Louisa on the Front Lines

by Samantha Seiple

  In the fall of 1862, Louisa was still busy sewing uniforms for soldiers and writing. “Sewing Bees and Lint Picks for ‘our boys’ kept us busy… wrote much… and sent it to L[eslie]., who wants more than I can send him. So, between blue flannel jackets for ‘our boys’… I reel off my ‘thrilling’ tales.… War news bad.… I like the stir in the air, and long for battle like a warhorse when he smells powder. The blood of the Mays is up!” Lu wrote. Lu wasn’t satisfied staying home and writing thrilling tales of adventure or sewing uniforms. She wanted to do her duty, but she wanted to live a life of adventure beyond what was deemed acceptable for a woman in serving a greater cause. She knew that if she had the opportunity to go out into the world, the life experience would help her develop as a person and writer, which, in turn, would allow her to further a cause that she passionately believed in while, at the same time, enabling her to take care of her family. Soon after the war broke out, Lu came up with a plan.

  She’d been studying William Home’s report on gunshot wounds as well as Florence Nightingale’s recently published best-selling book Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not. In 1862, the nursing profession was still in its infancy. Most nursing duties were assigned to men, soldiers recovering from injuries, because it was generally accepted that women were too fragile to cope with the demands.

  In a letter to the editor of the American Medical Times, an Army surgeon voiced this belief:

  Our women appear to have become almost wild on the subject of hospital nursing.… They, with the best of intentions in the world, are frequently a useless annoyance.… Imagine a delicate, refined woman assisting a rough soldier… supplying him with a bed-pan, or adjusting knots on a T-bandage employed in retaining a catheter in position.… Besides this, women as a rule, have not the physical strength necessary.… Women, in our humble opinion, are utterly and decidedly unfit for such service.

  At the start of the war, the Union army barely had a medical department and lacked a system for distributing food, medicines, and supplies. In response to this, Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female physician, organized the Women’s Central Association for Relief in New York City. She and a number of male physicians, along with similar relief organizations, petitioned the government to establish a central relief organization called the US Sanitary Commission to distribute the supplies that the women made, the money they raised and to provide nurses for the battlefields and hospitals. The Sanitary Commission would also act as an advisory body to the Union army’s medical department and keep tabs on the army’s health conditions.

  When the idea was brought before Surgeon General Clement Finley, he dismissed it as “a monument of weak enthusiasts and of well-meaning but weak silly women.” Nevertheless, he reluctantly agreed to it so long as “the operations of the Commission should be confined to the volunteers,” and the Sanitary Commission, considered the forerunner to the American Red Cross, was established in June 1861.

  Not long after the organization was established, an Alcott family friend, Dorothea Dix, who was a well-known mental health advocate and one-time teaching assistant to Bronson, was officially appointed superintendent of female nurses of the Union army, with a mandate to recruit female nurses. The announcement from the surgeon general’s office in the War Department, which was publicized in newspapers, read, “Miss Dix has been entrusted by the War Department with the duty of selecting women nurses and assigning them to general or permanent military hospitals.… Women wishing employment as nurses must apply to Miss Dix or to her authorized agents.”

  Although she didn’t have a nursing background, Dix was compared to Florence Nightingale “in her ministerings to the afflicted.… Her presence of supervision guarantees that all that can be done for suffering humanity will assuredly be done.” At fifty-nine years old, the unmarried Dix had been tireless for the past twenty years in her one-woman crusade to improve the living conditions in hospitals for the mentally ill. Despite her poor health from a bout with malaria, she was stern, with a no-nonsense approach that didn’t always win her friends, but it did earn her the nickname “Dragon Dix.”

