When the last Illinois man was discharged, Bickerdyke resigned from the Sanitary Commission to devote the rest of her life to her family and to charitable deeds. She died in 1901, and a sturdy freighter named for her carried on her work in the 20th century by ferrying Spam and sulfa drugs to American servicemen isolated on Pacific islands in World War II.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in America's Civil War magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Another tireless champion of wounded enlisted men during the Civil War was Hannah Ropes. The daughter and sister of prominent Maine lawyers, she was over 50 when the war started. An experienced nurse, she had gained prewar recognition as a reformer and abolitionist and was acquainted with many New England political leaders. Like Dix and Bickerdyke, she believed every soldier deserved proper sanitation, good food and humanitarian treatment, and never hesitated to go to the top to obtain such creature comforts. Secretary of War Stanton personally took action against officers and stewards she found to be slovenly and incompetent.

In 1862 Ropes became the matron of the Union Hotel Hospital located in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Georgetown, where Louisa May Alcott also served. In her book Hospital Sketches, Alcott described Ropes’ actions as casualties arrived from the Battle of Fredericksburg: “The hall was full of these wrecks of humanity…and, in the midst of it all, the matron’s motherly face brought more comfort to many a poor soul, than the cordial draughts she administered, or the cheery words that welcomed all, making the hospital a home.”

In her own published diary and letters, Ropes spoke often of her particular regard for the enlisted man. In October 1862, she wrote, “The poor privates are my special children of the present,” and described “the loss they have experienced in health, in spirits, in weakened faith in man, as well as shattered hope in themselves.” Later, she wrote to her daughter, Alice, “I owe no man anything but love.”

In her final diary entry in December of that year, Ropes, writing in the third person, described the passing of one of these men: “‘Thank you, madam….I must be marching on.’ So said Lewie as he passed away. Sitting on one side of him was his nurse, Miss Alcott, on the other side the matron [Ropes]….There was in the man such a calm consciousness of life, such repose in its secure strength….The matron is left alone when the breath ceases.” A few weeks later, Ropes died of typhoid fever, the same disease that had shortened Alcott’s nursing service.

Sometimes caring for the war wounded became a family undertaking. In New York, Jane Newton Woolsey, widow of a prominent industrialist, quickly rallied her six daughters to the cause. Georgeanna (”Georgy”), Eliza and Jane became nurses, while the others made supplies. The Woolsey home near the Brevoort House Hotel be-came a center for preparing supplies and distributing them to Union hospitals.

In 1861 Georgy Woolsey was among the first women to be accepted for nurse’s training and assigned to duty by Dorothea Dix. By September of that year, Georgy and Eliza were serving in a makeshift hospital in an unfinished government building. Georgy described how they used rough wood scaffolding for beds, with as many as six men in each one. The beds were so high that long broom handles had to be used to support them. Very sick men were given individual beds on piles of marble slabs originally intended for building construction. Until further work was done on the building, pulleys raised food and water to the ersatz hospital’s upper floors.

The three sisters served in numerous capacities, both in hospitals and on military hospital transport ships. Jane and Georgy were assistant superintendents of the U.S. Army hospital at Portsmouth Grove, R.I. The two also served at Hammond General Hospital. They were paid $12 a month and immediately returned the compensation to the surgeon-in-charge to purchase items for the patients. Eliza returned to private life when her husband, Colonel Joseph Howland, was wounded and mustered out of service.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to