“Oh, I forced the sentries,” I replied, “and here I am; but I have no time to tell you the how, and the why, and the wherefore. I must see Colonel Ashby without the loss of a minute: tell me where he is to be found.”
Upon hearing that his party was a quarter of a mile farther up the wood, I turned to depart in search of them, and was in the very act of remounting when a door on my right was thrown open, and revealed Colonel Ashby himself, who could not conceal his surprise at seeing me standing before him.
“Good God! Miss Belle, is this you? Where did you come from? Have you dropped from the clouds? or am I dreaming?”
I first convinced him he was wide awake, and that my presence was substantial and of the earth—not a visionary emanation from the world of spirits—then, without further circumlocution, I proceeded to narrate all I had overheard in the closet, of which I have before made mention. I gave him the cipher, and started on my return.
I arrived safely at my aunt’s house, after a two hours’ ride, in the course of which I “ran the blockade” of a sleeping sentry, who awoke to the sound of my horse’s hoofs just in time to see me disappear round an abrupt turning, which shielded me from the bullet he was about to send after me. Upon getting home, I unsaddled my horse and “turned in.” . . .
A few days afterwards General Shields marched south, laying a trap, as he supposed, to catch “poor old Jackson and his demoralized army,” leaving behind him, to occupy Front Royal, one squadron of cavalry, one field battery, and the 1st Maryland Regiment of Infantry, under command of Colonel Kenly; Major Tyndale, of Philadelphia, being appointed Provost-Marshal.
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker
(1832–1919)
U.S. Army
Mary Edwards Walker grew up in a progressive household in Oswego, New York. Her parents valued women’s education, and the family home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. She earned a medical degree at Syracuse Medical College in 1855 and continued there for advanced study. She wrote prolifically and contributed to the reform journal The Sibyl: A Review of the Tastes, Errors and Fashions of Society, where in 1859 she advocated for women to serve as soldiers in wartime. In 1861, after the Second Battle of Bull Run overwhelmed Washington hospitals with wounded, she filed for divorce from an unfaithful husband and went to the capital to request an appointment as an assistant surgeon for the Union Army. Secretary of War Simon Cameron denied her initial request. Undaunted, she made the rounds of Washington relief hospitals and convinced Dr. J. N. Green of the Indiana Hospital to allow her to serve as his assistant. She wrote about her war experiences in an unpublished series of sketches, “Incidents Connected with the Army,” from which the following excerpts are taken.
As I desired to act in the capacity of an assistant surgeon in the army, I visited hospitals on my arrival in Washington for the purpose of finding a vacancy. Dr. Green was at that time the only medical officer in that hospital. He stated that his predecessor had died from over work, there being not a sufficient number of surgeons in the army so that he could have an assistant. He stated that he had himself applied to Surgeon General Finley for an assistant in the hospital, but had been answered that there was none that he could give him. I asked him to write to the surgeon general requesting him to appoint me as his assistant. This he did and I took the paper to the office.
[Walker delivers the letter in person and presents her credentials; Finley returns them and says he cannot appoint a woman.]
As I had heard Dr. Green speak of Assistant Surgeon General Wood, I inquired for him, showed him my credentials, and stated to him that I had brought a letter from Dr. Green, and asked to be appointed. After Dr. Wood had read my credentials he said to me that if the surgeon general had been out and he had been acting that day he would have appointed me, and he expressed his regrets that the surgeon general had not been delayed beyond that hour.
I returned to the Patent Office Hospital and reported what had been said, and then told Dr. Green that I would act as his assistant without any appointment. . . .
I urged [Dr. Green to go out for a short break] now, saying that I would attend to all the patients in his absence; and it sometimes occurred that the hospital steward accompanied me with the book to write down the condition of the cases every day as explained by the surgeon, and the prescription that was given to each individual case, as must be done in a large hospital, as it is impossible for a physician to remember every individual case where there are a hundred to be seen every day. There were times when I examined and prescribed and continued the treatment of these hundred patients. . . .
