Harriet Tubman was best known among the many blacks who rendered distinguished service as Civil War nurses. Famed for her courageous exploits with the Underground Railroad, she was admired by many leaders of the time, including Secretary of State William Seward and New England poet Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Early in the war, Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew asked Tubman to help nurse in the military camps. She moved from one camp to another throughout the war, using her nursing skills and extensive knowledge of the healing properties of roots and herbs. Tubman rarely accepted the military rations that were offered to her, preferring to support herself by making baked goods and selling them in the camps. She gave any extra money to the freedmen who often sought refuge in the camps. Late in life, she was awarded a military pension, and when she died in 1913, she was given a military funeral.

A record of Civil War nursing from the black viewpoint was left by Susie King Taylor in her Reminiscences of My Life in Camp. Taylor was born a slave on the Isle of Wight near Savannah, Ga. In adolescence she learned to read and write at a clandestine school run by a free black woman. Marrying Edward King, she followed him when he joined the Union Army’s first black regiment, the 1st South Carolina Volunteers. In camp she nursed the wounded, did laundry, cooked and taught the men literacy skills.

Taylor became a prot?g? of Clara Barton, who often took her along on hospital rounds. Taylor admired Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, whom she described as “kind and devoted to his men” and “a genial presence.” In her book she also recalled Colonel C.T. Trowbridge. “He was the very first officer to take charge of black soldiers,” she wrote. “We thought there was no one like him, for he was a ‘man’ among his soldiers….I shall never forget his friendship and kindness toward me….No officer in the army was ever more beloved.”

Taylor’s book is filled with details of camp hospital life. She recalled making custard of milk and turtle eggs for the wounded in a camp on Morris Island, and she described warming her tent at night with an iron frying pan full of coals from the cook shed. She noted that fleas often kept her awake all night.

Taylor served for four years and three months in Union Army hospitals without receiving either pay or a formal appointment. After the war, she was granted no government pension or recognition for her nursing services. Still, she wrote, “I was glad…to go with the regiment, to care for the sick and afflicted comrades.”

Taylor summed up the attitude of volunteer Civil War nurses of both races when she observed: “It seems strange how our aversion to seeing suffering is overcome in war,–how we are able to see the most sickening sights, such as men with their limbs blown off and mangled by the deadly shells, without a shudder, and instead of turning away, how we hurry to assist in alleviating their pain, bind up their wounds, and press the cool water to their parched lips, with feelings only of sympathy and pity.”

The nurses of the Civil War left a heritage far beyond a country’s gratitude for bodies salvaged and spirits renewed. Observing the difference they had made, both the public and the medical community finally came to recognize nursing as a le-gitimate profession. Women such as the Woolseys and Clara Barton translated their experience in Civil War hospitals into reforms in both nursing science and the education of nurses. As Jane Woolsey noted in Hospital Days, “It has been a tiresome march, but think of the results.”

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Veteran freelance writer Alice Stein resides in Tonawanda, N.Y. For further reading, see: Cyclone in Calico: The Story of Mary Ann Bickerdyke, by Nina Brown Baker; or Dorothea Dix, Forgotten Samaritan, by Helen E. Marshall.

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