Ann Bradford Stokes

From: s3.amazonaws.com

Stokes (1830-1903), an illiterate African American woman born into slavery in Tennessee, served as a “contraband” (escaped slave) nurse on the hospital ship USS Red Rover, the first Union Naval
ship, from January 1863 to October 1864. She also received regular wages of a “first-class boy.”

Notably, she was among the first women to serve as a nurse in the United States Navy and the first to serve on a U.S. military vessel. In 1890, after years of unsuccessful petitions for a pension, Stokes reapplied for a pension based on her 18 months of service in the Navy instead of as a widow of a deceased soldier. Since she was listed as a “boy” while serving on the USS Red Rover, Stokes was granted her a pension of $12 per month (the usual amount awarded to nurses at this time) by the Navy.

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Ann Preston: First Woman Medical School Dean

By Maggie MacLean, 10-10-2012

Ann Preston (December 1, 1813–April 18, 1872) was a doctor and educator of women in Pennsylvania. One of the most notable achievements of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in the 19th century was the role it played in the entrance of women into medicine. Ann Preston was one of those pioneer Quaker women doctors.

Through her leadership and her persuasive influence, Dr. Preston promoted educational, professional and social changes that eventually established the right of women to study medicine and removed the barriers which blocked the path of those women who aspired to become competent and successful physicians.

Early Years
Ann Preston was born on December 1, 1813 in West Grove, Pennsylvania, Quaker community near Philadelphia. She was the oldest daughter and second of nine children of Quaker minister Amos Preston and Margaret Smith Preston. Of their three daughters, Ann was the only one to survive to adulthood.

Ann grew up in a close knit family revolving around the West Grove Meeting. Her parents were abolitionists and supporters of women's rights. The famous Quaker minister Lucretia Mott was a friend of the Prestons and often visited them.

Ann was educated at the local Quaker school, then at a boarding school in Chester, Pennsylvania, until she had to return home to care for her family when her mother became ill. To continue her education she attended lectures of the local literary association and lyceum, where such poets as James Russell Lowell and John Greenleaf Whittier came to speak, and began to write her own essays and poetry.

Ann also became a member of the temperance movement and the Clarkson Anti-Slavery Society, for which she wrote petitions and lectures. After her younger brothers were old enough to care for themselves, Ann became a teacher, and in 1849 she published a book of children's rhymes, Cousin Ann's Stories.

Because girls were restricted to sedentary and indoor activities and dressed in tight clothing, Ann believed that women should know more about their own bodies. After some intense study of those subjects, she began teaching physiology and hygiene to all-female classes.

For the first half of the 19th century all medical schools uniformly refused to admit females. In 1847 Geneva College in New York made a one-time exception for Elizabeth Blackwell, and she became the first American woman doctor. But others who wanted to train were forced to study medicine in the offices of physicians and could not gain the status of 'medical doctor.'

Medical Education
Encouraged by Philadelphia Quakers who were becoming interested in medical education for women, in 1847 Ann Preston became an apprentice in the office of Dr. Nathaniel Moseley. After two years of medical training under Dr. Moseley, Preston applied to four medical colleges in Philadelphia but her applications were rejected because of her gender.

To provide opportunities for women to study medicine, a group of Quakers founded the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1850 - the first institution in the world established to train women in medicine and offer them the degree of Doctor of Medicine. The first year the faculty of the College was all male, but in 1851 Hannah Longshore was selected as a demonstrator in anatomy and was listed as a faculty member.

Preston enrolled in the first class, graduating in December 1851 at the age of 38. She returned to the college the following year for postgraduate work, then ran a series of lectures on hygiene for women. In 1853 Preston was appointed professor of physiology and hygiene at the Female Medical College, and spent the rest of her life in service of women in medicine.

Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia
In 1857, the Philadelphia Medical Society spoke out against the Female Medical College, effectively barring its women students from educational clinics and medical societies in the city. Undeterred, Dr. Ann Preston organized a board of "lady managers" to fund and run a teaching hospital to care for women, where her students could gain clinical experience.

The area around the Medical College was too crowded to add a hospital wing, and it was therefore necessary to find a new location. But to buy such a site meant raising money. The supporters of the college had already given as much as they could, while other wealthy Philadelphians objected to women doctors. In 1858 Preston began walking from door to door soliciting funds.

During this time, she began to suffer from rheumatic fever and exhaustion, and she was confined to a hospital for three months to recuperate.

During the Civil War (1861-1865), the Medical College was forced to close due to lack of financial support. However, Dr. Preston had raised enough money to send friend and colleague, Dr. Emmeline Horton Cleveland, to Paris to study obstetrics so that she could be the resident physician at the new hospital.

When there was still not enough money in the coffers, Preston borrowed her family's horse and buggy and began to go from farm to farm in Bucks, Montgomery and Chester Counties, calling on Quaker families and pleading her cause. Her earnestness and faith were deeply moving, and slowly the money trickled in.

In 1861, Preston and her supporters founded the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia to offer medical and surgical care for women by women. Its purposes were to:

"establish in the City of Philadelphia a Hospital for the treatment of diseases of women and children, and for obstetrical cases; furnishing at the same time facilities for clinical instruction to women engaged in the study of medicine, and for the practical training of nurses; the chief resident physician to be a woman."

Woman's Hospital accepted its first patient, to the "Lying In Department (maternity)," on December 16, 1861. By April of 1862, twelve patients occupied beds. The hospital grew steadily; by 1875 it housed 37 beds, treated nearly 2,000 patients at their homes (with visits carried out largely by students), and saw more than 3,000 visitors in its dispensary. Women and children were admitted "without regard to their religious belief, nationality or color."

After the Female Medical College was re-opened in 1866, student Mary Putnam Jacobi was refused a medical degree by Edwin Fussel, though she met the required qualifications. Most of the faculty, including Preston, disagreed with the decision. Fussell resigned following the incident, and Preston was appointed dean.

Dean of Woman's Medical College
Dr. Ann Preston served as dean of the college from 1866 through 1872, becoming the first woman dean of an American medical school, a position that allowed her to champion the right of women to become physicians. Under her leadership the college trained the first African American and the first Native American women doctors in the country, as well as the first women medical missionaries to Asia.

The school changed its name to Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1867. Soon many eminent physicians, male and female, were among its teaching staff. When many small medical colleges were forced to close because of the introduction of higher standards in medical training, the College survived. In 1863 the school began to train nurses, one of the first institutions in the United States to do so.

Some of the women who audited the courses at the college gave lectures on physiology and hygiene to women in the poorest sections of the city of Philadelphia, thus pioneering medical outreach as a branch of social work. One of these women was Sarah Mapps Douglass, an African American teacher and Quaker.

While she had achieved her goal of establishing a woman's hospital, Ann Preston believed that her female medical students deserved the right to attend the larger, all-purpose clinics and hospitals in Philadelphia so they might learn to deal with a greater variety of medical conditions. At first all the hospitals barred "lady doctors."

However, in 1868 Preston won the right for her students to attend the teaching clinics at Blockley Hospital. When the first women arrived, however, they were met by an angry demonstration. The male medical students shouted insults and threw paper, tinfoil and tobacco quids at the women. The female students remained composed and attended the clinic, but on their way out they were pelted with rocks.

Following this demonstration, the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and of Jefferson Medical College held a meeting attended by representatives of the medical staffs of all the hospitals in Philadelphia to discuss the admission of women medical students and declared themselves to be opposed to the "admixture of the sexes at clinical instruction in medicine and surgery."

Because of the publicity over the behavior of the male medical students at Blockley and Preston's protest against it, public opinion began to swing in favor of the education of women doctors. In 1869 she made a similar arrangement with the Pennsylvania Hospital. Dr. Preston accompanied her students to the first clinic and witnessed the harassment by male students firsthand.

In a letter written February 21, 1925, one of Preston's former students, Sarah Hall, recalled the events that day for the 75th anniversary of the Woman's Medical College:

"We were allowed to enter by way of the back stairs, and were greeted by the men students with hisses and paper wads, and frequently during the clinic were treated to more of the same. The Professor of Surgery came in and bowed to the men only. More hisses... We retired the same way we entered and, on reaching the outer door, found men students lined up on one side of the way, and we, to get out, had to take the road and walk to the street to the tune of 'The Rogues March.' Our students separated as soon as possible. All who could took the little antiquated horse cars in any direction they were going. The men separated also, and in groups of twos, threes and fours, followed the women."

