Lucy Bissell

It’s April, it is finally Opening Day, and there’s snow on the ground…what in the world?

Pension File: 785618, 196657

P.O.: Kirkwood, Ohio

Service: nurse with the 22^nd Illinois from July 13, 1861

Applied: 1890 (SA)

Status: Accepted

Not too much in this file, unfortunately—as usual, special acts have next to no paperwork, so less for me to work with.  The upside should have been that Bissell was a regimental nurse, and sometimes examining letters and diaries from the regiment turns something up, but I haven’t found anything so far.  So far, we know that Lucy Bissell was a nurse attached to the 22^nd Illinois in July 13, 1861.  Since there aren’t any Bissells on the roster though, I don’t know what her connection to the regiment was.  She appears to have stayed with the regiment for at least the first year—the colonel of the regiment, Henry Dougherty, gave her a recommendation in 1862.  In 1863, the assistant surgeon at General Hospital No. 3 in Paducah also wrote her a recommendation, so by now she may have left the regiment.  She’d certainly left it in February, 1864, when she returned to Missouri (I say that because the 22nd Illinois was raised in Belleville, just the other side of St. Louis from her later address) and was given a position at Benton Barracks by James Yeatman (USSC), then transferred to Jefferson Barracks in July (her original commissions are included in the file).  She never received pay.  The next we hear of her, Bissell was living in Kirkwood, Missouri, just outside St. Louis.  She applied for her pension in February, 1890, via special act of Congress, which was approved that July.  The pension was dropped in August, 1896, after “failure to claim for three years.”  At best guess, Bissell never married—the special acts refer to her as “Miss Bissell,” but they have been known to be wrong before.  I'll update if I find anything, but if anyone knows something about the 22nd IL, please let me know!

Charlotte Ross

Pension: 1130592
P.O.: 80 Bloomington St., Indianapolis, and 1003 N. 4th Street, Arkansas City, Kansas
Service: contract nurse as regimental nurse for the 18th Indiana, then at Nashville General Hospital No. 23 and Murfreesboro General Hospital No. 7; served the duration of the war
Applied: September 8, 1892
Status: Abandoned

I've been seeing a surprising number of files like Ross's lately--maybe it's because I've been going through some old files, trying to track down burials and death dates.  Ross is one of the women who died while her claim was pending.
Pensions were loaded with social meaning in the nineteenth century--were you the 'deserving poor,' whatever the government and your community decided that meant, and thus qualified for a pension?  Could you bring yourself to discuss your wartime service as something other than charity, as something that deserved recognition and compensation from the government? Could you accept charity?  Could you make certain aspects of your private life public and admit that your living conditions were desperate, and take the shame that came with that?  But sometimes I need a reminder that buried underneath all that social meaning is often a very simple issue: many of these women are old, and they need these pensions to survive.
Charlotte Ross served during the war as Charlotte Gill (her maiden name).  Interestingly, I haven't been able to find any family members in the 18th Indiana (yet!) that would explain her presence--she mentioned she was attached to Co. K, so I'll be digging deeper into them.  Gill remained with the regiment until July, 1862, during which time she participated in every march, and every battle, including the Battle of Pea Ridge.  That July, however, she attached herself to General Hospital No. 23 in Nashville, while the regiment continued on to Arkansas.  Gill continued to work in Nashville until April, 1863, when she transferred to General Hospital No. 7 in Murfreesboro, where it seems she remained for the rest of the war.
Following the war, Gill married twice: the first to a man named Overturf (there's not much on him in the file), and then Thomas Ross, whom she married on November 24, 1873.  I might have found them in the 1880 census--there are a couple Charlottes and Thomas' in the Indianapolis area, and, to add to the confusion, it looks like one of them had a child prior to this marriage, because in the 1880 census, Thomas and Charlotte have a son, Archibald, who is seventeen years old.  That puts his D.O.B. at around 1863.  It's possible Charlotte was the mother, but given she served out the war, and there's no record of a name change in the pension file it seems more likely that Archibald is Thomas' child from a previous marriage, or they adopted him...or that it's not them at all!
At the very least, she was known to the WRC; she and her friend/fellow nurses, Harriet Hopp, whom she'd worked with in Nashville and Murfreesboro, were both listed on the WRC's nurse list from 1888.  She and Hopp appear to have kept in touch--Hopp testified during Ross's application.
Ross applied for her pension in September, 1892.  The Bureau could only find enough evidence in the records to prove three months service, so she sent in testimony from Hopp, as well as one of the soldiers from the regiment whom she'd nursed, Allen Kelley.  "I am in pressing need of it," Ross wrote Commissioner Raum that December, "and if I am going to get it I would like to have it soon for I am very old and cant live all ways and would like to get it in time to enjoy it before I die so please let me hear from you soon."  Unfortunately, there must have been a miscommunication somewhere, because when the Bureau next wrote Ross they said she application was completed.  When she hadn't received anything by April, however, Ross, understandably concerned, wrote the Commissioner again.  "You stated in your last card that my [pension] was on completed file and will you please answer this and let me know what si the delay of me not getting my Pension will you Please hurry it up as I stand in great need of it and oblige me, yours in F C and L."  None of the previous letters had the F C and L at the end, and this letter is in a different hand, which makes me wonder if the WRC or a friend in the WRC had taken an interest in Ross's case...
Ross sent one more letter in May, again asking why her pension hadn't been sent and for the Commissioner to get back to her quickly.  Finally, someone in the office got back to her, asking for additional information, since Ross only appeared on the rolls for three months, and none of the testimonials she provided counted as competent authority.  The problem was that the Bureau sent the letter to the wrong address.  When the letter finally made its way to the correct address, it was delivered not to Ross, but to her only living heir.  Ross had died on May 15th, just two days after she'd sent her last letter.

