Louisa on the Front Lines

by Samantha Seiple

  Once the city was secured, a group of Union soldiers went on a rampage, looting and vandalizing the abandoned homes and stores. An eyewitness reported:

  [In] the old mansion of Douglas Gordon—perhaps the wealthiest citizen in the valley… every room had been torn with shot, and then all the elegant furniture and works of art broken and smashed.… I found soldiers… diverting themselves with the rich dresses found in wardrobes, some had on bonnets of fashion of last year, and were surveying themselves before mirrors, which an hour or two afterward, were pitched out of windows and smashed to pieces upon the pavement; others had on elegant scarfs bound round their heads in the form of turbans, and shawls around their waists.… Every store, I think without exception, was pillaged of every valuable article. A fine drug store… was literally one mass of broken glass and jars.

  The looting wasted precious time and energy, and they would pay dearly for it.

  With the city of Fredericksburg now in Burnside’s hands, he assessed the Confederate’s line of defense, seeing that they were positioned on higher ground in a semicircle. Burnside informed his officers that he was going to launch a frontal assault by attacking the right side first, followed by a full-on attack on the left side. His officers thought the plan was ill fated and spoke out. “The carrying out of your plan will be murder, not warfare,” Colonel J. H. Taylor warned Burnside.

  Burnside didn’t listen. On December 13, he ordered a division of soldiers from Pennsylvania, which included John Suhre’s recently reenlisted half brother, Mike, to spearhead the attack. While John and his regiment waited anxiously in reserve, Mike and his division were ordered to charge an open field toward the densely wooded ridge on the right, called Prospect Hill, but it was soon renamed the “Slaughter Pen.”

  At first, the Confederate soldiers relentlessly fired their guns and cannons, but then they let the Union soldiers come within five hundred yards of the wooded area, where a fourteen-gun battalion was patiently waiting for them. For an hour, the battle raged, and the Union soldiers were able to break through the Confederate’s line. But their success was short lived when Confederate reinforcements arrived, driving them back. “The action was close-handed and men fell like autumn leaves,” one Union soldier said. “It seems miraculous that any of us escaped at all.” John Suhre’s half brother, Mike, wasn’t one of them. He was killed in action.

  The battle was far from over. At noon, Burnside ordered troops to storm Marye’s Heights, on the left side. It was a suicide mission. Behind a stone wall on Marye’s Heights, the Confederate soldiers were lined up in rows, with each row reinforcing the other. The soldiers in the back row loaded the weapons and handed them to the front. There was a steady hailstorm of bullets blazing at the Union soldiers, who were falling “like a steady dripping of rain from the eaves of a house.”

  Despite the loss of nearly 3,000 men in one hour, Burnside kept sending more and more troops to the stone wall, and the battle at Marye’s Heights continued, causing one Confederate soldier to exclaim, “Ye Gods! It is no longer a battle, it is butchery.”

  It was brutal madness, and Burnside showed no mercy to his soldiers, refusing to give up. At 2:30 P.M., John Suhre’s regiment was finally ordered to charge up the hill toward the stone wall. John and his fellow soldiers dropped their knapsacks and held firmly onto their guns and bayonets, advancing toward their enemy with the pungent smell of gunfire smoke filling the air. After 250 yards, they came to a sudden halt and confusion erupted.

  Lying before them, the dead and wounded blanketed the field. Some of the wounded men reached out and grabbed at their ankles, trying to stop John and his regiment from charging ahead. “Halt—lie down—you will all be killed,” they warned. But John and his fellow soldiers were ordered to disregard them and keep charging forward to the enemy’s line. They followed those orders, and some of them made it to within fifty yards of the stone wall at the crest of the hill. The Confederate soldiers behind the wall furiously fired their rifled muskets. “The stone wall was a sheet of flame,” their commanding officer reported.

  John and his surviving comrades finally dropped to the muddy ground, with nowhere to hide in the open field, forcing them to endure “a most terrific fire from the enemy’s infantry and artillery.”

