Accommodations for the wounded once they reached Washington were as badly organized as the ambulance service that evacuated them. The six military hospitals created in and around Washington in the months before Bull Run were already overcrowded with dysentery patients when the battle began. Once again, the army improvised medical shelters for the care of the wounded, requisitioning churches and temples, the top floor of the US Patent Office, Saint Elizabeth’s Insane Asylum, hundreds of private homes, and even the Capitol Building.
Samuel Gross, professor of surgery at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College, arrived to find the city demoralized. The shelters were overflowing, and soldiers lay in the streets in large number, many of them on the bare ground.18 Charles S. Tripler, King’s successor as medical director of the Army of the Potomac, claimed that the disorder was made worse by the fact that there was no system in place for assigning the wounded to hospitals. Regimental surgeons sent men from the field to the general hospitals with no way of knowing whether there were beds (or even floor space) available. It was not unusual for men to spend the night in the ambulances, which drove from hospital to hospital looking for a vacancy for their hapless cargo. The discharge process was just as haphazard. Men were released from the hospital with no way to get back to their regiment and nowhere to stay in the city.
Nursing the Wounded
Dix’s nurses and a score of informal female volunteers stepped into the chaos and began their work.
Maria W. Abbey was one of a group of six women from Brooklyn who volunteered in response to a call for nurses delivered a week after the fall of Fort Sumter by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher in the United States at the time; he was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, gave faces to the political and economic arguments about slavery. Abbey and her companions arrived in Washington on May 2 and were assigned to the Union Hotel Hospital. Even before Bull Run, she complained that there was no organization and that it was difficult to do anything systematically. After the battle, the hospital overflowed with the wounded “and we had no rest then,” she remembered.19
Eliza Howland, a New York socialite who would later serve with her sister, Georgeanna Woolsey, on a United States Sanitary Commission hospital transit ship, worked with surgeons and convalescent soldiers in a stifling ward improvised in an uncompleted storage room on the top floor of the Patent Office in Washington. The wounded and ill lay in groups of six on crude tables built from pieces of construction scaffolding. A system of pulleys carried barrels of water, baskets of vegetables, and sides of beef up the marble face of the building and through a top-floor window.
Former missionary Harriet Dada and her friend Susan Hall had been accepted as Dix nurses and were waiting in New York to be called to service. At noon on July 22, they received instructions to come to Washington with orders to report to Miss Dix. When they arrived the next day, Dix told them they were needed in Alexandria. Once at their hospital, a dark stone building that had formerly been a seminary, they found it packed with the wounded, some on beds and more on mattresses spread on the floor. Many were still in their uniforms, covered with their own blood and the dust from the burning summer battlefield. Unlike the Patent Office hospital, this one had no soldiers detailed as attendants for the first few weeks, so the two nurses did everything, with little sleep or food. The work was so hard that two weeks passed before Dada had time to write her family and tell them where she was. Despite the demands of their first assignment, Dada and Hall served together through the end of the war, transferred from hospital to hospital as needed.
Nancy Atwood was a widow with one child and worked as a seamstress in Bangor, Maine, when the war broke out. Since she was strong and healthy and had considerable experience as a domestic nurse, she thought it was her duty to volunteer, just as her brother felt it was his duty to join the Union army. She signed on as a nurse with the Sixth Maine Infantry Regiment in May 1861 and arrived at the front just in time to hear the roar of the cannons at Bull Run. With one other nurse, Mrs. Hartsun Crowell, also of Bangor, she nursed the wounded from the battle at a field hospital located on Robert E. Lee’s farm on Arlington Heights. With the rains that began on July 22, their tents were blown away several times, and she often found herself tending to suffering men in the pelting rain, with no dry clothes available for either nurse or patients.
Women from throughout the Washington, DC, area also volunteered on an ad hoc basis. Some of them nursed, while others merely “visited,” a term used to describe women who brought comforts but did not get their hands dirty. Clara Barton became the most well known of the Washington-based women who volunteered in the aftermath of the First Battle of Bull Run—famous even in her own time as “the soldier’s friend.”
