News and Reflection: Roman Catholic Nuns, Charity and Mercey

Nuns on the Civil War Battlefield: In a time of anti-Catholicism, they somehow became a unifying force, Nic Rowan, Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2018

Illustration: “Our Women and the War,” a wood engraving of women helping the Union Army, 1862

During the 1863 Chattanooga campaign, nuns from the Sisters of Charity tended to wounded soldiers in a Nashville, Tenn., field hospital. As they prepared to move on to another site, the men cried out in protest. Nuns on the battlefield had become a great comforts to the dying, and the soldiers passed around a petition urging them to stay.

As it circulated, one sick soldier delivered a speech praising the nuns, according to Pvt. William H. Nelson of the 19th Illinois Infantry. “I want to sign that paper. I would sign it 50 times, if asked,” the wounded soldier said. “For the sisters have been to me as my mother since I have been here and, I believe, had I been here before, I would have been well long ago. But if the sisters leave, I know I shall die.” More than 230 men signed the petition, and the nuns stayed.

Some 700 religious sisters ministered Civil War battlefields, offering respite from the horrors of combat. Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton’s Sisters of Charity were the largest group, with more than 300 sisters ministering to Union and Confederate troops alongside Catholic priests and Protestant ministers.

Shortly after the war, Catholic historian David Power Conyngham compiled testimonies, letters and newspaper clippings about the veteran Catholic chaplains and religious sisters. After his death, Conyngham’s manuscript was forgotten in the University of Notre Dame’s archives. Now it is being published as “Soldiers of the Cross.”

It’s telling that the sisters left little in testimony about themselves. What we know comes almost exclusively from the men they helped, and the book’s collection of primary documents shows soldiers offering high praise to the sisters. It’s unusual, considering the prevalent anti-Catholicism of antebellum America. But their service to American men of all faiths was living proof that these Catholics did not only take orders from the pope in Rome.

“I am not of your Church, and have always been taught to believe it to be nothing but evil,” an imprisoned Union soldier wrote to the Sisters of Mercy’s mother superior in an 1864 letter. “However, actions speak louder than words, and I am free to admit, that if Christianity does exist on the earth, it has some of its closest followers among the Ladies of your Order.”

Confederates shared similar sentiments. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard commended the “indefatigable” and “unremitting” service of the religious sisters who administered to his troops throughout the war. “Even Protestant commanding officers were always happy to avail themselves, in our hospitals, of the self-sacrificing, untiring and generous assistance of the ‘sisters’ who were so kind and devoted to the poor, helpless, sick, and wounded soldiers placed under their care, that these heroes of many hard fought battles, looked upon them as their own sisters or mothers,” he wrote.

The response was similar among the North’s leadership. Conyngham includes letters from Union Gens. George B. McClellan, George Meade and Philip Sheridan, all thanking the sisters for their intercession. Gen. Ambrose Burnside offered the highest praise, saying that his words could never describe the gratitude his men felt for the sisters’ deeds. “Of the Sisters of Mercy there is little need for me to speak,” he wrote. “Their good deeds are written in the grateful hearts of thousands of our soldiers, to whom they were ministering angels.”

Officers wrote personal commendations of the sisters. John E. Michener, a Union soldier captured in the summer of 1864, in a letter thanked the Sisters of Mercy at the Confederate hospital in Charleston, S.C., for bravely administering to men dying of yellow fever—even when Confederate officers were “too much alarmed to even furnish water for the sick and dying.” He added, “I know full well, that but for your untiring devotion to our helpless and unfortunate officers and soldiers, thousands to-day would have been sleeping the sleep that knows no waking.”

In one typical episode at a Kentucky hospital served by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, a Protestant chaplain witnessed a nun serve the sick without rest from daybreak until well past sunset. “It is as mystery to me, how those sisters can stand at their post without ever giving up,” he told a friend. Then, turning to the sister, he asked, “How do you account for it?” The nun only smiled at him and gestured to the rosary on her hip.

Mr. Rowan is a media analyst at the Washington Free Beacon.

CWL---The Civil War's Women Nurses: Humanitarian. Moral. But Professional?

The Inhospitable Hosptial: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine, Jane E. Schultz, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and History, 17:2 [1992], pp. 363-392.

The enthusiastic embrace by women of the benevolent organization, especially those focusing upon the health concerns of soldiers, was remarkable during the American Civil War. In the hospitals of the Union and the Confederacy, 20,000 women served. Enslaved and free black women, upper class white widows, farm women, and others served as nurses, matrons, cooks and laundresses provided paid, forced, and unpaid labor. Schultz's review of several hundred published and archived diaries, memoirs and letter collection reveals that female nursing evolved during a trend of increasing medical professionalism which was guided by men. (364-365)

In military hospitals, personal interactions of brought forth coping strategies by women. Their avoidance of the 'medical models of professionalism was a protest against male authority' that after the war were embraced. After the war in hospital training schools placed nurses at the bottom of the hierarchy. Obedience and discipline were principles were emphasized in the curriculum. Dissent and protest was not encourage among nursing students. Schultz focuses not on the post-war emerging professionalism of nursing, but the behavior of nurses that emerged as conflicts arose between male surgeons and female attendants regarding corruption, bureaucratic inhumanity and morality in Civil War hospitals. (365-366).

