Reading was not the only nurse on the ships to come from a working-class family. Bradley was the daughter of a Massachusetts cobbler. But most of the nurses who came to the boats through the Sanitary Commission were from more privileged backgrounds. Several were members of prominent New York families. One was married to the son of a shipping magnate, another was the widow of a naval officer, and two were wives of Sanitary Commission officers—a testament to the commission’s belief in Olmsted’s rhetoric of the hospital ships as an extension of the middle-class home. (As the Peninsular Campaign went on, George Templeton Strong’s pride in his wife’s service wore thin. By mid-June he was, by his own description “entreating, conjuring and commanding her to… come straight home,”21 where he was engaged in his own form of war service as the Sanitary Commission’s treasurer.) Bradley termed them “the Aristocrats” and grumbled that Olmsted gave them preferential treatment in assignments. Such women were more accustomed to supervising servants than scrubbing floors themselves.
On the boats, they often worked for two or three days with little sleep and meals snatched when the demands of duty allowed. They hauled buckets of water for cooking, cleaning, and laundry and cooked endless gallons of gruel and beef tea over spirit lamps. The smaller steamers patrolled up and down the peninsular rivers, taking on men and providing an occasional opportunity to go ashore—only one of several reasons why river steamers were a plum assignment compared to the larger ships that carried men from the river steamers to hospitals further north. Sometimes a shore visit allowed for sightseeing; the Custis farm near White House Landing, where George Washington spent the early years of his marriage was a pilgrimage shrine for Union nurses and soldiers. More often, transport women disembarked to forage supplies from a military encampment. For instance, on one occasion when Georgeanna Woolsey needed to prepare dinner for hundreds of wounded soldiers, she commandeered a stove from an officer’s tent and took it back to the boat in “a triumphant procession [through town], waving… bits of stove pipe and iron pot-covers.”22 As Katherine Wormeley told a friend, the nurses did a little bit of everything: far more than was included in the official description of the job.23
One volunteer, Eliza Harris, described conditions aboard the Spaulding after the Battle of Fair Oaks: “There were eight hundred on board. Passageways, state-rooms, floors from the dark and fetid hold to the hurricane deck, were all more than filled; some on mattresses, some on blankets, others on straw.”24 After a long day of amputations, seventeen arms, hands, feet, and legs lay piled in an area below deck. At night, after washing out her skirts to get rid of “the mingled blood of Federal and Confederate soldiers which covered many portions of the floor,” she lay down “with the sick, wounded and dying all around, and slept from sheer exhaustion, the last sounds falling upon [her] ears being groans from the operating room.”25
Clothing was another big change in their lives. Not bound by Dix’s restrictions, many of the nurses arrived wearing the ribbons and ruffles typical of women of their class, but they soon abandoned the filthy dresses in favor of a skirt and a man’s flannel shirt, worn with the collar open, the sleeves rolled up, and the shirttail out. They dubbed the shirts “Agnews,” the name of the doctor from whom they stole the first shirt.
Like their counterparts in military hospitals on land, the nurses on the transport ships found themselves at odds with doctors and military personnel at a very basic level. The nurses looked at each patient as an individual who deserved at least a moment of individual care. Woolsey stopped to learn each soldier’s name, write it on a piece of paper, and pin it to his clothing so he would not go unidentified. She and her comrades argued that it only took a moment to give a man a drink and an orange to eat, which was time well spent if it saved him from exhaustion while he waited for a meal.26 But the men they worked with saw those moments as interfering with the process of transferring soldiers from the landing to the ship and performing the basic triage that had often not happened on the battlefield. These arguments over the nature of care between nurses and doctors continued well past the short life of the Sanitary Commission’s hospital transport service.
The End of the Transport Service
In the weeks after May 4, the Sanitary Commission hospital boats transported thousands of sick and wounded men from the Virginia Peninsula to military hospitals in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Annapolis, and Baltimore. But in mid-July, Confederate gunboats began firing on the Sanitary Commission’s ships, removing the last illusion that the transport ships were safe. Olmsted refused to accept new female volunteers and began to demobilize the existing forces. Some women chose to go home. Others, like Amy Bradley, Harriet Douglas Whetten, and Annie Etheridge continued to work on transport boats under the army’s command. By the end of the month, the commission had turned all responsibility for transporting casualties back to the Union army.
