Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868

by Cokie Roberts

  The election of Abraham Lincoln brought Clara Barton bustling back to Washington, back to work in the Patent Office, and back to the boardinghouse she had lived in earlier. She made a point of befriending Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson, who was sympathetic to women’s demands, and she used her increasingly secure position to help other women along the way, deciding, “It does not hurt me to pioneer.” Into this pleasant interlude in her life came the startling news of the surrender of Fort Sumter and the alarms of an attack on Washington. When soldiers from her own state were among the first to arrive to protect the capital, she resolved to protect them. The Baltimore mob that pummeled the men of the Massachusetts Sixth also stole their luggage. So Clara not only nursed her self-appointed charges, sending the most severely wounded to recuperate at her sister’s house, but she also collected clothes and food for them. She organized delivery of the supplies to the Senate chamber “camp,” where she sat in the vice president’s chair and read a Massachusetts newspaper to the soldiers, joking that they were paying more attention than was usually the case in that hallowed hall. It was the first of a wartime of such efforts. And when letters home from the troops told of her work, people started sending care packages to Miss Barton. She had to find a bigger place to store everything, so she and her supplies moved into the business district even as the city anticipated an invasion, declaring that “while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them.” She bristled with pride and purpose. And that was before the fighting began.

  Once Clara Barton saw the lack of preparedness for sick and wounded soldiers after the first big battle at Manassas, she started soliciting supplies from the women of her home state through advertisements in the Worcester Spy. She instructed the donors on what to send and how to pack the goods, which came in such profusion that three warehouses were required to store everything. But that wasn’t enough for Clara. She wanted to be where the action was—to go to the battlefield herself to minister to the men. Even the bold Miss Barton, however, worried about the propriety of a single woman appearing in a military camp.

  It was her father, of all people, who talked her into doing what she wanted to do. When she went back to Massachusetts to be with him as he was dying, Clara raised the question of whether she would be mistaken for a prostitute if she joined the soldiers in the field. No, he assured her, she was a respectable woman and would be treated as such, but, more important, she had a duty to do what she could for her country. So with not just a blessing but a command from her father, Clara Barton had to convince the brass in Washington to let her carry out her mission.

  In July 1862 she succeeded. The Army of the Potomac had left the peninsula and set up camp in Fredericksburg, Virginia, not far from the capital. Clara took the opportunity to explain to an officer in the Quartermaster’s Office that she was sitting on three warehouses full of supplies, and he agreed to provide her with a travel pass plus wagons to transport the goods to the troops. In early August Miss Barton made her first delivery to soldiers in camp. When she returned to Washington a few days later for more supplies, she learned that fighting had broken out in Culpeper, Virginia, and, with her travel pass still in hand, she headed directly for the field. Going by train, then wagon, she reached the battlefront hospital, where she found grateful medical men eager to accept her supplies and support. At first the human carnage cowed her but there was work to be done. Surgeons operating feverishly to try to save the wounded soldiers had no time to clean the hospitals, where the filth from blood and body parts threatened to spread disease. Clara organized civilians to assist her in cleaning up the begrimed bedsides. She moved from makeshift hospital to hospital, scrubbing floors and distributing supplies, ending in a house crammed with wounded Rebels. She gave them the shirts she had left. But all of this work, as exhausting and rewarding as it was, was just a brief rehearsal for the major battle ahead—the second siege at Manassas, where the Union Army sustained sixteen thousand casualties.

  At Fairfax Station, where the train deposited her, Clara Barton was aghast at the sight of hundreds of wounded men screaming in pain, waiting for care. She did her best to give them relief and get them into ambulances to Washington, but the numbers were staggering and the battle was still going on all around them. The Union was retreating in the face of Stonewall Jackson’s advance when an officer pulled up and asked if she could ride a horse. When Clara answered yes, he replied that would give her an extra hour to work before the enemy fought their way there; if necessary she could escape on horseback. Luckily she and her coworkers managed to get the last man on the train and board it themselves just as Rebel soldiers rode in and set fire to the station. It had been overwhelming and frightening, but she had done it. And she knew now that the battlefield was where she was meant to be.

