What Did Civil War Nurses Do After the War?
Cornelia Hancock, ca. 1903
The Civil War was a pivotal experience for many of the women who served as nurses, whether they served for three weeks or three years. For many it was their first time away from family and home, and their first step outside the narrow framework of what society expected from them. They learned not only new skills but also new confidence. Whether in the immediacy of letters at the time or with the distance of memory, they expressed deep satisfaction with the work and the way of life, though they often groused about a particular detail. Katharine Prescott Wormeley, who served first on the hospital transport ships and later as the matron for a hospital for convalescent soldiers in Rhode Island, claimed to speak for the army nurses as a whole: “We all know in our hearts that it is thorough enjoyment to be here,—it is life, in short; and we wouldn’t be anywhere else for anything in the world.” Emily Parsons, who served as a nurse for two years at a variety of hospitals despite being blind in one eye, partially deaf, and lame, took the sentiment one step further: “I should like to live so all the rest of my life.”
Parsons, like most of the women, and the soldiers they cared for, went home at the war’s end. Nursing had been a temporary part of their lives, just like being a soldier was a temporary part of the lives of most of the men who served in the war. Many stepped back into their old lives as daughters, seamstresses, schoolteachers, and wives. Others created lives that were a little bigger than they had been before the war.
Some made a living writing. The most famous of these was Louisa May Alcott, whose account of her Civil War experience, Hospital Sketches, was the first work she published under her own name.
A few women who served as nurses during the war went on to earn medical degrees. Vesta Swarts, for instance, was a high school principal in Auburn, Indiana, before the war. She nursed at Louisville, Kentucky, from sometime in 1864 until March 1865, when she was honorably discharged, a fact she mentions with pride in an essay she wrote on her war work. After the war, she became a physician--a challenging proposition for women--and returned to Auburn, where she practiced medicine with her husband for the next thirty years.
Many of the middle-class women who volunteered as nurses were part of the large and varied community of American reformers before the war. Their wealthier counterparts often came from families who expected them to take part in high-profile charity work. After the war, both middle-class reformers and wealthy philanthropists used their newfound experience at organizing, political activism, and manipulating their way through male-dominated bureaucracies to expand their influence. Some took on new leadership roles at the local level. Parsons, for instance, organized a campaign to open a charity hospital for women and children in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. A few used their experience as a springboard to national leadership roles, founding groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, the American Social Science Association, and the American Red Cross. They involved themselves in opening schools, reforming prisons and asylums, improving conditions for women and children, “saving” unmarried mothers and their children (both in moral and practical terms), and providing vocational training for girls. Some became active in the labor, women’s rights, and temperance movements, which expanded after the war to fill the political and emotional space previously occupied by abolition. Others spearheaded social welfare programs designed to alleviate the human misery left by the war. They formed relief funds for war widows and orphans, and programs to settle unemployed veterans on farmland in the West, and schools for former slaves. Cornelia Hancock, for instance helped found a freedman’s school in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, where she taught ex-slaves for a decade. (Not as innocuous as it sounds. At one point those who objected to the concept of education for black children riddled the schoolhouse with fifty bullets.) Several decades after the war, they used those same skills to advocate for themselves. Arguing that they too had served their country, they successfully pushed through the Union Army Nurses Pension Act of 1892, which provided government pensions for army nurses similar to those given to Union soldiers.
The one thing few of them did was work as nurses.
But if they didn't continue to work as nurses after the war, their collective experience in the war had convinced Americans that nursing was not only a respectable job for a woman but that it could be a skilled profession.
In 1868, the American Medical Association recommended that general hospitals open schools to train nurses. It was a two- edged response to the success of volunteer nurses in the Civil War. The AMA both acknowledged the value of skilled nursing in hospitals and hoped to avoid another flood of untrained and uncontrollable volunteer nurses in future wars. By 1880, there were a total of 15 nursing schools in the United States; by 1900, there were 432. Nursing had become recognized as a skilled profession.
Clara Barton with a class of nursing students
History on Display: Dressing Downton
I have to admit, I never watched Downton Abbey, with the exception of the last ten or fifteen minutes before each episode of Mercy Street. My experience of the series has been limited to conversations with friends who urged me to watch* and the weekly recaps on one of my favorite podcasts, Satellite Sisters. ** I had two clear visions of the show: Maggie Smith rocked and the costumes were gorgeous.
When I saw the ad for an exhibit called Dressing Downton I was intrigued, not only because it was a chance to see the clothes but because it was being held at a Chicago museum I had never heard of.*** I immediately contacted one of my favorite Downton Abbey fans and planned an outing.
