Surgeon In Blue

by Scott McGaugh

  We may search history in vain for campaigns of equal severity, for battles of equal magnitude, with those of this Army for the past eighteen months, and we challenge history to produce a battle wherein the hundreds of wounded have been so well and so rapidly cared for, as the thousands in the great battles of this Army.16

  Letterman’s supporters sought more senior ranks for medical directors, beyond that of major and on a par with other department heads. It wasn’t until 1865 that Congress acquiesced.

  Letterman’s work had greatly improved the public perception of the army’s medical department. Blistering early-war criticism of the wounded lying abandoned at Bull Run for days had been replaced by increasing recognition and respect of medical department reforms. Letterman had overhauled battlefield care, hundreds of military hospitals had been built, and the medical department had evolved to a level of military organization that had not existed at the outset of the war. In early 1864, a Philadelphia newspaper reporter wrote: “We have alluded to this subject in order that the friends and relatives of those who are now imperiling their lives in defence (sic) of their country may have some idea of what is done by a humane and bountiful government for the relief of those who fall in its battles; and that they may rest easy in the confident assurance that there is a department of the government which looks after the wounded and the sick with the utmost care, and provides for all their wants.”17

  Despite growing recognition for these accomplishments, a key ally who had made Letterman’s reforms possible, Surgeon General William Hammond, had seen his political stock plummet. After Stanton had sent Hammond on his extensive tour of western medical facilities in September 1863, Stanton’s investigative committee did its appointed work. Hammond’s allies feared the worst, based on emerging rumors of what the investigation might reveal.

  A few weeks before Letterman asked for his transfer, on December 6, 1863,The New York Times previewed the committee’s not-yet-published investigative report: “. . . is said to be terrible in the management of that Bureau while under Surgeon-Gen. Hammond. It is proved that he instructed the Medical Purveyor in Philadelphia to cease purchasing drugs in open market at quotation prices, and contracted with other parties in that city for the same articles at from twenty-five to thirty percent higher rates than the testifying parties offered to furnish them for. A New-York blanket contract; the hospital bedstead contract, made with a secesh firm in this city, and whisky and other minor contracts of this bureau are said to be soaked with fraud.”18

  Hammond was arrested when he returned to Washington, on January 17, 1864, while Letterman was settling into his new post as hospital inspector in Pennsylvania. Charges of malfeasance and fraud—personally authorizing medical supply purchases without going through the medical purveyor and allowing the purchase of substandard supplies—mirrored the claims of the investigative committee. His trial began two days later and dragged on for several months.

  Three days earlier, January 14, Letterman’s post in the Army of the Potomac had been filled by surgeon Thomas McParlin. He had joined the Union army the same year that Letterman had enlisted. McParlin became assistant surgeon at Fort Union, New Mexico, in 1851, a post Letterman held five years later. McParlin assumed medical command for the Army of the Potomac in midwinter, finding an army in far better condition than when Letterman had assumed medical command less than two years earlier. Camp hygiene, military diet, a more reliable supply of provisions, and accountability, all hallmarks of Letterman’s regime, were evident in McParlin’s early assessments as his successor.

  The army’s winter camp was comprised “for the most part of log huts about eight feet square, with walls four feet high, and roofed with shelter tents, each hut accommodating from three to five men. Much skill and taste was evinced in the arrangement of many of the camps. . . . The rations furnished . . . were abundant in quantity, and of good quality and variety, the average weekly issue (included) three days’ rations of fresh beef, threeand-a-half of fresh bread, four-and-a-half of potatoes and twoand-a-third of other vegetables,” he wrote on January 26.19 Two weeks later he had expressed equal satisfaction with the Army of the Potomac’s hospitals. “These hospitals are floored with boards, and heated by means of open fireplaces, and their condition . . . was in every way good. Jellies and canned fruits are kept on hand and issued by the medical purveyor and from the fund created by the tax on newspaper vendors and sutlers, which has been put at the disposal of the medical director of the army.”20

  Meanwhile, Letterman inspected the Department of the Susquehanna’s eighteen hospitals that housed more than 4,000 patients. He had become responsible for about 10 percent of all Union army hospitals as the spring campaign season approached. Only the Department of Washington and Department of the Ohio operated more hospitals and patients. However, Susquehanna hospitals had a 37 percent occupancy rate, compared with an overall 54 percent occupancy rate in the Union army’s 190 total hospitals.21

  Letterman also became involved in the ongoing Congressional deliberation over the proposal to create an army-wide ambulance corps. Submitting his comments through General Meade, Letterman argued for a federal ambulance corps instead of one based on regiments. Several Army of the Potomac corps commanders, including Generals French, Pleasanton, and Howard, supported the legislation, based largely on their experience with the Letterman system. An unnamed Army of the Potomac surgeon wrote The New York Times that “From more than a year’s experience in the hard-fought engagements of this army, I can affirm that I have not known wounded to lie on the battle-field two hours after their injuries were received . . . except . . . where the field remained in possession of the enemy.22 General Gouverneur Warren remained one of the few senior line officers critical of Letterman’s approach and wrote letters to the Senate military committee opposing army-wide adoption.

  On March 11, 1864, Letterman’s system became federal law. Other than a provision that assigned ambulances based on regiment size, the legislation matched nearly all of the provisions contained in General Orders No. 147 issued by General McClellan on August 2, 1862, at Letterman’s behest. Less than eighteen months after Letterman had conceived of this overhaul of battlefield care, forged partially on the work of others, it became the required standard for the entire Union army. More than 86,000 casualties in Civil War battles yet to come would benefit from the medical department’s transformation from outpost medicine to combat care.

  Soldiers in the Army of the Potomac, however, saw little difference after the law’s adoption. “As the provision of the ambulance law corresponded in all essential particulars to the system already instituted in the Army by Surg. Letterman, no difficulty or delay occurred in its adoption. All of the ambulances were thoroughly repaired, painted, and marked with the distinctive badge of their several corps, details of medical officers and men for the ambulance service were made, and the persons so selected carefully examined. As was to be expected, a large portion of those first detailed were rejected, regimental commanders having attempted to rid themselves of their weak and worthless men. The men attached to the ambulances were carefully and regularly drilled, minute inspections of everything connected with the ambulances and horses were made, and guidons and hospital flags were procured and distributed,” wrote McParlin.23

  By that point, the medical department in the Army of the Potomac had evolved to become a major component of nearequal standing with other units. On May 1, its ambulance corps included 592 ambulances, forty medicine wagons, 209 army wagons, fifteen forges, nearly 1,900 horses, almost 1,200 mules and a like number of stretchers, six officers, and more than 2,200 enlisted men.24

  Four weeks later, Letterman became more removed from the war. On May 30, he traveled to West Point, New York, to conduct physical examinations of the latest graduating class of the U.S. Military Academy. Fifty-two graduates passed muster on July 1, all of them between sixteen and twenty years of age. In preparation to become military officers they had studied mathematics, literature, French
and Spanish, military tactics, drawing, chemistry, philosophy, and engineering.25

  The office of Letterman’s medical director was located in Philadelphia, and the Lettermans were “living for the summer in a very pretty village outside Germantown,” according to Letterman’s wife. In June, Mary’s mother wrote her son in Rome that she planned to rent a room near Philadelphia’s Logan Square to be closer to her daughter and son-in-law. However, it appeared Jonathan and Mary’s future was in New York. In mid-July, Mary asked a family friend to watch for homes that were for sale “not over $5,000 at Yonkers or nearer New York.”26

  Meanwhile, Letterman’s inspector duties required him to travel frequently, living out of his luggage in hotels. He was miserable, away from his wife and far from the battlefield where his authority and decisions directly affected the lives of tens of thousands of men. His letters to Mary provided a rare glimpse into man who had found a purpose in life outside the military. After fighting against an unending torrent of human slaughter, of stained and dirty faces looking up from bloodsoaked straw desperate for a glimmer of hope in the surgeon’s face, his salvation from a life of disease, death, and disability had become Mary.

  “To tell you that I am disgusted with this business would be to express myself in the mildest manner. It is a kind of business that I have no fancy for under the most favorable circumstances. . . . I am not by any means in good humor,” he wrote his wife. “I felt it would be hard to be separated from you . . . (but) I am deeper in love than I thought, your goodness, your exquisitely fine sense of all that is good and beautiful and true . . . (is) exemplified in all your thoughts and feelings and actions. How often you are in my thoughts and how pleasant it is to linger upon thoughts of you, you may never know, for I can tell you but little how dearly you are cherished.”27

  While Letterman had turned his attention to West Point’s future officers, his mentor became the subject of national debate and sometimes ridicule. On May 4, Surgeon General William Hammond was found guilty of the charges of sidestepping the medical purveyor and purchasing medical supplies found to be inferior and overly priced. He also was found guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer for telling a Philadelphia medical purveyor that he was obliged to fire him on orders from General in Chief Henry Halleck. Halleck claimed no recollection of such an order, and in his defense Hammond could only allege that documents proving the order came from his superior had been stolen from his office.

  The four-month trial had featured extensive testimony by witnesses on both sides, sometimes disputing the quality of the goods sold. The prosecution relied heavily on civilian physicians who worked in military hospitals, while Hammond’s attorneys called several career military physicians, including Letterman, who testified on Hammond’s behalf. Despite early support of the Sanitary Commission, The New York Times, American Medical Times, and Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, Hammond was dismissed from the army and prohibited from holding another federal government post.