  Despite the Union army’s desperate need for nurses, which was made shockingly evident after its disastrous defeat in the Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, Dix’s first order of business was setting forth the requirements that women had to meet if they wanted to become army nurses—no exceptions. Dix didn’t want nurses who were looking for husbands. So the applicants had to be at least thirty years old but no older than fifty, plain looking, and wear only brown, gray, or black clothing. Hoop skirts, which were very fashionable, were forbidden. Prerequisites included “habits of neatness, order, sobriety, and industry” along with two letters of recommendation “testifying to morality, integrity, seriousness, and capacity for the care of the sick.” Free black women, regardless of class and education, were not considered for any nursing positions at this point in the war—with one exception. Sometimes they were allowed to nurse highly infectious white patients, especially if there was an outbreak of smallpox. Although surgeons and administrators did hire black women to work in all-white hospitals, they were assigned the menial jobs, such as cooking, doing laundry, emptying chamber pots, and washing floors.

  Dix’s regulations did not require a nursing education or any training because nursing schools didn’t yet exist. The pay was $12.17 a month (men earned $20.50 a month), plus room and board, and a free round-trip train ticket. The length of service was six months or the duration of the war, whichever was shorter.

  Lu would turn thirty on November 29, and as soon as she was old enough, she sent in her application. “I want new experiences, and am sure to get ’em if I go,” Lu wrote in her journal. “So I’ve sent in my name, and bide my time writing tales, to leave all snug behind me, and mending up my old clothes—for nurses don’t need nice things, thank Heaven!”

  Chapter 3

  A SOLDIER’S STORY

  October 6, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland

  About two months before Lu enlists as an army nurse

  ON OCTOBER 6, 1862, A FLAME OF LIGHT FLICKERED IN the darkness of the cool night. John Suhre, a twenty-year-old Union soldier and blacksmith from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, was writing a letter to his sister. His tent was pitched one mile outside of Sharpsburg, Maryland, on Shepherdstown Road, among the gentle, rolling hills of green farmland and yellow cornfields that were now stained red with the blood of thousands of wounded and dead soldiers in the war’s deadliest one-day battle.

  John confided in his sister that he was homesick and worried. He didn’t write about any fear of battle, injury, or death. Instead, John was feeling anxious because he hadn’t received any letters from his family in three weeks.

  The stamps that his fourteen-year-old brother, George, had sent him earlier had arrived safely. Despite the difficulty that all soldiers had keeping paper and stamps dry, John had written and mailed two letters home, one to his mother and one to his older half sister, Anna. John wanted to write also to his older half brother Emanuel, but he wasn’t sure where to send the letter. Emanuel, who had been a printer’s apprentice and a teacher, was now working and putting himself through Bethany College in Virginia. John’s outspoken brother dreamed of one day being the editor and owner of a newspaper. Emanuel was also engaged to be married to Phoebe Colborn, a schoolteacher in Somerset, who was described as “a lady of culture and fine literary taste.” Since John hadn’t received any mail lately, he didn’t know the details of Emanuel and Phoebe’s wedding, which had taken place two weeks ago.

  Consequently, John was left wondering whether his family had received any of his letters. His main worry was that he’d been paid twenty-seven dollars for his service in the army, which began on August 14, and, even though his family was relying on him for money, he was afraid that if he mailed it to them, they wouldn’t receive it. So, he decided to keep the money for now.

  John’s family had experienced their fair share of financial hardship. In 1847,
when John was five years old, he was startled awake in the middle of the night as red-hot embers crashed down from the ceiling. The house his family lived in at Critchfield’s Mill was ablaze. Fortunately, his family slept on the first floor and woke up in time to get out. But they lost nearly everything in the fast-burning fire, which was later blamed on the stovepipe.

  His father, Joseph, was a German immigrant who had come to America and found work as a miller in the wooded highlands of Somerset County. It was there that he met John’s mother, Sarah, who, at the time, was in her midthirties and a recent widow with five children. They married in 1840, and John was born the following year. Joseph and Sarah had two more children together, and, throughout the years, they made their home in the various small villages, including Elk Lick and Milford, that made up Somerset County. But a few years prior to the war, his father died, and their mother, who was now in her midfifties, was struggling to make ends meet.

