Louisa on the Front Lines

by Samantha Seiple

  During her shift, Lu spent an hour tending to John, trying to make him comfortable. She washed his face, combed his brown hair, and smoothed out his sheets. Sometimes while she was tidying up the table next to his bed, she felt him softly touch her mended gown. “As if to assure himself that I was there,” she supposed. “Anything more natural and frank, I never saw, and found this brave John as bashful as brave, yet full of excellencies and fine aspirations, which having no power to express themselves in words, seemed to have bloomed into his character and made him what he was.”

  It was so difficult and painful for John to breathe that he could only speak in a whisper. He asked Lu to write a letter for him. She sat down in the chair next to his bed with her pen and paper. “Shall it be addressed to wife, or mother?” Lu asked, unable to suppress her curiosity.

  “Neither, ma’am; I’ve got no wife, and will write to mother myself when I get better.” He told Lu that his mother was a widow and was still raising his younger sister and brother. He was trying to help keep his family afloat, just like Lu. “We’re not rich,” John said. “And I must be father to the children and husband to the dear old woman, if I can.” John wanted the letter sent to his younger brother, George.

  With all his responsibilities to his family, Lu asked him why he had enlisted.

  “I wanted the right thing done,” John said. “And people kept saying the men who were in earnest ought to fight. I was in earnest, the Lord Knows! But held off as long as I could, not knowing which was my duty; mother saw the case… and said ‘Go;’ so I went.”

  “Do you ever regret that you came, when you lie here suffering so much?” Lu asked.

  “Never ma’am; I haven’t helped a great deal, but I’ve shown I was willing to give my life, and perhaps I’ve got to; but I don’t blame anybody, and if it was to do over again, I’d do it.” He looked at Lu, and as if he was reading her mind, suddenly asked, “This is my first battle; do they think it’s going to be my last?”

  It was the hardest question Lu ever had to answer. “I’m afraid they do, John.”

  Her answer seemed to startle him. After a moment, he said, “I’m not afraid, but it’s difficult to believe all at once.”

  “Shall I write to your mother, now?” Lu asked, thinking he might have changed his mind.

  “No, ma’am.” John still wanted the letter addressed to his younger brother. “He’ll break it to her best, and I’ll add a line to her myself when you get done.” John chose his words carefully, giving advice to his younger brother, “tenderly bequeathing” their mother and sister to him, and bidding him farewell. He wrote a few lines to his mother in his own hand.

  Of all the letters Lu had written during her time as a nurse, she thought “John’s was the best of all.” While Lu sealed the letter, John said, “I hope the answer will come in time for me to see it.”

  ON THE evening of December 27, Lu was called to John’s bedside. He was dying. “I had been summoned to many death beds in my life,” Lu recalled. “But to none that made my heart ache as it did then, since my mother called me to watch the departure of a spirit akin [to Lu’s younger sister, Lizzie/Beth] to this in its gentleness and patient strength.”

  When Lu approached his bedside, John reached out his hands. “I knew you’d come!” he whispered.

  Lu sat down in the chair next to his bed while Hannah took the chair on the other side of him. Lu wiped the drops of sweat from his forehead and began waving a fan over him, trying to make him comfortable even though there was little she could do. “I saw the grey veil falling that no human hand can lift,” Lu wrote.

  In the bed next to John, the patient with the amputated arm was looking over at him with tenderness. The patient on the other side, who had the fearful thigh wound, watched for a bit but then looked away, turning over in his bed and pulling the covers up over his head.

  Dr. Fitzpatrick, John’s surgeon, wasn’t called to his deathbed. There was nothing he could do, and Hannah didn’t trust him. “[The] ward physician is in his cups all day!… The most important ward in the hospital and the guiding spirit walking among the amputated limbs like a somnambulist,” Hannah revealed.

  Lu continued to fan her patient while waiting for him to die. John’s lips were white, and with each painful breath his body convulsed, fighting against death. At times, he would rip the covers off in his agony. But Lu noticed his eyes never lost the look of serenity. “The man’s soul seemed to sit therein, undaunted by the ills that vexed his flesh,” Lu wrote.

