Nurses begged the cooks for special meals for the very sick, muscled their way into the kitchen to do extra cooking, and purchased the ingredients for more delicate menus for their patients from their own pockets. Von Olnhausen, in another self-described “growling letter,” complained:
Every day I buy eggs and milk, in fact almost every nice thing for the sick ones. I know I have the right to them here; but I’ve learned enough to know that all who make complaints to headquarters are not only unpopular there but are pitched into by all the house; so I just speak to nobody, get what I can, and buy the rest. Sometimes I can make eyes at the ice-box man and he’ll give me a bit of chicken and mutton; but he isn’t always to be melted any more than his ice, though he is the only one who really seems to work for the soldiers.20
She was not the only one to use her own money to buy luxuries for the sick. Elvira Powers, for instance, bought dried peaches for a fifteen-year-old soldier suffering from typhoid; fruit in particular seemed to appeal to sick men who had little appetite. The urge to purchase needed supplies went beyond food for the sick. The wealthy Woolsey family told their daughters to “buy whatever you see is needed or the surgeons and nurses want. Don’t wait for red tape. If it is mattresses, cots, pillows, spirit lamps, food, sheeting, flannel, etc. To wrap wounded men in, or what not. You can have plenty of money, and it could not be better spent than in fitting up a hospital even if that is government work.”21
In March 1863, von Olnhausen decided she’d had enough. Dr. C. was in charge of the commissary, so she went after him on behalf of her patients. She cornered him in his office and told him that the sickest patients would starve if the nurses didn’t buy food for them. As was often the case when nurses went on the attack, Dr. C. became defensive. He said that he knew his nurse did not buy food for the men and called her into the office to prove it. His nurse said that she did buy food for her patients. He called in the other nurses; they all gave the same answer.
Eventually every nurse and doctor in the hospital was involved in the argument, which lasted most of the day. Dr. C. insisted that the men received everything that was called for in the new diet-table issued by the army. Some of the doctors agreed with him; others hotly denied it. At last they all went down to the basement, where the kitchens were located, to read the official list. It became clear that the patients were not getting even the quantity that was called for. (The quality was a different question altogether.) As a result of von Olnhausen’s intervention, things were a little better, but she held no hope that the improvements would last: “Soon… it will be back to the old standard, for the wretch H [the hospital steward] or somebody will miss the money and get it back if possible.”22
Sometimes even the most basic foods were scarce, particularly in regions close to the battlefronts. In November 1861, Lucy Campbell Kaiser, stationed in a contested area of Missouri, found that a soldier had reported her for not giving him enough to eat. She admitted, “I suppose it was true. The fact was I could not get enough food: butter out, sugar out, no crackers, poor bread, tough beef, no vegetables, no candles; in fact, the commissary was bare, and the officers in town on a drunk.”23 Cornelia Hancock, writing to her family from Gettysburg, reported, “Our stores have given out. There is nothing to cook with, hence I have nothing to do, and, therefore, have time to write. Such days will come here that we have to see our wounded men fed with dry bread and poor coffee; and I can tell you it is hard to witness some cursing for food, some praying for it… I would give anything to have a barrel of butter and some dried rusk.”24
Nurses had no doubt that their patients would be much worse off if it weren’t for the efforts of the women at home. Cornelia Hancock, who was quick to ask friends and family from Philadelphia’s wealthy Quaker community for donations of shirts, drawers, cologne, rags, and sheets, emphasized with every plea that “Uncle Sam is very rich, but very slow”25 and that whatever comforts the men received beyond the basic necessities came to them from the ladies’ aid groups.26 Almost from the first days of the war, nurses engaged in letter-writing campaigns, alternately begging friends and family for both necessities and luxuries for “their boys” and thanking them for goods received.
