Heroines of Mercy Street

by Pamela D. Toler PhD

  At first, von Olnhausen wasn’t sure what to do. Mansion House Hospital looked dreary compared to the plan for the new hospital in North Carolina, and though Dr. Page was pressuring her to stay, Miss Dix urged her to go to North Carolina. The choice wasn’t any clearer when looked at in terms of how busy a nurse was apt to be based on surrounding military activity. In the late summer and early fall of 1863, Union and Confederate forces were struggling for control over Chattanooga, which was a key railroad center and the gateway to the Confederacy from the west. Several of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War would be fought in and around Chattanooga later that fall, including the Battle of Chickamauga, but in the first week of September, the campaign was still a matter of feints and skirmishes. The Outer Banks of North Carolina were the site of continual armed encounters between blockade runners and the Union’s navy, but had not seen a major battle since before McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign the previous summer. Alexandria, on the other hand, was located in the Union’s medical center.

  Mansion House soon became a less appealing option. H., the steward with whom von Olnhausen had fought the “ration wars” in March, had taken revenge in her absence. He had reported the butcher to whom the nurses sold their excess meat ration, and the government fined both the butcher and the nurses $50. Mrs. B. had appealed the case, but it was decided against the nurses soon after von Olnhausen’s return. Angry that she had to pay out of pocket for her share of the fine, back to the old ration of beef and bread for meals, and irate at the lack of justice in the system, von Olnhausen told Dr. Page she could not stay in the hospital if H. remained. Dr. Page did not try to change her mind, but made her promise she would come back to him if he ever had a hospital without H. The last thing he said to her when they parted was that he depended on her to keep that promise. With the Mansion House door closed, von Olnhausen allowed Miss Dix to make the decision. North Carolina it was.

  Von Olnhausen’s trouble with the steward was not quite over, however. Just as she and Mrs. B. got in the ambulance to leave for the station and the first leg of their journey south, an order came for their arrest. H. had informed Dr. Page, who was out of town, that the two nurses were absconding with large quantities of the hospital’s stores. Dr. Page could not ignore the accusation, so he sent word to the officer of the day to arrest and search them. The officer in question, Dr. Barnes, found Mrs. B., told her he would rather leave the service than follow the orders, and got the chaplain to back him up. The two nurses were halfway to Baltimore before Mrs. B. recounted this to von Olnhausen, who was disappointed she had lost the opportunity to bring H. to grief. If she had known, she would have insisted Dr. Barnes carry out the search and prove them innocent.

  As she told her correspondents in Lexington, “There can never be an end to fusses in the Mansion House.”4

  Impatient in North Carolina

  Von Olnhausen and Mrs. B. arrived at Morehead City, North Carolina, on September 14, 1863, to find that the town and hospital were as different from Alexandria and Mansion House as it was possible to be.

  Morehead City was located thirty miles from the state’s former capital of New Bern, which served as the Union’s military garrison for the region, and the town, like the hospital, was very new. Developers with aspirations of building a new port city on the Newport River sold the first six hundred lots in 1857; but it was still little more than a fishing village at the terminus of the new Atlantic and East Carolina Railroad when it was incorporated on February 20, 1861, only two months before the war began.

