Many Union soldiers Nellie nursed during the Civil War wrote home about her. A one-armed man composed a lengthy tribute to her for saving his life at the Battle of Fredericksburg. That article first appeared in the New Orleans Daily True Delta, on Friday, January 16, 1863. Frank Moore later incorporated the story into his book, Women of the War: Their Heroism and Self-Sacrifice (Hartford, CT: S. S. Scranton, 1866). Moore’s papers, including the anonymous letter that hounded Nellie years after the war, reside in the Moore Collection (Manuscript Department, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, NC).
A wonderful miscellany of information about the Hundredth Pennsylvania Regiment appears on the official Roundhead Regiment website (http://www.100thpenn.com/). Descendants of the Roundheads have opened their private family collections to make available copies of the memorials they cherish—photos, artifacts, letters, and diaries. The webmaster, David Welch, himself a Roundhead family member, has provided me with invaluable research assistance.
Then there are the stray bits: the sole extant picture of Nellie with the staff at regimental headquarters; a newspaper clipping announcing that a famous Philadelphia photographer had just issued a carte de visite for Miss Nellie Chase; an interview with members of the Ladies Aid Society in Philadelphia, showing that one of their agents is a Miss Chase of Nashville; a comment from a soldier that she worked in Nashville under special orders from General Rosecrans; an Army roster of the military hospitals in Nashville that lists her as head matron of General Hospital #3. From those bits and pieces, I have tried to reconstruct Nellie’s life and personality.
Readers may want to know which parts of this story are factual, and which are the products of the author’s imagination. Here are a few guidelines. Nellie’s early years are obscure, except for Colonel Leasure’s recounting of what she had revealed to him. I have used his version, although, of course, what she told him may, or may not, have been the truth. The year she spent with the Roundheads is extensively documented. We know exactly where she was and what she was doing. The reader can trace the events in William G. Gavin’s Campaigning with the Roundheads: The History of the Hundredth Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the American Civil War 1861-1865 (Dayton, OH: Morningside House, Inc., 1989) or in my own historical monograph, A Scratch with the Rebels: A Pennsylvania Roundhead and a South Carolina Cavalier (Chicora, PA: Mechling Bookbindery, 2007). After that year, however, large gaps appear in the records. I have had to create the events that explain her departure from the Roundheads, her short tour with the New York Highlanders, and her move to Nashville. Those fictional events are, I hope, plausible in the light of what was going on during the period.
Except for the census of 1870, which shows her living in Louisville with her husband George, there is not a single mention of Nellie Chase’s life between 1865 and 1878. The same gap, therefore, necessarily exists in Beyond All Price. The end of Nellie’s life is fairly well-documented in the records of the yellow fever epidemic of 1878. That story takes its details from several historical accounts of the epidemic in Tennessee, most of which can be found in the Memphis Room of the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, Memphis, TN, or the Genealogy Room of the Paris Public Library.
Wherever possible, I have used the names of actual people with whom Nellie associated. Every soldier’s name and service record can be found in the regimental rosters of the Civil War. The medical doctors for whom she worked, and the neighbors who shared her fate in Paris, Tennessee, are real people. The only completely fictitious characters in the novel are some of the civilians—Mrs. McMurphrey, the tavern-keeper’s wife; the slave women, Bessie, Maudy, Maybelle, and little Glory; and the Sisters of Charity in Newport News.
Similarly, the locations are as accurate as I’ve been able to make them. The Pointe in Pittsburgh looks quite different today, and Joel Barlow’s home has disappeared to make way for the elegant embassies that now occupy Kalorama Heights in Washington, DC. My descriptions of those spots take their details from photographs taken in the 1860s. Hilton Head Island’s gated communities conceal much of the evidence of the old Union camp, but just off the main thoroughfare, the cemetery is still accessible and large sections of the encircling ditch and wall remain. The foliage has not changed, and it is possible almost anywhere to step a few feet off the road and find yourself in a setting Nellie might have recognized. On James Island, the pluff mud keeps waging a battle with those who would pave it over. The site of the Battle of Secessionville as been partially restored, but the mosquito squadrons guard it as ferociously as ever. Paul Heddon of J&G Tours in Charleston guided me on a tour of James Island that helped me understand the logistics of the battle.
At Beaufort, all the mentioned houses are intact. Vernier House, which served as Gen. Wright’s headquarters, is now a museum, while the others remain private residences. The current owners of the Leverett House allowed me to explore their home. The interior has been remodeled to add bathrooms and a kitchen, but the original flooring and the general layout remain unchanged. The slave yard is long gone, of course, but the owners showed me where they had found remains of the cookhouse and the cistern. I based my description of the slave yard on a similar, but unrestored, antebellum property, the Aiken-Rhett House in Charleston.
The Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia became known as Mercer Hospital. Despite its modern innovations, it was torn down after the war. Only the sketches and plans remain. In Nashville, the Capitol Building still overlooks the city, and the Ensley Building, central structure of Hospital #3, remains the architectural masterpiece of Courthouse Square. James A. Hoobler’s Cities under the Gun: Images of Occupied Nashville and Chattanooga (Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 1986) provides detailed pictures of the Nashville Nellie knew.
In Paris, Tennessee, however, nearly every trace of Nellie’s life has disappeared. All possessions of yellow fever victims were burned to prevent the spread of the disease. The Railroad Hotel at 905 Depot Street remained closed until the turn of the century. It reopened during the early 1900s and then fell into disrepair after the 1940s. According to the Paris Post-Intelligencer, (May 4, 1974, and June 2, 2006), the city auctioned off its contents and razed the building after a series of small fires. Even the hill on which it stood was bulldozed. All that remains are the same dip in the road where stage coaches used to bog down after a rain and the train station, rebuilt but still operating in its same location across the street.
As a professional historian, I am well aware of history’s tendency to ignore the contributions of women, and I hope this imaginative re-telling of Nellie’s story can at last give her the credit she deserves. I am not sure, however, that Nellie herself would appreciate it. She was very much a woman of her own time, and she went out of her way to avoid drawing undue attention to herself. She wanted her life to count for something, but the only recognition she really wanted was her own. After Nellie’s bout with coastal malaria at Hilton Head, Daniel Leasure wrote, “I believe she expects and wishes to die at her post, sooner or later, to the end that she may lay down a life in the service of her country that has been a burden to her.” Nellie Chase was content to die when she could believe that she had contributed something worthwhile, something that bettered the lives of others. She did not find that assurance on a Civil War battlefield or in the praise of those who called her the “Florence Nightingale of the West.” Nellie Chase found a cause for which to lay down her life in a railroad hotel in a small Tennessee town.
Carolyn Poling Schriber received her Ph.D. in Medieval History from the University of Colorado. After she retired from her position as a history professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, she turned her research to the history of America’s Civil War. In 2007 she published A Scratch with the Rebels: A Pennsylvania Roundhead and a South Carolina Cavalier, which documented the experiences of the 100th Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment during the first year of the war. Beyond All Price is a historical novel based on the characters in that regiment.
Carolyn Poling Schriber, Beyond All Price
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