Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  By ship, as well as by train, the Island received the wreckage of the army in Virginia. Throughout June, hospital ships had come up from the Peninsula. In July, the wounded poured in a great tide from the battles of the Seven Days. Crowds gathered at the Sixth and Seventh Street wharves to see the men carried from the ships and loaded on the ambulances. At night, there were fewer spectators. In the flaring light of the torches, the workers of the Sanitary Commission moved about the sheds where coffee and beef soup steamed in cauldrons. The watchman’s hoarse voice cried, “Steamers in sight!” Through the mist, loomed the white top-heavy shape of a great river boat. In silence, like a ghost ship, it moved alongside the wharf. There were no lights, no figures at the rails, no stir of arrival or greeting. The passengers lay on the decks, in the cabins and the saloons, even on the stairs and the gangway. The light of the relief workers’ candles flickered on beseeching eyes, for these men were pitifully afraid of being stepped on. The business of transferring them to the ambulances went on quietly. There were a few groans. Now and then, a man screamed as he was lifted. For the most part, the passengers were as silent as their companions who lay with covered faces in the bow. The ghost ship moved on, to make way for another. All night, the ambulances rattled out to the hills beyond the city.

  Often, when at long last he lay in a quiet bed, the wounded soldier opened his eyes on a strange apparition—the figure of a woman. The example of Miss Florence Nightingale in the Crimea had made seemly the presence of ladies in hospitals devoted to men. In June of 1861, Miss Dorothea L. Dix of Massachusetts had been appointed Superintendent of Women Nurses.

  Miss Dix had for many years been known among her compatriots for a remarkable reason; she was a lady who was engaged in public work. She had devoted her life to lunatics, paupers and prisoners. By her revelations of the inhumane conditions in almshouses and jails, particularly in the treatment of the insane, she had brought about reforms, influenced legislation and enlarged the social consciousness of the nation. All this she had accomplished without sacrificing her woman’s prerogative of timidity and refinement. Her health was extremely delicate, so were her sensibilities. She wanted to be, in the words of her biographer, “a voice of tender supplication“; and she shrank from the filth and depravity which her investigations forced her to witness, as she did from the vulgarity of the politicians through whom she was obliged to work. There was something formidable in the self-castigation of this fragile and consecrated virgin. She had a low, sweet voice. The knot of hair seemed too heavy for the gentle head set on a long neck. But her mouth and chin were firm, and her blue-gray eyes could dilate with holy indignation. Her fame as a humanitarian was national. Railway companies in all parts of the United States sent her passes. Express companies carried free the packages she forwarded to prisons, hospitals and insane asylums. Her reputation cast a final respectability over the position of female nurse; and on the news of her appointment applications flooded into Washington, while many young women came in person to offer their services.

  The majority of these thousands of applicants met with a stern rejection. Miss Dix in 1861 was nearly sixty years old. She considered all persons under thirty disqualified for nursing. She requested the provost marshal, who had been receiving a number of aspiring ladies, to send her only those who were able to turn a full-grown man around in bed, and to do the most menial work. This, he remarked, thinned the ranks of the candidates very much. Good looks met with as little favor as youth. Miss Dix had a detestation of wasp waists. A kindly disposed woman said that, to win the superintendent’s approval, an applicant must be “plain almost to repulsion in dress.” Certainly, hospital wards were no place for crinolines. The nurses, in their perpendicular skirts, seemed to themselves laughably “angular” and “mediaeval” in appearance. But young and personable women showed that they were able to lay off their hoops, forget their vanity, and do good work in the hospitals; while a number of Miss Dix’s elderly frights proved a disgrace to the service for which she had accepted them.

