The inspectors were to focus on prevention. They were given checklists (180 items!) concerning drinking water, rations, discipline, mortality, sickness, hospital accommodations, and so on. They also distributed pamphlets to army surgeons on new medical and surgical practices.
The Sanitary Commission’s second task grew in scope as the war went on. It became obvious that the army was unprepared to attend to the needs of the vast volunteer force. The Sanitary Commission took it upon itself to make up for this deficiency. Olmsted established a dozen depots behind the lines from which the inspectors and agents could draw supplies. He designated local voluntary relief organizations, generally controlled by women, as subsidiary branches of the Commission. They were responsible for collecting, storing, and shipping donations to the depots. Many of the donations were in kind: blankets, bandages, clothing, baked and canned goods. Local branches in major cities raised funds used to purchase medicine, surgical supplies, foodstuffs, wine and brandy (which were invaluable stimulants), cots, tents, wagons, and horses.
Before all this could be accomplished, a hurdle had to be overcome: the army’s Medical Bureau. The Bureau had actively resisted the formation of the Sanitary Commission. The Commission, in turn, considered the Bureau poorly organized and ineffectual. The Medical Bureau had been designed to serve a peacetime army of fifteen thousand men; it was unprepared to deal with the hundreds of thousands of volunteers. At the beginning of the war the army had only twenty-six surgeons, of whom fully one-third were untrained. Nevertheless, the Bureau resisted any attempt at reform. For example, the army would not permit Olmsted to launch a public appeal for blankets since this would imply that the troops were not being well taken care of by the government. (Eventually Montgomery Meigs, the practical quartermaster general, issued his own appeal.) The advice of the Commission inspectors often fell on deaf ears since army surgeons were promoted according to military seniority rather than medical skill. Olmsted put much of the blame for this situation on the surgeon general, Clement A. Finley, whom he considered a “self-satisfied, supercilious, bigoted blockhead.” In October Bellows, Olmsted, and several members of the board met with President Lincoln and demanded Finley’s replacement. Lincoln, who had once referred to the Sanitary Commission as a “fifth wheel to the coach,” refused. So did the secretary of war, Simon Cameron, a man of dubious reputation, responsible for the notorious corruption of the War Department.
In an attempt to discredit Finley, Cornelius Agnew planted stories critical of the surgeon general in the New York World. Unexpectedly, other New York papers came to the surgeon general’s defense, and the Commission found itself the object of criticism. Olmsted quickly organized a response—a long report for the Secretary of War that he leaked to the press. “I want that as soon as practicable after this [report] is out, there should be a grand simultaneous expression of confidence in the Commission,” he instructed Bellows, “which shall completely counteract the effect which has unquestionably been mischievous of the Times’ & other attacks upon us.” The nastiest attacks were in the Times, signed “Truth.” The author was a young woman with whom the editor Henry Raymond appears to have been romantically involved. Olmsted coolly made sure that Mrs. Raymond was alerted. Soon the letters from “Truth” ceased. But what turned the tide was his “Report to the Secretary of War.” It was pure Olmsted: an exhaustive and candid review that synthesized the Commission’s work thus far and clearly—and uncompromisingly—spelled out solutions for the future. The papers praised it. Even the Times admitted that the Commission represented “humanity ministering to wants and sufferings that would become horrors but for such merciful ministrations.”
• • • •
Amid the political intrigues Olmsted regularly returned to New York to work on Central Park, although with increasing apprehension that his advice was neither wanted nor welcome. In October 1861 Mary gave birth to a child. “We have a girl,” he informed Charles Brace, “which though not what the country wants now is to me personally more agreeable than a man-child would have been.” Little Marion was a healthy baby who pouted and made faces at her father, who had hurried back from Washington. Mrs. Lucas, the nurse, said it was just stomach cramps, but Olmsted thought it was a sign of character. “They used to call it spunk when I did it,” he maintained with fatherly pride.