In addition to the formal ladies’ aid societies, some groups of women allied themselves to specific nurses and kept them supplied. Clara Barton established her own network of suppliers; by the time she applied for a pass to travel to the battlefront in August 1862, she had accumulated three warehouses of food and hospital supplies. She kept those warehouses replenished over the course of the war by writing inspiring letters to her ladies and harrowing accounts of the suffering of “our boys” on the battlefield for the newspapers. Von Olnhausen did the same thing on a smaller scale, maintaining a relationship with the women of Lexington, Massachusetts. Her first thank-you letter to them is dated September 21, 1862, less than a month after she arrived at Mansion House:
I have been so happy to get your two letters telling me about you all and especially about that box;—you can have no possible idea of the good it will do. I know what all the Sanitary committees in the North have done and how much they think the poor soldiers are comforted; but I can assure you that in the way of delicacies they get mighty little—none in fact,—and, so far, not even good, nourishing food.27
Weeks later she complimented the good ladies of Lexington on the superior quality of their bandages, telling them she could dress an arm or leg forty times as well with the bandages they made as with any others. She then requested even more: “And we are likely to want all we have if the report is true of the big battle [most likely the Battle of Perryville].”28 Over the course of the war, she continued to wheedle, thank, and praise in equal measure. The ladies of Lexington continued to produce: “Till the very end of the war every month brought comforts from them. A soldier never went from my ward, either to his regiment or to his home, without some proper clothing and often a little money to help him on the journey. For this I take no credit; it was only through those dear friends I was able to do it.”29
Even Anne Reading, who had no home base in the United States she could call on, did not hesitate to “beg for the boys” whenever someone she knew visited the hospital. Miss Gillson, a New York socialite who had worked with Reading on the hospital ships, was especially generous, providing “56 shirts, 120 towels, 120 pocket handkerchiefs, 6 bottles of current wine, 6 bottles of lemon syrup, and large quantities of jellies” in response to Reading’s appeals.30
Control over the boxes and barrels sent from the ladies’ aid societies became another point of contention among nurses and surgeons and hospital stewards. Surgeons, attempting to maintain control over prescribed meals for sick men, objected to the unsupervised distribution of food in the wards, though it is hard to imagine what a visitor might give them that would be worse than the common diet. Nurses believed that boxes turned over to the commissary often failed to reach the men for whom they were intended. In July 1862, soon after she arrived at Union Hotel Hospital, Hannah Ropes took control of the key to the storeroom that contained the medicinal wines, quarts of canned fruits sent by ladies’ aid societies for the soldiers, and other prized supplies. There was an “almost universal complaint that delicacies sent to the patients [were] eaten by the nurses and surgeons.” She was determined that wouldn’t be true at Union Hotel Hospital on her watch.31
Von Olnhausen gained similar control over luxuries at Mansion House Hospital after a struggle with Dr. Summers in the fall of 1862. In the weeks since her arrival, her friends in Lexington had regularly sent her comforts for the patients under her care. She stored them in her room and shared them with the sick and wounded in other wards as well as her own.
One day, Summers called her into his office and said he understood she was in the habit of receiving supplies for the men. He insisted that in the future all such boxes were to be sent to the dispensary and distributed from there. Never one to mince words, von Olnhausen told him that the boxes she received were all f
rom her personal friends in Lexington, not official supplies from the Sanitary Commission. She would throw what she had out on the pavement before she gave any of it “to his drunken dispensary clerks to be eaten and drank and used by them.”
The doctor then told her there were several barrels of apples lying at the wharf addressed to her. This was no doubt what inspired his interest: the hospital had very little fruit, and everyone craved it. He claimed the apples were needed for the hospital and insisted she order them sent to him at once.
Von Olnhausen refused and told him she would send them back unless she could do with them what she chose. She then stormed out of the office and flew back to her room, sure the matter was not over.
Round two was quick in coming. Von Olnhausen was summoned to the office again; an order had come from the docks that the barrels of apples were still waiting to be delivered and must be sent for at once. Summers asked if she had changed her mind. She told him no and negotiated for a storeroom where they could be safely locked away, along with her boxes from the ladies of Lexington. The doctor agreed, but wanted her to take charge of their distribution for the hospital as a whole. She refused. She was there to nurse soldiers, not to be a dispensary clerk. She was too busy to both manage the stores and take care of her ward.
Summers was furious and ready to walk away from the deal, but von Olnhausen offered a substitute storekeeper as a compromise. A few days earlier Miss Dix had brought a widow, Mrs. B., to the hospital to oversee the special diet, and von Olnhausen felt she could trust her. By nightfall the apples were stored in a locked room, with the key in Mrs. B.’s charge. In a rare act of diplomacy, von Olnhausen sent a barrel to every ward, as well as one to the cooks and one to the doctor. She thought the problem was solved. The storeroom was now a “fixed fact” and she had the comfort of knowing that the whole house had enjoyed the fruit meant for the soldiers.32
The storeroom turned out to be only a partial solution. Eight months later, Mansion House Hospital was once again in an uproar about food. “Those miserable toads” in the dispensary had taken twenty-five pounds of sugar, twelve bottles of pickles, twelve bottles of cordial, and other delicacies from a Sanitary Commission package for their own use, leaving only twelve cans of milk for the patients. Von Olnhausen was indignant: “Isn’t it a shame? Just look how the people at home are cheated and duped! I wonder anybody there ever trusts anyone concerned in the war.”33
Nurses found themselves fighting their own version of the war, in which the dispensary, commissary, and kitchen marked the front lines.
Attacking Corruption
Mary Phinney von Olnhausen fought a constant battle against pilfering in the commissariat at Mansion House Hospital, a problem that made her declare “I can sooner forgive the Rebels who kill them” than the men who cheated her soldiers.34 Nurses at other locations exposed surgeons and quartermasters who served soldiers substandard food and sold official provisions for their own profit. In many cases, the nurses found themselves subject to retaliation from the men they exposed, thanks in part to their own failure to understand the system and their relative lack of power within it. Mrs. S. A. M. Blackford, who presented the Illinois governor with complaints about inadequate food given to soldiers under her care, was dismissed for her failure to honor the proper chain of command. Her unsuccessful efforts at reinstatement included a letter to President Lincoln, repeating the offence that had gotten her fired in the first place by once again making an appeal to civilian authorities to redress military wrongs. She pled that while she had no doubt been “ignorant of military rules,” all she wanted was “to get our sick and wounded enough to eat.”35 Not all the women who set out to expose corruption were so naive about how to work the system. Annie Turner Wittenmyer, proponent of the special-diet kitchens, and Hannah Ropes, of Union Hotel Hospital, for instance, had the political savvy and connections to effect change without compromising their positions.