  Even in June, 1861, when preparations were being made for a war of only two or three months, Miss Dix needed an organization. In her long career of public service, she had always worked alone, and she had no administrative ability. She was elderly, high-strung and inflexible. In a determination to do everything herself, she was soon involved in a maze of details. She interviewed all candidates, assigned them to their posts, visited hospitals, adjusted disputes, and ferreted out abuses, in addition to supervising the distribution of quantities of supplies. Her authority was ill-defined, and conflicted with that of surgeons. Most of them did not approve of the new-fangled idea of introducing female nurses into the military hospitals. Some conceded that women might have a place in the diet kitchen, the linen room or the laundry. Others would employ only black-robed, disciplined Sisters of Charity, who did not gossip or fuss, and were not given to writing home that the patients were maltreated, or that the surgeons drank and misappropriated the hospital stores.

  It was not a time when men were accustomed to having their work interfered with by women. The pious and opinionated Miss Dix, sweeping like an avenging angel through the wards, was soon detested by the medical profession. Under the pressure of her multifarious and unsystematized duties, she grew overwrought, lost her self-control and involved herself in quarrels. In these she was often in the right; but she never showed the graces of tolerance and tact. Some of her feuds were carried to remarkable lengths. The surgeon in charge of the Mansion House Hospital in Alexandria was determined to have none of her nurses. Miss Dix assigned a woman to the Mansion House, instructing her to make no complaint, whatever happened. The hospital informed the nurse that there was no room for her. Miss Dix bade her stay where she had been placed. Resolutely ministering to the wounded by day, this obedient soul passed the nights on the floor between their cots until her presence was accepted. But hers was an unusual fortitude.

  Miss Dix remained at her post without a leave of absence throughout the war. Many of the doctors snubbed her, and selected their own nurses, and they were supported by the Surgeon General’s order giving them “control and direction” over the attendants of the cases under their charge. The nurses were never organized. One group continued to report to Miss Dix, others to various surgeons. Some gave their services without compensation, and some received the Government allowance of twelve dollars a month and food. There were women sent by State agencies and aid societies, and wives and sisters who came to visit soldiers and remained to care for them. Without training or discipline, they were all set adrift in the hospitals, to learn their duties as best they could. They were overburdened with heavy work because of the infirmity of the male attendants—convalescent soldiers, often too weak to be of any assistance. Women showed courage and initiative in entering this new field of activity, but most of them were of little use. The foolishly sentimental and the incompetent were weeded out. Many fell ill. Only a few heroic women were able to survive the hard work and the bad food, and to conciliate the surgeons and wardmasters.

  In her inspection of the hospitals, Miss Dix had fixed her spinster’s eye on perfection; but in those hastily devised institutions perfection was nowhere to be found. At the outbreak of war, no general hospital existed in the United States Army. Buildings, nurses, sickdiet kitchens, clothing, a readily available supply of medicines were all wanting. The entire system had to be created in the midst of war. On the Medical Bureau, as on the other War Department bureaus, the dead hand of seniority lay heavily. Its white-haired officers had not kept pace with the improvements made in European armies in the care of the sick and wounded. The Surgeon General’s authority was confused by complicated relations with the Commissary Department, which had jurisdiction over food for the hospitals, and the Quartermaster’s, which was in charge of ambulances and of hospital construction and equipment. The small medical staff of the regular Army was largely composed of elderly men, unfit for active service. It was necessary to recruit doctors by thousands; a
nd, tying green sashes about their waists, practitioners of every degree of skill and training were transformed into army surgeons. In addition, large numbers of physicians—the so-called “contract surgeons”—were employed as uncommissioned officers in the hospital wards. Underpaid and without incentive to promotion, the contract surgeons were, with notable exceptions, an inefficient and ill-disciplined group. A corps of Medical Cadets was chiefly made up of students who volunteered as dressers and assistants. The duties of druggists, clerks and storekeepers were performed by men who enlisted as stewards.