Late Years
By this time Ann Preston was gravely ill, suffering from articular rheumatism. She continued to teach at the college, serving as professor of physiology, and to serve as consulting physician at the Woman's Hospital, but she had to restrict her private practice to office visits because she could no longer ride out to visit her patients in their homes.

Nevertheless, her spirit remained strong, and she was a constant inspiration to her students. Year after year she addressed the graduating class of the Female Medical College, urging them to continue to practice the highest standards of medical care despite opposition. In 1871 Preston suffered an attack of acute articular rheumatism, which left her in a weakened state.

Dr. Ann Preston died on April 18, 1872 and was buried near her beloved friends Lucretia and James Mott and many other Quaker abolitionists at Fair Hill burial ground in North Philadelphia. Ann left her instruments and her life savings to her beloved college for a scholarship. Six years later, her friend Dr. Emmeline Cleveland died and was buried next to Dr. Preston, as she had requested.

There is a beautiful sequel to Ann Preston's life. The Woman's Hospital that she founded flourished on North College Avenue for many years and then was moved to West Philadelphia, where the street facing it was named Preston Street. The neighborhood around it deteriorated, there was less need for a woman's hospital, and it was abandoned some years ago. However, it has now been rehabilitated by a Quaker group, Friends Rehabilitation Corporation, as housing for elderly and homeless women.

SOURCES
Wikipedia: Ann Preston
Pioneer Woman Doctor: Ann Preston
Changing the Face of Medicine: Dr. Ann Preston
Wikipedia: Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania

From: civilwarwomenblog.com

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Black Women After the Civil War: African American Women in Postbellum America

By Maggie MacLean 9-14-16

After the Civil War, African American women were promised a new life of freedom with the same rights provided to other American citizens. But the newly freed women in the South had little or no money, limited or no education and little access to it, and racism impacted every area of their lives. The transition from enslavement to freedom was a difficult and frightening one for most black women who emerged from enslavement knowing "that what they got wasn't what they wanted; it wasn't freedom, really."

The Civil War promised freedom to African American women, but as the Confederate Army and slaveowners fleeing from Union troops often took their male slaves with them. The women and children were left behind. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation freed African Americans in rebel states in 1863 and the Thirteenth Amendment emancipated all slaves wherever they were, the nation was still unprepared to deal with the question of full citizenship for its newly freed black population.

Freedmen's Bureau
The Bureau assisted African Americans in finding jobs, land, a home, and an education, as well as obtaining clothing, food, water, and health care. It distributed 15 million rations to blacks and set up a system by which planters could borrow rations to feed freedmen they employed. Its efforts were quickly consumed with the plight of former slaves and the objective of establishing emancipation in the face of strong opposition.

In 1865, Republican congressmen founded the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, better known as the Freedmen's Bureau, to avert mass starvation and suffering of freedwomen and men. The immense social crisis that made the bureau necessary came as a direct result of the Union Army's physical destruction of the South.

The Freedmen’s Bureau, which had offices in 15 Southern states and the District of Columbia, operated from 1865 to 1872 to help manage the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of slaves.

Southern blacks now faced the difficulty Northern blacks had confronted for decades - that of a free people surrounded by hostile whites. Freedman Houston Hartsfield Holloway wrote:

"For we colored people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free colored person about them."

The Reconstruction implemented by Congress, which lasted from 1866 to 1877, tried to find ways for whites and blacks to live together in a free society, but people in the South saw Reconstruction as a humiliating imposition.

With the protection of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, however, African Americans enjoyed a period when they were allowed to vote, participate in politics, purchase the land of their former owners, and seek their own employment. Opponents of this progress, however, soon rallied against the former slaves and eroded the gains for which many had shed their blood.

Nicodemus, Kansas
After the Civil War there was a general exodus of blacks from the South. Some emancipated slaves quickly fled from the neighborhood of their owners, while others became wage laborers for them. Benjamin Singleton led an exodus of African Americans from various points in the South to Kansas. Six blacks and two whites ncorporated the Nicodemus Town Company in Kansas in 1877 - the oldest of about twenty towns established predominately for blacks in the West.

Nicodemus, Kansas is located on the plains in the northwest corner of Kansas. The six founders, all from Lexington, Kentucky, named the town Nicodemus after a legendary African slave prince who had purchased his freedom. They envisioned Nicodemus as a place where its settlers would have both political freedom and economic opportunity.

Northern teachers, many of whom were white women, volunteered to provide education and training for the newly freed population. In time, schools from the elementary level through college provided a variety of opportunities, from the rudiments of reading and writing and various types of basic vocational training to classics, arts, and theology.

By 1886 Nicodemus had become a prosperous community surrounded by farms owned by blacks. The town had two newspapers, the Nicodemus Enterprise and Nicodemus Western Cyclone. There was also a drugstore, a bank, schoolhouse, three churches, and a general store, the first two story building in the town.

Kate Drumgoold
Multiple sources estimate that she was born in 1858 or 1859 near Petersburg, Virginia. While Drumgoold was still young, her mother was sold to allow her owner to pay a poor white man to go to the Civil War in his place. Drumgoold's mother left a husband, one son, and 17 daughters behind. Kate later wrote:

We did not know that she was sold until she was gone; and the saddest thought was to me to know which way she had gone and I used to go outside and look up to see if there was anything that would direct me.

When Kate's mother returned to her family after Emancipation, she found her husband remarried, her daughters scattered, and her only son, who had fought for the Confederacy, was now missing.

Kate and her mother reunited as much of the family as possible and moved to Brooklyn, New York, where Kate worked as a domestic, battled significant illnesses, and worked toward obtaining an education, which she considered essential to the advancement of African Americans. Her plans to attend school had to be put aside for a few years after she contracted smallpox, but she never wavered in her determination.

"For every time that I saw the newspaper there was some one of our race in the far South getting killed for trying to teach and I made up my mind that I would die to see my people taught."

Kate Drumgoold left Brooklyn and went to Wayland Seminary school in Washington DC and later returned. In 1878 she left again and went to Harpers Ferry for four years at school. She returned again to Brooklyn and began teaching in 1886, fulfilling her dream of teaching African Americans. Her mother passed away on February 28, 1894, but Kate continued to teach for eleven more years until her health began to fail.

On January 20, 1897 a severe illness of some sort struck Kate Drumgoold, and she was forced to quit teaching in March of 1897. Her autobiography ended abruptly soon after, as she prayed for the strength to finish her work.

Mattie J. Jackson
Mattie Jane Jackson was born in January 1847 in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Westley Jackson and Ellen Turner. Despite being enslaved by different owners, her parents had three children together: Sarah Ann, Mattie Jane, and Esther J. After the birth of his youngest daughter, Westley Jackson escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad. He settled in Chicago, Illinois and became a minister, but he died before the Civil War.

Mattie Jane Jackson (1847-1910) is known for her 1866 autobiography, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson: Her Parentage, Experience of Eighteen Years in Slavery, Incidents During the War, Her Escape from Slavery: A True Story (1866). Excerpt from that book:

"Two years after my father’s departure, my mother, with her two children, my sister and myself, attempted to make her escape. After traveling two days we reached Illinois. We slept in the woods at night. I believe my mother had food to supply us but fasted herself. But the advertisement had reached there before us, and loafers were already in search of us, and as soon as we were discovered on the brink of the river one of the spies made enquiries respecting her suspicious appearance. She was aware that she was arrested, consequently she gave a true account of herself - that she was in search of her husband. We were then destitute of any articles of clothing excepting our wearing apparel. Mother had become so weary that she was compelled to leave our package of clothing on the way. We were taken back to St. Louis and committed to prison and remained there one week, after which they put us in Linch's trader's yard, where we remained about four weeks. We were then sold to William Lewis."