In November he revived Yeoman and wrote an article for the New-York Times. In “The Rebellion: How to Reason with the South—How to Deal with the Slavery Question,” he made the original proposal to establish sanctuaries in occupied areas where runaway slaves would be offered safe haven. He had introduced a similar idea years before in A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. The resulting depletion and demoralization of plantation labor, he argued, would have a serious effect on the South’s war effort.
His renewed interest in slavery was spurred by a recent event. The previous month, the federal navy had seized parts of the South Carolina coast, including the harbor of Port Royal and the sea islands of Hilton Head and Edisto, which contained some of the richest plantations in the South. The plantations and the slaves were considered spoils of war (slaves were not automatically freed—the Emancipation Proclamation was still a year away). The secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, a rigid antislavery advocate, resisted leasing the plantations and their workers to private interests and instead appointed a lawyer named Edward Pierce to supervise the so-called contrabands on behalf of the government. Olmsted saw an opportunity to demonstrate that free slaves could become self-sufficient laborers. He met with Pierce, who was sympathetic. So was Secretary Chase; but he was reluctant to spend public money on a social experiment. Olmsted then drafted a bill “to provide for the occupation and cultivation of the cotton and other lands in possession of the United States” and convinced the Republican senator from Connecticut to sponsor it. The bill, introduced in February 1862, allocated funds for medical care and supervision and regulated the amount that the slaves, who were referred to as “indigents” and “vagrants,” would be paid. Olmsted carefully avoided the contentious issue of emancipation, but his gradualist sentiments were plain. He lobbied hard for the bill. He prepared a petition for his father to circulate in Hartford. He solicited help from prominent members of the Commission board: Bellows, Bache, and Howe. He corresponded with influential friends: George Curtis and Charles Eliot Norton. He wrote to President Lincoln.
An editorial in the New York World called for a government commission on Port Royal. “Mr. Fred. Law Olmsted probably combines more qualifications for such an office than any other man in the country.” This time Olmsted had nothing to do with the newspaper coverage, but the idea of becoming personally involved had occurred to him. “I shall go to Port Royal, if I can, and work out practically every solution of the Slavery question—long ago advocated in my book,” he told his father. “I have talked it over with Mary and she agrees.” He was not being disloyal to Bellows. At this point the future of the Sanitary Commission was far from certain. Its funds were running low, Lincoln was not supportive, and Finley appeared firmly entrenched as head of the Medical Bureau.
To break the logjam, in December 1861 Bellows and Olmsted tried a different tactic. They prevailed on the chairman of the Senate’s Military Affairs Committee to introduce a bill calling for the reform of the Medical Bureau. The legislation was drawn up by William A. Hammond, an army physician whom the Commission was backing as Finley’s replacement. Olmsted mobilized support for the bill. He arranged for prominent civic leaders to lobby congressmen. He enlisted the support of George Opdyke, the mayor of New York, as well as General George McClellan, the commander of the Army of the Potomac.
Olmsted was becoming versed in Washington politics. While he was pushing his two bills through Congress, he concluded that the real authority over the confiscated plantations lay not with the Treasury but with the War Department: it would be the future military governor of Port Royal who would have the real power to effect the changes that Olmsted advocated. So, when Salmon
Chase wrote him that Pierce wanted to return to his law practice, and that—at Pierce’s insistence—he was offering Olmsted the position of supervisor, Olmsted turned him down. Instead, he offered his services to the newly appointed secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton.
Olmsted had several balls in the air. When he refused Chase, he did not mention the War Department, but told him that he was considering an alternative job offer. In fact, Mayor Opdyke had asked Olmsted to be the next street commissioner of New York. This influential and powerful post combined planning, constructing, and maintaining not only streets but also piers, wharves, and public buildings. Olmsted was tempted—not least by the five-thousand-dollar salary.