  Hannah noticed this too: “There was in the man such a calm consciousness of life, such repose on its secure strength. There he lay, his broad chest heaving with obstinate breath, but the face composed in its manly beauty, as though he were taking natural rest in sleep. The dignity of the man, considering the circumstances, was wonderful.”

  The gaslight lamps were burning brightly in the ward. For two hours, John suffered under their glow with each breath, crying out only once, asking for air. All Hannah could give him was a sip of water.

  “Thank you madam, I think I must be marching on,” John said. He stretched out his right hand, placing it in Lu’s lap and reaching for her hand.

  “He never spoke again, but to the end held my hand close, so close that when he was asleep at last, I could not draw it away,” Lu recounted. When she finally let go, her hand felt cold and stiff. The marks from John’s fingers remained even after her hand warmed up. “I could not but be glad that, through its touch, the presence of human sympathy, perhaps had lightened that hard hour,” Lu hoped.

  Lu got up out of her chair, leaving Hannah alone with John. As Hannah continued to watch him with “loving sympathy,” she reached out, touching his forehead with her hand “as though she would cross palms with the angels commissioned to take her work out of her hands.”

  After a moment, Hannah began preparing his body for burial. She smoothed back his brown hair and cut a lock to send to his mother. She also straightened his long limbs and was so affected by his “wondrous manly beauty” she sent for Lu. Lu returned to John’s bedside feeling “a tender sort of pride in my lost patient.” In her mind, “he looked a most heroic figure, lying there stately and still as the statue of some young knight asleep upon his tomb. The lovely expression which so often beautifies dead faces, soon replaced the marks of pain.”

  While Lu was standing there with Hannah, the ward master handed Lu a letter. It was from John’s mother. Lu leaned down and “kissed this good son for her sake” and placed the letter in John’s hand, so he “would not be without some token of the love which makes life beautiful and outlives death.” As Lu walked away, she felt “glad to have known so genuine a man, and carrying with me an enduring memory of the brave… blacksmith, as he lay serenely waiting for the dawn of that long day which knows no night.”

  Through John, Lu had met her unfulfilled destiny in love and war. He was the soldier she couldn’t be, and he was the man her father wasn’t. John was physically imposing in his masculinity and unpolished speech, but at his core lived a tender and empathetic caretaker. Like Lu, he wanted to help his family financially, fight for a cause he believed in, and put others first. John was Lu’s hero. A noble man who was willing to sacrifice his own needs and desires to give to others, no matter the cost.

  Sharing the raw and emotionally intimate experience of John Suhre’s pain had opened Lu’s heart and awakened her authentic voice. Those intense emotions would transform her work, giving her insight to create characters and stories that would transcend the page and fill her readers’ hearts.

  Chapter 8

  A BITTER PILL

  A few days later, Union Hotel Hospital

  A FEW DAYS AFTER JOHN’S DEATH, LU WAS TAKING THE stairs and started to cough uncontrollably until she was forced to sit down. Her head felt like it was spinning, so she leaned against the cool banister. Steam from the washroom below puffed and swirled the stench through the hospital’s drafty hallways. Lu tried to catch her breath.


  “My dear girl, we shall have you sick in your bed, unless you keep yourself warm and quiet for a few days,” Dr. John said upon finding Lu on the stairs. He warned her in a paternal manner, just like the other doctors did, that she would soon be sick with pneumonia if she didn’t go off duty.

  Lu thought him kind but was displeased that he considered her “a frail young blossom, that needed much cherishing, instead of a tough old spinster, who had been knocking about the world for thirty years.” However, she couldn’t ignore the fact that her head felt like a cannonball and that, when she looked at Dr. John, he appeared unnaturally tall while the walls moved in a wavelike motion. “Taking these things into consideration… I resolved to retire gracefully, if I must,” Lu decided.

