nursing services. Mary Livermore, a future women's rights leader who worked with the U.S. Sanitary Commission, said:

"I am neither a Catholic, nor an advocate of the monastic institutions of that church . . . But I can never forget my experience during the War of the Rebellion . . . Never did I meet these Catholic sisters in hospitals, on transports, or hospital steamers, without observing their devotion, faithfulness, and unobtrusiveness. They gave themselves no airs of superiority or holiness, shirked no duty, sought no easy place, bred no mischiefs. Sick and wounded men watched for their entrance into the wards at morning, and looked a regretful farewell when they departed at night."

This was quite a change. Before the Civil War, nuns often didn't wear habits in public or when traveling, because of anti-Catholic hostility. In Indiana, children threw rocks at them. In New England, anti-Catholic mobs threatened to burn down their convents (and sometimes actually did). And in New York, a man walked up to a Sister in habit, called her a "damned papist bitch," and slapped her face.

But when the war came, they were desperately needed. In general, nursing wasn't considered a respectable profession for women. Nor were there many hospitals; most people were cared for at home. The exceptions here were the Sisters, who operated twenty-eight hospitals nationwide as of 1861. While other churches had women nurses, including the Lutherans and Episcopalians, Catholic nuns constituted the single largest pool of experienced nurses in America on the eve of the Civil War.

Altogether on both sides, over 4,000 women served as nurses; more served as nurses' assistants, cooks, and laundresses. What did the nurses do? They cleaned wounds and bandaged them, helped doctors in surgery, and cleaned the wound. It wasn't easy work, and the turnover rate was high. All in all, it was hard, ugly work.

The turnover rate may have been less for the Sisters. For centuries, historian George Stewart writes, nursing was a "religious ministry rather than a profession." One Sister, asked how she gathered strength to do her work, said: "I thought of the cruel wound in the side of our dear Lord, and my strength was restored." And they asked little remuneration beyond necessities.

They were there on the war's bloodiest battlefields. At Shiloh, where some 25,000 fell, Sister Anthony O' Connell, a Cincinnati-based Sister of Charity, said she was unable to bear the terrific stench from the bodies on the battlefield. This was bad enough, but what we endured on the field of battle while gathering up the wounded is beyond description . . . Day often dawned on us only to renew the work of the preceding day without a moment's rest.

Dr. Pat McNamara is a published historian. He blogs about American Catholic History at McNamara's Blog.

From: patheos.com

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Nurses in the U.S. Civil War

From: questia.com

Civil War nurses were actually not part of the military and did not serve as part of any army. Most of those nurses who tended to the dying and wounded of the Confederate or the Union armies were volunteers and not paid for their work. Even as volunteers they were confronted with difficulties with regard to paternalism and bureaucracy in order to help soldiers both on and off the battlefield.

The Civil War is known to have been the impetus and catalyst for many good things. It was the main source for volunteerism which became an integral part of American society. Although battlefield hospitals and medicine were nearly non-existent during the Civil War, women helped and saved countless numbers of soldiers. There are many famous names associated with Civil War nursing and they were instrumental in revolutionizing the way battlefield medicine and healthcare in the military were administered and delivered.

The most famous pre-Civil War nurse was Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), who was instrumental in obtaining better medical care for the soldiers who required medical attention during the Crimean War (1853-1856). Many nurses of the Civil War had studied Florence Nightingale's way of working and were exposed to her philosophies of nursing care, which advocated a clean environment and fresh air, as well as guaranteeing that every wounded soldier received kind, compassionate and humane care. The Civil War produced some very famous nurses. They include Clara Barton, Mary Todd Lincoln, Dorothea Dix, Louisa May Alcott and even one man -- the famous poet, Walt Whitman. All of them served as nurses during the Civil War and had a profound impact on the lives of many soldiers.

It is estimated that more than 2,000 nurses served in the Civil War with most of their names being unknown. They are considered the unsung heroes of the war. Due to poor record-keeping and the lack of appreciation and attention given to the many individuals -- mainly women -- who worked the battlefields providing medical care to the soldiers, their names were either lost or never recorded. Some of the nurses of the time kept diaries or journals while others wrote their memoirs after the war. It is through those written records that some names and people became prominent for the causes they championed.

Battlefield surgery, as it is referred to today, was not the same as in modern times. If surgery became necessary, it often consisted of two nurses holding the soldier down while the surgeon went to work cleaning, cutting and sewing the wound. Ether or modern-day anesthesia did not exist or were in very short supply. Most soldiers suffered in pain. The soldiers called the nurses "battlefield angels," who helped by feeding, changing bandages and bathing sick or wounded soldiers. At times they had to comfort dying soldiers. They witnessed the horrors and trauma of war from a very personal viewpoint. These experiences most definitely influenced these nurses and played a role in the causes they championed after the war.

The Confederate army did promote a nurse, Sallie Louisa Tompkins, to the rank of captain and put her in charge of the hospital in Richmond, Virginia. It appears that she was the only woman to be commissioned in the Confederate army.

Many changes took place in the United States after the Civil War in the field of nursing. The most profound change was that nursing became the profession of women. Women were viewed as compassionate and willing to give of themselves to others, especially the sick and wounded. It was women like Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton who made the nursing profession a respectable and sought-after career for women.

Although not actually nurses, many women who served during the Civil War had a tremendous effect and impact on the soldiers' health. These women belonged to groups called Soldiers' Aid Societies, that ensured that the medical and nursing needs of the soldiers were met. They delivered bandages, medicines and clean supplies to the soldiers. Many nurses during the war were also members of the societies and worked alongside other members. Another organized group of women during the Civil War was the Sanitation Commission which was in charge of the camps' sanitation and hygiene.

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