Born in Massachusetts in 1821, Barton was working as a clerk at the United States Patent Office when the war began, one of only four women employed by the federal government before the war. After Bull Run, she visited the wounded in the improvised hospital on the top floor of the Patent Office every day, bringing them delicacies and helping where she could.
She soon became a one-woman relief agency. She developed a personal supply network of “dear sisters” who sent her packages of food, clothing, wine, and bandages to distribute to the troops, and she received so many boxes that she had to rent warehouses to store them. Over time she became convinced that she was needed on the battlefield, where she could help men as they fell.
When the Army of the Potomac was mobilized in the summer of 1862, Barton convinced Colonel Daniel H. Rucker, head of the Quartermaster Corps depot in Washington, to give her a wagon, a driver, and a pass signed by Surgeon General Hammond that gave her “permission to go upon the sick transports in any direction for the purpose of distributing comforts to the sick and wounded, and nursing them, always subject to the direction of the Surgeon in charge.”20
Armed with her pass, she distributed supplies to the field hospital at Falmouth Station, near Fredericksburg, but she still felt she was not doing enough. When she heard that fighting had broken out at Cedar Mountain, she headed for the battlefield. Thereafter, in battle after battle, Barton ran soup kitchens, provided supplies, nursed the wounded, and tried to keep track of the men who died so she could tell their families what had happened to them. In between battles, she returned to Washington, where she collected the latest batch of supplies, wrote impassioned letters thanking the women who provided them, and fought with bureaucrats to be allowed to continue her work.
Barton’s experiences caring for men after Bull Run ultimately led her to the battlefield, where she became a familiar figure of comfort to wounded men. So familiar was she that scores of the men she helped named their daughters “Clara Barton” in her honor. She was unique, both in her direct approach to helping soldiers and in her fame after the war. But she was by no means the only woman inspired to volunteer as a nurse by the disaster at Bull Run.
The horrors of the battle and its aftermath inspired popular outrage. A reporter from the New York Times summed up the feelings of many: “The worst sight of all was the ambulances, coming back empty, or with only tired soldiers in them. As the rain poured and the darkness drew on, our thoughts would go out to the hundreds of gallant fellows who were lying wounded and uncared for in the bushes, under the rocks and the forest trees, along the ravine of Bull’s Run.”21 Others wanted answers and assurances that such a disaster would not occur again. The editor of the influential American Medical Times laid the blame for the medical disaster on Finley and demanded, in the name of the entire medical profession, to know why the wounded were not brought off the field in a systematic way.22 Frederick Law Olmsted wrote a scathing denunciation of men and officers alike, with a particular emphasis on the failings of the Medical Bureau, in his report on the Union’s performance at Bull Run for the United States Sanitary Commission.
But the medical failures at Bull Run also inspired change. The newly formed United States Sanitary Commission beg
an to inspect existing hospitals and lobby for the construction of new ones. Using Olmsted’s report as a weapon, they pushed Congress for the appointment of a new surgeon general and reform of the Medical Bureau’s seniority system. Their first success was smaller, however. On August 3, 1861, Congress passed an act that added ten additional surgeons and twenty additional assistant surgeons to the regular army and created a corps of fifty medical cadets, made up of medical students who could dress wounds at general hospitals and drive ambulances or carry wounded men from the field.
That same bill authorized the surgeon general to hire female nurses at a salary of $12 a month, plus a soldier’s ration. Dix’s dream of an army nursing corps was now official.
Chapter 3
Volunteers
“I immediately wrote to all the people of influence I knew, begging them to procure me some place in the war as nurse, or whatever I could do.”