[Dr. Green] told me that he would give me a part of his salary. I replied that he needed all that he had for his wife and children, and that I should not accept of any, but I would be his assistant surgeon just the same as though I had been appointed.
[During her tenure at Indiana Hospital, Walker encounters Superintendent of Army Nurses Dorothea Dix.]
I was somewhat amused when Dorothy [sic] Dix visited the hospital. . . . I did not understand at that time why she seemed in such a troubled mood about something when she first saw me but afterwards learned that a part of her mission was to try to keep young and good looking women out of the hospital.
She had stated that no woman less than thirty years old ought to be allowed to go into a hospital where there were soldier patients but as she could not possibly have any control over myself she walked through the hospital in a manner that it is hard to describe. When she saw a patient who was too ill to arrange the clothing on his cot if it became disarranged and a foot was exposed she turned her head the other way seeming not to see the condition while I was so disgusted with such sham modesty that I hastened to arrange the soldier’s bed clothing if I chanced to be near when no nurses were to do this duty. I was not able to understand and am not to the present day of what use any one can be who professes to work for a cause and then allows sham modesty to prevent them from doing little services that chance to come in their way.
[She goes on to call Dix “a good hearted woman” and notes that the country should be grateful to her for her work in improving conditions in “lunatic asylums.” Dix is not the only member of the military medical establishment with whose ideas of treatment Walker disagrees.]
There were cases where [soldiers] had been wounded in the arm or leg, and in the most pitiful manner that made it very difficult for me to suppress my emotions, they would ask me if that leg would have to come off, if that arm would have to come off, telling me that the ward surgeon said it would have to come off, and that they would rather die than lose a leg or lose an arm, whichever the case happened to be. I did not wish to be unprofessional and say anything to any other medical officer’s patients that would seem like giving advice outside of a council; but as I had a little experience and observation regarding the inability of some of the ward surgeons to diagnose properly, and truthfully I considered that I had a higher duty than came under the head of medical etiquette.
I had assisted in an operation where there was amputation of an arm where it was no more necessary than to amputate anybody’s arm that had never been injured. The two surgeons in the ward who had decided to have that arm amputated when there had been only a slight flesh wound, seemed to me to take this opportunity to amputate for the purpose of their own practice, which was utterly cruel: but knowing that if I gave my opinion against amputating that I would be debarred from entering one of the largest hospitals in Washington, I gave antiseptics and the arm was removed.
I then made up my mind that it was the last case that would ever occur if it was in my power to prevent such cruel loss of limbs, therefore I made it my business, when visiting hospitals, whenever I found that there were contemplated operations, and a complaint from a soldier that a decision had been made to remove a limb, I casually asked to see it, and in almost every instance I saw amputation was not only unnecessary, but to me it seemed wickedly cruel. I would then swear the soldier not to repeat anything that I told him, and the
n I would tell him that no one was obliged to submit to an amputation unless he chose to do so, that his limbs belonged to himself. I then instructed him to protest against amputation, and that if the physicians insisted upon it that if he had never used swearing words to swear and declare that if they forced him to have an operation that he would never rest after his recovery until he had shot them dead. I need not say that secrecy regarding what I had told to the soldier was kept and that my advice was followed and that many a man today has for it the perfect and good use of his limbs who would not have had but for my advice, to say nothing about the millions of dollars in pensions that would have been paid without all the suffering, had I not decided it my solemn duty to the soldiers instead of carrying out etiquette towards my medical and surgical brothers.
[This is confirmed after the war by written testimony of several soldiers whose arms and legs were saved as a result of Walker’s advice. Because the mortality rate after amputation was so high—up to 60 percent in amputations below the knee and 80 percent in cases of amputation at the hip—Walker probably also saved lives as well as limbs.