  She wasn’t the only nurse who wasn’t feeling well. A little less than three weeks after the wounded soldiers arrived from the battle at Fredericksburg, most of the nurses were run-down. “The tax upon us women who work for the love of it is tremendous when we have a new arrival of wounded,” Hannah explained in a letter to her son, Neddie. Hannah herself was feeling deathly ill, yet her strong sense of responsibility and work ethic kept her from taking care of herself. After she had prepared John’s body for burial, Hannah had stayed up all night helping another patient. Soon after, Dr. Stipp, the head surgeon at the hospital, had ordered her to stay in her room where he would check on her twice a day. “My last patient, who was so crazy, whose hand I held so long till he fell asleep, upset me,” she wrote. “It was, the Doctor said, ‘the drop too much.’” She wrote to her daughter Alice that she had pneumonia.

  The pervading medical theory at the time was that damp, cold air invaded the respiratory tract and caused pneumonia. For mild cases of pneumonia, some medical experts advised keeping warm, drinking hot tea, and taking small doses of the flower lobelia combined with either a vapor or footbath to make the patient sweat. Lobelia was touted as a “nauseant expectorant” with no equal. Some considered it the most effective drug for the treatment of “respiratory affections,” including colds, pneumonia, asthma, whooping cough, bronchitis, laryngitis, and a sore throat.

  The doctors at the Union Hotel Hospital, who were treating Hannah, ordered her to rest in her room, stay warm, and drink some tea. Although her prognosis was good, Mary Boyce wanted her to leave the hospital and recover at her home. But Hannah refused. “I have had the devoted attention of the whole house,” she replied to her friend’s offer. “And all the surgeons say even if I can’t do anything at all, I must stay or the house will go down!”

  Hannah may have been an ideal patient who listened to the doctors and took their advice, but Lu did not follow her example. Although Lu agreed to go off duty, she had trouble staying in her room and resting. For the first day or two, Lu walked down the flight of stairs to the dining room for her meals. “No one had time to come up two flights while it was possible for me to come down,” Lu wrote. “Far be it for me to add another affliction.” But this was futile because she couldn’t even eat the bread and butter. So Lu decided to try her own “exercise and sun cure,” hoping that if she went outside for some fresh air and activity, it would make her feel better. “Every morning I took a brisk run in one direction or another,” Lu wrote. “For the January days were as mild as Spring. A rollicking north wind and occasional snow storm would have been more my taste, for the one would have braced and refreshed [my] tired body and soul, the other have purified the air.”

  On one of her morning runs, she stopped by the Armory Square Hospital, where she had originally hoped to serve as a nurse. She wanted to see how it compared to the one she worked for. Despite the Christmas dinner scandal, it was evident to Lu at first glance that this hospital truly was one of the best. She was impressed with the “long, clean, warm, and airy wards, built barrack-fashion, with the nurse’s room at the end.” It was a stark contrast to her ward and room, which were “cold, dirty, inconvenient, up stairs and down stairs, and in everybody’s chamber.”

  The Armory’s head surgeon, Dr. Willard Bliss, and the hospital steward, Mr. Abram Nichols, were well-liked and held in high regard. On Christmas Day, they were each given a stylish gold watch. Dr. Bliss was also presented with a cane, topped off with a gold handle, as a “memento of the respect and esteem in which he is held by the soldiers on account of his labors for their welfare.”

  While Lu breathed in the clean air in the Armory, she watched a white-aproned nurse, with her well-stocked supply of medicine, and the well-trained attendants taking care of the sick and wounded and was further impressed. “Here [at the Armory Square Hospital], order, method, common sense and liberality reigned and ruled, in a style that did one’s heart good to see,” Lu noted. At the same time, it made her feel bad about her own situation. “At the Hurly-Burly Hotel, disorder, discomfort, bad management, and no visible head, reduced things to a condition which I despair of describing.”