On July 31, Anne Reading and her colleagues on the Spaulding received orders to transfer the rest of the men on board to the Saint Mark, an army-run transport ship. The next morning, Dr. Jenkins, the chief army surgeon from the Saint Mark, came on board the Spaulding and asked Reading what she intended to do next. She told him she wanted to head back to Baltimore and take a position in Miss Dix’s nursing corps, as she had intended to do before the Sanitary Commission snatched her up. He gave her a letter of recommendation, then asked if she would work on the Saint Mark for a time since they had no female nurses on board—clear proof that some army doctors had begun to see the worth of female nurses. For the next two weeks, Reading worked aboard the ship, nursing wounded men as they moved from the peninsula to the Northern hospitals. At one point, the Saint Mark had three hundred casualties on board, many badly wounded and none of them in good condition. Most had been held in the prison camps in Richmond for five or six weeks. They were dressed in rags and half starved, “like skeletons having barely enough skin to cover their bones,” a condition Reading attributed to Confederate malice rather than to Confederate poverty. Some of them were so weak they could scarcely drink the water and wine the nurses gave them through their tears of joy for their release from captivity. When the Saint Mark finally docked at Philadelphia on August 13, one of the men who had been in prison in Richmond offered Reading a ring he had made out of a piece of bone and begged her to accept it as a token of gratitude for the kindness she had shown him.27
The next day, Reading presented Dr. Jenkins’s letter of recommendation to the army’s medical director in Philadelphia and asked for work. He told her no female nurses could be engaged “without the sanction of Miss Dorothea Dix.”28
Having made her request for government work, Reading headed to New York for a well-deserved rest. She arrived late in the evening two days later and went straight to the rooms of her friend Sophie. She rested for a full day, then went to St. Luke’s, where she picked up her letters from England and visited with friends. It took her only a few hours to notice the impact of the war on the economy of the city. After a run on the banks in December, New York bankers suspended specie payments to their customers. Eight months later, coins had disappeared from circulation, and postage stamps filled their role as the popular currency. Merchants used them to make change, and carriage drivers demanded them as payment. The need to get work as soon as possible must have seemed even more pressing.
Late the next night, on August 19, Reading received a telegraph from Miss Dix telling her to come immediately to Washington. The hospital transport service was finished, but the war was not.
Chapter 5
Arriving at Mansion House Hospital
“We stopped before a great pile of buildings, with a flag flying before it, sentinels at the door, and a very trying quantity of men lounging about. My heart beat rather faster than usual, and it suddenly struck me that I was very far from home; but I descended with dignity, wondering whether I should be stopped for want of a countersign, and forced to pass the night in the street. Marching boldly up the steps, I found that no form was necess
ary, for the men fell back, the guard touched their caps, a boy opened the door, and, as it closed behind me, I felt that I was fairly started, and Nurse Periwinkle’s Mission was begun.”
—Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches1
A visitor to Alexandria, Virginia, in July 1860 once observed, “We do not believe there is any place in the whole bounds of the Union where the people enjoy more of the real comforts of life than in Alexandria.”2 The city where George Washington attended Sunday services in a small brick church was not only a thriving seaport but also a ground transportation hub. The Alexandria Canal funneled coal from the Appalachian coalfields through the port, and three rail lines connected the city to the agricultural riches of both the Shenandoah Valley and the developing American West. Regular steamboat service traveled north to Baltimore and New York City and south to Richmond and Fredericksburg, while frequent ferries shuttled passengers across the river to Washington and Georgetown and back. Improvements in transportation led to the creation of foundries and factories, a rare thing in the antebellum south; the 1860 census listed ninety-six small factories and commercial workshops in the city. Alexandria’s economy was booming, and so were its expectations for the future.
James Green’s Mansion House Hotel was a symbol of the city’s new affluence. Green was an English-born entrepreneur who arrived in Alexandria sometime after 1800. A carpenter by trade, he established a furniture factory in the 1830s and went on to become the wealthiest man in his adopted city. In the 1840s, he converted a three-story brick building that had once housed the Bank of Alexandria into a luxury hotel. Built in the Italianate style and topped with an octagonal cupola, Green’s Mansion House soon earned a reputation as one of the finest hotels between Washington and New Orleans. A review in the Alexandria Gazette, dated May 24, 1849, described the Mansion House as a “spacious and newly furnished Establishment.”3 Its amenities included a scenic view of the surrounding landscape, a restaurant that offered select wines and liquors, oysters and other delicacies, and a billiard table for the amusement of hotel guests. Visiting merchants, salesmen, and tourists crowded its hallways, and members of local society hosted dinners, balls, and other social events in its public rooms. Business was so good that Green began construction on a new four-story wing in 1855.
The fall of Fort Sumter, however, would bring an end to Alexandria’s boom times, and to those of Green’s Mansion House Hotel.
Alexandria Occupied
Alexandria held the distinction of being occupied by the Union army longer than any other Confederate city during the war. In the months after Abraham Lincoln’s election in December 1860, Alexandria, like much of Virginia, maintained an ambivalent position on the question of secession. That changed with the fall of Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to put down the Southern insurrection. On April 17, a convention of delegates in Richmond voted in favor of Virginia’s secession. In Alexandria, the volunteer militias, whose commanders had previously forbidden any public display of support for the Confederacy, celebrated the fall of Sumter with a seven-gun salute. One of Green’s competitors, James W. Jackson, owner of the Marshall House Hotel, raised a huge Confederate flag, paid for by public contributions, on the pole above his roof and swore it would come down only over his dead body. Smaller Confederate flags fluttered in windows and off porches. Alexandria was “secesh” and proud of it.
