How the United States Sanitary Commission Elbowed Women to One Side in the American Civil War
Last week, while writing about the use of hospital transport ships in the American Civil War, I promised to tell you the story of how a group of men hijacked Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell’s Women’s Central Association of Relief to form the United States Sanitary Commission. It is a story that will feel all too familiar to many of you.
Here we go:
The story begins with the ladies’ aid societies that women across the Northern states formed for the support of Union soldiers after the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861.
Perhaps as many as ten thousand local aid societies were formed in the first year of the war alone. Modeled on the mission aid societies common at the time, their purpose was to make and collect food, clothing and medical supplies for Union soldiers.(1) They turned homes, schools, and churches into small-scale factories and shipping warehouses.
Over the course of the war, the aid societies would provide millions of dollars of much-needed supplies and much-appreciated luxuries for the troops, but their initial efforts were sometimes as chaotic as those of the new army itself. With no understanding of how the still-developing military distribution system worked, their boxes were often literally sidetracked at the rail yards to make way for troops and army stores—leaving cakes to mold and jars of jelly to ferment and explode. In addition, some groups produced goods that showed a fundamental ignorance about soldiers’ needs.
Disturbed by the waste of time, energy, and material, as well as the rush of overzealous and under-trained nursing volunteers, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to become a licensed doctor in the United States, decided it would be useful to unite the independent ladies’ aid societies into a central organization. On April 25, 1861, Blackwell called an informal meeting of women with experience in reform work to discuss the possibility of forming a Women’s Central Association of Relief (WCAR). A notice of the meeting accidentally found its way into the New York Times. Instead of a small meeting of known organizers the parlors of the New York Infirmary for Women were crowded with women eager to do their part. Two men also attended the meeting, Reverend Henry Bellows, a popular Unitarian minister, and Dr. Elisha Harris. (You’ll want to keep your eye on Dr. Bellows.)
Encouraged by the enthusiasm of the initial meeting, Blackwell called an open meeting four days later at the much larger Cooper Institute, to be presided over by Rev. Bellows. (I told you to keep an eye on him.) The hall was packed: New York papers estimated the attendance at between two and three thousand. Repeated waves of applause interrupted Bellow’s speech, in which he praised the outpouring of aid for the troops and called for an umbrella organization under what he described as “an appropriate head.” 3)
Blackwell and her associates followed Bellow’s speech with a presentation of a plan for the proposed WCAR. The organization, as they envisioned it, had three objectives:
- Managing the efforts of existing ladies’ aid associations and encouraging the creation of new local associations
- Coordinating with the Army’s Medical Bureau about the needs of the rapidly growing army so members’ efforts weren’t wasted
- Creating a system for selecting and training volunteer nurses (4)
Finally the meeting elected a board of managers for the new umbrella organization, made up of twelve men and twelve women. The board then elected Dr. Valentine Mott, a founding faculty member of the university medical college of New York, as president and Bellows as vice-president—a shrewd recognition on Blackwell’s part that, while the women of the WCAR were more than capable of managing the grassroots support efforts, the organization was unlikely to succeed in its efforts to build a relationship with the Army’s Medical Bureau without male spokesman.
On May 15, Rev. Bellows and three (male) doctors associated with WCAR took the train to Washington. Their goal was to learn firsthand what the relief associations could accomplish and how they could work with the Medical Bureau. Over the course of the thirteen-hour train ride, the four men began to discuss what would become the United States Sanitary Commission.
Once in Washington, as Bellows met with Acting Surgeon General Colonel Robert C. Woods, generals, cabinet members, and President Lincoln himself, his goals changed from formal recognition of the WCAR’s three-part plan to the the creation of a civilian sanitary commission that would focus on the broader questions of army health that the army itself was prone to forget. This was a change that not only bypassed the efforts of the WCAR, but that Bellows presented as a way to control the extent to which the efforts of ladies’ aid societies and volunteer nurses disrupted the army’s systems.(5) In a letter dated May 18, Bellows and his fellow committee members offered themselves as members of a sanitary commission who would serve as advisors to the government with a mandate to inspect military camps and hospitals and the power to enforce sanitary regulations for the benefit of the soldiers. The proposal made no mention of the WCAR, which had paid to send the committee to Washington in the first place and reduced the question of female nurses to a side issue.(6) Check the dates: it took Bellows only three days to throw the women under the ambulance.