  They held their position for an hour while the sun began to set in the West, turning the sky and gun-smoked air a fiery red. Finally, night fell and darkness descended. Burnside had no choice but to withdraw and end the battle. It was a crushing defeat for the Union, and Burnside openly wept.

  The field, which was dotted with remnants of the corn and wheat harvest, was now strewn with dead and wounded men, their blue uniforms stained with blood. The Union dead or injured were more than double that of the Confederates, with a toll of almost 13,000. John Suhre was one of them.

  A bullet was lodged in his chest, another tore clean through his lung, and a third wounded his shoulder. John lay on the battlefield, listening to the screams of the wounded men. One witness described how “the cries of the wounded rose up over that bloody field like the wail of lost spirits all the night; cries for water, blankets and ‘to be borne off the field’… terror and suffering… filled the very air with pain.”

  It would take nearly a week to remove the wounded from the battlefield. When they were finally cleared, Lu would be among those to receive them.

  Chapter 7

  THE HURLY-BURLY HOUSE

  The next day, December 14, 1862,

  Georgetown, Union Hotel Hospital

  LU’S FIRST DAY AS A NURSE OFFICIALLY BEGAN AT 6:30 A.M. with the sound of reveille reverberating throughout the hospital. She lit a gas lamp, brightening her cheerless room.

  In the too-small fireplace, a log crackled and spilled out onto the hearth. But the fireplace failed to make the room cozy. The broken windowpanes, which someone had draped with bedsheets, let the cold winter air creep in. A bottle of lavender water sat on the mantelpiece along with a candle without its candlestick, a flatiron to press her clothes, a shiny tin basin, and a copy of the Bible.

  Lu crawled out of her narrow bed, pushing back the sheet, two blankets, and a coverlet marked with the words “U.S. Hosp. Dept.” in indelible ink. The mattress and pillow were uncomfortably thin, and, like most beds in military hospitals, the bedframe was made of iron, which was believed to help prevent a bedbug infestation.

  Stepping onto the cold floor, Lu tried not to trip over the burning log that was jutting out of the fireplace as she began to get ready in her sparsely furnished room. On the whitewashed wall, there was a pocket-sized mirror that hung over a tin basin with a blue pitcher for washing. She really couldn’t see her reflection in the mirror, so Lu would have to make do. The hospital didn’t have any washrooms with showers or bathtubs. However, it did have a few sinks and flushable toilets, but many of them didn’t work. Inside her small closet, Lu had unpacked her plain-looking dresses, her big black bonnet, her bag, and her boots. The rest of her personal belongings were stored in a trunk behind the door.

  Once dressed and her bed made, Lu was ready to start her day. Breakfast was served promptly at seven o’clock, and, as soon as the first bell rang, she could hear the thundering footsteps of the hospital staff. Lu joined the stampede, stepping into the narrow, twisting hallway and down two flights of stairs to join the twenty others sitting at the unpolished wooden table in the gloomy dining room.

  The hospital wasn’t at all what Lu expected or hoped for when she signed on to be a nurse far away in Concord. To her dismay, this hospital building, with its noticeably rotting woodwork and dirty wallpaper, had seen better days. The three-story brick building, built in 1796, had originally been a stylish hotel and tavern, featuring stables sufficient for fifty horses and numerous sheds for carriages. It had also boasted a robust spring of running water, located less than twenty yards from the kitchen, and a well-stocked bar of the best liquor. The once-fashionable hotel used to be a popular spot for wealthy plantation owners and prominent citizens. When John
Adams became the second president of the United States, he stayed there while the White House was under construction. But, over the years, the hotel changed hands and fell into disrepair. Prior to the Civil War, the Union Hotel was a boardinghouse renting cheap rooms to clerks, teachers, and poor families. Soon after the war began, the government notified the proprietor that it was seizing the building under eminent domain and was converting it into a hospital to meet the overwhelming demand of wounded soldiers. The boarders were unceremoniously ordered to move out, so they packed up their belongings and took everything with them—including the chamber pots—making sure to leave nothing of value behind.