Six years later, Ellen Turner met and married George Brown and together they had two sons. Brown escaped to Canada around 1855. Turner tried several times to join her husband, but was repeatedly caught and beaten. Brown returned to the United States, changed his name to John G. Thompson, and became a barber in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Her owner grew tired of Turner's constant attempts to escape; he sold her and her children to the captain of a Mississippi River steamboat. When Ellen met Sam Adams and made preparations to marry, the steamboat captain kidnapped the family and sent them to Louisville, Kentucky, where they were sold to different owners.

With the help of the Underground Railroad, Mattie escaped to Indianapolis, Indiana, where her mother and brother reached her several months later. At the end of the American Civil War, Mattie and her mother and brother traveled back to St. Louis, where Turner married Sam Adams.

Shortly after the end of the war, Mattie Jackson's stepfather, who had earlier changed his name to John G. Thompson, located the family and invited Jackson and her half-brother to join him and his wife, Dr. Lucy Susan (Prophet) Schuyler Thompson, a botanical physician and antislavery activist. Mattie was nineteen when she brought her eleven-year-old half-brother to Lawrence, Massachusetts to live with his father and stepmother, Lucy Susan Prophet Schuyler Thompson, who had recently lost her only child, a Civil War soldier.

In 1866, Mattie related her life experiences as a slave to her stepmother who went by the title Dr. L.S. Thompson. also published The Story of Mattie J. Jackson to raise money for Mattie's education. Evidence shows she finished her education and moved back to St. Louis, with her mother Ellen and her third husband, Sam Adams.

In 1869, Mattie married William Reed Dyer, a native of Warrenton, Missouri, a Union Army veteran who was employed as a porter on steamboats traveling up and down the Mississippi River. They eventually moved into their own home in the city of St. Louis. Out of their eight children, four sons and a daughter reached maturity. Of their nine children, five would live to maturity. After Ellen Turner Adams' death in May 1893, the Dyers moved to Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, about thirty-five miles from St. Louis, where they lived for the rest of their lives.

SOURCES
Docsouth: Mattie J. Jackson
Wikipedia: Mattie J. Jackson
BlackPast.org: Nicodemus, Kansas
Library of Congress: African American Odyssey
A Slave Girl's Story. Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold
NWHM: Claiming Their Citizenship: African American Women, 1624-2009: The Civil War and Reconstruction Period

Image 1: A freed family on a plantation gathered for a photograph

Image 2: Image: Mustered Out. Little Rock, Arkansas, April 20, 1865. Published in Harper's Weekly, May 19, 1866.
Alfred Waud's drawing captures the exuberance of the African American women and children as the U. S. Colored Troops returned home at the end of the Civil War.

From: civilwarwomenblog.com

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How a Government Worker Discovered Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office

By Matt Blitz, 11-13-15

On the day before Thanksgiving 1996, General Services Administration carpenter Richard Lyons was conducting a final review of a decrepit building at 437 Seventh Street, Northwest, that had recently fallen into government possession and was now set for demolition. Coming in from the cold rain, he entered the dusty old building alone. On the first floor (which was once a shoe store), he checked for infrastructure damage, trash, and whether anybody had made it their temporary home. Then, he moved to the second floor and did a similar sweep. He moved to third floor. “There were no lights… it was dark,” Lyons tells Washingtonian, “Then, I heard this noise, but saw nothing.” Lyons heard a noise again, so he walked back and forth, stopping at the window. “I was at the window and it felt like somebody tapped me on the shoulder… when I turned around, I spotted an envelope between the ceiling and the wall.”

He got out a ladder and reached for it. The envelope was addressed to a “Edward Shaw, Washington City.” Curious, he pulled himself through a small hole leading to the attic. That’s where he found an assortment of artifacts—utensils, clothing, Civil War-era newspapers, a bayonet and one small sign written in gold and black lettering. It read “Missing Soldiers. Office. 3rd. Story. Room 9. Miss Clara Barton.”

The sign Lyons found. Photograph courtesy the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.
Clara Barton was born into a military and abolitionist-leaning Massachusetts family in 1821. Her father was a militia captain and founder of the community’s Universalist church, one that held progressive views on abolition. At 18, she began her professional career as a teacher in Oxford, Massachusetts. In 1854, she moved to Washington to become a recording clerk at the United States Patent Office. She was so impressive, both in her skills and confidence, that she was paid the same salary as her male co-workers, which was nearly unheard of at the time. Unfortunately, the job only lasted three years: When Democrat James Buchanan became president, the vocal Republican and abolitionist was let go. When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, she got hired again, but to the position of copyist—not nearly as prestigious or well-paying a job. When war broke out in 1861, Barton volunteered at the Washington Infirmary. As the conflict dragged on, more brutal than many had anticipated, Barton made her way to the front lines, determined to help those fighting for the cause she believed in.

Barton wasn’t a trained nurse, but her ability to organize supplies, help, and treatment was immensely needed during a war that injured and maimed thousands. She became a welcome and morale-boosting sight whenever she showed up at a Union hospital. Frequently written about in newspapers across the country, Barton became a well-known figure to Americans. Due to this and her proximity to soldiers, Barton received scores of letters from families asking whether their loved ones were alive or dead, and if dead where they were buried. Unable to answer every letter, she hired several assistants and ordered stationery. She named her new mobile venture “The Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army.”

In late 1864, with the war finally winding down, Barton moved back to the nation’s capital to gather supplies. It was at this time that Edward Shaw, a friend and co-worker from the patent office, offered Barton a chance to move into his boarding house at 488 1/2 7th Street—437 7th Street today. She took him up on it and also convinced him to rent her half of the third floor for an office. Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office was born.

Over a period of about four years, Barton and her staff handled over 60,000 pieces of correspondence, helping to give peace of mind to a country scarred by war. She placed ads in newspapers, wrote letters to her military contacts, and urged soldiers to tell her about final resting places of their fellow comrades. She went on to establish the American Red Cross 12 years later.
After his discovery, Richard Lyons became so infatuated with Barton and the Missing Soldiers Office story that he spent a year researching and reading everything he could. “I would go home, walk the dog, then go to the Library of Congress and stayed there until closing time every night,” says Lyons. With the help of the National Park Service, the GSA, and the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, many of the found artifacts have been archived–including a blouse with a hole in its sleeve.

“While doing research, I read that (Barton) was at Antietam giving soldiers water,” Lyons says. “She wrote in her diary that a bullet went through her sleeve and hit a soldier in the head, killing him … under that she wrote, ‘I never bothered to mend it.'” Lyons believes it’s the same blouse–“Why else would a hole like that be in a sleeve?” he says.

Today, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine operates the DC building’s first and third floor as a museum and monument to the achievements, heroism, and willpower of Clara Barton. Lyons still volunteers there on occasion, giving tours and telling people about the historic trove he found. When asked if he thought, perhaps, it was the spirit of Clara Barton that lightly tapped him on the shoulder that cold, rainy November night nearly two decades ago, Lyons responds,“I don’t know what it was, but it felt real to me.”

From: washingtonian.com

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Mrs. Keckley, “Contraband” and The Lincolns

By Feather Schwartz Foster, 10-19-15

The Civil War brought out great bitterness. It also brought out great generosity.

Shortly after the Civil war began, runaway slaves were give a unique new name: “Contraband of War.”

Fortress Monroe, near Norfolk, VA, was a crucial center for the Union, since it commanded the Chesapeake Bay, its trade, commerce and defensive position. General Benjamin Butler, a “political” general and Massachusetts lawyer, was in command of Union forces in that area, which was a magnet for the runaways. Technically, they “could not” be freed and “should” be returned to their masters, but Butler, an abolitionist, was not about to permit it. He declared the runaways as “contraband of war”, giving quasi immunity and a sense of growing pride and importance to the once-enslaved.

The Sanitary Commission

Early in the war, the Sanitary Commission was formed in the North. As a precursor to the Red Cross, the organization was devoted to provide money, goods and services for Union soldiers, particularly the wounded.

The idea caught on like wildfire, and hardly a Northern town  was without a chapter. (In the South, there was no structured organization; everyone pitched in however they could.)

Men had organized the Sanitary Commission, but it fell to the women to organize many of their activities: fairs and bazaars, knitting and sewing circles, assembling mess kits and sundries.

Huge sums were raised. Thousands upon thousands of articles – from fully-equipped ambulance wagons to socks and pajamas – were provided to army hospitals.