  Despite not feeling better from her “exercise and sun cure,” Lu had been eagerly awaiting New Year’s, as this was the day President Lincoln would sign the Emancipation Proclamation. At midnight, when the firecrackers and bells rang out through Georgetown, Lu jumped out of bed and opened her bedroom window. She cheered and waved her handkerchief at the shouting black men in the street below, bringing in the New Year and celebrating through the night. When the sun came up, the streets were flooded with people. Women wore their best bonnets and silk dresses, and men were in coattails as they made their way to the White House. Thousands were gathered there, anxiously waiting for the gates to open, so they could meet President Lincoln.

  INSIDE THE White House, Lincoln was holding a reception, the first since his son Willie’s death from typhoid nearly a year prior. Soldiers and police stood guard at the entrance and lined the hallway. In a parade of dress uniforms, shiny medals, and gold lace, foreign diplomats, politicians, and military officers were the first to pay their respects to the president.

  At noon, the gates were opened, and the public poured in, surging through the densely packed hallway. As the crowd rushed forward, bonnets were lost, coattails were torn, and pockets were picked. The people were corralled into Mary Lincoln’s recently renovated Blue Room. The oval-shaped drawing room, with its blue frescoed ceiling, overlooked the back lawn and had a view of the Potomac River. The walls were draped with blue and gold hangings, and the floor was covered in blue and white velvet carpet. Mary had chosen wooden chairs and sofas with gold leaf trim and covered with blue and silver satin damask. An aide to Prince Napoleon described the room as magnificent—but “the furniture, though extremely rich, was in rather poor taste.”

  With the reception in full swing, President Lincoln stood in the middle of the Blue Room with Mary, still in deep mourning wearing a black velvet dress with diamond-shaped trim. Lincoln’s familiar stovepipe hat was adorned with a black ribbon in memory of Willie. Lincoln’s hair was graying, his shoulders were stooped, his skin was sallow, and there was a “sunken, deathly look about the large, cavernous eyes.” Grief had noticeably altered his appearance.

  Mary too was still consumed with grief over her son’s death. The night before, Mary had met with a spiritualist who claimed to speak to her dead son. One of Mary’s friends detailed in his diary, “Mrs. Lincoln told me… she [the spiritualist] had made wonderful revelations to her about her little son Willie who died last winter, and also about things on the earth. Among other things she revealed that the cabinet were all the enemies of the president, working for themselves, and that they would have to be dismissed, and others called to his aid before he had success.”

  In the face of so much death, grief and uncertainty fueled the fad of talking to the dead. Mary Lincoln would cultivate friendships with various spiritualists, but sometimes she claimed not to need a spiritualist to help her communicate with Willie. “He lives,” Mary told her half sister, her eyes wide and shining. “He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of my bed with the same sweet, adorable smile he always had.… You cannot dream of the comfort
this gives me.”

  Unlike Mary, Lincoln didn’t believe in this practice and was concerned that these so-called spiritualists might be doing more harm than good for his wife’s fragile mental state.

  Despite Mary’s early departure from the New Year’s Day reception, Lincoln stayed, shaking hands for hours with a steady stream of people. He was wearing white gloves, and when he finished shaking the last hand, his glove looked like “it had been dragged through a dust-bin.”

  Mary’s Blue Room wouldn’t fare much better. Whenever the public visited the White House, chunks of the carpet, wall hangings, and damask-covered furniture were stolen—sometimes even by the person standing guard.

  When the reception was over, Lincoln went upstairs to his office. The Emancipation Proclamation was placed before him. When he dipped his pen into the inkwell, his hand trembled. He dropped his pen and looked up. “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper,” he said. “But I have been receiving calls, and shaking hands since nine o’clock this morning, till my arm is stiff and numb. Now, this signature is one that will be closely examined, and if they find my hand trembled, they will say ‘he had some compunctions.’ But, any way, it is going to be done!”

  Lincoln picked up his pen again and boldly signed his name, effectively changing the meaning and purpose of the Civil War. It was no longer just about keeping the states united. The war was also about freeing the slaves—exactly what abolitionists like Lu had been fighting for and were willing to die for.

  BACK AT the Union Hotel Hospital, nearly all the nurses were sick and off duty. Julia Kendall was ordered to stay in bed. Her knee wouldn’t bend, and she could no longer walk.