On June 9, Secretary of War Simon Cameron approved the creation of the United States Sanitary Commission, which went on to do good work, much of which was powered by women. The executive board of the commission, headed by Rev. Bellows, was all male. But women continued to dominate the organization at the regional and grassroots level. Twelve regional branches of the commission—located in New York, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Louisville, New Albany, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh—coordinated and directed the actives of thousands of local societies that chose to come under its umbrella. Those societies became training grounds for a generation of women who went on to become leaders of the large and varied community of American reformers after the war.
*(1) Now that I think of it, there are parallels with the women who are turning on their sewing machines and raiding their fabric stashes all over the United States to make masks. (In all fairness, there are doubtless men doing this as well. But the mask-warriors[2] of my acquaintance are all women.) Ladies, and gentlemen, I salute you.
(2) Sew-rriors?
(3)Who did he have in mind, I wonder?
(4) Blackwell missed her opportunity on this one. Six days before Blackwell’s meeting, Dorothea Dix had visited the White House and made her pitch to form an army corp of female nurses. Blackwell was unimpressed by Dix’s qualifications for the job. (Rightly so, as it turned out.) Hearing that Dix had been appointed superintendent of women nurses, Blackwell complained, “The government has given Miss Dix a semi-official recognition as meddler general—for it really amounts to that, she being without system or any practical knowledge of the business.”
(5)Grrr.
(6) I repeat, grrr.
The Boston Massacre: A Family History
Those of you who’ve been hanging out here in the Margins for a while know that I love books that turn what we think about a historical subject upside down, or at the very least expand it.
Historian Serena Zabin does both in The Boston Massacre: A Family History.
Paul Revere’s iconic engraving of the “Boston Massacre” of 1770 shows colonists and soldiers facing each other across a clear divide, breached only by gunfire. Zabin argues that prior to the violence of March 5, 1770, the two groups were in fact linked together in complicated social, spatial, and and even familial relationships.
Zabin drills down into details of relationships between Bostonians and the unwelcome soldiers quartered in their midst in the years prior to the Boston Massacre. Many were housed in tents on Boston Commons, but others, especially men with families, rented rooms in Boston homes. All of them patronized Boston businesses. Beyond these casual points of connection, Zabin considers the effects of marriages, seductions and affairs. She looks at instances of members of one group serving as godparents for children of the other group, at roles played by soldiers’ wives, at soldiers working side jobs for Bostonians, and at pub brawls. She outlines the social relationships between British officers and the Bostonian elite.
Having established the depth and intricacy of these relationships, Zabin looks in detail at the events of March 5, 1770, the mass of contradictory accounts of those events, and the trials that followed. She demonstrates how attorneys on both sides erased those relationships from their arguments, creating their own versions of the gulf between Bostonians and British soldiers that appears in Revere’s engraving.
The Boston Massacre is a well-written and eye-opening addition to the social history of colonial America.
Most of this review appeared previously Shelf Awareness for Readers
Hospital Transport Ships in the American Civil War
I must admit, I did not expect to write another blog post about Civil War medicine any time soon. That’s not where my head is these days. But the recent mobilization of Navy hospital ships to help the embattled medical systems in New York and Los Angeles led an old friend and regular reader to ask me about hospital ships in the American Civil War.
This one’s for you, Tracy.