  In the spring of 1861, while everything connected with the army organization was in chaos, ladies’ relief societies were devotedly working in every city and town and village in the country. Their boxes of clothing and food overloaded the freight cars on the Washington railroad. Sidetracked to make way for the movement of troops and army stores, these cars frequently yielded moldy cakes, broken glass, and garments stained by fermenting jellies. Even when they were not wasted, the supplies sent in those first days were usually unsuitable. Soldiers at the front were soon obliged to dispense with the luxurious outfits which loving hands had prepared for them; and the hot and cumbersome havelocks carpeted every camp and line of march with soiled white drilling. Even before they had learned that the havelocks were an outstanding example of misapplied energy, the women began to realize that their impulsive generosity should be guided by some information about the soldiers’ needs.

  In New York City, Dr. Henry Bellows, a popular Unitarian minister, suggested that the information should be sought in Washington; and, in company with three doctors, he made a trip to the capital in the second month of the war. Though their mission had received its impetus from the ladies, these gentlemen were only secondarily concerned with the delivery of comforts for the army. They had been deeply impressed by the appalling loss of life by disease during the Crimean War, and they were determined that the United States should profit by the experience which Great Britain had gained at such fearful cost. They wanted to form a scientific board which should have power to enforce sanitary regulations in the camps. Their hopes were soon dashed by contact with the antiquated machinery of the Medical Bureau. The meddlesome civilians were received with coldness, and discouraged by evasion and delay. But they were prominent gentlemen, and persistent, and at last they were grudgingly granted permission to act as an advisory body.

  The office of president of the United States Sanitary Commission fell to Dr. Bellows, and he devoted his eloquence and zeal to the arduous task of raising funds for its work. The chief executive duties were performed by the general secretary of the commission at its central office in Washington; and presently, to fill this post, a frail little man arrived at the capital on crutches. Before the war, Frederick Law Olmsted had traveled widely in the South, and had written books describing social and economic conditions little comprehended in the free States. The vivid and tolerant pages of A Journey in the Back Country and A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States had given many Northerners their first accurate knowledge of slavery. Aside from his writing, Olmsted’s main interest was in farming and horticulture. He was engaged in an unusual profession, that of landscape architect, and he had been made the architect and superintendent of New York City’s Central Park, that project novel in America of a large pleasure ground designed for the use of the people. Olmsted had proved to be an able public servant who tenaciously developed the park in the face of unceasing opposition from corrupt politicians. His health had suffered from the strain; and a fall from his horse, while inspecting the work, had given him a badly broken thigh. Yet his leave of absence for patriotic duty brought him no rest for two laborious years. In July of 1861, he shared with a competent doctor the labor of inspecting twenty camps near Washington. That year, the servants often found him still at work when they came to set the breakfast table. In the spring of 1862, he went to the Peninsula to spend himself in untiring service. His wasted, autocratic face, with its feminine features and straggling mustache, burned with the same harsh flame of consecration that lighted the features of Miss Dix. But Olmsted had a genius for organization; and, backed by the gentlemen of his board, he developed the Sanitary Commission into an immense and powerful agency for the relief of suffering among the soldiers.

  Theirs were the plans for the new pavilion hospitals; theirs, the monographs which acquainted country practitioners in green sashes with hygiene and vaccination, with the treatment of dysentery and malaria and venereal diseases. They forced the necessity for camp sanitation on the Government’s attention. Their barrels of potatoes and onions abated scurvy in many regiments. They equipped and staffed the hospital ships; and, later, built hospital cars, with swinging litters, kitchens and dispensaries.

  For all this great work, however, the Sanitary Commission might have remained little known to the general public, had it not been for the secondary phase of its activities—the distribution of supplies. By the sheer force of their patriotic benevolence, the ladies overwhelmed the scientific preoccupations of Dr. Bellows and Mr. Olmsted and their associates. Everywhere the war was bringing women out of the seclusion of domestic life. Timid ones grew bold as lions. Invalids arose from their sofas. To the astonishment of men, they were able to draft constitutions and bylaws, to serve on committees and preside at meetings; even to raise and handle money. From thousands of aid societies in all parts of the Union, a steady stream of stores flowed to the Sanitary Commission. Enriched by large donations, it established enormous storehouses, and administered them efficiently. It organized a relief service for hospitals and camps, and installed its own refreshment saloons. Trained agents, in charge of the commission’s wagonloads of supplies, moved with every army. The name, which had been derived from an interest in preventive hygiene, became a household word; and everything sent to the soldiers, from currant wine to canton flannel drawers, went by the name of “sanitary stores.”

