“Our Army Nurses”
Nurses and doctors at Fredericksburg after the Battle of the Wilderness, 1864
About a million years ago, I wrote a study guide to Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage for a reference book called The Literature of War. In the course of my research, I was introduced to the flood of material produced about the American Civil War some twenty or thirty years after it ended: regimental histories, general histories, poetry, pamphlets, biographies, lightly edited diaries and, most of all, memoirs by war veterans. Many war memoirs were small privately printed works distributed to friends and family. At the other end of the spectrum, The Personal Memoirs of US Grant (1885) was one of the best selling American books of the nineteenth century.* It was a fascinating view of warfare, and useful context for writing about Crane. When I was done, I tucked it away in the back of my brain with all the other miscellaneous bits of information I collect as a writer of popular history and moved on to my next assignment.
I didn’t think about the specialized narrative of the Civil War memoir again until I got the call about writing The Heroines of Mercy Street** It had never occurred to me that Civil War nurses also wrote memoirs–it didn’t come up in the course of my research on Crane. (Women are largely invisible in traditional military history and its spin-offs. Something I want to help change.) Boy did they ever! The first to appear, and probably the best known at the time, was Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, a lightly fictionalized account of Alcott’s brief stint as a Civil War nurse that was published in 1863 while the war was still in progress. But she was by no means alone. After the war, women in the North and South wrote their memoirs and edited their letters for publication, with titles like Ministering Angel, An Army Nurse in Two Wars, The Lady Nurse of Ward E, Hospital Pencillings, etc. Others wrote out their story for family members.
One of my favorite Civil War nursing memoirs will probably never be reprinted: Our Army Nurses. Interesting Sketches, Addresses and Photographs of nearly One Hundred of the Noble Women Who Served in Hospitals and on Battlefields during Our Civil War, compiled by Mary A. Gardner Holland. The book is exactly what it sounds like: one hundred short accounts by written by Civil War nurses roughly thirty years after the fact. Holland took on the task of tracking down as many former nurses as possible and asking them to contribute. She received more letters and photographs in response than she could include. Some of them are beautifully written–most notably Holland’s own essay. (I suspect her desire to write her story inspired the project.) Some of them suggest that their authors seldom picked up a pen for any purpose other than labeling jars of piccalili and chow chow at the end of the summer’s canning. All of them display pride in their service. And well they should.
Nurse’s memoirs are easier to get hold of than they used to be. When the study of women’s history began to gain solid ground in the 1980s and 1990s, many of these works were reprinted, along with previously unprinted collections of letters. I am now the owner of a small collection of well-thumbed reprints; some with scholarly introductions and footnotes, others as naked of scholarly apparatus as the day they first left the printers. Charming, funny, heartbreaking–they’re worth reading if you are interested in different perspective on the Civil War.
*Thanks in part to a clever marketing campaign devised by its publisher, Mark Twain. Grant finished the book only a few days before he died. Twain sent 10,000 sales agents across the North, many of them Civil War veterans dressed in their old uniforms. They sold the two-volume memoir by subscription, using a script written by Twain himself, which was designed to appeal to veterans mourning Grant’s death. Twain described the work this way: “this is the simple soldier, who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools and put into them a something which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts.” Some of Twain’s praise may be sales puffery, but Grant’s work remains highly regarded for its shrewd and intelligent depiction of the war.
**I did warn you there would be a certain amount of “my book, my book!” over the next few months.
Copperheads
When we write the history of national conflicts, we tend to assume that “our” side stood united in monolithic opposition to “them”. It’s a simple and enjoyable version of history, but it simply isn’t true. Sympathizers with the “other side”* are a fact of war. Sometimes they engage in fifth column activities.** Sometimes they simply gather with like-minded folk and grumble into their martini glasses. Sometimes, if they live in a place with freedom of speech, they are vocal in their objections and express them through established public channels. There were Nazi sympathizers in Britain and the United States in World War II. There were British loyalists in the American Revolution. And in the American Civil War, Southern sympathizers in the North were known as Copperheads.***
Copperheads opposed the war and advocated the restoration of the Union through a negotiated peace settlement with the South. Many Copperheads were from Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, where many families had southern roots and agrarian interests resented the growing power of the industrialized northern cities. The movement was also prominent in New York City, where many merchants and workers were dependent on the cotton trade. (Demonstrating that there is more than one path to any given political position.) Others were opposed to the draft, abolition, Lincoln’s abrogation of civil liberties, the Republican party, or all of the above. Some just wanted the bloodshed of the war to end.
The New York Tribune first used the term in July 20, 1861,**** comparing southern sympathizers to the poisonous snake that strikes without giving its victims the courtesy of a warning rattle. The implication was that southern sympathizers would, by definition, engage in treason given half a chance. In practice, they were more inclined to fight the war at the level of local elections and on the floor of state legislatures.
Peace Democrats embraced the name: “copperhead” was also the slang term for a penny, which at the time had an image of Lady Liberty on one side. They saw themselves as defending the Constitution and civil liberties against presidential incursions. I leave you to draw parallels to current political positions and note the resultant ironies for yourselves.
*NOT the same thing as pacifists.
**When such people fight the “other side” for “us”, they are called the resistance. You can see how quickly this gets complicated.
***And before anyone raises their hand to protest: I am not saying that British Tories were the moral equivalent of Nazis. Southern sympathizers are a gray area. Quite frankly, many Northerners who supported the war effort were not pro-abolition and even abolitionists were often racist in ways that shock a modern reader.
****For those of you who have not spent recent months living and breathing the Civil War, that was the day before the the first major battle of the war occurred: the First Battle of Bull Run aka the Battle of Manassas aka the Great Skedaddle (depending on where you hang your hat).
Déjà Vu All Over Again: Crowdsourcing
Earlier this year I watched fellow history buff Sarah Towles run a Kickstarter campaign for her innovative digital history projects at Time Traveler Tours and Tales. As far as I can tell, she ran a model campaign, combining the precision of Bismarck and the charm of Wellington. She’s still doing a great job at making her contributors feel like part of the process. If the day ever comes when I want to run my own Kickstarter campaign, she will be my model.*
Crowdsourcing is a wonderful new model for funding projects that takes advantage of our new ability to find our people and make them part of the process. It is innovative, exciting, and looks amazingly like what authors, printmakers and publishers from the earliest days of printing through the nineteenth century knew as selling things “by subscription.”
Back in the days when publishers were glorified printers and there was no mass distribution system for books, works that didn’t already have a guaranteed market** were often sold by subscription, which meant that people paid up front for a book, which didn’t get published unless enough people ponied up. John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, and many of the novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were sold by subscription. Mark Twain was a big fan of the business model. He claimed that “Anything but subscription publication is printing for private circulation.” As late as 1926, T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) offered the very expensive first edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by private subscription.
Lawrence’s experience points up the hazards of the model, then and now. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was expensive, but not expensive enough. The sales price covered only one-third of the production costs. Crowdsourcing does not absolve you from doing the math.
*And, no, that is not a hint. There is no such plan on the horizon. The mere thought makes me want to go lie down. Preferably with a large whiskey in my hand.
**i.e. almost everything