Annie Turner Wittenmyer learned that special-diet kitchens solved the problem of feeding the most fragile patients but increased the temptation for corruption by providing more and higher-quality supplies to hospital kitchens. When the woman in charge of the special-diet kitchen at the army hospital in Madison, Indiana, complained to Wittenmyer about the quality of the food, especially the coffee, Wittenmyer sent one of her best assistants, Miss Lou E. Vance, to the hospital to investigate. Miss Vance soon discovered that the hospital’s kitchen staff, on orders from the chief surgeon, were drying used coffee grounds and adulterating them with logwood dye, a century-old technique for passing off exhausted grounds as the real thing. The kitchen then reused the adulterated grounds and the surgeon sold a portion of the unused coffee beans on the black market.
Armed with affidavits from the kitchen attendants, Wittenmyer traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, the headquarters for the medical director of the region, where she demanded a private interview with Assistant Surgeon General Robert C. Wood. Wittenmyer laid out the case against the chief surgeon. Wood, who apparently had learned little in his encounters with Miss Dix several years previously, protested that the man was one of his best surgeons. Wittenmyer pushed back, saying the surgeon ought to be “hung higher than Haman,” a reference to a biblical punishment that was as much about public humiliation as pain. She insisted the case be referred to the highest authority available without reference to military protocol, in this case the governor of Indiana; Wood insisted the case remain within the military system. Unlike the hapless Mrs. Blackford, Wittenmyer was not employed by the army, so was not subject to dismissal by Wood, and she had too much political power to be ignored. They compromised: Wittenmyer agreed to have the charges against the surgeon heard by a military commission, and Wood agreed to allow Wittenmyer to choose the members of the commission. In the end, the charges were never heard at all. As soon as the commission arrived in Madison, the surgeon telegraphed his resignation to Washington and fled, unpunished.
Hannah Ropes was even more successful in her efforts to bring a corrupt steward to account, a spectacular example of nurses’ willingness to ignore the constraints of bureaucracy when in search of results.
Born in Maine in 1809, Ropes was an ardent social crusader from a prominent family of lawyers and public servants. Unlike many of Dix’s nurses, she was neither an old maid nor a widow. Her husband abandoned her sometime around 1847, leaving Hannah to raise their two children alone. In 1855, Ropes moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where her son had filed a land claim. There, as an active member of the abolitionist movement, she soon learned that abolition wasn’t a theoretical issue in “Bleeding Kansas” in the mid-1850s. Pro- and anti-slavery forces literally battled for control over the contested territory. Murder in the streets was a fact of life. Ropes was so fearful that her home could be attacked at any moment that she kept loaded pistols and a bowie knife on her table at night and three loaded rifles in the room.36 In mid-1856, she moved back east to Massachusetts with her daughter Alice, leaving her son behind to maintain his land claim. Once safely in Massachusetts, she published a controversial tract opposing the legal expansion of slavery into the western states. The pamphlet, “Six Months in Kansas: By a Lady,” proved successful and launched her career as an anti-slavery activist. By the late 1850s, she was well known not only to the abolitionist community in Massachusetts but also to the politically powerful as well, including Henry Wilson, the state’s senior US senator and subsequent chairman of the influential Senate Military Affairs Committee.
Like other women with an interest in abolition, Ropes was eager to do her part when the nation went to war. Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing had already sparked her interest in nursing before the fall of Sumter, and when she learned Dix had called for applicants for an army nursing corps, Ropes got her affairs in order and headed to Washington. Unable to carry a musket in the name of freedom, she was ready to care for those who did. In fact, her first patient was not a wounded soldier. Senator Wilson collapsed in the entry of his house a few hours before Ropes arrived i
n town in June 1862, and his family asked her to take care of him as he recovered. Ropes spent her first two weeks in Washington at his bedside, with “Officers and Senators at the door in squads every day to see him.”37 It was an introduction to the highest level of Washington politics that most volunteer nurses did not receive.
Ropes began her nursing assignment at the Union Hotel Hospital on July 4, and Dix appointed her matron in charge of nurses at the hospital that fall. Soon thereafter, the hospital steward, who by his own admission was there “to make all the money he could out of the hospital,”38 suggested Ropes join him in reselling hospital clothing, soap, and food. Ropes complained to the hospital’s chief surgeon, Dr. A. M. Clark, who neither reprimanded nor dismissed the steward. She then took her accusations directly to Surgeon General William Hammond. Hammond, insisting all communications come through the proper chain of command, refused to act on Ropes’s charges and referred the letter back to Clark, whom Ropes described in her diary as “ignorant of hospital routine, ignorant of life outside of the practice in a country town in an interior state, a weak man with good intentions, but puffed up with the gilding on his shoulder straps.”39 Clark, irate that Ropes had gone around him, demanded she prove the charges. Ropes declined: the evidence was clear for anyone to see in the kitchen, the larder, and the pinched faces in the wards.40
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