—Mary Phinney von Olnhausen1
The news of the defeat at Bull Run and the shameful failure of care for the nation’s wounded soldiers after the battle led a second wave of women to volunteer their services as nurses. Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing inspired some, while others were driven by the same desire to combine patriotism with action that led young men to enlist in the first rush of enthusiasm for the war. Some were called to nurse by religious zeal; others by the financial need caused by a husband’s absence. Louisa May Alcott, for example, was eager to have a part in the war from the beginning. Soon after the fall of Fort Sumter, she wrote in her diary, “I long to be a man; but as I can’t fight, I will content myself with working for those who can.”2 In the evenings she curled up with a medical book and studied the care of gunshot wounds; as soon as she turned thirty, she contacted Dix for a place as a nurse. Whatever their motivation, women who wanted to do more than collect supplies and sew shirts contacted anyone they thought might be able to help them get a position in a hospital: local clergymen and surgeons, hospital directors, local and national Sanitary Commission officers, Miss Dix, Surgeon General Finley and other members of the Medical Bureau, and, in at least one case, President Lincoln.
While some received an immediate answer, most suffered the frustration of waiting for a reply that in many cases never came. Some received what appear to be form rejections, such as the one the secretary of the Michigan Soldier’s Relief Association sent to applicants: “We are in daily receipt of similar applications… and we are obliged to say to you as we do to all others, that we will place all such applications on file, and procure positions for them as fast as possible… While we commend the patriotism of these ladies… we must remind them that there are many thousands of their sex scattered over the whole Union who are offering to make the same sacrifice.”3 Others received personal notes designed to discourage them. Amy Morris Bradley, who served first as a regimental nurse and later under the auspices of the United States Sanitary Commission, contacted two surgeons regarding the possibility of nursing for the Third Maine regiment. One answered, “I am fearful that you would be deprived of many comforts and even necessaries of life and that you would be sorry that you had left those comforts for the rough life of the camp.”4 Bradley not only joined the regiment by the end of the year but went on to reform the convalescent camp outside of Alexandria, living under conditions that were more than rough.
Perhaps as many as half of those who served in the war chose to bypass Miss Dix and the official channels. Some, like Estelle Johnson and her sister, followed their husbands to war. According to Johnson, when her husband and brother-in-law enlisted, she and her sister objected, “telling the recruiting officer that if our husbands went we should go too, but not thinking that such a thing could be.” To their surprise, they heard back from the recruiting officer within a week: “The colonel said that although nurses had not been called for he wanted us to go.” A month later, they were formally sworn in to the Fourth Vermont Regiment, Company J, in the presence of the colonel, the major, and the governor of Vermont.5 Others like Lucy Fenman and Modena McColl unofficially joined a regiment and “went from place to place wherever the ‘boys’ were ordered.”6 Some simply presented themselves on the battlefield or at a hospital and began to work. Many found their way to the front to take care of husbands, sons, and brothers, and then stayed on after their own relative’s death to care for other women’s men as a way to “soften [one’s] grief by assisting in the work.”7
There were many paths for aspiring nurses to take. The lives of Mary Phinney von Olnhausen and Anne Reading illustrate two of those that led to the Mansion House Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, in August 1862.
Mary Phinney von Olnhausen
Mary Phinney von Olnhausen was forty-three years old when the Union troops fled the field at the Battle of Bull Run. She was exactly the type of woman Dorothea Dix looked for as a member of the new nursing corps: an educated middle-class widow with reformist tendencies and a history of hard work.
Most of what is known about von Olnhausen comes from an account compiled by her nephew James Phinney Munroe, from her letters, and an incomplete autobiographical sketch. Published in 1904, Adventures of an Army Nurse in Two Wars was part of the flood of Civil War memoirs, biographies, regimental histories, pamphlets, poems, and diaries that appeared once the war was far enough away to generate nostalgia but still recent enough for readers to feel an interest in the experience of everyday people who had served.