  Life in Washington seemed frivolous to Clara Barton after what she had seen. But she wouldn’t be there for long. The woman who had begged to go to battle now was summoned there. A soldier brought her orders: Harpers Ferry. So she was off and then on to Stone Mountain. As the army moved toward Sharpsburg she realized that her supply wagons were too far in the rear, that she wouldn’t be able to get to the field in time to be of help. She spent the night pushing her way past the wagons filled with sleeping soldiers so Clara Barton would be where she needed to be when the sun came up that awful morning of September 17.

  THOUGH THE BATTLE at Sharpsburg had been inconclusive, it served as a turning point in the war. President Lincoln deemed it a decisive enough victory for him to make his next move. On September 22 he informed his Cabinet that he planned to issue an executive order forever freeing all the slaves in the states in rebellion unless those states rejoined to the Union by January 1. Again Montgomery Blair warned that the measure could drive off the Border States and give the Democrats a major issue in the coming elections. But Lincoln thought he had placated the slave states still in the Union long enough—it was time to act: “we had about played our last card and must change our tactics, or lose the game.” The newspapers published the president’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, letting the country and the world know that on January 1 he would sign the order. “The President’s proclamation took the breath out of me,” Lizzie Lee declared her distress; “it seems to me that all that could be done to hurt our cause has been done there.” But in fact the announcement helped the cause. Britain and France, countries where slavery was outlawed, could no longer toy with the idea of recognizing the Confederacy. Fears that the troops might not fight for the slaves turned out to be mostly misplaced—the soldiers knew the Rebels were using slave labor to support their army and what the fighting men wanted above all was to defeat the enemy and end the war. If freeing the slaves helped do that—fine. But concern about the effect on the election was justified. Republicans lost gubernatorial races in New York and New Jersey and were defeated in several state legislatures, plus the Democrats added thirty-four seats in the House of Representatives. Still, the Republicans emerged with a majority of twenty-five members in the House and actually added five new senators.

  “It is now quite ascertained that the President has a good working majority in the next House of Reps,” Lizzie Lee announced, “anything more is hardly desirable—a strong opposition is a healthy condition of things for the country’s well being.” A strong opposition definitely greeted President Lincoln when the lame-duck Congress came into session in December. In his annual message, the President simply stated: “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. . . . We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. . . . In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.” A Democratic resolution condemning emancipation as a “high crime against the Constitution” went down in a party-line vote. And the new state of West Virginia would come into the Union only on the condition that slavery there was abolished.

  The enslaved African Americans who could do so were already freeing t
hemselves by escaping to the North, especially to Washington, where they crowded into contraband camps that were soon rife with disease. “Poor dusky children of slavery, men and women of my own race,” Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave herself, lamented, “you were not prepared for the new life that opened before you, and the great masses of the North learned to look upon your helplessness with indifference—learned to speak of you as an idle, dependent race.” Seeing the tremendous need, Mrs. Keckley formed the Contraband Relief Association to collect money and goods for the impoverished blacks. Mary Lincoln gave the first contribution of two hundred dollars and explained the expense to her husband by telling him what Mrs. Keckley had told her: “She says the immense number of Contrabands in W[ashington] are suffering intensely, many without bed covering & having to use any bits of carpeting to cover themselves—Many dying of want.”

  The plight of the contrabands was beginning to get public attention. The abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison sent Harriet Jacobs to report on the situation for his Liberator newspaper. Miss Jacobs had become something of a celebrity with the publication a year earlier of her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a harrowing account of her life in slavery and escape from it. Now she was taking on her first journalistic assignment and she was appalled by what she found—people packed together “without any distinction or regard for age or sex.” Every day some died and every day more came but there was no one “to administer to the comfort of the sick and dying.” Elizabeth Keckley tried to fill that void but with the Emancipation Proclamation in the offing, the need would only increase.