In April the balls fell to the ground. Olmsted’s political instinct about Port Royal had been correct, and his efforts on behalf of the contrabands did bear fruit, but he misjudged his own qualifications. Stanton appointed a military man—a brigadier general—to oversee the confiscated plantations. As for Opdyke, he was unable to garner the necessary support for Olmsted’s nomination—the threat of a disinterested commissioner controlling political patronage proved too great. On the other hand, at the Sanitary Commission the situation accidentally improved. Secretary Stanton, a stiff Ohioan, had an altercation with Finley over an unrelated matter—and fired him. With Finley’s departure, opposition crumbled, and in April the House passed the medical reform bill. A little later, Hammond was confirmed as surgeon general. “Our success is suddenly wonderfully complete,” Olmsted wrote his father.
Nevertheless, he remained undecided about his future. The reinvigorated Commission was planning a flotilla of hospital ships. Olmsted was in charge of organizing the venture but warned his father, “Yet it may all slip up, so don’t talk of it.” Olmsted briefly considered the post of commissioner of a soon-to-be-created Bureau of Agriculture and Statistics. He thought it respectable, comparatively quiet—and permanent. “The alternative is going in & trying to build up a landscape gardening business—an alternative that even at forty, I am not likely to follow very steadily, I fear,” he wrote his father. “ ‘Wherever you see a head, hit it’ is my style of work, & I have not yet sowed my wild oats altogether,” he added cheerfully. Wild oats, indeed! He was now well into middle age.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Yeoman’s War
THE SECRETARY OF WAR agreed that the army would lend vessels and crews to the Commission. The Commission would outfit, staff, and operate the ships. In March 1862 the Army of the Potomac—more than one hundred thousand men—under McClellan had been transported by sea to the mouth of the James River. The plan was to move up the broad peninsula that was bounded by the York River on the east and the James on the west and attack Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy.
The first Sanitary Commission ship, the Daniel Webster, a side-wheel steamboat, sailed from Alexandria, Virginia, at the end of April. Olmsted—who had not joined the Bureau of Agriculture and Statistics, after all—was on board. He was taking personal command of the Hospital Transport Service, a hurriedly organized venture that he could not entrust to a subordinate. The Commission’s relationship with the Medical Bureau was still strained. Someone with authority was needed to make sure that the operation ran smoothly. In any case, he was glad to get out of Washington. And he was finally in the navy. Better still, it was his own little navy.
Olmsted’s first task was to convert the vessels to hospital use, which involved tearing down partitions and building wards, bunks, kitchens, and storerooms. He had canvas awnings constructed to shade the upper decks. The Hospital Transport Service eventually consisted of more than a dozen vessels. Shallow-draft boats navigated the creeks and brought casualties to the riverboats that acted as floating hospitals. The Wilson Small, a side-wheel paddle steamer, served as Olmsted’s headquarters. A supply ship provisioned the hospital ships. Larger steamboats ferried the wounded to the military base at Yorktown or transported them north to Washington and New York. The boats were an odd assortment—cavalry transports, river steamers, tugboats, merchant vessels, and two clipper ships. The largest ship could hold as many as one thousand casualties; smaller vessels carried two or three hundred.
By mid-May, the Hospital Transport Service was headquartered at White House, twenty miles up the Pamunkey River, a tributary of the York. This railhead, about forty miles east of Richmond, was now McClellan’s main supply base. His army was poised outside the city. It had taken him more than three weeks to march up the Peninsula. There had been little fighting, yet casualties poured into White House, victims of dysentery and malaria. A typhoid epidemic was a threat. Olmsted took charge. Tents were set up ashore to act as way stations. The undernourished men were fed and nursed before being loaded aboard the hospital ships and ferried to Yorktown.
