As the war dragged on, other women augmented the work of Dix’s corps and the volunteer nuns. Soldiers’ wives, residents of battlefront areas and representatives of newly formed organizations such as the U.S. Sanitary Commission all helped care for sick and wounded soldiers.

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Dix operated from houses she personally rented in Washington, and she did not take off a single day during her four years of service. Her hospitality was always available to nurses and discharged servicemen who lacked shelter. Louisa May Alcott, who became ill with typhoid fever soon after entering her brief service as a nurse, gratefully recalled Dix “stealing a moment from her busy life to watch over the stranger of whom she was as thoughtfully tender as any mother.”

In her zeal to reduce suffering and death, Dix constantly prowled the hospitals. Her intolerance of hospital administrators and nurses who did not meet her exacting standards caused constant friction. Finally, in October 1863, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton transferred part of the responsibility for appointing nurses to the surgeon general and gave medical officers at each hospital jurisdiction over their own female nurses.

Dix was heartbroken but responded with a magnanimity that drew admiration from even her staunchest opponents. After she resigned at war’s end and her post was abolished, she continued to work doggedly for another 18 months, helping individual soldiers and their families deal with the stresses of recuperation. Throughout the rest of her life, Dix begged biographers to de-emphasize her Civil War years. But in 1983, long after she was dead and could not protest the well-deserved honor, she was featured on a U.S. postage stamp.

While Dix was gathering her forces in Washington, Mary Ann Bickerdyke was taking matters into her own equally dedicated hands in Galesburg, Ill. A 45-year-old juggernaut, Bickerdyke personified Dix’s ideal nurse. Before the war, she had received training in botanic and homeopathic medicine and had been engaged in private-duty nursing. Recently bereaved by the untimely death of both her husband and young daughter, she felt divinely called to spend her remaining life relieving human suffering.

On a Sunday in June 1861, Bickerdyke listened as her pastor, Edward Beecher, brother of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, told of the need for volunteer help in the military camps in nearby Cairo, Ill. When the congregation asked her to accompany a load of food, clothing and medical supplies to Cairo on behalf of the church, she was ready. Except for short visits, that was the last her two young sons saw of her until the end of the war.

When Bickerdyke saw the poor condition of the hospital in Cairo, she took a room in town and immediately began a determined cleanup effort that quickly spread to the other five military hospitals in the area. Although he granted her a grudging welcome at first, Dr. J.J. Woodward, a surgeon with the 22nd Illinois Infantry, later praised Bickerdyke as “strong as a man, muscles of iron, nerves of finest steel; sensitive, but self-reliant, kind and tender; seeking all for others, nothing for herself.”

Throughout the war, “Mother” Bickerdyke moved from one trouble spot to another, acting on her belief that bodies healed best when they were bathed, placed in clean surroundings and fed well. She evinced a special concern for enlisted men and stopped at nothing to get supplies that would bring comfort to her “boys.” She begged food from any viable source, raided government supplies–often without permission–and commandeered boxes of delicacies sent from home to healthy soldiers. Many times, when government rations were waylaid or ran out, she found a way to feed the troops. Her tireless zeal earned her the nickname “Cyclone in Calico.”

In the early period of her service, Bickerdyke held no authority other than semiofficial status granted occasionally by Union Army officers. Her manner, however, was so forthright and compelling that she was rarely questioned. When one surgeon dared to ask where she received permission to do what she was doing, Bickerdyke retorted she was given orders by “the Lord God Almighty. Have you anything that ranks higher than that?” Later, she was named a Sanitary Commission agent.

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