  When the war began and President Lincoln called for volunteers, John’s older half brother Mike enlisted, joining the Thirty-Ninth Regiment of the Tenth Pennsylvania Reserves, Company A, on June 20, 1861. One year later, Mike was wounded and taken prisoner at the Battle of Gaines’s Mill, a bloody victory for the shrewd and strategic Confederate general Robert E. Lee. By the following month, Mike was paroled and recovering in a war hospital. Although he planned on returning to the Union army as soon as he could, Mike hadn’t been paid in five months. So John had sent him a dollar, explaining to his sister via letter, “I told him if he needed any more he should let me know. It is not very pleasant to be out of money altogether.”

  Despite his brother’s plight, a month after Mike was admitted to the war hospital, John joined the Union army himself, signing on for nine months with the 133rd Pennsylvania Volunteers Regiment, Company D. Everyone in his company had been recruited from Somerset County. Major Edward Schrock was the commander, and Edward’s younger brother, Amos, was the captain of the regiment.

  For the nearly two months that John had been in the Union army, luck seemed to be on his side. Taller than the average soldier and handsome with brown hair, a beard, and serene eyes, John was well liked in his regiment, not only for his courage and physical strength but also for his thoughtfulness toward others. John was trained for combat at Camp Curtin in Harrisburg, near the State Capitol building. Afterward, his regiment was sent to Washington, DC, where they were brigaded with other volunteer regiments from Pennsylvania. They were then ordered to go to Alexandria, Virginia, where they established a camp for a few days until August 30, before grabbing their guns and charging toward the front where the Second Battle of Bull Run was taking place.

  In an offensive attack, General Lee marched his fast-moving army within thirty-five miles of Washington, DC, where Union troops were waiting for their reinforcements. Even though Lee knew he was already outnumbered, better leadership and a higher morale among his soldiers helped them crush the Union army in a bloody three-day battle, resulting in 22,177 casualties. The Confederate victory in Virginia opened the door for the next invasion—Maryland, with their sights set squarely on Pennsylvania.

  John and his regiment didn’t fight in the Second Battle of Bull Run. It was over before they received the order. Instead, for the next two weeks, they dug entrenchments and were assigned to picket duty, guarding the army’s encampment from possible enemy advancement and putting them at the highest risk of being the first to be wounded, killed, or captured.

  On September 12, 1862, John and his regiment packed up their camp and traveled to Washington, DC, where they exchanged their weapons for Springfield muskets and sixty rounds of ammunition. With their new weapons in hand, they were ordered to protect the town of Frederick, Maryland, from falling into the grip of the Confederate army.

  But after arriving in Frederick, on September 17, they were ordered to march twenty-three miles to Sharpsburg, Maryland, to fight in the Battle of Antietam, which had started early that morning. John and his regiment marched all night, but by the time they arrived the next morning, with tired and aching feet, the bloody battle was over.

  Although it was a victory for the Union army because they had successfully stopped the Confederates from invading the North, Lincoln had wanted General George McClellan to destroy the rebel army and put an end to the war. But McClellan had been overly cautious and worried that he was outnumbered. While he was planning his next move, Lee and his army had enough time to retreat to safety. McClellan decided not to pursue the rebels.

  The one-day battle had been a shocking bloodbath, leaving 23,000 dead and wounded. In the short time that John had been in the army, the number of casualties in the war was nearly two times the population of Somerset County. “The dead are strewn so thickly that as you ride over it [the field] you cannot guide your horse’s steps too carefully. Pale and bloody faces are everywhere upturned. They are sad and terrible; but there is nothing which makes one’s heart beat so quickly as the imploring look of sorely wounded men, who beckon wearily for help which you cannot stay to give,” an eyewitness reported.

  At the start of the battle, the Union army field surgeons were in desperate need of supplies, but the army’s medical supply wagons were not due to arrive anytime soon. The doctors were forced to use corn husks to dress the wounds of the soldiers until Clara Barton, a volunteer nurse, unexpectedly showed up with a wagonload of bandages and medical supplies that she had spent the past year collecting. In her bonnet, red bow, and dark-colored skirt, Clara worked side-by-side with the field doctors. Bullets flew by, and one tore a hole through her sleeve and killed the soldier she was helping. Undaunted, Clara worked nonstop for two days, prompting James Dunn, a surgeon at Antietam, to say, “In my feeble estimation, General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield.”