Olmsted had two sterling assistants. He brought Frederick Knapp with him from Washington. Knapp had the crucial job of provisioning the hospital ships with food, drinking water, brandy, quinine, ice, and clothing, as well as the usual medical supplies. Robert Ware, an energetic young Boston physician and a Commission inspector, was the chief surgeon. Another valuable aide was James Grymes, a Washington physician and a friend of Knapp’s. The heroic Grymes was untiring in his efforts despite his own ill health—he was tubercular. The rest of Olmsted’s staff consisted of surgeons, medical students, and nurses. There was also a group of volunteers, young ladies from the local aid societies that had given Bellows the original impetus to form the Sanitary Commission. Katharine Wormeley was a thirty-two-year-old unmarried woman from Newport, Rhode Island. “As far as I can judge, our duty is to be very much that of a housekeeper,” she observed. “We attend to the beds, the linen, the clothing of the patients; we have a pantry and store-room, and are required to do all the cooking for the sick, and see that it is properly distributed according to the surgeons’ orders; we are also to have a general superintendence over the conditions of the wards and over the nurses, who are all men.” Olmsted, who was generally skeptical of the usefulness of volunteers and preferred paid workers, came to admire the women’s cheerfulness and untiring dedication. “They beat the doctors all to pieces,” he said. The women, in turn, were devoted to him.
The Commission workers referred to Olmsted as the “Chief.” “In little things as well as in great things no one opposes his will,” observed Wormeley. That was only partly true. As the head of a civilian agency in a war zone, Olmsted was at the beck and call of the military. He answered not only to the medical director of the army—an inflexible man named Tripler—but also to the quartermaster department, the camp commandant, and even to McClellan’s staff. Montgomery Meigs, the quartermaster general, was usually helpful, but he did not hesitate to commandeer a hospital ship for other uses at a moment’s notice. The army transports were inferior to those of the Sanitary Commission. Olmsted was frequently called on to fill in whenever an emergency arose, which further complicated his schedules. Much of his time was spent sorting out conflicting directives and dealing with overbearing army officers, many of whom had never heard of the Hospital Transport Service or the Sanitary Commission.
Still, he persevered. On May 31 the Confederates sallied out of Richmond and attacked McClellan’s left flank near Fair Oaks station. The resulting battle was inconclusive but bloody, with five thousand casualties on each side. Soon boxcars full of Union wounded—also wounded Confederate prisoners—started arriving in White House. Olmsted put all the available transport ships into operation. The Elm City, a 760-ton steamer, ferried five hundred men at a time to Yorktown; three hundred and fifty wounded were crammed into the Daniel Webster; the old Knickerbocker was likewise crowded with wounded. As the shore hospitals filled up, Olmsted ordered the transports to farther ports such as Annapolis and Boston.
Nothing had prepared the Commission staff for the maelstrom of confusion, suffering, and death. The army treated casualties with scant attention. Trainloads of wounded were dumped on the riverbanks. Olmsted provides a graphic description of the scene:
; At the time of which I am now writing, Monday afternoon [two days after the battle], wounded were arriving by every train, entirely unattended or with at most a detail of two soldiers to a train of two or three hundred of them. They were packed as closely as they could be stowed in the common freight cars, without beds, without straw, at most with a wisp of hay under their heads. They arrived, dead and alive together, in the same close box, many with awful wounds festering and alive with maggots. The stench was such as to produce vomiting with some of our strong men, habituated to the duty of attending the sick & wounded of the army.
The heat and humidity were insufferable. The hospital ships filled up with screaming wounded. Surgeons worked around the clock. Wormeley and the other women bravely tried to assuage thirst, hunger, and pain. “You can’t conceive what it is to stem the torrent of this disorder and utter want of organization,” she wrote to her mother. “To think or speak of the things we see would be fatal. No one must come here who cannot put away all feeling. Do all you can, and be a machine,—that’s the way to act; the only way.”
The nightmare continued for a week. There was barely time to eat or sleep. To make matters worse, everyone suffered from a mild but persistent diarrhea. The doctors worried about Olmsted’s health, but it was Knapp who finally came down with malaria and had to return to New York. Another Commission member broke down and became hysterical; he, too, was shipped home. “The horror of war can never be known but on the field,” Olmsted wrote Mary. “It is beyond, far beyond all imagination.” Still, he felt he and his staff had made a difference. “If we had not been just where we were and just so well prepared as we were, I can not tell you what a horrible disgrace there would have been here to our country.” He estimated that of the two or three thousand casualties who were brought to White House, his ships had transported seventeen hundred.
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 23