Dressing Downton is an intriguing combination of fan convention and social history. Many of the visitors arrive wearing their best approximation of a period hat--or at least a hat. You have the option of having a traditional English tea**** before or after visiting the exhibit. Neither my friend nor I wore a hat, but we did sign up for the tea.*****
My personal favorite of the costumes
The costumes in the exhibit are, in fact, gorgeous. Each is displayed with a sign that tells what character wore it and in what episode. (The signs assume you're familiar with the show. I was glad Tracy was with me to fill in the details.) The construction of each costume is described in loving detail. More importantly--at least from my perspective--the exhibit places changes in the shape and construction of the clothing in the context of social changes as England moved from the Edwardian summer through World War I and out the other side, making it clear that changes in hemlines and silhouettes were a matter of more than just designers' whims. (Can we say the same today?)
The Driehaus Museum is the perfect setting for the exhibit. Home to wealthy Chicago industrialists are the height of the Gilded Age, the beautifully restored interiors are as lavish as any in Downton Abbey. The home was commissioned in 1879 by banker Samuel Mayo Nickerson and is an over-the-top mixture of Renaissance and Moorish Revival, occasional dabs of Gothic and Queen Anne, and modern plumbing. The historian in me would have been happy to see the kitchen and servants quarters as well as the public rooms, but the public rooms are worth the visit. And I was fascinated to learn about Lincrusta, a deeply embossed luxury wallcovering based on linseed oil gel that was the hottest thing in high end home design at the end of the nineteenth century. Invented by Frederick Walton, who also brought us linoleum flooring,****** Lincrusta was used on the walls of European palaces, the White House, private railroad cars, and six staterooms in the Titanic.
Dressing Downton will remain in Chicago through May 8, then will travel to small museums across the country through January 2018. (Check here for the schedule.) If you're interested in the nexus of fashion and social history, or you're suffering from Downton Abbey withdrawal, it's definitely worth seeking out. As for me, I'll be keeping my eye on the schedule for future delights at the Driehaus Museum.
*I don't know why they bother. My record of watching television shows as they air is abysmal. I get to shows when they call my name, often years after the fact.
**NOT a history podcast.
***I felt much better about my ignorance when I learned that the Driehaus Museum opened in 2008. Only eight years of lost opportunities.
****Afternoon tea, not "high tea", which is a different meal altogether and more apt to include fish fingers than finger sandwiches. (Rant over)
*****Worth doing. The tea was weak, but the sandwiches were excellent and the setting was glorious.
******In many ways the cultural opposite of Lincrusta. Evidently Mr. Walton was interested in supplying the decorating needs of just plain folk as well as those of high society.
Cornelia Hancock: Civil War Nurse, Reformer, Muse
As the official superintendent of the Union Army's newly minted nursing corps, Dorothea Dix had a clear vision of what her nurses should look like. Only women between the ages of thirty or thirty-five and fifty would be accepted. “Neatness, order, sobriety and industry” were required; “matronly persons of experience, good conduct or superior education” were preferred.
Dix turned away many able applicants because she thought they were too young, attractive, or frivolous. Twenty-three- year-old Cornelia Hancock, for instance, was preparing to board the train to Gettysburg with a number of women many years older than she was when Dix appeared on the scene to inspect the prospective nurses. She pronounced all of the nurses suitable except for Hancock, whom she objected to on the grounds of her “youth and rosy cheeks.” Hancock simply boarded the train while her companions argued with Dix. When she reached Gettysburg, three days after the battle, the need for nurses was so great that no one worried about her age or appearance. Too inexperienced to help with the physical needs of the soldiers, she went from wounded soldier to wounded soldier, paper, pencil and stamps in hand, and spent the first night writing farewell letters from soldiers to their families and friends. When wagons of provisions began to arrive, Hancock helped herself to bread and jelly, then divided loaves into portions that could be swallowed by weak and wounded men.
Enlarged from a tiny detail in a photo at the Library of Congress
She quickly became accustomed to the realities of the battlefield, telling a cousin in a letter written on her second day in the field "I do not mind the sight of blood, have seen limbs taken off and was not sick at all." In fact, she proved to be such a dedicated nurse that the wounded soldiers of Third Division Second Army Corps presented her with a silver medal inscribed Testimonial of regard for ministrations of mercy to the wounded soldiers at Gettysburg, Pa. -—July 1863. (She also had a dance tune named after her, the Hancock Gallop--a tribute that I suspect none of Dix's middle-aged matrons received from the soldiers under their care.)
Hancock worked as a nurse for the rest of the war, tending the wounded after the battle of the Wilderness, Fredericksburg, Port Royal, White House Landing, City Point and Petersburg. She was one of the first Union nurses to arrive in Richmond after its capture on April 3, 1865.
After the war, Hancock helped found a freedman’s school in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, where she taught ex-slaves for a decade. (At one point those who objected to the concept of education for black children riddled the schoolhouse with fifty bullets.) When she moved back north to Philadelphia, she helped found the Children's Aid Society of Pennsylvania.
Hancock became a posthumous best-selling author in 1937, when her charming and insightful letters from the battlefield were published under the title South After Gettysburg. They are now available under the title Letters of a Civil War Nurse--well worth the read if you are interested in Civil War nurses or daily life in a Union army camp behind the lines.