  The Union army occupied Morehead City in April 1862, as part of an amphibious campaign to gain control of the barrier islands and numerous inlets of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, thereby plugging holes in the Union’s blockade of Southern ports. The campaign was successful enough that Lincoln appointed a military governor for the state in May 1862. Major operations in the region ended that summer with the withdrawal of troops for McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign, but a force of Union troops remained garrisoned at New Bern under the control of Major General John G. Foster. While North Carolina seemed like a military backwater compared to Alexandria, New Bern served as the hub for regular raids against Lee’s supply lines. The region would remain a contested area until February 1865, when Union forces captured Wilmington, the last open Confederate seaport. Casualties in the Outer Banks campaigns were small compared to those in Virginia or the western territories, but the need for military hospitals was real. Mansfield General Hospital at Morehead City was the last of three general hospitals the Union army built in coastal North Carolina. It was not yet finished when von Olnhausen arrived. Her initial impression was that the place “looked forlorn enough,”5 though she admitted that Dr. Bellangee had accomplished wonders in the short time he had been there. Eight barracks, holding forty-five beds each, were completed and ready for patients, and another three to four were scheduled to be built. So far the hospital held only two hundred patients, but there was talk at the time of breaking up the hospital at New Bern and transferring its patients to Morehead City, a proposal von Olnhausen approved of because she felt New Bern was unhealthy—a sinkhole of bad smells and uncleaned cisterns. Rumors about which hospital should be closed and how patients should be moved among the general hospitals at Morehead City, New Bern, and Beaufort would be a regular and distressing part of von Olnhausen’s experience in North Carolina.

  Von Olnhausen would later declare that Morehead City was the best hospital she saw during the war, but she was slow to reach that conclusion. She spent her first several months there begging Miss Dix to relocate her because she felt she was underutilized. Only two weeks into her assignment, she complained that while she was a little less homesick, she was not happy. The setting was beautiful, only two miles away from the open sea and surrounded by green woods, and Dr. Bellangee was kind and supportive. But she had nothing to do. Anytime she got a patient, he recovered in only a few days thanks to the fine sea air. She ranted to a friend, “I certainly did not come into the service to play; and every walk I take I feel as if I were a real humbug.”6

  The only excitement she had in her first weeks at Mansfield Hospital was a tussle with an assistant surgeon protective of his rank and privileges. He threatened to have her discharged because had she not consulted him before performing what he claimed was a surgical procedure. She had applied a mustard plaster, a remedy familiar to nineteenth-century housewives, to a man who suffered from the colic in the middle of the night. (Today colic refers to an infant disorder, but in nineteenth-century medical terminology it was a painful abdominal spasming that usually occurred in adults; perhaps irritable bowel syndrome.) When the assistant surgeon complained the next morning, Dr. Bellangee wrote out permission authorizing her “to mustard” when necessary.

  During this period, von Olnhausen was torn between frustration at Dix’s refusal to relocate her and very real appreciation of the relative peace of the hospital in contrast to “the corruption and constant fusses of the Mansion House.”7 Her daily routine was as orderly as that maintained by Nightingale’s nurses in the Crimea, with time for long walks after dinner and an occasional sail. She admitted that it was a very healthy life—and it drove her crazy. She complained loudly and often about both the low quantity and quality of the work that was asked of her. By December, she was so discouraged that she was tempted to “cut Miss Dix altogether and run away.”8 She had only two wounds to dress and feared she was forgetting all she knew. One was an injured rebel, who wasn’t even wounded in battle, but had cut his hand making shingles, severing the artery. It kept bleeding, so she had to watch him night and day, finding it “pretty tedious to have to sit all day looking at the very dirtiest paw you ever saw.” The other was a black freeman “who was shot, all for love.”9 At a time when there were thousands of wounded Union soldiers in other parts of the country who needed her, she felt she was wasting her time caring for Confederate soldiers and civilians.

  She was distracted in mid-December by the unexpected a
rrival of some half dozen inspectors, sent by General Butler with what proved to be idle threats of closing the hospital; and again at New Years’ Eve when the soldiers at Fort Macon, located across Bogue Sound from the hospital, invited the nurses to a ball. Dr. Bellangee insisted his nurses accept the invitation. Von Olnhausen went reluctantly, feeling shabby in a patched purple skirt, without the proper shoes or gloves. It ultimately didn’t matter what she wore: “I was not first-best, but as there were only seven ladies, I had to be a belle, and so danced continuously.”10 It was a late night, even for nurses accustomed to long days. The weather turned so bad that they could not take the tug back across the sound until five in the morning. When they got to the station, they discovered the mule that pulled their cart to the landing had run off, so they had to walk the last mile on dance-weary feet. Just as von Olnhausen got upstairs, hoping to get an hour’s sleep before beginning the inexorable routine of the hospital day, an orderly came to tell her that one of her patients was worse. When she checked on him, she was sure he wouldn’t live long, so she threw off her “ball fixings” and stayed with him until he died, at about nine that morning.