Through 1862, Walker continues to assist in surgeries and wound dressings at Washington DC hospitals. She also engages in relief work with soldiers and their families, developing a nationwide reputation for her compassion and devotion. In March she completes a course in new treatments at the Hygeio-Therapeutic College in New York City. That fall, she returns to Washington. Casualties from the Battle of Antietam and actions in northern Virginia have overwhelmed hospitals in the town of Warrenton, near the front lines and occupied at this time by Union forces. Walker acquires a pass to serve there, where she finds appalling conditions and such a severe shortage of supplies that she is forced to rent a single two-quart basin from a local woman for a dollar and to tear up her own nightgown for towels. Later she goes to headquarters to request permission to move a number of the patients to Washington, where they can be treated more effectively. They set out on November 15, 1862.]
General Burnside gave me written authority to go with them, and that all persons should afford me all facilities that I required.
The condition of the army at this time was such that raids from the opposing forces were expected at any time between there and Alexandria. Seven car-loads, but one of which was a passenger car, were loaded up. Some of the not very sick were placed upon the tops of the cars, as there was not room enough in the freight cars for them all. In the passenger cars were some brave persons who had been down to the army . . . and others whose business in running to Washington I was not informed concerning all were specially anxious to get out of danger. Among these was Henry Wilson, then a member of the House of Representatives at Washington.
When we had proceeded but a short distance the train stopped at a barren place. . . . While we were waiting I went to the cars, that were so high that it was difficult to get into, to see how my patients were, all of whom were as comfortable as they could expect, as they expressed themselves, with the exception of two. As I approached one I saw that he was near the other shore, and asked him his name, which I wrote down, but before I could get anything more except his regiment, he had passed to the beyond. Another was so far gone that he could not speak plainly, and when I asked his name he could barely speak the same and I guessed at the rest and told him to press my hand if I got it right. He did so.
[Walker then figures out before the soldier dies that he came from Ohio. She documents the soldiers’ deaths with the War Department, which will enable the family of the second soldier to learn of his death and to successfully file a pension claim nearly two decades later.]
After quite a long stop I inquired what they were staying there for, then I found that there was not an officer on board, or any body who had any authority whatever on the train that was left except myself, and I directed the engineer to proceed to Washington, which he did as soon as the directions were given. I could not help suppressing a smile at the thought of his stating that he was waiting for orders, and that in reality I was then military conductor of the train that bore one of the law-makers of the nation not only, but its citizens and its helpless defenders. Since then it has been with some pride that I have recalled the fact that I have been the conductor of a train that had conveyed the future Vice President of the United States.
After the Battle of Fredericksburg, surgeons whom Walker had assisted tried, again unsuccessfully, to secure an appointment and commission for her. She made her own uniform and continued providing medical care in hospitals and evacuation points in and around Washington DC, often at her own expense.
In the fall of 1863 she traveled to the battlefield hospitals near Chickamauga, where Union forces had suffered a defeat and 16,000 casualties. Her work there earned the admiration of General George H. Thomas. In 1864 she persuaded Congressman (and former brigadier general) John Franklin Farnsworth to recommend her appointment to Assistant Surgeon General Wood, long one of her supporters. Wood ordered Walker to Chattanooga for a medical board evaluation of her skills. The evaluating officers, hostile to contract surgeons and women physicians, dismissed her qualifications. They questioned her only on women’s health issues, derided her answers to their questions, and ignored her previous wartime service.
General Thomas overruled the board’s recommendation to deny her appointment. He commissioned her as an assistant surgeon at the lieutenant grade and assigned her to the 52nd Ohio Volunteers at Fort Gordon, Georgia, under the supervision of Col. Daniel McCook Jr. McCook sent Walker on humanitarian and espionage missions across Confederate lines.
