A Lagniappe: A chance to win a copy of Heroines of Mercy Street
For those of you who don't know, I'm a regular contributor at Wonders & Marvels, a group history blog where you can find some of the most interesting writers of things historical on the internet.* The blog's subtitle says it all, "A Community for curious minds who love history, its odd stories and good reads."
To celebrate the publication of Heroines of Mercy Street on February 16, I'm sharing more stories about Civil War nurses there, one a week starting today and ending February 22. You have a chance to share in the celebration. Wonders & Marvels has several copies of Heroines of Mercy Street to give away. To be included, you need to sign up at the Wonders & Marvels site before 11:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on February 29. (Not here on the Margins, not on Facebook, not by email. I'm always happy to hear from you any of those places, but it won't count toward the giveaway.)
Here's the link for the first post: http://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2016/01/mercy-street-a-television-show-a-book-and-a-giveaway.html. Head on over,** and poke around a little while you're there. I bet you'll find something you like.
*For the record, I was a fan long before I became a contributor.
**Full disclosure. You might want to wait until Monday or Tuesday. In my excitement I messed up and I don't think the form is up yet. *headsmack*
Clara Barton, Act II: Finding the Missing
[WARNING: For the next few weeks, it's going to be all Civil War all the time here at the Margins as we lead up to February 16, when Little Brown releases Heroines of Mercy Street into the world. I'll try to keep the My Book! My Book! to a minimum and focus on the stories instead, but I may slip now and then because I'm excited. On the upside, there will be a couple of chances to win copies of the book and possibly other swag if I can get my act together.]
When the Civil War ended, most of the women who had volunteered to serve as nurses went home and stepped back into their old roles as daughters, seamstresses, schoolteachers, and wives. (Not to mention factory workers, New York socialites, reformers...) Nursing had been a temporary event in their lives, just like being a soldier was a temporary part of the lives of most of the men who served in the war.
Clara Barton was one of the exceptions. (Does this come as a surprise to anyone?*)
After the end of the war, women wrote to Barton asking her to help them find missing husbands and sons, whom they feared had ended up in Southern prisons. The anguish in their letters convinced her that locating missing soldiers was the most important thing she could do now that peace had come. Barton opened the Office of Correspondence with Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army, which operated out of her own rooms in Washington. She put together lists of missing soldiers, organized by location and unit, posted them in army hospitals, and had them printed in local and national newspapers, with the request that any information about the missing men be sent to her to pass on to their families.
Eventually she received official sanction for her new mission. Shortly before his assassination, President Lincoln wrote a letter to the public informing them to contact Barton with information about missing soldiers. When her own resources were exhausted, Congress appropriated $15,000 to complete the project—close to $3 million today. The search for missing soldiers led to an effort to identify graves, beginning with the unmarked graves of the 13,000 Union soldiers who died in the prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia. Between 1865 and 1869, she and her assistants received and answered more than 63,000 letters and helped locate 22,000 missing soldiers.
Her grueling work in the war had left Barton physically exhausted; her efforts after the war imposed a new kind of strain. In 1869, she was near collapse. Her doctors ordered her to Europe for a rest cure.** She did not rest for long. While in Switzerland she became aware of a little organization called the International Red Cross. Perhaps you've heard of it?
*If you're coming in late to the story, you can catch up here.
**A standard medical prescription for exhausted Americans*** in the nineteenth century, which has sadly fallen out of favor.
***At least for those with the time and money to spare. My guess is that no one suggested an exhausted small farmer or factory girl take several months in Switzerland.
Clara Barton: Nursing Outside the Box
Clara Barton, ca. 1866
[WARNING: For the next few weeks, it's going to be all Civil War all the time here at the Margins as we lead up to February 16, when Little Brown releases Heroines of Mercy Street into the world. I'll try to keep the My Book! My Book! to a minimum and focus on the stories instead, but I may slip now and then because I'm excited. On the upside, there will be a couple of chances to win copies of the book and possibly other swag if I can get my act together.]
When I first began talking to Little Brown and PBS about writing Heroines of Mercy Street, most of what I knew about nurses in the American Civil War could be summed up in two words: Clara Barton.*
Barton first caught my imagination when I was seven or eight, thanks to a child's biography that belonged to my mother. ** Coming back to her as an adult, I found that her story was more complex, and more amazing that I had realized. Instead of being the archetypical Civil War nurse, Barton was an original who worked outside the system. She avoided any alliance with the official nurses, though she did not hesitate to alternately charm and kick men in high places to get the support and permission she needed in order to provide comfort and medical care to "her boys" on the battlefield.
When the Civil War began in April, 1861, Barton was working as a clerk at the United States Patent Office , one of only four women employed by the federal government before the war. (In short, she was already a shin-kicker.) After Bull Run, she visited the wounded in the improvised hospital on the top floor of the Patent Office every day, bringing them delicacies and helping where she could.
Barton soon became a one-woman relief agency. She developed a personal supply network of “dear sisters” who sent her packages of food, clothing, wine, and bandages to distribute to the troops. In fact, she received so many boxes that she had to rent warehouses to store them.
Over time she became convinced that she was needed on the battlefield, where she could help men as they fell. When the Army of the Potomac was mobilized in the summer of 1862, Barton convinced the head of the Quartermaster Corps depot in Washington to assign her a wagon and a driver.
Armed with a pass signed by Surgeon General Hammond that gave her “permission to go upon the sick transports in any direction for the purpose of distributing comforts to the sick and wounded, and nursing them, always subject to the direction of the Surgeon in charge,” Barton delivered her supplies to the field hospital at Falmouth Station, near Fredericksburg. But she still felt she was not doing enough. When she heard that fighting had broken out at Cedar Mountain, she headed for the battlefield. Thereafter, in battle after battle, Barton ran soup kitchens, provided supplies, nursed the wounded, and tried to keep track of the men who died so she could tell their families what had happened to them. In between battles, she returned to Washington, where she collected the latest batch of supplies, wrote impassioned letters thanking the women who provided them, and fought with bureaucrats to be allowed to continue her work.
She became a such a familiar figure of comfort to wounded men, that scores of the men she helped on the battlefields named their daughters “Clara Barton” in her honor. But that wasn't her only legacy after the war… [This is known in the trade as a cliffhanger. Don't touch that dial.]
*Okay, six words: Clara Barton and Louisa May Alcott.
** I know I've mentioned them before, but I owe a debt of gratitude to the authors who wrote biographies for young girls about smart and/or tough women who sidestepped (or kicked their way through) society's boundaries and accomplished stuff no one thought they could accomplish. (Now that I think of it, a lot of those biographies were set in and around the American Civil War--which like WWI and WWII opened doors to women that had previously been closed.) To any of you writing similar biographies today (and I know you're out there), you're making a difference. Thank you.