As war drew near, the quality of daily life decreased. The Union blockade of Southern ports, known as the Anaconda Plan, slowed traffic in the normally busy seaport. Wharves stood deserted. Food prices soared. Travel and communication with places outside the city became more difficult as the army confiscated horses and carts and the federal government seized local mail boats. Schools and businesses closed, leaving behind vacant buildings that would later be commandeered for use as soldiers’ billets and hospitals. Those residents who could, fled the city. Anne Frobel, whose family stayed throughout the war and whose diary is one of the primary historical sources for life in wartime Alexandria, described the scene near one of the city’s railway depots: “a dense crowd thronged the streets, carriages filled with people, wagons, carts, drays, wheelbarrows all packed mountain high with baggage of every sort, men, women and children streaming along to the cars, most of the women crying, almost every face we saw we recognized, and all looking as forlorn and wretched as if going to an execution.”4 On May 16, only days before federal troops would invade the city, a Northern visitor lamented, “A more people-forsaken and desolate city I have never seen than Alexandria. The houses are low, dirty, and closed; the streets are narrow, filthy, and rough, and the people in the sackcloth of sullen humiliation… The withering blight of secession had stamped its seal upon all around.”5 It was hardly the same city the earlier visitor had described only ten months before.
Across the Potomac, the Union’s political and military leaders watched Alexandria with concern and made plans for rapid movement. With Virginia’s secession the city posed a strategic threat to the capital.
On May 23, Virginians ratified the Ordinance of Secession in a popular vote. Less than twenty-four hours later, the Union army captured the city. Eight Union regiments moved into place over the course of the night, unaccompanied by either fife or drum so as not to rouse the sleeping city. One column marched across the Long Bridge that had connected Washington to Virginia since 1809; another came across the towpath over the aqueduct, one mile to the north of the bridge. Colonel Elmer Ellsworth and the Eleventh New York Volunteer Infantry, known as the Fire Zouaves for their distinctive uniforms modeled on those of French infantry units in North Africa, crossed by boat and entered the city through the wharves. Moving quickly, Union soldiers occupied the city’s three railroad depots and the telegraph office. Just before dawn, the federal ship Pawnee steamed into the harbor, with its eight Dahlgren guns trained on the city, and ordered the city’s militia units to surrender or vacate. Most of them were already gone. At some point in the morning, Colonel Ellsworth, accompanied by some of his Zouaves, attempted to remove the Confederate flag from the roof of the Marshall House Hotel; Jackson shot him dead only to be killed immediately by a Zouave. The flag, indeed, was removed from his roof over his dead body. Their respective compatriots saw both men as martyrs—the first of the war. Alexandria would remain under Union occupation for the remainder of the war. The same strategic location that had made the city a threat now made it valuable to the Union. The “people-forsaken and desolate” city was transformed into a major operational hub for the Army of the Potomac. Mary von Olnhausen reported that the street outside Mansion House Hospital was never quiet: she could hear marching soldiers, the groans of the sick and wounded, and the rumble of heavy cannon at all hours of the day or night.6 (One of the patients reported a more pleasant version of the constant noise of an occupied city: “I hear from my room, from the time I first wake in the morning till I go to sleep at night the clank, clank, clank, of the soldiers (artillery & cavalry) swords as they rattle on the sidewalk as they are passing up & down. That sound is almost as regular as the ticking of a clock, from morning till night.”7) The quartermaster’s storehouses now crowded the previously deserted wharves. Train depots that had thronged with residents fleeing Alexandria now teemed with troops and supplies on the move. Camps for the growing army sprang up on the surrounding hillsides, and shantytowns filled with escaped slaves, known at the time as “contrabands,” who had found their way to the relative safety of the Union-occupied city.
Occupied Alexandria also needed to make provisions for another growing population: the sick and wounded who poured into the city, a thousand or more at a time, from the battlefields at Bull Run, the Peninsular Campaign, Cedar Mountain, Fredericksburg, and Shiloh, carried by boats and trains, in horse-drawn ambulances, and, after Bull Run, on their own exhausted legs. Dr. John H. Brinton reported at one point in late August 1862, during his brief tenure as the medical director of transportation in Alexandria, that he was on his feet for three days and two nights
assigning the wounded to hospitals as they arrived.8 On August 30 alone, after the Second Battle of Bull Run, four hundred vehicles of various sorts, nearly two thousand horses and mules, and more than one thousand drivers and attendants were needed to recover the wounded from the battlefield. Just as the growing army needed camps and barracks, the growing army of the wounded needed hospitals.
Mansion House Occupied
Alexandria was the site of the first general hospital the Medical Bureau opened after the First Battle of Bull Run: Hallowell’s School, which was converted into the Old Hallowell Hospital. The building was used as a school from 1832 to 1860, when the principal closed it in order to give out-of-town students a chance to get home safely before the war broke out. Besides, he admitted, he found it “almost impossible to direct the minds of students to profitable study”9 with the distraction of war on the horizon. The four-story building was dark, damp, and dirty, with narrow stairways. Its only toilet facilities were outhouses located more than forty yards away—inconvenient but probably more sanitary than establishments like the Union Hotel, where the location of the water closets contributed to the spread of waste-born diseases. It had room for not quite one hundred beds. It soon became clear that more facilities would be needed.
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