  As Lu made her way through the converted hotel-hospital and entered the dining room, she learned that the stampede to the dining room was typical. No one wanted to be late to a meal; otherwise, there wouldn’t be a crumb left to nibble on. This was surprising to Lu because she found the food almost inedible, bearing a striking resemblance to what she imagined prison fare to be like. The bread tasted like sawdust, the stewed blackberries looked like cockroaches, the coffee was muddy, and the huckleberry tea was weak and flavored with lime. Lu didn’t trust the meat, but not because she was raised on a strict vegetarian diet. To her, the beef looked rotten, as if it had been around since the last war, and she suspected that the pork came from one of the many rowdy pigs that roamed freely through the muddy streets.

  Although she made a mental note to go to the market and buy crackers, cheese, and apples to store in her room, Lu would later learn that this was a bad idea, owing to the unseen rats and bugs that were living in her closet. “I resigned myself to my fate, and remembering that bread was called the staff of life, leaned pretty exclusively upon it… varied by an occasional potato or surreptitious sip of milk,” Lu wrote.

  When the hospital staff was finished eating breakfast, the day shift began. The hospital matron, fifty-three-year-old Hannah Ropes, supervised the nurses, oversaw the washing and distribution of the clean clothes and bed linens, and made sure the soldiers received their meals. Despite Hannah’s responsibility to manage the other nurses, the person who was in the position of power, and responsible for everyone and everything, was Dr. A. M. Clark, the “surgeon in charge.” Female nurses were ranked low on the hierarchy, just above the cook and laundress, but beneath everyone else, including male nurses. But Hannah wasn’t concerned about status. Nor was she concerned that the volatile Dix, whose headquarters were nearby and who dropped in on the hospitals, turned her nose up at her. Ropes didn’t “care a fig” for Dragon Dix. Hannah Ropes had been working at the hospital since June 25 and had worked alongside Lu’s friend, Hannah Stevenson.

  Stevenson liked Ropes, calling her genial, cheery, wise, and sweet. But Ropes suffered from rheumatism, and sometimes the work was too physically demanding. “She is quite a feeble person for work so rough as this,” Stevenson noted. “She seems like one who had somewhat been worn out with hard & uncommon exertions, & whose will is most self-sacrificing.”

  But during her tenure as the matron, Hannah Ropes proved she was a force to be reckoned with, causing some to shake in their army-issued boots. She had been born into a well-to-do family of prominent lawyers in Maine and Boston with political connections, but her independent spirit didn’t always mesh with the traditional role that was expected of women at the time. She would have been headed toward what was then considered spinsterhood had she not married at the age of twenty-five. When her husband left her several years later, she risked her good reputation and standing in society by divorcing him.

  Despite her failed marriage, Hannah embraced motherhood and was devoted to her children, Ned and Alice. But she was hungry for a higher purpose beyond the domestic sphere. “Why did you give this homely hen the wings of an eagle?” Hannah had once written to her beloved mother. “Behold they flap heavily against her sides, for want of proper use.”

  Hannah soon found her calling as an active abolitionist. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, allowing settlers to decide whether the new state of Kansas would be proslavery or free, Hannah packed up her belongings and moved her family from Boston to a log cabin there. She planned on spreading her antislavery ideas but found herself instead nursing her friends who were sick with malaria. The constant threat of violence between the proslavery and antislavery settlers, some of which was led by abolitionist John Brown, caused Hannah to keep “loaded pistols and a bowie-knife upon my table at night, (and) three Sharp’s rifles, loaded, standing in the room.”

  She eventually moved back East where her antislavery beliefs were less dangerous. But her time there left a lasting impression, and Hannah wrote a book called Six Months in Kansas. She followed it up with a novel called Cranston House. The experience she gained caring for her sick friends in Kansas combined with reading Florence Nightingale’s book further ignited her interest in becoming a nurse. And after the war, Hannah planned on writing a book about being a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital.