  WHILE WASHINGTON DEALT with the effects of the war, the war itself raged in nearby Virginia. “There is great excitement in the city, the battle has opened on Fredericksburg which I heard was in flames this morning,” Lizzie Lee reported with alarm in the middle of December. It would be one of the largest, and for the Union one of the most costly battles, signaling the Civil War’s first urban combat. The Confederates occupied the abandoned city before the Union army had built pontoon boats to get across the Rappahannock River. Clara Barton watched from the federal camp on the other side, knowing the next day’s battle would be brutal. As Yankee soldiers crossed on rickety bridges and slapped-together boats the Rebels fired from inside houses and behind garden walls. A Union surgeon who had set up a hospital in Fredericksburg sent word to the intrepid little woman: “Come to me—your place is here.” Against advice from soldiers telling her she’d never survive, Clara made the dangerous crossing with bullets bursting around her and then nursed and fed the soldiers for several days, piling up body parts among the platters and pitchers of the town’s fine houses. The surgeon she worked with had been attached to the Massachusetts Twenty-First, which had inducted Clara as a daughter of the regiment on a happier occasion when a dress parade was held in her honor. There would be no parades after “Burnside’s Blunder,” where nearly 200,000 soldiers skirmished over four days until the Federals conceded defeat with more than 13,000 casualties compared to the Confederates’ 4,500. Calling it a folly from beginning to end, Lizzie sputtered that “the enemy could make themselves impregnable except by army able to surround them.” She sadly added that Brigadier General George Bayard died from the wounds he sustained at Fredericksburg and was buried the day he had planned to be married: “many is the young heart that is broken by this woeful war.”

  With the new influx of wounded men, yet more buildings in Washington were requisitioned as hospitals. “Our city is being filled with hospitals, 5 churches are now being fitted into hospitals,” Lizzie Lee informed her husband. So far Harriet Lane’s Episcopal church had escaped, a friend told her with some relief. “Our church has not been converted into a hospital yet.” Georgetown College had to turn over a couple of buildings to the Surgeon General but he did spare one religious institution—the Visitation Convent, Harriet Lane’s old school. General Winfield Scott’s daughter had joined the Visitation order and was buried on school property. The old general still had enough clout to stop the secretary of war from confiscating the school, so it stayed in operation through the war with both northern and southern nuns and students tensely sharing the dormitories and the duties necessary to keep the place operating. But the convent was one of the few places and the nuns were some of the few women not called into action as the wounded soldiers kept coming.

  The women of Washington were urged to help out in the wards: “the gov[ernmen]t exhorts the ladies to attend & keep the menials there from neglecting the soldiers.” Lizzie Lee regretted that she couldn’t respond to the exhortation. She had always been sickly and her mother wouldn’t hear of her risking her health in a hospital, much to Lizzie’s regret. “I never coveted robust health more than I might help to serve them for here there’s a great want of good nurses.” Louisa Meigs, on the other hand, hoped that the female recruitment meant she could come home: “I am quite a skillful nurse, and I feel that I could make myself exceedingly useful in taking care of the sick & wounded.” She was clearly hurt that her husband didn’t seem to miss her, but with the Rebels so close in Virginia, Quartermaster Montgomery Meigs simply didn’t want to worry about his wife: “I am busy & anxious & I’m relieved from a portion of this anxiety by knowing that my family are far from the center of the great struggle now going on.” The struggle, they all knew now, was likely to go on for some time. There would be no quick end to the fighting and dying, all the more reason, from Louisa’s standpoint, for her to return to Washington: “If you are contented to have me prolong my absence in Germantown until the termination of our national difficulties, I shall bend to your decision,” she huffed, but she didn’t see why she would be in any more danger than anyone else, “The General in Chief who is supposed to have some knowledge on the subject deems it quite safe & proper to bring his wife to that beleaguered city.” But Meigs was more concerned about supplying the army than soothing his wife. And now more and more of the men needing supplies were lying in overcrowded make-do hospitals.