  On January 3, foreseeing another year at Mansfield Hospital, von Olnhausen reached the point of despair. Her ward had been full for the last fortnight, but all her patients were up for discharge or furlough. She was nursing two bad typhoid cases, but she didn’t think they would live much longer. Then she would be out of a job, with nothing to do but loaf. She was ready to “darn” Miss Dix, who seemed determined to keep her in North Carolina for the rest of her life, particularly since Dr. Bellangee had told the nursing supervisor how useful she was. She wanted someone to need her somewhere else and to demand that she come, no matter who objected.

  Dirty Linen

  To add insult to frustration, von Olnhausen was given responsibility for the laundry operation at Morehead City, a task that involved supervising as many as twenty laundresses in a demanding job. To most nurses, the laundry was the least prestigious and most annoying of all the jobs associated with nursing, and one that von Olnhausen had never been involved with at Mansion House.

  Civil War–era laundry was a difficult job under any circumstance, one that most households undertook no more than once a week. Washing machines were a relatively new invention, first demonstrated at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London. They consisted of a ten- or twenty-gallon cylinder on top of a boiler that produced both hot water for the clothes and the steam that drove the engine. The operator would put clothes and soap in the cylinder, which then revolved for five to ten minutes. High-end versions had a second boiler for hot rinse water. The machines were expensive and found in only the wealthiest homes: in 1861 a basic machine cost $50—more than $9,000 today.11

  Most people made do with wooden washtubs, soup-sized kettles for heating water, and elbow grease. The first step, one not thought of as part of the laundry process today, was mending and patching. Once she finished mending torn clothing and bed linens, the laundress or housewife moved on to stain removal, a time-consuming process that could involve applying lemon juice (a relatively expensive choice), exposing stained items to direct sunlight, or soaking them overnight in “blood warm water” (basically the same temperature as a baby’s bottle). Washable clothing (made from fabrics such as cotton and linen as opposed to silk, leather, velvet, and some woolens), bed linens, and rags were then washed in hot water using soft soap and a scrub board, boiled to kill lice and insects, rinsed several times in hot water, allowed to cool, and then rinsed again in cool water. Wet laundry was hung out to dry on anything that would hold it off the ground: lines in a yard, bushes, porch railings. Once dry, clothing would be ironed using a cast-metal iron heated on a stove or run through a mangle, a device made up of two rollers and a crank that used pressure to smooth the wrinkles from the fabric.

  This description masks the layers of physical work involved in the process. Water had to be brought from water sources that varied in degree of inconvenience: a stream or pond at some distance from a home, a shared pump in an urban neighborhood, a farmyard well. Once acquired, water was heated in large kettles on wood- or coal-burning stoves and carried from kitchen to washtub. Commercial soap was not yet widely available outside of major cities, though Procter and Gamble would transform itself from a struggling Cincinnati soap and candle maker to a national brand over the course of the war thanks to army contracts; many homes made their own.

  From mending to folding, laundry was backbreaking work, and hospital laundry was done the same way on a larger scale. It was not unusual for a general hospital laundry to process two to three thousand pieces of laundry in one day.

  Laundresses were employed directly by the army and entitled to the same housing, fuel, and rations as a soldier. Early in the war, they were often the wives or widows of enlisted men. As the war went on and the Union army moved farther south, the demographic makeup of laundry staffs shifted. Most of the laundresses who reported to von Olnhausen in North Carolina were free blacks or escaped slaves; not surprising since the region around New Bern was the principal refuge for escaped slaves on the North Carolina coast.