Born in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1818 to a lawyer with a passion for farming, Mary was the fifth in a family of ten children. According to her nephew, she was not a particularly “girly” child: “In a generation whose women shuddered at a grasshopper, she used to tame spiders and to give pocket-refuge to toads and snakes.”8
When her father died in 1849, the family farm was sold and Mary and the other unmarried daughters were forced to look for ways to support themselves. Thirty-one years old and probably resigned to never marrying, Mary took an unusual route for a middle-class woman who needed to earn a living. Rather than teaching or serving as a companion to an older, wealthier woman, she enrolled in the newly founded School for Design for Women in Boston, one of a group of such schools founded in the midcentury in Northern cities with a strong manufacturing presence. The curriculum of such schools was designed to train women in textile and wallpaper design, wood engraving, and other marketable artistic skills. The benefits of such training went two ways: women who needed to support themselves learned a marketable skill, and American industries, particularly the textile mills, were able to lessen their dependence on expensive imported French designs. Mary was considered one of the best designers in her class. After graduation she found steady employment as a textile designer in the New Hampshire fabric mills, working first in Dover and later in Manchester.
In Manchester, Mary’s life took an unexpected twist. She made friends among a community of German immigrants, some of the thousands of European refugees who fled their own countries following the political revolutions of 1848. For the most part, such refugees were moderate reformers who fit in well with what some described as the “benevolent empire” of voluntary reform associations that spread through New England and the Midwest in the first half of the nineteenth century—dedicated to causes that included temperance, Dorothea Dix’s pet projects of penal and asylum reform, women’s rights, education, and, above all, abolition. Among the Manchester community of “Forty-Eighters” was Gustav, Baron von Olnhausen. Most of the 1848 revolutionaries belonged to one of two groups: urban workers and artisans angered by the impact of industrialization on their ability to make a living, or middle-class liberals who wanted to play a greater role in government. Gustav, who preferred to call himself Gustav A. Olnhausen once he reached the United States, was unusual: a reformer who was also a member of Saxony’s minor aristocracy. He studied at the University of Munich in 1827 and 1828, worked as a chemist in Prague in 1830, and studied at the University of Edinburgh in 1840. In Manchester, he used his considerable scientifi
c training to secure employment as a dye chemist in the same mill where Mary worked as a designer.
According to Mary’s nephew, “their engagement seems to have been a foregone conclusion before it became an actual fact.”9 They married in Boston in 1858, when Mary was forty and enjoyed a brief, happy marriage: “A little house filled with flowers, ferneries, aquaria, (for they were alike in their love of nature) and peopled with birds, lizards and even tamed toads, was the centre of their happiness; their chief pleasure, beyond that of their perfectly sympathetic life together, being found in their work, in holiday walks through the woods and in picnics and little impromptu parties with their many friends.”10 Two years later, Gustav became seriously ill and required surgery. The fact that the surgery took place at a general hospital in Boston, devoted to charity cases, makes it clear that their financial situation was precarious, something that would remain true for Mary throughout her adult life. The surgery was considered a success initially, but he died of complications on September 7, 1860. Mary, though still practically a newlywed, was a widow at forty-two.
Within two months of his death, in search of work and a distraction from her grief, Mary Phinney von Olnhausen left her home to help her younger brother George, who had claimed a homestead in the frontier state of Illinois with his invalid wife and four small children. The railroad had not yet made its way to the part of Illinois where the Phinney homestead was located, so Mary traveled the last miles in a wagon drawn by horses and oxen. It was a six-hour ride across the prairie, through a landscape of deep black mud lightly covered with snow.
When she reached the “station,” she found it was nothing more than a barnlike building, with a single house to keep it company in an otherwise empty landscape of “everlasting mud.”11 No one was waiting for her, but the stationmaster assured her she was in the right place. She settled down to wait for her brother in a room as barren as the landscape around her: the windows were caked with dust, the lone chair was hard and uncomfortable, and the fire was nearly out. After a long and dreary wait, her brother finally arrived in a farm wagon with no springs and a rush-bottomed chair where the seat should be, drawn by “a sorry pair of mules”—very different than the carriage she had expected and emblematic of her new life on the prairie. As they drove off, the snow fell harder until it was impossible to see anything. The ride seemed as if it would never end, and Mary gave in to despair: “The great sorrow I had left behind came back with twofold force, and the desolation of that dismal prairie hidden by falling snow was more than I could bear.”12
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