  By August, many of Hammond’s supporters had abandoned him. Although no allegations claimed that Hammond personally profited by his conduct, a reporter from The New York Times lambasted the former surgeon general, saying, “He not only directly violated the law in order to indulge favoritism in giving out contracts for supplies, but he stooped to the level of the lowest shoddy knave in knowingly taking supplies of medicines and of blankets of an inferior and unsuitable quality for an exorbitant price. . . . In an evil hour he listened to temptation, and the result is that he will be remembered only to be loathed, and to serve as an example of the infatuation of betraying the public trust for gold.”28

  With his political enemy out of the way, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton erased Hammond’s influence in the surgeon general’s office. Surgeon John Brinton, a supporter of Hammond and friend of Letterman, was transferred out of the office in late September to a post in Kentucky. Although Brinton considered Stanton honest and patriotic, he knew that anyone associated with Hammond had a limited medical department future in the army. “Believing himself to be right, he [Stanton] regarded all those who differed in opinion from him to be wrong thinkers and wrong-doers, criminal, in fact, and that it was his duty as Secretary of War to punish them, when he conveniently could. Now, I not only was a friend of Hammond’s, but a relative, a blood-relative of General McClellan who, in the esteem of the Democratic Party, and a possible candidate for the presidency of the United States, was in the eyes of Mr. Stanton little less wicked than the Arch Fiend himself.”29

  Another Stanton foe and Letterman ally, General George McClellan, prepared to make a comeback on the national stage. As Hammond left his office, the Democratic Party nominated McClellan as its candidate against President Lincoln, the man who had relieved McClellan of his command.

  A reluctant candidate, McClellan felt saddled by a plank of the party platform that called the war a failure and sought unconditional peace. McClellan rejected that position and believed reunion was a necessary condition for ending the war. His personal views didn’t matter, though, as Republicans seized on the Democrats’ peace plank to level their attack on him. When McClellan decided to make only two campaign appearances over three months, the race dimmed to a war of words waged by allies among the partisan newspapers.

  On November 8, more than 4 million votes were cast, giving the victory to Lincoln by a 10 percent margin. In the electoral college, it was a landslide for the president, as McClellan only carried New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky, losing 212–21. McClellan had relied heavily on Union troops for support, yet Lincoln carried the army vote by an overwhelming 78 to 22 percent margin. The results were nearly as bad for McClellan in his former command. Seventy percent of the men in the Army of the Potomac voted for Lincoln.

  McClellan resigned his army commission on election day, telling friends and family he had not looked forward to the burdens of the presidency. His lack of campaigning reflected that reticence. He remained optimistic, however, believing his political defeat was “part of the grand plan for the Almighty, who designed that the cup should be drained even to the bitter dregs, that the people might be made worthy of being saved.”30 But as the weeks passed, McClellan grew discouraged. On November 28, he had not found a job after being passed over for the president’s post with the Morris & Essex Railroad. “Were it not for the house on 31st St. I should now be almost penniless,” he wrote a friend.31

  As McClellan adjusted to a life outside the army, on December 2, Letterman received orders for the Department of the Missouri, commanded by General William S. Rosecrans. It had been two years since Letterman had served under Rosecrans in the Department of West Virginia, within the overall command of McClellan. After Letterman had been summoned to the Army of the Potomac, Rosecrans had served in western Tennessee before a transfer to Missouri, a command of modest military significance.

  Letterman faced another assignment on the outskirts of the Civil War. Just as the Department of the Susquehanna had guarded the Pennsylvania flank of the North, skirmishes and raids occupied the Department of the Missouri in the southwestern corner of the war.

  Unbeknownst to his closest colleagues Letterman was thinking seriously about refusing an army order for the first time in his career. In fact, he was contemplating an even bigger decision, one that would set a new course for the Lettermans, who had been married a little over a year, and would allow them to build a life together. On December 22, 1864, Jonathan Letterman declined the Missouri assignment. He shocked friends and colleagues by submitting his resignation from the Union army.

  Letterman had decided to end a fifteen-year military career with the outcome of the Civil War not yet certain. With characteristic reserve, he offered nothing personal that might have revealed the reasons for his decision. Colleagues could only speculate that the decision may have been born out of exhaustion, disenchantment over the fate of his mentor, William Hammond, or perhaps due to increasingly chronic poor health.

  Jonathan Letterman had turned forty years of age
less than two weeks prior to his resignation. Colleagues talked of a chronic digestive ailment of vague origin that had plagued the surgeon for some time. His face had grown gray as the war’s toll became evident in the darkened bags that developed under his eyes. Letterman gave every appearance of exhaustion after three years of war, after experiencing some of the war’s most devastating battles.

  His decision to resign from the army came at a point in the war when a soldier’s likelihood of surviving disease or a wound on the battlefield had greatly improved. Over the course of three years, army diet and hygiene had seen significant improvement. His ambulance system had improved the speed with which a wounded soldier received treatment. Transportation to hospitals in the North had become far better organized. By mid-1864 there were 190 general hospitals in the north with 120,000 beds.32 As a result, the 9 percent mortality rate that the Army of the Potomac had suffered at Gettysburg was about one-third of what it had suffered in the Peninsula Campaign of 1862 (26 percent) two years earlier.33

  His final twelve months of service to his country had taken Letterman off the battlefield and to a big-city military life in the rear, where he lived and worked in the Philadelphia area. He traveled to nearby cities such as New York City and, freed from a life of army marches and commandeered barns and farmhouses, shared his military life with civilians for the first time. His wife’s family, well-respected throughout the Maryland region, had high-profile business and social connections.