Mrs. Elizabeth Keckley

Elizabeth Keckley (1818-1907) was born in Petersburg, VA, a mulatto slave.  At a young age, she discovered a rare talent for sewing and designing ladies fashions and eventually became so adept that she earned enough money ($1200) to purchase her freedom.

As a free woman, she moved to Washington in 1860 and opened a shop, making gowns for the capital’s elite. She had come highly recommended to Mary Lincoln, and began working with the new First Lady the day the Lincolns entered the White House.

“Lizzie” Keckley became an indispensable part of the Lincoln White House.

The relationship between Elizabeth Keckley and Mary Lincoln would steadily deepen. Mrs. K. would not only be engaged as her modiste and personal dresser, but helped nurse Willie and Tad when they were sick, and tended to an ailing (and grieving) Mrs. Lincoln as well. From time to time she even combed the President’s thick and unruly hair. In short, she became indispensable, and the close confidante and companion to the First Lady.

Elizabeth Keckley and Contraband

Free Negroes and former slaves came to Washington in droves during the Civil War. They were usually “disappointed” by freedom.

While the North and South actively supported their wounded, “Contraband” were given little assistance. Where were these poor souls to go? How would they find work and avoid starvation?   They were being ignored and neglected.

Mrs. Keckley had become a prominent figure among the free Negro citizens of Washington, well respected by her community. After witnessing a fund-raising fair in Washington to help wounded Union soldiers, she approached the pastor of her church about forming a society to assist all those “contraband” who needed food, clothing, medical attention and shelter. An organization was formed to collect money and goods, and to distribute them where they could. They named it the Contraband Relief Association.  Once Negroes were accepted as soldiers in the Union Army, it became The Ladies’ Freedmen and Soldiers Relief Association.

It was one of the first organizations established for Negroes to provide care for their own, and set a standard for subsequent charitable groups, uniting assistance among the capital’s Black Churches.  They organized their own fairs and bazaars, lectures and dances.

President and Mrs. Lincoln Contribute

President Lincoln approved a generous personal donation to the Contraband Relief Association.

Lizzie Keckley had had a very brutal upbringing. Her “masters” were cruel; she was subject to beatings, rape and humiliation, yet she rose above it and was proud and self-sufficient. She was not given to beg for favors. Her prominence as dressmaker to the First Lady, and the genuine kindness she received at the Lincolns’ hands was sufficient.

Mary Lincoln was a generous supporter to the Contraband Relief Association.

However, a month after the Contraband Relief Association was formed, she accompanied Mrs. Lincoln on a trip to New York, and took advantage of that time to tell her about her new “organization.” Mrs. L. was delighted to lead off the fund raising drive, and after requesting support from the President, pledged $200 (which would be far more than $2500 today). Mrs. Lincoln’s influence also brought Lizzie in contact with many prominent Northerners who also contributed generously. Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass were included among the subscribers, and even gave lectures on its behalf.

Both Lincolns would make subsequent contributions from time to time.

Mrs. Keckley: A Fall From Grace

“Behind the Scenes” has been reprinted many times – but it was unsuccessful when it was written. It is said that Robert Lincoln arranged to purchase every existing copy to prevent his mother’s embarrassment.

The rupture of the close friendship between the First Lady and her dressmaker began basically over money. After Lincoln’s assassination, Mary Lincoln needed Mrs. Keckley’s near-constant companionship and nurturing, but she could no longer afford to pay her. Mrs. Keckley needed the money. Devoting all her time to the demanding former First Lady left her no time to tend to her business. She lost her customer base.

Elizabeth Keckley lived a long life, but it was mostly in poverty, relying on assistance from some of the charitable organizations she helped to found.

In a effort to support herself, she penned an autobiographical book with a ghost-writer, called Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. In it, she presented an intimate portrait of the Lincolns including private letters from Mrs. Lincoln. This was a total breach of trust and privacy and Victorian morality, and the relationship between the two women was severed. Mrs. Lincoln never spoke of her again except to refer to her as the “Negro historian.” Mrs. Keckley had not intended to harm or humiliate the former First Lady, and indeed was devastated by the broken relationship.

Elizabeth Keckley later spent time as a dressmaking instructor at Wilberforce University, but eventually died at age 89 in poverty, at a Home for Destitute Colored Women, one of the offshoots of the Contraband Relief Association.

Sources:

Fleischer, Jennifer – Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckley – Broadway Books, 2003

Keckley, Elizabeth – Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House – Important Books, 2013

About Feather Schwartz Foster
Feather Schwartz Foster is an author-historian who has made more than 500 appearances discussing presidential history. She teaches adult education at the Christopher Wren Association (affiliated with William and; Mary College), and adult Education programs at Christopher Newport University. She has been a guest on the C-SPAN "First Ladies" program. She has written five books.

From: featherfoster.wordpress.com

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My Heart Toward Home: Letters of a Family during the Civil War

Eliza Woolsey Howland & Georgeanna Woolsey Bacon

This is the story of a remarkable family during the Civil War. Seven daughters, one son, and their mother contributed their services to the Union cause. The book, based on the personal letters and diaries of the Woolsey family of New York, was written by Eliza Howland and Georgeanna Woolsey in 1898 but has never been published until now.

"My Heart Toward Home: Letters of a Family During the Civil War, is an important new source for Civil War reenactors and researchers. Based on the letters and journal entries of the Woolsey family of New York, it is a treasure-trove of primary source material."
Robin Schwartz, The Citizens' Companion

This edition includes photographs of the Woolsey family, an introduction by Daniel J. Hoisington, and an index.

ISBN 1-88920-07-9

From: edinborough.com

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The Women of Winchester, Virginia

By Virginia R. Bensen, 11-30-11

We are happy to welcome guest author Virginia R. Bensen.

This is the Introduction to a series of articles that will follow over the next few months about the Civil War women of Winchester, Virginia. What is interesting about these women is each represents either a Unionist or Secessionist perspective. The articles in this series will sometimes focus on just one woman from Winchester or Frederick County, Virginia. In other articles, there will be a bantering of diary entries between two or more women.

At first I thought I would write about all Secessionists, and then all Unionists, or all about the younger women or older women, but in thinking about presentation, I decided it would be more interesting to mix up these women and present the series more in a chronological order. This will provide the reader an opportunity to make easier comparisons of perspectives and attitudes of the women.

Scholarly work that has been presented about Southern women has been primarily about the wealthy plantation mistress. Only during the past twenty years has the focus changed to examining the lives and experiences of other classes and races of women of the Civil War period. All of the women of course who wrote diaries were literate and fairly well educated. In reading these diaries and manuscripts, it appears that when the women are occupied by their enemy, it is at that time they are prolific writers. The articles will span a focus from the wealthy socialite to the mercantile store keeper, and to those in between. Most of the writers are widowed or single and the ages range from a 14-year-old to a 45-year-old. Unlike the plantation mistresses or belles who were found in the Deep South, these women represent the women who lived in the Shenandoah Valley region.  Their values and beliefs in some ways are similar to those in the Deep South, but in other ways they are quite different.

The women of Winchester, Virginia regardless of whether they supported the Union or the Confederacy, tended to be tenacious in their loyalties. This brought about a tension that built over time between those who were pro-Union and those who were pro-Confederate. To complicate the situation, Winchester changed Union and Confederate occupations over 70 times during the Civil War. The town’s majority of civilians supported the Confederacy, and the women although restricted from fighting in the military demonstrated their support for the South in many ways that were within the boundaries and sometimes slightly over the boundaries of womanhood for that time.

In order to fully understand the complexity of the situation, here is a very brief background of Winchester, Virginia. At the beginning of the Civil War, Winchester dominated the lower Shenandoah Valley because of its network of seven major roads that radiating out in various directions to connect it to other large towns and cities in Virginia. Two of the roads were macadamized and connected Winchester to both the lower and upper Valley – Martinsburg to the north, and Staunton to the south. The road system made the town a major trade center for the Valley. In 1860 Winchester had a population of 4,392, which included 680 free blacks and 708 slaves. (Click here for a map of the area.)