  As the first volunteers marched from the Washington depot, the regiments spilled out ailing and exhausted men. Unless they were desperately ill, they could find no room in the few beds provided by the Government, or the emergency hospitals established by the regiments; and many lay in cars and streets, dependent on the random charity of the passers-by. After the rout of First Bull Run, the number of these derelicts was enormously multiplied; and, for the purpose of giving them food and shelter, the Government allotted to the Sanitary Commission a part of an old cane factory near the depot. This was the beginning of a new field of the commission’s work. From the cane factory on North Capitol Street grew the rest house known as the Soldiers’ Home. It was a collection of frame structures, enclosed by a picket fence, with the name of the Sanitary Commission flapping on an awning over the entrance. Between the buildings on sunny days, pale soldiers were to be seen lounging against the walls, resting on their crutches or sitting in wooden chairs. It was the first of five lodges established in Washington, in addition to two at Alexandria—one at the depot, and one in the near-by convalescent camp, known to the soldiers as Camp Misery. They served food to the wounded at wharves and depots, gave lodging to their mothers, wives and children, and cared for convalescents who were discharged from the hospitals. Forty rest houses were operated by the commission at various points during the war.

  At the outset, there had been no pretense that a sufficiency of any sort of supplies existed in Washington. The surgeons had been so destitute of every necessity that the Sanitary Commission had undertaken to supplement the Government’s hospital stores, and also to employ nurses, dressers, laundresses and barbers, until the Medical Bureau should have time to function properly. There were many cases of dysentery, diarrhea and typhoid in the unsanitary camps. The sick lists were lengthened by the frequent acceptance of the unfit for service—men with long-standing disabilities of hernia or consumption. Country boys had little resistance to the epidemics of measles, mumps and smallpox which broke out in the first summer of the war, and autumn ushered in the season of malaria in Washington. />
  As the months passed, the other War Department bureaus were active, and, in spite of fraud and confusion, the army was in some fashion being fed and clothed and armed. The Medical Bureau remained somnolent. Even for the routine medical work of the camps, no efficient allowance was made. In spite of the smallpox epidemic, the Government ran short of vaccine virus in the autumn, and the Sanitary Commission provided for the vaccination of over twenty thousand men. Although a battle was momentarily expected to take place near Washington in the fall of 1861, the Medical Bureau refused to prepare for it, and informed the protesting Sanitary Commission that it would be time enough to order hospital supplies after the battle had occurred. When a few wounded were brought to the capital after a skirmish in September, the Medical Bureau was obliged to call on the commission for lint and bandages. As late as November, there was no large reserve of hospital stores in the capital. If Ball’s Bluff had been followed by a general action on the Potomac, it would have been impossible to care for the wounded.

  Indignant at being forced to continue the legitimate work of the Government, Mr. Olmsted and the other members of the commission determined that the Medical Bureau must be reformed. These gentlemen became vigorous lobbyists, and the medical bill which they assisted in preparing was passed by Congress in the spring of 1862—too late to prevent the frightful neglect of the wounded in the campaigns of that season.

  Among the bill’s provisions was the appointment of a Surgeon General on the ground of ability, rather than seniority. The incumbent, Dr. Clement A. Finley, placed in office in 1861, was a gentleman of the old school, courteous and fossilized. In his youth, he had been known as the handsomest man in the Army, and he still presented a very fine appearance, with his rosy cheeks, short white hair and spruce beard and mustaches. Although he had been obliged to yield the point, Dr. Finley was opposed to female nurses for soldiers. In Philadelphia, he had an old-maid niece called Martha, a female who tried her hand at writing stories. Before he died, he would see Martha Finley make a success with her Elsie Dinsmore books.