Between June 1861 and October 1863, Dorothea Dix appointed 3,200 women to nursing positions. In October 1863, the surgeon general allowed surgeons to appoint nurses. Frequently chosen by surgeons were Catholic nuns who would not be paid and required very little in regard to housing. Vows of poverty and self-sacrifice along with experience in asylums and orphanages seemed to suit the nature of nursing as it was recognized by doctors. Female U.S. Sanitary Commission agents at time assumed nursing duties on hospital transport boats and ships. The Union paid female nurses 40 cents a day and one ration. Cooks and laundresses earned between six and ten dollars a month. (336-367)

Untypical but noteworthy are Esther Hill Hawks and Mary Edwards Walker, both educated by medical colleges. It was inconcievable for a women to have military rank yet both performed service. Hawks tended to black federal soldiers in South Carolina and Walker performed emergency medical services at Fredericksburg in December 1862 and later Chickamauga in September 1863. The Confederacy established a pay scale for female nurses, yet it appears that most Confederate nurses provided temporary and unpaid services. (368-369)

Nurses' duties consisted of keeping clean patients with their beds and clothes, preparing and serving food and perscriptions ordered by the surgeon, and writing for and pass time with them. Military hospitals were plagued by cascading issues. Chief among was the issue of relating the early 18th century mindset of allopathic medicine to the emerging mid-19th century mindset of homeopathic medicine. Additional issues included military rank, hospital inspectors, medical competency examinations and graft among vendors and quartermasters. (370-373)

Women entered situations in which 'status anxious' poorly supplied and trained surgeons. These doctors declared that the best service to be done by women be at the bottom of the chain of command. Ratios of doctors to patients, nurses to surgeons, male nurses to female nurses created difficult situations particular to the size of the hospital. Schultz believes the small hospital homes of Richmond held fewer bureaucratic dilemmas than the larger general and pavilion hospitals like Chimborazo in Richmond. The post-war memoir by Phoebe Yates Pember reveal this. Jane Stuart Woolsey, a nurse at Washington DC hospital offered a similar reflection on her experience. (373-374)

Image Source: Civil War Nurses

Research----Worth a Dozen Men: Women, Nursing and Medical Care During the American Civil War; Dissertation In Search of a Publisher

Worth a Dozen Men: Women, Nursing and Medical Care During the American Civil War, Libra Rose Hilde, Harvard University, 2003.

CWL--- I am probably one of a small group who periodically search Dissertation Abstracts to find new scholarship on the Civil War. Also, I am one of a even smaller group who actually borrow dissertations through inter-library loan and read a few chapters of a dissertation just for fun; dissertations are not indexed, so I read chapters. Well, what can I say? I am like that. And yes, I do read the 30+ page bibliographies.

Jane E. Schultz's, Women at the Front: Hospital Workers In Civil War America (2004) looks broadly at women, such as laundresses, cooks, matrons and nurses in soldiers' hospitals during the war. Libra Rose Hilde's dissertation, Worth A Dozen Men, focuses on nursing during wartime. The nursing profession, its ideals and it practical applications provide the focus of the first 130 pages of the dissertation. The social changes which the profession of nursing passed through are presented in the next 400+ pages. The movement of females into the nursing profession, the conflicts male doctors and female nurses, and the emotional support of female nurses for male patients are thoroughly presented.

Hilde's tenth chapter stands as a nice complement to Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering (2008). 'Far From Home and Mother: Death in Civil War Hospitals' begins with Ada Babcock's diary entry. "There was another death . . . he was very much frightened, & I am told wept nearly all day yesterday. I am so sorry I did not know it, I would have gone to him & tryed [sic] to ease his last moments." Also, Chapter 7, Women's work in Civil War Hospitals, stands well by itself. "The traditional female roles shaped middle and upper class women's official duties in the South. Expectations regarding motherhood, domestic nursing, and female sympathy and piety determined a typical suite of unofficial duties that women . . . from ward nurses to chief matrons, added to their daily routine." (p. 315)

"Middle and upper class Southern women frequently lacked experience with the more basic labor involved in their positions. Suddenly place in charge of a kitchen and feeding hundreds of men, Phoebe Pember quickly adapted despite unfamiliarity handling certain types of food. "For the first time I cup up with averted eyes a raw bird . . . .' " (p. 323) The chapters I read frequently use anecdotes similar to Pembers' to illustrate the the point being made.

A small or large publisher, looking for a an item in the Civil War field, would do well to examine Hilde's dissertation for a book length or booklet length publication.

Photo: Nurses and Officers of the U.S. Christian Commission at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Library of Congress