The majority of whites were non-slaveholders.  The town itself had multiple shops, taverns and hotels.  It was one of the few towns in the Valley that had gaslights and a water system.  There were warehouses and a railroad depot.  It also had two banks, two newspapers, more than fifty stores several fire companies and ten churches.   In addition, it housed the Winchester Medical College which was the first medical school in Virginia, and four private schools for educating the children.  For the most part, the community “embraced a middle class work ethic, which was similar to that of a Northern market region than to the hierarchical slave society.”   Sheila Phips observes, that Winchester during this time “Had all of the amenities expected of an urban area, if on a smaller scale.” In the words of historian Jonathan Noyales, “The strategic location of Winchester promoted its economic prominence and that location brought about its wartime problems.”

Prior to secession the majority of civilians in the town were against leaving the Union, but when Virginia seceded, that majority became the small minority in the town.  Many who supported the Confederacy did so because they felt the United States had abandoned them in many ways.  For the most part, they did not want to secede from the Union, but did so because they believed they had a higher and deeper loyalty to their state of Virginia.

When Virginia seceded, the townspeople went into a mass celebration. The young men were in a frenzy to join the militias to serve the Cause.  The romance of war became a fever, and the women encouraged that fever.  There is a story that is told among historians of Winchester, that is probably from oral history, since no one can find the source. One young man was reluctant to join a local militia unit. Some of the younger women in town had a gift package delivered to his home.  When he opened the package it contained a pair of ladies bloomers with frills and lace. Lying on top of the pantaloons was a note that read, “If you don’t sign up to fight, you might as well put these on. The next day the young gentlemen joined the militia. Throughout the Civil War the Secessionist women encouraged their men to continue fighting for the Southern Cause.  Even during the Union occupations, many smuggled letters to their “boys” and also smuggled contraband goods such as sugar, coffee, fabrics, thread and needles from Baltimore into Winchester not so much for civilian use, but to feed and clothe the Confederate sick and wounded.

During the initial Confederate occupancy in 1861 and early 1862, the women of Winchester participated in the usually expected activities such as organizing sewing and knitting groups to make socks, shirts, and caps for the Confederate troops. During the early part of summer of 1861, many of the troops became ill with measles, and the women took those soldiers into their homes and cared for them during their recovery.  Both Union and Confederate sympathizers housed the Confederate soldiers during this timeframe.

Although there were some minor skirmishes during June 1861, it was not until after the First Battle of Manassas, that the Winchester woman witnessed the horrors of war. In diaries there were descriptions of men with their faces mutilated, gut shot men, dead men, and of piles of amputated limbs.  Many Winchester women, especially of Confederate loyalty described going to the hospitals and nursing “their boys.”  Nursing to many of these women meant reading, writing, and feeding the wounded, not cleaning or bandaging wounds.

Although tensions between the Unionist and Confederate civilians were fairly amicable in the beginning of the war, when General Stonewall Jackson began arresting many of the prominent Winchester area Unionists in the fall of 1861 and winter of 1862, tensions intensified.  Jackson’s arrests started a total distrust by the Unionists toward the Secessionists.  On the other hand, the Secessionists by the end of 1861 withdrew from any socializing with the Unionists, and only made contact with them when absolutely necessary. By the time General Nathaniel Banks took occupation of Winchester in the spring of 1862, relations between the Unionists and Confederates rose to a hostile level.  Because of this tension, civilians identified with either the Unionists or the Secessionists. Remaining neutral meant that you were open to hostilities by both the Unionists and Secessionists.

After spending hours reading these diaries and manuscripts, it seemed that I was becoming friends with these individuals.  Through their writings I was invited into their inner most thoughts and feelings, and sometimes I wanted to shout at these women for acting like such fools, or for being so stubborn about some of the pettiest issues. Then, it dawned on me that these women have been dead for over a hundred years! I do not live in the nineteenth century, I live in the twenty-first century. What I consider to be a petty issue, to the women living in the 1860s that same issue was far from petty.

Through these diary accounts of the Civil War experiences of the women of Winchester, Virginia, there becomes a serialized story of the Winchester Civil War civilians and in particular the women’s experiences. This story contains drama, intrigue, romance, as well as comedy.  Each woman relates her own perspective. Yet, each contributes to the rich tapestry of the Civil War history itself.

About the Author: Virginia R. Bensen has a doctorate in Higher Education Leadership, an MBA and has taught a variety of college business courses. She has designed award winning workforce and education programs.  After finishing her doctoral dissertation, she decided to write a historical novel focusing on the civilian and women’s experiences in Civil War Winchester, Virginia.  Although familiar with social science research methods, but feeling rather intimidated with historical research, she enrolled in a Masters of American History program at American Public University. Her research interests are Civil War women and women’s identity change. She enjoys writing both popular and scholarly history.

From: emergingcivilwar.com

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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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The Ladies Union Aid Society of St. Louis (LUAS)

From: civilwartalk.com

We often see photographs of women who were serving with the U. S. Sanitary Commission in the East. Jessie Fremont was the wife of General John C. Fremont and daughter of prominent Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton. She urged her husband to set up a separate Western Sanitary Commission in St. Louis to serve the Trans-Mississippi region. Gen. Fremont issued an order that established the Western Sanitary Commission in St. Louis, Order No. 159. A primary purpose was to provide doctors and nurses for the hospitals in the fight in the West. It opened or supplied some 15 hospitals in St. Louis as well as hospital ships and trains that brought the wounded from the battles on the Mississippi to St. Louis. Eventually, the WSC also provided assistance for soldiers in St. Louis who had no funds for lodging, refugees from the South, and newly freed people in the city.

Another organization, the Ladies Union Aid Society of St. Louis (LUAS) actually preceded the WSC in its founding. The LUAS was organized on August 2, 1861 and the WSC on September 10, 1861. Many of the women whose names appear in our thread on Women of Missouri like Mrs. Anna Clapp were members of the Ladies Union Aid Society of St. Louis (http://civilwartalk.com/threads/civil-war-women-of-missouri.123548/) with Mrs. Clapp being the president. They met initially in the founders' homes, but the group soon became too large and they were given a room for meetings in the Military Hospital in downtown St. Louis. The LUAS met each week at 3:00 pm on Friday for reports from hospitals and their other activities.

The Union military authorities weren't prepared for the numbers of the wounded that would be transported to St. Louis, where there were hospitals such as New House of Refuge, Jefferson Barracks, City General, Good Samaritan, Marine, Pacific, Hickory Street, Benton Barracks, Lawson, Eliot, Schofield Barracks, City and Sisters, Invalid Corps Hospital, and the Gratiot Prison Hospital to care for them. LUAS members worked in the hospitals, visited the sick now in St. Louis due to the war, and provided for burial expenses. They also raised considerable amounts of money to support these efforts. Some LUAS members like Adaline Couzins would be injured or suffer frostbite as they went into the field to nurse the wounded. Ms. Couzins had been badly frostbitten early in the war and was later hit by a minie ball at Vicksburg. Arethusa Forbes was also frostbitten attending to soldiers in the field. The deaths of Mrs. Margaret Breckinridge and Mary Palmer were attributed to exhaustion from their work for LUAS.

Sometimes the statements about women's efforts during the Civil War seem to be along the lines of "They rolled bandages and visited the soldiers in the hospital, bringing them flowers and reading to them." I don't know whether the actions of women in Missouri were more than elsewhere, or whether they were just better documented. This passage from the recording Secretary of the LUAS describes the kind of baskets which were delivered to those convalescing in the 14 hospitals that LUAS dealt with:

"Within was a bottle of cream, a home-made loaf, fresh eggs, fruit and oysters;, stowed away in a corner was a flannel shirt; a sling, a pair of spectacles, a flask of cologne; a convalescent had asked for a lively book, and the lively book was in the basket; there was a dressing-gown for one, and a white muslin handkerchief for another; and paper, envelopes for all.” Woman's Work in the Civil War: A Record of Heroism, Patriotism and Patience, Linus Pierpont Brockett, Mrs. Mary C. Vaughan, p. 632.

