Frank Stringfellow–Confederate Spy
In the PBS series Mercy Street, Frank Stringfellow is a spy and assassin. A cold-blooded killer with a hint of the psychopath, he seems to enjoy the violence that the war has unleashed. (Or at least that's how I read the character thus far. That may not be the intention of the show's creators.) It's hard for me to understand why the otherwise appealing Emma Green is in love with him, handsome or not.
The real life Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow was teaching Latin in Mississippi when the American Civil War broke out. He hurried home to Virginia to enlist in the Confederate army, where he was turned down by multiple units as the classic hundred pound weakling.* He decided to prove his worth with a dramatic act of derring-do. He scouted out a Confederate** encampment, captured three men from the picket line, and took them to their commander as his prisoners. The commander was impressed.
Accepted into the Confederate Army on the grounds of brains and daring, Stringfellow soon became a spy for the Confederacy. He became known for disguises and narrow escapes. On one occasion, he disguised himself as a woman and used a travel pass that had been issued in the name of a young woman of his acquaintance to attend a ball given by Union officers, where he danced, flirted, and gained useful information about troop movements. (I suspect candlelight made the deception a little easier, even for the willowy young Stringfellow.) Later in the war, he posed as a dental student, traveling from hotel to hotel in Washington DC. By the end of the war, some Union officers considered Stringfellow "the most dangerous man in the Confederacy" and there was a $10,000 dollar reward on his head.***
After the war, Stringfellow fled to Canada, where he found religion. In 1867, he returned to Virginia, entered an Episcopalian seminary, was ordained as a priest and married his long-time love, Emma Green.
In 1898, at the age of 58, Stringfellow attempted to enlist as an army chaplain in the Spanish-American War. He had been too scrawny for the army thirty-seven years before. Now the army rejected him as too old. Once again, Stringfellow had an unexpected card to play. After the Battle of Cold Harbor in May, 1864, Stringfellow had been close enough to General Grant to shoot him in the back, but hadn't been able to bring himself to pull the trigger. After the war, he wrote to then President Grant about the incident, evidently providing enough detail to make the president believe it was true. Grant wrote back, saying that he or any future president would grant Stringfellow a request. Stringfellow called in his marker and was allowed to serve as an army chaplain.
He returned safely from the war and continued as a minister until his death in 1913. If he'd lasted a bit longer, I suspect he'd have found a way to sign up in the First World War, too.
*At 5 foot 8 inches tall and less than 100 pounds, he could have been accurately named Frank Stringbean. (Sorry. Sometimes I just can't resist.)
**Not a typo
***Roughly $155,000 in today's money using the Consumer Price Index, which is the simplest, if not necessarily the most accurate, of the various ways to make this calculation.
The Last Armada
A Spanish invasion force, already crippled by punishing storms that had separated it from most of its troops and supplies, landed at the Irish harbor of Kinsale on September 21, 1601. The Spanish troops intended to battle their way through Ireland with the support of a population that Irish expatriates assured them was eager to fight for the Catholic king of Spain and then conquer England from the west. Instead they found themselves besieged by English forces in an indefensible harbor town, waiting for allies and reinforcements that never came.
In The Last Armada: Queen Elizabeth, Juan del Águila and the 100-Day Spanish Invasion of England, Irish journalist Des Ekin tells the story of the failed Spanish invasion from the perspectives of not only the English and Spanish commanders but their Irish allies. Ekin establishes his major characters—General Juan del Águila of Spain, Charles Blount of England, and Irish chieftain Hugh O'Neill—as the heroes of their own stories and places them firmly in their very different cultural milieus. Many of the secondary characters, including an English femme fatale, a Jesuit secret agent, and a Franciscan priest determined to run the invasion in the name of God, are equally vivid on the page. The result is an even-handed account of a critical event in Irish history that has often been the subject of "bitter recriminations, laments or partisan rants".
The Last Armada is a historical page-turner with acts of heroism, betrayal, espionage, self-aggrandizement and self-sacrifice.
This review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Did Civil War nurses have uniforms?
A Brief Commercial: I will be speaking about Civil War nurses at the Lyceum in Alexandria, Virginia on Thursday, February 4. (Here's the link to the details--please note the snow date. I'm hoping Alexandria has had it's share of snow for the winter, but you never know.) If any of you live in the area, I'd love to see you there. If you have friends in the area who might be interested, please spread the word. For that matter, spread the word about the program the night before as well. Civil War medical historian Von Barron is speaking on the medical knowledge of the period. I'm looking forward to it.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled blog post and the question of nursing uniforms:
If you poke around the Internet looking for pictures of Civil War nurses for any length of time, you find pictures of youngish women in identical dresses with white caps and aprons identified as Civil War nurses. Every time I see them I want to pound my fist on my desk and say "No! No! No!"
The pictures are wrong in so many ways. For one thing, the dresses have the wrong silhouette for the period.* The dresses are frequently white. And in a few egregiously wrong cases, the women are wearing Red Cross armbands. (As a reminder, Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross in 1881--fifteen years after the end of the war.)
The fact of the matter is that, with the exception of the several hundred nuns who served, the women who volunteered as nurses did not wear uniforms. They definitely didn't wear spiffy white dresses.**
Instead they looked more like this:
Dorothea Dix had a strict dress code for her nurses. They were to wear brown, gray, or black dresses: practical choices given the inevitable exposure to blood, pus, vomit, and other filth in a hospital of that day and the heroic efforts required to do laundry in the nineteenth century.*** Bows, curls, jewelry, and especially hoop skirts and crinolines were forbidden. Again, a practical requirement. Hospitals were crowded and the aisles were too narrow for women in fashionably wide skirts to walk through them. In at least one case, a wounded soldier is reported to have bled to death when the crinoline worn by a female visitor caught on his cot and tore open his wound. ****
Nurses who served on the United States Sanitary Commission's hospital transit ships weren't bound by Dix's restrictions, but they soon recognized the practical value of her rules given the realities of life on the ships. Many of them arrived wearing the ribbons and ruffles typical of women of their class, but they soon abandoned frilly dresses in favor of a skirt and a man’s flannel shirt, worn with the collar open, the sleeves rolled up, and the shirttail out. They dubbed the shirts “Agnews,” after the doctor from whom they stole the first shirt.
Even the "Agnew "was a long way from the practicality of this:
Modern nursing field uniform, courtesy of US Army Medical Department, Office of Medical History
My guess is that Miss Dix would have approved.
*Leg o'mutton sleeves were popular in the 1830s and again in the 1890s, but not in the 1860s.
**And speaking of spiffy white dresses, I cannot believe that Emma Green in the first episode of Mercy Street got out of the hospital with that white wedding cake of a dress untainted except for a little blood on the skirt. Just like I don't believe Mary Phinney von Olnhausen could get through her first day the hospital with every hair still in place. (Of course, that may be because I can't get through a quiet day at my desk without my hair standing all anyhow.)
***Perhaps the subject of a future blog post. What say you, Margin-ites?
****This may be a nineteenth century urban legend: I've seen many accounts of this incident, all phrased in similarly cautious terms and none of them attributed to a specific contemporary source.