On April 10, 1864, Confederate soldiers captured Walker on one of her missions behind Confederate lines. Suspecting her of espionage, they transferred her to Richmond’s infamous Castle Thunder prison. She slept on an infested mattress in a poorly ventilated room, where gas lighting damaged her eyes so that she would never again perform surgery. She nearly starved on limited rations of cornbread, bacon, and pea or rice soup. She was allowed only thirty minutes of exercise in the prison yard each day. Guards treated her poorly, and Richmond newspapers ridiculed her. She was exchanged for a Confederate surgeon on August 12, 1864.
After her release, Walker returned south to treat wounded from the Battle of Atlanta. Afterward she served as surgeon in charge of the Female Prison in Louisville, Kentucky, and as director of the Refugee House in Clarksville, Tennessee. Her military service officially ended on June 15, 1865.
President Andrew Johnson awarded Walker the Medal of Honor for “valuable service to the government” and devotion with “patriotic zeal to the sick and wounded soldiers, both in the field and hospitals, to the detriment of her own health,” and for enduring “hardships as a prisoner of war four months in a Southern prison while acting as a Contract-Surgeon.”
After the war Walker wrote and lectured on women’s rights, petitioned Congress to secure military pensions for Civil War nurses, and ran a tuberculosis sanitarium. She received a pension half that of her male peers. In 1917 the War Department changed the criteria for the Medal of Honor and rescinded her award, along with those awarded to William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and 909 other men. She refused to return the medal, and wore it until her death two years later.
In 1977 President Jimmy Carter restored Walker’s award, citing her “distinguished gallantry, self-sacrifice, patriotism, dedication and unflinching loyalty to her country, despite the apparent discrimination because of her sex.” To date, she remains the only woman so recognized.
Cornelia Hancock
(1840–1927)
U.S. Army
Cornelia Hancock, a Quaker, served as a nurse with the Union Army. After the Battle of Gettysburg, her brother-in-law, Dr. Henry T. Child, requested her service as a volunteer nurse to help with those wounded in the fighting. Dorothea Dix turned her offer of service down because she was young and attractive, but Hancock went anyway. She spent the rest of the war in nursing, except for a short period working with escaped African American slaves in Washi
ngton DC. The excerpts below are from her letters home, first published posthumously in 1937 as South after Gettysburg: Letters of Cornelia Hancock.
Gettysburg, Pa. July 7th, 1863.
My dear cousin
I am very tired tonight; have been on the field all day. . . . There are no words in the English language to express the sufferings I witnessed today. The men lie on the ground; their clothes have been cut off them to dress their wounds; they are half naked, have nothing but hard-tack to eat. . . . I was the first woman who reached the Second Corps after the three days fight at Gettysburg. I was in that Corps all day, not another woman within a half mile. . . . [I] received nothing but the greatest politeness from even the lowest private. You can tell Aunt that there is every opportunity for “secesh” sympathizers to do a good work among the butternuts; we have lots of them here suffering fearfully. To give you some idea of the extent and numbers of the wounds, four surgeons, none of whom were idle fifteen minutes at a time, were busy all day amputating legs and arms. I gave to every man that had a leg or arm off a gill of wine, to every wounded in Third Division, one glass of lemonade, some bread and preserves and tobacco—as much as I am opposed to the latter, for they need it very much, they are so exhausted.
I feel very thankful that this was a successful battle; the spirit of the men is so high that many of the poor fellows said today, “What is an arm or leg to whipping Lee out of Penn.” I would get on first rate if they would not ask me to write to their wives; that I cannot do without crying, which is not pleasant to either party. I do not mind the sight of blood, have seen limbs taken off and was not sick at all.
Gettysburg—July 8th, 1863
My dear sister
We have been two days on the field; go out about eight and come in about six—go in ambulances or army buggies. . . . I feel assured I shall never feel horrified at anything that may happen to me hereafter. There is a great want of surgeons here; there are hundreds of brave fellows, who have not had their wounds dressed since the battle. . . . Get the Penn Relief to send clothing here; there are many men without anything but a shirt lying in poor shelter tents, calling on God to take them from this world of suffering; in fact the air is rent with petitions to deliver them from their sufferings.
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