18thVirginia said: ↑
The Union military authorities weren't prepared for the numbers of the wounded that would be transported to St. Louis, where there were hospitals such as New House of Refuge, Jefferson Barracks, City General, Good Samaritan, Marine, Pacific, Hickory Street, Benton Barracks, Lawson, Eliot, Schofield Barracks, City and Sisters, Invalid Corps Hospital, and the Gratiot Prison Hospital to care for them. LUAS members worked in the hospitals, visited the sick now in St. Louis due to the war, and provided for burial expenses. They also raised considerable amounts of money to support these efforts. Some LUAS members like Adaline Couzins would be injured or suffer frostbite as they went into the field to nurse the wounded. Ms. Couzins had been badly frostbitten early in the war and was later hit by a minie ball at Vicksburg. Arethusa Forbes was also frostbitten attending to soldiers in the field. The deaths of Mrs. Margaret Breckinridge and Mary Palmer were attributed to exhaustion from their work for LUAS.

Thanks for the thread, 18th! Yes, they did indeed lay it all out. What's crazy is how many of these women were lost. It's very tough getting ' the word out ' on them, too. You see their photos, care worn, battered, so faded by the time anyone has asked for a photograph and no one imagines this uninteresting looking female has incredible stories attached to her. Many who died I cannot find, when coming across a mention of them in someone's diary or journal. There will be an entry of a death " Mrs. Reed died today of typhoid after being here for only 6 weeks. She was buried with many tears. " That kind of thing. It's so prevalent, makes me wonder if there are statistics, you know?

No, it's not just Missouri- women from all over, North and South had the same kind of stories. It's just always been extremely hard, knowing how to convey who did what, you know? Some organizations were poorly funded but rich in intent- these lost a lot of workers to disease and over work. Some, the bandage rollers, tended to make a lot of noise over volunteering, maybe had an awful lot of resources but stayed little distant from the action. I wonder if there's a list somewhere?

But then, how do you include women like those in towns post battle? Virginia Wade's sister handed her baby, Lewis McClellan to her mother and walked to the hospitals.

The work accomplished by the Ladies Union Aid Society of St. Louis was very impressive. One quote I read from a Union soldier about the Confederate leaning women of Missouri said they were "spunkier" than some other women. I'd say that went for both Union and Confederate women of Missouri--makes me quite proud to count a great-grandmother from Missouri.

The LUAS went far beyond just carrying baskets to the convalescing soldiers and supplying nurses to the many St. Louis hospitals and the hospital ships. Finding a need for hospital clothing, they received $5,500 from the Western Sanitary Commission to sew 75,000 pieces of clothing. Soldiers' wives who needed to earn extra money were hired to provide the sewing. The Medical Purveyor then gave them a contract for $6,000 to produce 128,000 articles of clothing. Sewing machines were available in the LUAS headquarters for the women to use.

LUAS also received a contract for 261,00 yards of bandages.

In 1864, the Western Sanitary Commission and the Ladies Union Aid Society collaborated on the Mississippi Valley Sanitary Fair of 1864, to raise funds for their hospitals and the many wounded soldiers flowing through St. Louis. Though the men of the Western Sanitary Commission chaired most of the committees, it is generally agreed that the LUAS women did most of the work and personed the booths.

The Fair lasted from May 17 to June 18, 1864 and raised $550,000. Admission to the Fair to view the booth exhibits of sewing machines, hardware, and other knitted, embroidered or quilted crafts by the women of St. Louis started at $2 and went to .50 after the initial days.

The most popular booth at the fair was The Delphic Oracle, a fortune-telling booth.

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Kate Cumming (ca. 1830-1909)

By Katherine E. Rohrer, University of Georgia, 10-12-2007

Kate Cumming is best known for her dedicated service to sick and wounded Confederate soldiers. She spent much of the latter half of the Civil War (1861-65) as a nurse in hospitals throughout Georgia.

Inspired by Florence Nightingale, Kate Cumming served as a nurse during the Civil War. She treated wounded Confederate soldiers in numerous field hospitals throughout Georgia. After the war she published a chronicle of her wartime nursing experiences.

in Edinburgh, Scotland, circa 1830 (sources differ on the exact date), Cumming migrated with her family to North America as a young child, stopping first in Montreal, Canada, before permanently settling in Mobile, Alabama. Inspired by both the Reverend Benjamin M. Miller, who in an address urged the women of Mobile in early 1862 to aid wounded and sick Confederates, and by Florence Nightingale, the heroic British nurse who served in the Crimean War, Cumming, despite having no formal nursing training, decided to offer her services. Much to the distress of her parents, who firmly believed that ladies did not belong at the battlefield, she left Mobile in April 1862, along with forty other local women, including the novelist Augusta Jane Evans (although Evans did not make it to the front), for the Mississippi-Tennessee border. There, until June 1862, she cared for Confederate soldiers injured at the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862).

Unlike most women nurses, who served only temporarily, Cumming continued as an active nurse for the duration of the war. After a two-month respite in Mobile during the summer of 1862, she traveled to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to volunteer at Newsome Hospital, where she remained for the next year. While there, the Confederate government reluctantly decreed in September 1862 that hospitals could legally pay nurses rather than rely on them as volunteers. Thus Cumming's status changed from volunteer to professional; for the war's duration, she was officially enlisted in the Confederate Army Medical Department.

After the fall of Chattanooga in the summer of 1863, Cumming moved on to Georgia, where she served in numerous mobile field hospitals established throughout the state in response to the destruction inflicted by Union general William T. Sherman's troops. As the major military forces moved southward and eastward, so did the location of these facilities. Confederate field hospitals were set up in many Georgia locations, including Catoosa Springs, Cherokee Springs, Dalton, Kingston, Marietta, Ringgold, Rome, and Tunnel Hill, during the Atlanta campaign of 1864. Later they were established in other Georgia locales: Americus, Athens, Augusta, Barnesville, Columbus, Covington, Forsyth, Fort Gaines, Greensboro, Griffin, LaGrange, Macon, Madison, Milner, Newnan, Oxford, Thomaston, and Vineville. Though not employed in all these hospitals, Cumming spent considerable time in several of them, specifically those at Americus, Cherokee Springs, Dalton, Newnan, and Ringgold. When the war ended in April 1865, she was working in southwest Georgia.

Cumming returned to Mobile after the war, and in 1866 she published A Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee from the Battle of Shiloh to the End of the War, a chronicle of her day-to-day nursing experiences on the Civil War battlefields of Tennessee and Georgia. In 1874 she moved with her father to Birmingham, Alabama. She never married. She resided there as a teacher and active member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy until her death on June 5, 1909. She is buried in Mobile.

Further Reading Jeanne Bryner, Tenderly Lift Me: Nurses Honored, Celebrated, and Remembered (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004).

Kate Cumming, The Journal of a Confederate Nurse (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998).

From: georgiaencyclopedia.org

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Sarah Emma Edmonds: The Immigrant Woman “Male Nurse”

By Patrick Young, Esq. - February 15, 20160311

Sarah Emma Edmonds was a teenage immigrant making her way on her own in Michigan when the Civil War broke out. She had been raised on a failing farm in Nova Scotia in Canada, but she had to leave her abusive father. Emma ran away from home when her father arranged for her marriage to the man he was financially indebted to, essentially selling her off to pay his debts. When her father tried to track her down, she assumed the identity of a man, Frank Thompson, to help her evade him.  She crossed the border into the United States under this masculine guise and lived in New England before moving to Flint, Michigan.1

Women immigrants coming to the United States sometimes hid their identities as women. This could help them escape abusive fathers or husbands. For women travelling alone, it also served as protection against sexual abuse along the way.  Once they came to the U.S., they might continue to use the disguise as a way to obtain jobs in occupations otherwise closed to women.2

When war came a few years after her immigration, Edmonds joined the army as a man, Frank Thompson, on May 21, 1861. While this may seem like a fantastic scenario to modern readers, there were several hundred women whose service in the army while disguised as men has been documented. Civil War soldiers were given perfunctory medical exams at induction which did not involve undressing. Soldiers rarely bathed and avoided being seen nude. Women typically passed themselves off as teenage boy recruits.3

At the end of the war, Edmonds tried to explain her decision to join the army. She wrote; “It is true, I was not an American—I was not obliged to remain here during this terrible strife—I could return to my native land.” But, she said, “It was not my intention, or desire, to seek my own personal ease and comfort while so much sorrow and distress filled the land.” Still, she wondered what she, as a young woman barely out of her teens, could do. She joined the army as a male “Field Nurse.”4

Edmonds accompanied the army to the battlefield of First Bull Run in July of 1861. She tended to the battlefield wounded and she was almost captured by the Confederate cavalry during the Union army’s disastrous retreat. After the Battle of Bull Run, Edmonds tended the wounded at different hospitals in Alexandria, Virginia. She found a more lasting post at the newly established hospital at Georgetown near Washington.  There she encountered men wounded in body and mind. On August 3, 1861, she recorded in her journal “Have been on duty all day. John C. is perfectly wild with delirium, and keeps shouting at the top of his voice some military command, or, when vivid recollections of the battle-field come to his mind, he enacts a pantomime of the terrible strife…” The inadequacy of the medical corps preparations were fully on view to the young nurse; “There are five hundred patients here who require constant attention, and not half enough nurses to take care of them.” 5

Historical markers describing Emma Edmonds’s life were erected in Michigan and Texas. She was one of only three women admitted to full membership in the Civil War veterans organization the Grand Army of the Republic.

