In the 1860s, medical care and medicine were not adequate for the wounded on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. The United States Government tried to support the sick and wounded of the national army by establishing the United States Sanitary Commission on June 18, 1861, however the amount of men that succumbed to the stages of near-death surpassed the amount of tools and nurses that were available during that era. Thus, many wounded soldiers died due to disease and lack of attention from low numbers of staffers. To witness these incidences, historians and scholars have traced the diaries of nurses that were present and working in make-shift tents on the edge of the battlefield. Among freshly-cut limbs, the noises of saws chopping bones and loud screams, and the poignant smell of blood, sweat, and death, young and old women proudly and tirelessly volunteered to take care of the sick and wounded. In their words, one may witness the horror of a Civil War camp and what the nurses had to deal with on a daily basis. The bloody and dirty conditions are an understatement, as reality from that time period clouds what we are able to read and visualize today. In this blog post, I am going to be analyze some of the writings of Katharine Prescott Wormeley, a Union nurse who traveled and worked with the army during the nine-week Peninsula Campaign of 1862 (photograph of Nurse Wormeley, date unknown, ‘Civil War Women’ blog).
In the 1862 diary entry below, Nurse Wormeley write’s about her patients’ sufferings, her colleagues, and the government’s failure to provide enough supplies for the sick and wounded. Note the language in this entry– the nurse appears to be pleading to the Union generals and President Abraham Lincoln to improve the bloody conditions in the Union Army hospital tents.
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“DEAR MOTHER, Yesterday was a hard day, and not a very useful one. The result is that I am a little befogged this morning—deaf, drowsy, and dull. Five hundred men came down last night, out of the regimental hospitals on the right. Our gentlemen were up all night. I was safe in my berth; but Georgy [Georgeanna Woolsey, another volunteer nurse] was in the tent till 3 a.m., though she had been up all the night before.
The Commission is to take:
1. All badly wounded men, all amputations and compound fractures of the lower extremities, and all other cases which ought not to travel at first (say five hundred—a large estimate), and keep them on board the Knickerbocker and the St. Mark [hospital ships] in the river until they can be moved. It engages to spend a sum not exceeding ten thousand dollars on the means of carrying out this first item.
2. It agrees to receive at Fortress Monroe three thousand other bad cases able to bear transportation, whenever a battle occurs; twelve days of it, and transport them to New York, Washington or elsewhere.
Thus, you see, the Commission gains the certainty that the worst cases and the greatest suffering shall be under its own eye and care. The rest—the slightly wounded, or those so wounded as to be able to help themselves—are the ones that are left to the Government.
This enables us to contemplate a great battle with less of a nightmare feeling than we have had while there was nothing to expect but a repetition of past scenes. We feel that something is impending; the clearing out of the hospitals, the arrangements thus decisively made for the wounded, all seem to point to a coming emergency. Oh! Can we help dreading it!
This matter of dirt and stains is becoming very serious. My dresses are in such a state that I loathe them, and myself in them. From chin to belt they are yellow with lemon-juice, sticky with sugar, greasy with beef-tea, and pasted with milk-porridge. Farther down, I dare not inquire into them. Somebody said the other day that he wished to kiss the hem of my garment. I thought of the condition of that article, and shuddered.
Good-bye! I have so many letters to write that sometimes I feel as if I could not write another word. I have twelve lying by me now, ready to go off—soldiers’ letters and answers to the friends of the dead.
We receive such pathetic, noble letters from the parents and friends of those who have died in our care, and to whom it is a part of our duty to write. They will never cease to be a sad and tender memory to us. The mothers’ are the most noble and unselfish; the wives’ the most pathetic—so painfully full of personal feeling….”
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In her words, the reader fears the terror and hopelessness of the nurse, as she battles time, lack of government attention, and squirming soldiers. During her service as a Civil War nurse, Wormeley was also headquartered at George Washington’s Mount Vernon in Virginia, which she nicknamed “the White House.” The house provided much space for the Union nurses to tend to many sick and wounded, whom were brought there by rail or wagon through the state’s forests. It is interesting to fathom that women of wealth and comfort would quickly volunteer to leave their cushy lives behind and engage in medical procedures that were inadequate and with men who were sick and wounded. No matter how hard the times were, and though bitter at the government’s lack of action towards the camp’s hygiene, Wormeley left her fashionable life behind to work on the bloody battlefields and serve her country. Like other woman nurses, Wormeley’s patriotism illustrates the era where although families were divided, Americans bonded together to do the right thing. Wormeley once wrote: “We all know in our hearts that it is thorough enjoyment to be here. It is life, in short; and we couldn’t be anywhere else for anything in the world.” This sentence demonstrates a woman’s motivation to serve her country and change the lives of those less fortunate one step at a time. These are traits that I admire. And traits that we should still continue to exhibit in this age.
For more information: Read Katharine Prescott Wormeley’s book, The Cruel Side of War With The Army of The Potomac (originally published in New York in 1889).
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