  BACK IN Washington, five days after the slaughter in Antietam, Lincoln called a meeting with his cabinet members, which included Edwin Stanton, William Seward, and Salmon Chase. “I have, as you are aware, thought a great deal about the relation of this war to Slavery.… I think the time has come now.… The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have best liked. But they have been driven out of Maryland, and Pennsylvania is no longer in danger of invasion.… I made the promise to myself, and (hesitating a little)—to my Maker… and I am going to fulfill that promise,” Lincoln said to them. He then issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, declaring that on January 1, 1863, all slaves in the Confederate states “shall be… forever free.”

  In John’s letter to his sister, he didn’t mention that President Lincoln had visited the town of Frederick just two days prior. Although Lincoln hadn’t prepared a speech, thinking it wasn’t proper to make one, at this time, he did say to the military men, “I return thanks to our soldiers for the good service they have rendered… the hardships they have endured, and the blood so nobly shed for this Union of ours. I also return thanks… to the good men, women, and children in this land of ours for their devotion to this glorious cause.… May our children and children’s children for a thousand generations continue to enjoy the benefits conferred upon us by our united country.”

  Lincoln also visited the battlefield of Antietam and met with McClellan, which sparked speculation that McClellan was going to be fired. “As yet, no one except his constitutional advisors know the purpose of his visit.… So far as we know, there have been no changes among the generals in the field. All is quiet,” the Alexandria Gazette reported.

  So, while the Union and Confederate armies regrouped and planned their next moves, John and his regiment settled into their Sharpsburg camp and prepared for the next battle. John didn’t know how long they would remain there, but he asked his sister to send him one of their mother’s old quilts. The nights were cold and “it would add to my comfort,” he wrote. He ended his letter by asking her, “Give my love [to] Mother and all the rest and Remember your Devoted, John F.
Suhre.” After writing down his return address, John extinguished the flickering flame, unaware that he would soon be in the biggest fight of his life—with Lu by his side.

  Chapter 4

  HELP WANTED

  Early December 1862, Concord, Massachusetts

  “I AM GETTING READY TO GO TO WASHINGTON AS AN ARMY nurse in one of the Hospitals & expect to have a hard winter if I do,” Lu wrote in a letter to her friend. “But I like it & want to help if I can.… If I was only a boy I’d march off tomorrow.” While Lu was waiting on pins and needles to receive a letter detailing her nursing assignment, she spent the first week of December washing, sewing, and mending her clothes. “I reviewed every rag I possessed,” Lu wrote. “I detailed some for picket duty while airing over the fence; some to the sanitary influences of the washtub; others to mount guard in the trunk; while the weak and wounded went to the Work-basket Hospital, to be made ready for active service again.”

  When she was finished with her tasks, time seemed to slow down even more, and she felt “powerfully impatient” as her life in Concord went on as usual. “Father writing & talking, taking care of the schools & keeping his topsy turvy family in order,” Lu detailed. “Mother sings away among her pots & pans, feeds & clothes all the beggars that come along, sews for the soldiers & delivers lectures on Anti slavery & Peace wherever she goes. Annie [Anna, Lu’s older sister] & and her good man John… hope to have a little Lu [a baby].… I write stories, help keep house… Abby [May, Lu’s younger sister] teaches drawing & music, goes to parties, rides horseback, rows boats, has beaux & is a… pretty girl.”

  Lu’s younger sister, twenty-one-year-old Abigail, who preferred to go by the name May, was back from Syracuse and now teaching at Frank Sanborn’s school. With May’s return home, their next-door neighbor, Julian Hawthorne, stopped by the Alcotts’ house every chance he had, usually on his walk to and from school. Although sixteen-year-old Julian was several years younger than May, he’d been in love with her from the moment he first spoke to her, which was two years prior, right after his family moved in next door. They were standing on the path at the bottom of the hill between their homes when May started the conversation by asking her bashful neighbor, “Do you like ladies and gentlemen bathing together?”