  “OUR CITY IS hourly receiving the wounded & their number is appalling so I hear,” Lizzie Lee lamented. “I would not be surprised if they made requisition of the private houses in a few days—hotels certainly—the last would have been taken before but for their being all so badly ventilated.” When the hotels were converted to hospitals, that lack of ventilation posed a health risk much of the country learned about through stories by one of the nurses—a young Massachusetts woman named Louisa May Alcott. She had just turned thirty and felt she “must let out my pent up energy in some new way,” so the fledgling writer “decided to go to Washington as a nurse if I could find a place.” She received word in December of an opening at the old Union Hotel in Georgetown and set off immediately from Boston, leaving behind a few “tales” to be published. A last-minute tinge of fear threatened to derail her: “ ‘Shall I stay, Mother?’ as I hugged her close. ‘No, go! And the Lord be with you!’ answered the Spartan woman,” Louisa recorded in her journal, wondering if she would ever “see that dear old face again” and feeling like “the son of the house going to war.”

  The trip “through the country white with tents, all alive with patriotism, and already red with blood” sobered even more the nervous Louisa, who wasn’t sure whether she would end this adventure “alive or dead.” As soon as she arrived in Georgetown, after a brief night’s sleep she “began my new life by seeing a poor man die at dawn.” It was the start of a taxing but fascinating few weeks that would help propel Louisa May Alcott to the extraordinary literary success she achieved. Her journal gives a fairly matter-of-fact account of those tough days and nights when she was “surrounded by 3 or 4 hundred men in all stages of suffering, disease & death.” But she later turned the experience into one of her “tales,” and her somewhat fictionalized Hospital Sketches enjoyed such success when serialized in the Boston Commonwealth that book publishers came knocking on her door, much to Louisa’s “surprise and delight.” A few years later, Roberts Brothers asked her to write a story for g
irls. Little Women has never been out of print since it first appeared in bookstores in 1868.

  That the story would have such a happy ending was not at all likely, as the neophyte nurse worked “giving out rations, cutting up food for helpless ‘boys,’ washing faces, teaching my attendants how beds are made or floors swept, dressing wounds, taking Dr. Fitz Patrick’s orders (privately wishing all the time that he would be more gentle with my big babies)” in the Union Hotel hospital, with air “bad enough to breed a pestilence.” The pestilence that grabbed Louisa was typhoid fever, putting a quick end to her nursing career. As the young woman lay sick in bed, Dorothea Dix brought her a basket of get well gifts: “She is a kind soul but very queer & arbitrary,” Louisa recorded about the Superintendent of Female Nurses, adding, “no one likes her & I don’t wonder,” but then she crossed out that somewhat unkind but accurate observation. Dorothea Dix did much better functioning as a one-woman lobbying operation than in an organization where she had to deal with other people.

  Seeing how sick her charge was, the head nurse at the Union Hospital summoned Louisa’s father to take her home a little more than a month after she had arrived. But Louisa May Alcott’s short stint as a nurse allowed her to paint a picture for the country of what life was like in hospitals trying desperately to save the thousands upon thousands of wounded soldiers. “Forty ambulances are at the door,” her roommate announced as the casualties from the Battle of Fredericksburg demanded attention. “In they came, some on stretchers, some in men’s arms, some feebly staggering along propped on rude crutches, and one lay stark and still with covered face, as a comrade gave his name to be recorded before they carried him away to the dead house.” The men did enjoy one ray of Christmas spirit as Elizabeth Smith, the wife of the outgoing secretary of the interior, organized volunteers to decorate the wards and deliver dinners, with donations from Mrs. Lincoln, who never got much credit for her contributions. Adele Douglas, on the other hand, was hailed as an “angel of mercy” for turning her house into a hospital. All the accounts “of the women of Washington attention to the hospitals does them great honor,” Lizzie Lee marveled.