* * *
In the spring of 1862, General George McClellan was preparing to lead the Army of the Potomac in an amphibious advance on the Confederate capital through the Virginia Peninsula. It was clear to the Army’s Medical Bureau that this strategy would offer new challenges to a medical system that had been seriously overburdened from the first days of the war.* In addition to high battle casualties, field hospitals could expect large numbers of soldiers who succumbed to disease thanks to the peninsula’s malarial swamps. Moreover, the region’s terrain, with its swampy forests and miry roads, would make it difficult to transport wounded and sick men from the battlefield with horse-drawn wagons.
The obvious answer was a water-based evacuation system, but the army’s prior efforts at hospital transport ships had been a failure. Instead of trying again, the army contracted with the United States Sanitary Commission** to operate a semi-independent hospital transport system, using steamships to evacuate wounded and sick soldiers through the James and Pamunkey Rivers and then up the coast to Union hospitals. The army would provide a fleet of ships to serve as hospital transports. The Sanitary Commission would staff and supply them.
The Commission’s secretary, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, was the organizing force behind the project. Volunteer nurses were the engine that made it run. Olmsted envisioned the transport ships as being less like hospitals and more like a home away from home, where an injured soldier could rest and recover in relative ease, complete with women to prepare beds for incoming casualties, staff kitchens to prepare special diets for the ill and comfort the wounded—replicating in an institutional setting the middle-class domestic experience of nursing a family member at home.
According to volunteer nurse Katherine Prescott Wormeley, the reality fell far short of Olmsted’s vision:
“Imagine a great river or sound steamer filled on every deck—every berth and every square inch of room covered with wounded men; even the stairs and gangways and guards filled with those who are less badly wounded; and then imagine fifty well men, on every kind of errand, rushing to and fro over them, every touch bringing agony to the poor fellows, while stretcher after stretcher came along, hoping to find an empty place; and then imagine what it was to keep calm ourselves, and make sure that every man on both boats was properly refreshed and fed.”
Olmsted also envisioned the ships as a secure place for middle-class and elite women to volunteer away from the rough atmosphere of overcrowded military hospitals. That didn’t work out either. In reality, the nurses on the transport ships were closer to the battlefield than their counterparts in the military hospitals and saw some of the worst scenes of suffering of the war. The nurses often worked for two or three days with little sleep and ate meals snatched when the demands of duty allowed. They hauled buckets of water for cooking, cleaning, and laundry, cooked endless gallons of gruel and beef tea over spirit lamps, and commandeered supplies from military encampments whenever they got a chance. Not exactly the sheltered experience their families expected.
The Sanitary Commission hospital transport service plunged into action on May 4. (Like everything else that happened in the early days of the Civil War, they weren’t quite ready.) In the following weeks, the hospital ships transported thousands of sick and wounded men from the Virginia Peninsula to military hospitals in New York, Philadelphia, Washing, Annapolis, and Baltimore. In mid- July, Confederate gunboats began firing on the Sanitary Commission’s ships, removing the last illusion that the transport ships were safe. Olmsted refused to accept new female volunteers and began to demobilize his forces. By the end of the month, the commission had turned all responsibility for transporting casualties back to the Union army.
* * *
Hospital transport ships appeared in another guise on the Mississippi River, where a side-wheel steamer named the Red Rover was used as a hospital ship on an on-again, off-again basis.
* Thanks to the combination of an elderly and inflexible Surgeon General who took pride in paring his budget to the bone and a sudden massive increase in the size of the army.
**A civilian organization that offered its services to the Union as a medical watchdog group, with a mandate to inspect military camps and hospitals and the power to enforce sanitary regulations for the benefit of the soldiers. Lincoln reluctantly signed the order establishing the Commission on June 13, 1861—just in time to move into action when the first major battle of the war, the Battle of Bull Run ( or Manassas if you prefer), demonstrated that the United States Army’s Medical Bureau was totally unprepared for the sheer volume of the wounded and ill. (The Confederate Army’s medical system wasn’t in any better shape.)
Just for the record, the Commission basically highjacked Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell’s Women’s Central Association of Relief. A story that aggravates me so greatly that I may need to write one more Civil War medicine post just so I am not guilty of contributing to historical erasure. Don’t touch that dial.