  Von Olnhausen’s relationship with the women who worked for her is troubling from a modern perspective, though typical for the period. Racism and abolitionism were not mutually exclusive positions at the time. (Louisa May Alcott, for instance, who claimed “the blood of two generations of abolitionists waxed hot in my veins,”12 nonetheless described the black laundry and kitchen workers at Union House Hospital in less than flattering terms as “obsequious, trickish, lazy and ignorant, yet kind-hearted, [and] merry-tempered.”13) Von Olnhausen refers to the laundry workers under her supervision as “nigs” and “darkies” and complains of their inability to use a handkerchief or properly fold a dressing gown. Yet, recognizing that the laundry staff were in rags and unable to provide clothing for themselves because the army was almost a year behind in paying salaries, she sewed night and day to make dresses and underclothing for them as Christmas gifts, an act of generosity that would be more impressive without her assertion that “it was no use to give them anything unmade, as they would botch it so.”14 In one horrifying scene, she slapped one of the women out of a hysterical fit, then followed it up by a “good shaking,” “a right smart scolding,” and “another dose of each” when the woman began to cry. When the rest of the staff broke out into sympathetic tears, von Olnhausen was so frustrated that she claimed, “If I’d been big enough and strong enough, I would have slapped them all.”15

  It was far from von Olnhausen’s finest hour.

  Under Attack

  Von Olnhausen’s wish for someone to need her was soon answered. In late January 1864, the Confederate army staged an attempt to recapture New Bern, which, as the major Union supply base in the region, held provisions that would be useful to the increasingly impoverished Confederate army. The news that New Bern had been attacked reached Morehead City on February 4; the next day they learned that a large Confederate force had attacked Newport Barracks, a Union supply depot only ten miles away on the railroad south of New Bern. Most of the forces garrisoned at Morehead City had already been sent to help defend New Bern. Now Colonel Jourdan of the 158th New York left for Newport Barracks with the few remaining men, mostly raw recruits, and two field pieces, leaving Morehead City almost defenseless for a brief time. The troops were forced back almost immediately, and Morehead City prepared to defend itself. “Such a scurrying time you never saw,” von Olnhausen reported later. White men were armed, and black men were put to work digging entrenchments—a contrast to the response to possible attack in Alexandria, where all men not suspected of harboring Confederate sympathies, black and white, were armed to defend the city. Regimental stores were loaded on the gunboats to protect them from seizure by the Confederates, and everyone began to pack their belongings in case they had to flee. Von Olnhausen complained that “everything seemed to be thought of except the patients.”16 She refused to leave, or even pack,
unless the patients went too.

  That night they could see Newport Barracks burning. Cut off from all communications and “just waiting to be ‘took,’” with only three hundred men to defend the city against a reported five thousand rebel soldiers, the residents were jumpy. Civilian women screamed in their houses with fear that their men might be forced to fight. Occasionally a terrified sentry fired his gun at nothing. Soldiers from Newport Barracks arrived throughout the night; some had been wounded in the attack on the depot, and all had alarming stories of Confederate forces on the move. A thousand rumors flew, but the feared Confederate force never arrived.

  The main body of the defending force from Newport Barracks began to find their way to Morehead City the next day, arriving a few at a time. Even with more men to help defend the city, its residents spent another day and night of constant alarms, with everyone ready for instant flight. The hospital not only took care of all the sick and tired soldiers as they arrived, but also sheltered about a hundred black women and children from the surrounding countryside who had taken refuge in the city. Fires were visible in all directions. Parties of men could be seen moving on the other side of the river, too distant to tell if they were friend or foe. Hopeful citizens watched for reinforcements from the high places in the city. With the telegraph lines cut and bridges burned, no one knew whether New Bern had fallen or not. In the course of the excitement, von Olnhausen never lost focus on her main concern: “They talk of many wounded and killed, but they brought only three into Beaufort and one or two have straggled in here. All that came I have in my ward.”17