Everything from trained staff to medicines to food was in short supply. Emma Edmonds had to beg for supplies from women in town just to feed her men.6

As her nursing days went on, Edmonds noticed that she hardened to the suffering of the men. “Oh, what an amount of suffering I am called to witness every hour and every moment. There is no cessation, and yet it is strange that the sight of all this suffering and death does not affect me more… It does seem as if there is a sort of stoicism granted for such occasions.”7

As Frank Thompson, she served alongside a male friend, a fellow Canadian immigrant in the Michigan Volunteer Infantry.  Emma Edmonds wrote that though she had known her Canadian friend since childhood, he had not realized who she was, but that he befriended his comrade because “Frank” was an immigrant from his homeland. Her friend was, she wrote, “like myself, …a wanderer from his native land. There was a strong bond of sympathy existing between us, for we both believed that duty called us there, and were willing to lay down even life itself, if need be, in this glorious cause.” One day in 1862, he was killed in a skirmish in the Peninsula Campaign in Virginia. “Now he was gone,” she wrote, “and I was left alone with a deeper sorrow in my heart than I had ever known before.”8

Resource: You can read Nurse and Spy in the Union Army The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields by Emma Edmonds.

Sources:

1. The Lives of Emma Edmonds by Carl Senna NY Times Disunion April 21, 2014; Nurse and Spy in the Union Army The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields by Emma Edmonds (1865); They Fought Like Demons, Women Soldiers in the Civil War, By DeAnne Blanton and Lauren Cook published by Louisiana State Press (2002).
2. They Fought Like Demons, Women Soldiers in the Civil War, By DeAnne Blanton and Lauren Cook published by Louisiana State Press (2002).
3. They Fought Like Demons, Women Soldiers in the Civil War, By DeAnne Blanton and Lauren Cook published by Louisiana State Press (2002).
4. Nurse and Spy in the Union Army The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields by Emma Edmonds (1865) (Kindle Locations 197-200)
5. Nurse and Spy in the Union Army The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields by Emma Edmonds (1865) (Kindle Locations 580-582)
6. Nurse and Spy in the Union Army The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields by Emma Edmonds (1865) (Kindle Locations 586-588)
7. Nurse and Spy in the Union Army The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields by Emma Edmonds (1865) (Kindle Locations 588-590)
8. Nurse and Spy in the Union Army The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields by Emma Edmonds (1865) (Kindle Locations 999-1002).

From: longislandwins.com

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Prostitution and the Civil War

By Annika Jensen ’18

It was to my slight disappointment that I found out that the term “hooker,” one of many referring to prostitutes (or, as they were called during the Civil War era, “public women), is not actually a play on the name of Joseph Hooker, the infamous and promiscuous Union general. Fighting Joe may, however, have helped elevate the term to its current popularity; after all, a certain red light district in Washington, D.C. was dubbed “Hooker’s Division.”

Pushing past the etymology, however, I discovered a vast array of sources, anecdotes, and documents leading to the world of prostitution in the Civil War era. In an earlier post I explored the prudish nature of domestic sex, a topic not often discussed or even performed. Indeed, prostitution and sex work was held in contempt by the majority of Victorian society: William Quesenbury Claytor on Virginia penned in his diary in 1852 that “impudent prostitutes” were often seen in Alexandria at night, and Union officer Josiah Marshall Favill wrote that in the same city in 1862 houses were “thronged” with sex workers. As discouraged and taboo as the practice was, however, it continued to expand and thrive during the Civil War era.

Sexually transmitted diseases indicate the prevalence of prostitution during the war itself; an estimated 8.2% of Federal soldiers were diagnosed with either syphilis or gonorrhea throughout the war, and far more likely went undiagnosed. These venereal diseases were a tremendous setback for the army, as treatment could put troops out of combat for long periods of time; officers had to ensure discipline and order to keep their men from frequenting brothels. Such problems proved especially prevalent in Union-occupied Southern cities like Nashville and New Orleans.

One effort taken by the Union to eradicate this fraternization was to ship the prostitutes to other states. This was attempted in Nashville, where women were put on trains and sped off to surrounding cities. However, many of them were close enough to find their way back, and more drastic measures were sought. The army decided the solution was to transport the women to different states by boat; they called upon Captain John Newcomb of the steamboat “Idahoe” to transport 100 prostitutes to Kentucky. The captain protested, not willing to tarnish the reputation of his ship, which he claimed would becoming known as a “floating whorehouse,” but he could not stand up to the army, and his trip went underway. Unfortunately for Newcomb, no city in Kentucky, or any other state, would accept his cargo, and he was forced to circle back to Nashville. The result was a ruined ship and a city that had not rid itself of its prostitutes.

The documentation of prostitutes and legalization of their work became an effective—though not necessarily morally sound—solution. This system was implemented in Nashville in August 1863, when public women were required to report to a newly-transformed clinic and be tested and licensed. Thus, prostitution essentially became legal and much safer, as sex workers were required to be tested every two weeks; if they failed the medical exam, they were sent to the hospital until they were deemed “cured,” after which they could return to their work. Unlicensed prostitutes caught working were incarcerated.

In the roughly two years that this system was used in Nashville, nearly 400 licenses were issued and the city and Union army alike became considerably healthier. The moral question was naturally raised, to which the army could only conclude that the safety and health of its soldiers transcended ethical values.

So, while the Civil War era is generally regarded as a part of prudish Victorian society, in which intimacy in the home was of a taboo nature, there was no lack of sex.

Sources:

Claytor, William Quesenbury. Diary of William Claytor, 1849-1896, vol. 1. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2002.

Favill, Josiah Marshall. The Diary of a Young Officer Serving with the Armies of the United States during the War of the Rebellion. Chicago, IL: R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., 1909.

Lowry, Thomas P. “The Army’s Licensed Prostitutes.” Civil War Times Illustrated 41, no. 4 (August 2002): 30-36. America: History and Life.

Schogol, Jeff. “Do ‘hookers’ Owe Their Moniker to a Civil War General?” Stars and Stripes. April 28, 2011. stripes.com.

Serratore, Angela. “The Curious Case of Nashville’s Frail Sisterhood.” Smithsonian. July 8, 2013.

Image: General Benjamin Butler enforced harsh discipline on the people of Union-occupied New Orleans; he is noted for threatening to publicly denounce women as prostitutes if they acted out against his soldiers. This editorial cartoon illustrates the resulting change in behavior.

From: gettysburgcompiler.com

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Badass of the Week: Mary E. Walker

By Ben Thompson

"Tables about breast high had been erected upon which the screaming victims were having legs and arms cut off. The surgeons and their assistants, stripped to the waist and bespattered with blood, stood around, some holding the poor fellows while others, armed with long, bloody knives and saws, cut and sawed away with frightful rapidity, throwing the mangled limbs on a pile nearby as soon as removed." -- Lt. Col. W.W. Blackford, 1st Virginia Cavalry

Detonating artillery shells and the non-stop rattling of musketry menacingly rumbled in the distance, barely audible over the groans and agonizing cries of dying men as droves of new arrivals steadily flooded into the ordinary, single-family home that was now being utilized as a front-line field hospital.  Horse-drawn ambulance carts packed full of trauma victims lined the driveway to a grisly facility that mashed together a barely-serviceable emergency room, operating room, and morgue into a painfully-typical three-bedroom house on the outskirts of Chattanooga, Tennessee, the hospital's overworked, exhausted nurses desperately trying to triage the wounded between those who are possibly treatable and those who aren't going to make it.