  Like many female nurses at the time, Hannah believed her role was to provide maternal kindness to the patients under her care. “I take the place of his mother at once,” Hannah said about each individual soldier she treated. Her patients’ welfare always came first. So Hannah sometimes had to ignore the hospital rules and chain of command, especially when she was dealing with a “jackal” like the new hospital steward, Henry Perkins.

  When she discovered that Perkins, who was in charge of the supplies, was stealing the soldiers’ clothes and rations and selling them for a profit, she told Dr. Clark. But Dr. Clark, who “walked around the ward with all the dignity of a lamp post,” didn’t do anything about it. “Between surgeons, stewards, nurses and waiters, the poor men in all the hospitals barely escape with life or clothes or money,” Hannah revealed to her daughter, Alice.

  Abusing sick and wounded soldiers wasn’t just a problem at the Union Hotel Hospital; it was widespread. In September 1862, a special committee from various state relief associations reported their findings from a special investigation to the new surgeon general, William Hammond. The report harshly criticized the surgeons in charge of the Northern hospitals visited, many of the stewards, the nurses, and even the chaplains for “gross inattention, rudeness to philanthropic visitors, and frequent mal-appropriation of donated delicacies from the patients to their own benefit.” The investigation also revealed how some of the hospital staff were stealing from the wounded and sick soldiers: “Food of the most miserable quality is served to the sick in some of the hospitals, and that the surgeons commute the full soldiers’ rations which is the patients’ due, and pocket the money themselves. It is believed that some of the most unscrupulous clear a thousand dollars a month by stealing the accruing hospital fund, keeping the sick and wounded in their charge on the meanest diet, and returning vouchers as of money applied to their comfort.”

  After the report was presented, Surgeon General Hammond promised to begin a vigorous investigation into the charges. So, when Dr. Clark failed to do anything about the steward, Hannah took it upon herself to write a letter to Hammond. She would eventually discover that despite his promise of “a vigorous investigation,” he was not her ally.

  “Surg[eon] Gen[eral] Hammond is said by those who have known him, to be a scheming ambitious man, & to be dead set against—women—nurses,” Stevenson revealed.

  Hammond’s office did respond to Hannah’s letter, but the letter was not addressed to her; it was sent to the head surgeon in charge of her. Again, Dr. Clark didn’t do anything to the steward. Instead, he sent an “official notice” to Hannah telling her that she had to provide evidence.

  “As though I had not better business to do than to dabble in such muddy water!” Hannah wrote in her journal. To Hannah, the evidence “was plain in the kitchen, in the larder, and every pinched face one meets in the stairs or in the wards.”

  But Hannah did find time to formally write back to Dr. Clark, stating:

  How I came to judge him [the steward]… while cont
ending with him for food suitable for the men, he said with a sneer he was not of the benevolent kind, that his business was to make all the money he could out of the hospital, adding triumphantly that the power was in his hands. If the sick privates had been dogs, he could not have spoken more contemptuously of them.

  Not long after, Hannah found out that the steward had incarcerated a boy named Julius in a dark hole in the cellar, among the rats and cockroaches. Julius was a convalescing patient who had recovered enough to help in the hospital. Julius angered the steward when he sent too much food to one of the wards, and they came to blows. Julius filed a complaint with Dr. Clark, which the doctor ignored. Instead, Dr. Clark gave the steward orders to get Julius back to work, and if Julius refused, he was to be thrown by the neck and heels into a cell.

  This time, Hannah went directly to Surgeon General Hammond’s office, but he was too busy to see her. So, Hannah dashed off to his superior’s office, the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton. It was no secret that Stanton didn’t like Hammond.

  Hannah had to wait only ten minutes before Stanton met with her. She spoke up, telling him about the black hole in the cellar.

  “Call the Provost Marshall,” Stanton said to his functionary. “Go to the Union Hospital with this lady, take the boy out of that black hole, go into it yourself so as to be able to tell me about it, then arrest the steward and take him to a cell in the Old Capital Prison, to await further orders!”

  A few days later Dr. Clark was also arrested and sent to the Old Capital Prison. He was released after several days and later transferred out of the hospital. Before leaving, he confronted Hannah. But she refused to back down, telling him: