In one nightmarish repetition of the arrival of the wounded from Fredericksburg, sometime in March or April, von Olnhausen struggled to deal with the newly arrived wounded without the help of attendants or supervision from the ward physician. Boatload after boatload of the wounded had arrived in Alexandria over the course of the day, so many that the city’s hospitals could not take them all and two boatloads of men had to be reloaded and sent on to Washington. Seventeen hundred injured soldiers, ambulances, stretchers, crutches—everything and everyone jammed the streets. The ward attendants made multiple trips, lugging crippled men from the wharves to the hospital until they were too exhausted to carry another man. It was midnight before the last boat of suffering men arrived.
With the exception of two men detailed to wash the wounded as they arrived, von Olnhausen had no attendants to help her in the ward. The doctor in charge of her ward was the officer of the day and could not leave his post. He sent for her and told her to manage everything as she thought proper—a statement of trust that she valued, though in the moment she would have valued another set of hands more. She helped wash the men, then began to dress their wounds, make splints, and put up fractures. With no assistance, it took hours. The closest thing she got to surgical support was a a flying midnight visit from the chief surgeon, Dr. Page, who simply told her he was pleased with her work and moved on to inspect the next ward. It was nearly morning before she fell into bed, knowing that another round of dressing wounds awaited her in the morning.23
Several weeks later, von Olnhausen had only a few brand-new recruits as attendants to help her with a boatload of wounded who had been in rebel hands for more than a week: “I thought I never should get the patients washed and into bed… Until you could once be in a hospital and see the state of the men as they come in, especially of those who have the blood of three weeks upon them and the dirt of as many months, you can form no idea of the undertaking. But the satisfaction on their faces when all is done and they are finally at rest is very great. Especially when a woman is near to nurse them, they seem so grateful.”24
In May, as the wounded rolled in from Chancellorsville, rumors flew around Alexandria that Confederate troops were poised to invade the city and liberate it from its Northern occupiers. Most people only half believed the rumors, but the military could not afford to ignore them; Alexandria was not only the major storehouse for the Army of the Potomac but the gateway to Washington. General John Clough, military governor of the city, ordered that preparations be made for its defense. Soldiers dug rifle pits across the streets leading to the commissary departments and rigged the bridge across the Potomac so it could be destroyed in an instant. Armed sentries patrolled the streets and the few secesh men in the hospital were put under guard. Von Olnhausen informed her correspondents in Lexington that a battery of four guns had been planted in a pit just under her window. Even as she wrote, the orderly was arming every man in the hospital able to shoulder a gun. She assured her correspondents, “I don’t feel the least frightened for myself, but it’s horrid to think of these poor wounded fellows and what they would suffer. The town is full of Secesh just waiting for a raid in order to come out openly; and they could fire every hospital at once.”25
With the Confederate army reportedly only ten miles away, the front lines seemed very near.
Nursing the Enemy
Nurses fell into two camps on the question of caring for the enemy. Those driven by a religious need for service were generally willing to nurse the enemy, even if they couldn’t manage to love him. Those who enlisted out of patriotic zeal were less sympathetic to wounded Confederates.
Amy Morris Bradley was clearly one of those who took to heart the dictum “If thine enemy hunger, feed him.” When a surgeon advised her not to help a wounded Alabamian, she snapped back, “Doctor, that poor boy is wounded [and] suffering intensely—he was my enemy, but now he needs my aid. If I obey not the teachings of the Savior I am not a true disciple.”26 Hannah Ropes was a devout Swedenborgian; her response to the presence of a Confederate soldier with an amputated leg in Union Hotel Hospital was simple: “We take just as good care of him as of anyone.”27 (Louisa May Alcott, confronted with the same Confederate soldier, was not inclined to “deliver a moral sermon upon the duty of forgiving our enemies.” Instead she promised herself she’d get soap in his eyes, and rub his nose the wrong way if she got the job of washing him.28) Anne Reading, whose Anglican faith was clearly an important part of her life, admired the patience and resignation with which one rebel officer who had been shot in the spine at Fredericksburg and was paralyzed from the waist down dealt with his sufferings. She claimed her sister, who was assigned to nurse him, couldn’t have done more for him if he had been a Union officer.
Von Olnhausen was definitely in the patriotic zeal camp and not shy about expressing her feelings on the subjects of seceshes and “copperheads,” a pejorative term for Northerners who opposed Lincoln’s war policy and advocated restoring the Union through a negotiated settlement with the South. In May 1863, after the battle of Chancellorsville, where her hometown regiment the Second Massachusetts was hard hit, she snarled, “How I hate my Reb wounded.”29 She didn’t think she could bring herself to dress their wounds anymore. It was a position she found hard to maintain when faced with a badly wounded Confederate. A few weeks later, sixteen men from the Forty-third Virginia Battalion, known as Mosby’s Raiders, were brought to Mansion House Hospital. Four of them were placed in von Olnhausen’s ward. She hated having them there and at first felt that she could not, would not, take care of them. But two of them were so badly wounded that she began to feel pity for them, even after she learned that one of them had killed a Union soldier after the man surrendered to him. He was only sixteen, with voice still like a child’s, and had been in the army for just two months. In the end, “his sufferings were so terrible that [she] forgot for the time how wicked he was,” and cared for him as best she could.30
Fighting for Their Rations
In the middle of this period of hard work and high stress, von Olnhausen led the other nurses in a revolt against the tyranny of the cooks and the steward.
In March 1863, Dr. Summers, with whom von Olnhausen had developed a good working relationship after a rocky start, was promoted and sent to another post. A new chief surgeon, Dr. Page, replaced him, and the steward and cooks took the opportunity to lash out at the nurses, who had cut off their ability to sell rations on the black market by fighting for the soldiers’ rights. Instead of spoiling their food, the cooks attacked the nurses’ rations, serving them nothing but bad coffee with no milk and dry bread for breakfast, bread and stringy meat for dinner, and coffee and bread again at night. Mrs. B., who seemed the logical person to address the problem since she managed the low diet, refused to go to Dr. Page and ask about their rations for fear he would think the nurses were selfish.
Sitting by the fire one night, tired, and so hungry she could have eaten cat’s meat, von Olnhausen decided she had had enough. She went to Dr. Page, who called the steward, H., into his office and told him that in the future the nurses were to draw their own rations from the common store and have their own cook.
They waited for five days and received no rations, despite making repeated demands to the kitchen. Finally von Olnhausen threatened to appeal to Dr. Page again. Only then did the steward—described by von Olnhausen as “just the meanest, hatefullest (oh, help me to a word, I don’t care if it is profane) man that ever lives”—send them rations for a ten-day period. The rations were so short the nurses were forced to buy half of what they needed. Sure that something was wrong, von Olnhausen asked soldiers from the quartermaster’s department to check their rations; the nurses learned they had not received a third of what they were due. After another round with Dr. Page and the steward, von Olnhausen asked that the nurses be allowed to draw their rations directly from the quartermaster. No doubt happy to end the discussion, Dr. Page signed a requisition order for the eight nurses.
&
nbsp; Von Olnhausen and Mrs. B. went straight to the quartermaster, taking a boy along to help them carry the rations. To their amazement they needed a cart, not a boy with a basket: eighty pounds of meat and eighty pounds of flour plus beans, rice, molasses, vinegar, salt pork, tea, coffee, and sugar. Even candles. When von Olnhausen and Mrs. B. called the other nurses down to see the bounty, they all went a little crazy with joy. The women immediately indulged in their own version of selling off rations. They sold sixty-two pounds of meat for $5.25 ($102 today), and used it to buy butter and milk, plus some cups and saucers to replace the standard-issue tin mugs. They traded their flour pound for pound to a baker in exchange for bread and an occasional cake or pie. In the short run, the revolt was a success. The nurses drew their rations every ten days, using the surplus to allow them to buy items that were not standard rations. They were overjoyed with how nicely they could live once they understood how the system worked; the luxury of drinking from a cup made an enormous difference.
Their triumph would be short-lived.
Phinney Comes Down with Dysentery
Von Olnhausen enjoyed her triumphs, small and large: a doctor’s praise for her skill in splinting a fractured leg, a field trip to Mount Vernon with a group of convalescents, a venal steward thwarted. Nonetheless, confusion, overwork, and exhaustion are recurring themes in her letters and diaries during this period:
I live in such a state of confusion all the time. There is always somebody new quartered upon me. I have had a “game” leg and so many bad sick ones.31
I hardly know whether I have a head on my shoulders; since last summer I never saw such times here, sick coming and going all the time.32
You can form no idea of our disturbed nights,—constant alarms and the backward movement of the army. The continual rattling of heavy wagons and the guard patrolling and challenging, one cannot sleep much. I have not felt fully awake in a fortnight; and when the noise outside is a little less, comes the watchman with, “Somebody has a chill or a pain, or wants to see me,” so all nights are disturbed ones33
I shall give up, I cannot write; I have tried fifty times since this was commenced. You can’t know all I have done these last two days; more patients have come and gone, and now I have only ten left in my ward.34
When an epidemic of dysentery swept through the hospital in June, she was already weakened by the long strain of work and the heat and humidity of Washington’s “evil climate.” She soon contracted a severe case of the disease. The other nurses were too busy to care for her, so she lay in her room, half conscious and tended to by a small German convalescent, with big round blue eyes that looked as large as cups to von Olnhausen in her fever-induced delirium.
It was July before she was well enough to be moved, and her sisters then took her home to Lexington to recuperate. Von Olnhausen admitted, “After all the turmoil of that life, it was so delightful to be quiet.”35 But as far as she was concerned, her time in Lexington was nothing more than a leave of absence: “I’m in it for the war until discharged;… I could never be contented now at home remembering what I can do here and how many need me. I know that all are not fitted for this life, but I feel as if it were my special calling and I shall not leave it, if God gives me strength, while I know there is a Union soldier to nurse.”36
Anne and Jenny Reading also left Mansion House Hospital in 1863, but for a much happier reason.
On October 30, 1862, Anne committed an unforgivable sin from Dorothea Dix’s point of view and married one of her patients, Andrew Flurry. Not surprisingly, Reading chose to keep quiet about the marriage. In March someone told Miss Dix that Reading had gotten married. “Dragon” Dix was not pleased.
Reading was not the only woman to meet her future husband while nursing. Ellen Sarah Forbes and Nancy M. Atwood both married men they nursed. (Like Reading, Forbes married while part of the nursing corps and left as a result.) Amanda Akin, Georgeanna Woolsey, and Annie Bell all later married doctors they met during the course of the war. One Sister of Charity left her order to marry one of her soldier-patients. The numbers were small, but Dix feared the people who opposed female nurses in the army would use them as proof that women entered the nursing corps only to find a husband.
It was a common charge. Cornelia Hancock told her niece Sallie that she was sure most people believed that was the reason she’d joined the army. Hancock acknowledged that if she were interested, it would be a good place to look since there were many nice men, and since soldiers were required to show respect to women. There were a number of women who spent the evenings gallivanting in just that pursuit. As for herself, she declared, “I do not trouble myself with the common herd.”37
Elvira Powers, somewhat older, took the suggestion that she might husband-hunt among her patients as a joke. “Once in my life did I have the audacity to pay special attention to a young corporal from Massachusetts by accompanying him to church one Sabbath evening, and came very near being discharged for the same. Shall never dare to repeat the heinous offense. Special attentions not allowed among Uncle Sam’s nephews and nieces. It is my opinion that said corporal is not over fifteen years younger than myself, still there’s no knowing what might have come of it.” She concluded, tongue-in-cheek, “Ah, me! What a sacrifice am I making for the good of my country.”38
Faced with Dix’s strong disapproval of nurses marrying patients or doctors, Reading reached the conclusion that it was time for her to go. Jenny chose not to remain in Alexandria without her sister.