Outside the city walls the Union Army, pushed back to Chattanooga following their crushing defeat at Chickamauga, was making a desperate stand to hold the city against a massive Confederate counter-attack.  46,000 men of Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee were entrenched on the heights overlooking the critical strategic rail and communications center, with the Union forces backed up against the Tennessee River, but now a massive assault led by General George Thomas was rushing straight up a steep ridge, straight into hardened enemy positions that included 112 cannons, and were taking murderous fire from the enemy in an all-out attempt to smash the Confederates' defensive positions and break out of the siege.  Those wounded soldiers lucky enough to find their way back to friendly lines found themselves here, in a stinking, unsterilized, makeshift hospital surrounded by malaria-infected men and saw-wielding surgeons practicing a particular brand of medicine that had more in common with medieval torture than anything resembling a modern-day visit to the pediatrician, their only consolation being a cup of cold water and the soothing voice of nurses trying to comfort them and ease their pain in some small way.

During the Civil War, over ten thousand women worked as nurses in field hospitals across the war zone.

Mary Edwards Walker of the 52nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry is the only one who served as a surgeon.  She's also the only woman in history to ever receive the Medal of Honor, the highest award for military bravery offered by the United States of America.

Walker was a woman who was roughly a hundred and fifty years ahead of her time.  Routinely criticized by women and men alike for her desire to wear men's clothing (at a time when "men's clothing" basically meant "any article of clothing that allowed you to walk through doorways or work in any capacity whatsoever), Walker paid her own way through Syracuse Medical College in 1855, becoming just the second woman in American history to complete physician training and work as a doctor.  When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Walker had already been running her own private practice for six years, but even though there were just 86 licenses surgeons in the Union Army at the start of the hostilities she was still turned away by every recruiting officer she approached.  Undeterred, the 29 year-old surgeon signed on as a volunteer  nurse, working on the front lines at the First Battle of Bull Run, then working as an unpaid volunteer surgeon at Indiana Hospital later that year.

Walker continued her practice of "I'll just show up wherever people are dying and see if they'll maybe let me help fix them for free", volunteering at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, performing front-line operations, and taking control of a medical train that was ferrying wounded men back to Washington.  Her skills at slicing and dicing men up in the name of science so impressed Union General Ambrose Burnside that the Federal commander nominated her for a commission.  At first she met with the resistance she was so used to encountering, but thanks to Burnside's recommendation, she was finally commissioned as an Assistant Surgeon in the 52nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, issued a U.S. Army surgeon's uniform, and sent to Tennessee to help treat wounded and dying men during the siege of Chattanooga.  She would be the only woman in the war to receive this honor.

Now, in order to fully appreciate how intense the job of a Civil War surgeon actually was, try to think of it as something of a cross between the Spanish Inquisition and an Eastern European butcher shop.  Since artillery shells, canister fire, and cannonballs typically resulted in the instant, untreatable, and horrific death of anyone unlucky enough to be standing in front of a cannon muzzle, the majority of Civil War surgical cases were from gunshot wounds caused by a .58-caliber minie ball – a soft metal, mostly hollow, incredibly heavy projectile over half an inch in diameter that was shaped very much like a modern bullet, and one that not only hit so hard that any bone it came in contact with shattered like a fluorescent lightbulb being smacked against a brick wall, but that also mushroomed on impact much like a modern-day hollow-point bullet, expanding to about an inch in width, ripping through muscle, blood vessels, organs, and all of those other important things that people keep inside their skin.

Because there was no such thing as organ transplantation, internal surgery, or blood transfusions, if a soldier got hit in the head, chest, or abdomen, he had a 90% chance of death – all you could do for the poor bastard was give him morphine and water and find a shady tree for him to sit under until he died.  Wounds to the arms and legs had better odds, however, which is why fully three-quarters of surgeries performed during the war were amputations performed on these appendages.

Here's how it worked.  After a guy got shot, he had 48 hours to get his arm cut off with an unsterilized hacksaw or he was probably going to die a painful death from gangrene.  You, as the doctor, working in terrible conditions at someone's kitchen counter, would slosh the blood off the operating table with a bucket, get the guy up there, then you'd have a couple minutes to figure out what kind of shape he was in.  If his arm wasn't broken, he might be ok – you can just wash it out, slap a tourniquet on there, and move on to the next guy.  If it was broken, you'd need to operate.  One of your nurses would anesthetize the dude with a chloroform-soaked rag (if it was available – in some field hospitals all you got was a shot of whiskey and a bullet to bite down on) until he was unconscious, then you'd have to stitch the broken artery closed with a needle and thread, dig the bullet out of there with your forceps, cut through the muscle with a sharp knife, saw through the bone with your hacksaw, tie off the arteries with another piece of thread, and then sew it all shut into a stump.

A good surgeon could perform the operation in under ten minutes.  And he'd do it dozens of times in a row, all of this while people were pounding the city with artillery shells and stray bullets were slamming into the walls around them.  One nurse at the Battle of Antietam recalled working on a guy in the hospital tent and then having a stray bullet pass through the tent, through the sleeve of her dress, and then kill him right in front of her, which, honestly may have been more of a humane way to go – because this was back before we knew you had to sterilize your equipment before you operated on a patient, almost 25% of people who underwent amputation surgery ended up dying from infected wounds.

Saving human lives by performing barbaric work with her bone saw under hellish conditions in the middle of a raging war zone as bullets and artillery shrapnel ripped through the skies around her, Mary Edwards Walker continued working as a front-line surgeon throughout the three-day Battle of Chattanooga.  After a heroic, unlikely charge by George Thomas's men broke the Confederate position and sent Bragg retreating back to Georgia, Walker continued her work, not only assisting wounded Federal troops but also crossing enemy lines and providing medical care to Confederate troops and civilians in Tennessee and Georgia.

On one of these trips to Georgia to aid sick and injured civilians, Walker was ambushed by Confederate pickets, who found her in her Union uniform carrying two pistols and arrested her as a spy, a detail that may or may not actually have been true (we can't prove it either way).  Her captors, who noted in their report that she argued "enough for a regiment of men", recommended sending her to a lunatic asylum for being a woman doctor, but instead she was sent to Richmond and thrown in a jail for Federal prisoners of war.  She spent four months in brutal conditions in the POW Camp, Walker was sent back to Yankee lines as part of a prisoner exchange (she later confessed that she was very proud to have been traded straight-up for a male Confederate surgeon).

After the war, Walker was sent back to the Union Army, where she was attached to Sherman's army during the Atlanta Campaign.  After the Battle of Atlanta, she was appointed Chief Surgeon at a women's military prison in Louisville, Kentucky, where she served until the end of the war.  After her service, Walker collected an Army pension, wrote a couple books, became a women's suffrage activist, founded a weird commune, and got arrested a couple times for wearing pants instead of a dress.

During her time in the Union Army, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker had been recommended for promotion both by General George Thomas and by General William Tecumseh Sherman.  Since she technically wasn't a uniformed service member, these requests for promotion could not be granted, but in honor of her service Mary Edwards Walker was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1866.  Of the 1.8 million women who have served the United States military, she is the only one to ever receive the award.  The Federal government tried to correct this in 1917 when they changed the guidelines for the Medal of Honor, stipulating that it could only be awarded for actions that occurred in combat, and stripped 900 people – including Dr. Walker – of their awards.  Walker, obviously, told them to get bent – she wore the medal until her death in 1919.  It was officially reinstated by order of the President in 1977.

Sources:

Bollett, Alfred J.  "The Truth about Civil War Surgery."  Civil War Times.  June 12, 2006.

Davis, William.  Civil War Journal.  Thomas Nelson, 1999.

De Pauw, Linda Grant.  Battle Cries and Lullabies.  University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.

Schroeder, Glenna R.  The Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine.  M.E. Sharpe, 2008.

Wilbur, C. Keith.  Civil War Medicine.  Globe Pequot, 1998.

From: military.com

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