Mary Madole

Pension: 1130478, 854165
P.O.: 2244 Cass Ave., St. Louis, Missouri
Service: contract nurse at St. James General Hospital, New Orleans, from Nov. 30, 1862 to April 16, 1864
Applied: September 2, 1892
Status: Accepted

Another day, another profile.
Meet Mary Madole, née Flaherty, born May 5th or May 9th, in 1833 or 1838 (depending on which record you look at), in Galway, Ireland.  She immigrated to the States in 1853, and married Richard Knight, who died shortly after.  A respectable widow then, she became a contract nurse at St. James General Hospital in New Orleans--the building is still standing, to an extent; it's now the heavily renovated Board of Trade Plaza--where she served from late November, 1862 to mid-April, 1864.
During the winter of 1863/64, Mary took on a new patient: Joseph H. Madole, a private in Co. D, 147th New York, who was in the hospital with "febris" (a fever).
I always get a smile out of hospital romances.  Poor Dorothea Dix was fighting a losing battle trying to prevent those from happening.
Mary and Joseph were married in the hospital on March 29, 1864.  They then boarded a hospital ship where they both served as nurses (what a honeymoon), and settled in St. Louis, where Joseph worked as a Post Office clerk.  Both were members of St. Leo's, the Catholic church just down the street.  Joseph was also active in the community: he was a member of the Ancient Order of United Workmen (AOUW), and the local GAR post, Ransom.  Mary and Joseph had six children together, including Honora, or Annie as she was also known, Martha, and Mary, or Mamie.  Unfortunately, none of them lived past 1900.  Mary was the last, dying in October, 1900, just three months after her father.
Based on what little I've been able to find, it looks like Mary continued to live in the family home.  In until 1918, when she fell and injured her hip.  She was sent to St. John's Hospital, where she wrote to the Bureau asking for them to change her pension from nurse to widow--widows' pensions had been increased in 1916 to $25, but not nurses' pensions.  The Bureau was still in the middle of processing her claim when she died at Mercy Home on May 30, 1919.  She's buried in Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis, alongside her husband and daughter.

Elizabeth S. Ward

Pension: 1130368, 920782
P.O.: 23 Loan and Trust Building, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Service: worked as a dietician at Foundry Transfer Hospital in Louisville from October, 1864, to January, 1865; transferred to Wilson General Hospital, Nashville, and served from January to May, 1865
Applied: October, 1892
Status: Accepted