Reading planned to stay with her husband’s family in Philadelphia until he was free to leave his regiment, but that changed when she got the news that he had been injured in a gun explosion and transferred to the convalescent camp. He expected it to be a year or more before he would be discharged. Rather than travel back to Alexandria to nurse him, she chose to stay in New York with her sister, where it would be easier to get work. She was unable to get her old job at St. Luke’s; the matron, like Dix, disapproved of married nurses. Instead she found work in a factory in Yonkers, where she stayed through the end of the war, working her way up to a supervisory position over a female workforce made up primarily of Irish immigrants. Her nursing career, which had taken her to three continents and two wars, was over.
Chapter 9
Reporting Back to Duty
“One lady came here a few days since, who staid [sic] only two days. She was ‘not used to any such fare, such cold rooms, and couldn’t work for any such pay.’ There are others here who do not work for the ‘pay,’ but for something higher and better.”
—Elvira Powers, Hospital Pencillings1
“Sometimes I think I cannot bear it another hour, that I’ll just leave here; but when I see these miserable nurses and more miserable attendants who are here merely for the poor pay, I think it cruel to go, for, if anywhere, I can do some good here; these poor fellows have at least someone to help them.”
—Mary Phinney von Olnhausen2
Hundreds of women lasted little more than a month as nurses in the Civil War, worn down by the physical and emotional challenges, but others stayed for several years. Those who lasted were transformed by their experiences at the front and in general hospitals; fighting for soldiers and with surgeons; facing the realities of dirt, disease, and death; and the frustration of hospital politics and military protocol. Over time, they began to see themselves as veterans.
Though nursing would not become a profession until well after the war was over, when Mary Phinney von Olnhausen came back to Mansion House Hospital in September 1863, she returned with a renewed sense of vocation. She also found a new set of opportunities waiting for her. Doctors who “a year ago were all opposed to female nurses and ‘poohed’ at the idea of one being useful”3 were now eager for her to work with them.
More Trouble at Mansion House Hospital
After a month of convalescence at home in Lexington, Mary Phinney von Olnhausen arrived back at Mansion House Hospital on September 3, 1863. The trip from Lexington to
Alexandria was always long and complicated, and this time it had been particularly difficult. The boat from Boston was so full she considered herself lucky to find a spot to sleep on the floor of the main cabin, though it was next to the door and everyone who came in or out was forced to step over her. The boat became even more crowded at Newport, Rhode Island, where 150 women and children got on board; all of them suffered from seasickness when the sea got rough. Once on land, a “copperhead” sat next to her on the train ride to Philadelphia and made her so furious she couldn’t sleep. She boarded the train to Baltimore at midnight, only to have the girl in the bunk beneath her talk for two hours until von Olnhausen’s own bunk broke down, and she almost squashed the young woman. The fright silenced the girl. Von Olnhausen moved to another bunk and finally got some sleep. When she reached Washington, she barely had time to run to Miss Dix’s office, report in, and catch the boat to Alexandria.
After such an eventful and exhausting journey, her arrival at Mansion House Hospital felt like a letdown. The chief surgeon, Dr. Page, was delighted to see her, but most of the nurses she had worked with were discharged during the month she was away, and the doctors had relocated to other hospitals. In fact, it soon turned out the only thing that hadn’t changed was her former adversary, the steward.
Von Olnhausen found two letters waiting for her, both of which offered her options if she didn’t want to stay at Mansion House. The first was from Dr. Summers. He had wanted nothing to do with her when she had arrived at Mansion House the year before, but now he begged her to join him in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he needed a matron for the large hospital under his control. The second job offer was from her old ward surgeon, Dr. Bellangee, who was now in charge of a new hospital at Morehead City, North Carolina, and needed a surgical nurse.
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