There is a special circle of frustration reserved for research involving US Christian Commission dieticians like Elizabeth Ward.  These women perfectly encapsulate the dichotomy of female workers during the war--they were technically members of the military, yet they performed traditional feminine tasks, in this case running the special diet kitchens.  The woman who created the job, Annie Wittenmyer, called the women dieticians, or sometimes nurses.  Mostly, the rolls listed them as cooks.  Given the issues surrounding gender during the pension application process (who qualified as a nurse/who can be counted as part of the military depended in part on your job title and if it was feminine rather than professional), and the fact that they were hired by a woman with no formal title, you can just imagine the trouble these women faced in the years following 1892.  And given just how adamant Wittenmyer was in defending her work and the women who worked for her, it's a safe bet there's a lot to talk about in a pension case involving a dietician.
A bit of background: proposed by Annie Wittenmyer in December, 1863, the special diet kitchens were, in Wittenmyer's words, meant to "reform the system of cookery in the US military Hospitals, which was the most defective of any part of the service."  Given that soldiers likely had little experience cooking for themselves prior to the war, and the rather limited knowledge of nutrition at the time, I'm not entirely surprised the food situation was such a mess.  The special diet kitchens  would prepare food for the very sick or severely wounded, "who often needed food delicately prepared, more than medicine."  The proposal was widely applauded and immediately put into practice in general hospitals across the north, and Wittenmyer was charged with finding women to run the kitchens.
Elizabeth Ward, or Libbie, as she was called, was one of her choices.  Ward wrote to Wittenmyer in August, 1864, offering her services, Wittenmyer accepted, and sent her a train ticket.  Ward reported for duty at Foundry Transfer Hospital on October 1.  She worked at Foundry until January 28 the following year, when she was transferred to Wilson General Hospital, also known as No. 6, in Nashville.  Wilson General Hospital was a colored hospital, and according to Wittenmyer, Ward was transferred there "because she was willing to work in a Hospital for sick and wounded Colored soldiers."  Jane Schultz argues in her book, Women at the Front, that white nurses achieved fairly "egalitarian" relations with the colored troops under their care.  Wittenmyer's choice of words, however, suggests that while Ward likely fit that description, not everyone was on the egalitarian bandwagon.  Ward worked at Wilson alongside two fellow nurses/dieticians, Mrs. Purington and Mrs. Sallie A. Marion, before she came down with typhoid in April, and was sent home, ending her army career.
Ward never married.  Following the war, she lived with her parents in Bristol, Wisconsin, while working as a dressmaker.  When they died, she moved back and forth between siblings--in fact, she shows up twice in the 1900 Census, living with both her sister's family, and her uncle.  She continued work as a dressmaker, though according to her testimony she was barely able to support herself by then.  She was known to the Woman's Relief Corps--she appears on their list of nurses, and has a brief entry in Our Army Nurses--and it's likely that this connection to the WRC, coupled with her connection to Annie Wittenmyer and her need for an income, prompted her to apply for a pension in 1892.
The major stumbling block was, since Wittenmyer had hired Ward, whether or not Wittenmyer was considered a competent authority--did she have the power to hire nurses?  Luckily, Fred Ainsworth, the head of the Records and Pension Division, and Surgeon General Sternberg ruled that Wittenmyer was a competent authority--they did not always agree on this point, and it got nasty at least once before they sorted things out--so Ward received her pension in 1896.  She continued to draw it until her death in February, 1914, at the age of 75.
Apart from the debate over Wittenmyer's authority, and the commentary on nursing colored troops, what I found striking about this application was Wittenmyer's appeal to the Bureau on Ward's behalf.
I have a small-scale obsession with Annie Wittenmyer.  Because of her work with the Army Nurses Pension Act (she nearly pushed the bill through single-handed), and her subsequent work as a pension agent, she appears fairly frequently in the pensions I study.  Her letters to the Bureau are always the highlight of a pension file.  Her testimonials, for instance, add details about a nurse's service that I wouldn't get otherwise--the description of Ward's work at Wilson GH comes from a letter Wittenmyer sent to the Bureau Commissioner.  And to back up her recollections, she mentions the dozens of wartime letters and records she has--eight volumes of which are preserved in Des Moines!  Jackpot!
Anyway, Wittenmyer was an outspoken woman, and a staunch advocate for the women who had worked for her.  The fact that she was, to all intents and purposes, a pension agent in a period where only a handful of women worked in law is testimony to her character and commitment.  Yet in Ward's application she has a change in voice, if you will.  Given the number of ex-dieticians applying for pensions at the time, and the controversy I mentioned surrounding their applications, Wittenmyer felt it prudent to explain herself and her work to the Bureau Commissioner.  And this forthright woman ended her letter with an apology: "I am very sorry to be thus obliged to write of myself, or work, but I feel you will generously credit it to my zeal for the best interest of the Army Nurses, hundreds of whom I know personally. I secured the passage of the Army Nurses Pension Act of Aug 5, 1892 and have for two years worked for them without one cent of salary, and I desire on their account that you should understand the facts."
This was not an uncommon attitude; in fact, it was the norm, and had been since before the Civil War, for women involved in benevolent work.  A number of nurses also expressed similar discomfort when discussing themselves and their work when they wrote to the Bureau regarding their pensions.  But it was not what I expected from Wittenmyer, a woman whose life's business was to put herself out there at the head of new, ambitious projects.  Yet she was, in her own way, conservative. For instance, she served as head of the Women's Christian Temperance Union until Francis Willard proposed adding women's suffrage to the WCTU's goals, at which point Wittenmyer left and founded the Non-Partisan WCTU, which concentrated solely on prohibition.  Her apology to the Commissioner echoes that more conservative/traditional stance--and serves as a reminder to me.
Wittenmyer is a fascinating, complex woman, and she and her work embody so much of the gendered controversies of the time.  Fingers crossed there are more files like Ward's, or there's a road trip to Iowa in my future, because I don't think we can understand the dramatic changes in gender roles underway in the US in the late 19th century, and the Civil War's role in those changes, without understanding this woman.  And I don't think I've even brushed the surface.

Rosina Gardner

Pension File: 1130856
P.O.: Costello, Potter Co., Pennsylvania
Service: matron at Mansion House Hospital, Alexandria, February, 1862-1864
Applied: September 14, 1892
Status: Rejected

If you follow Downton Abbey, PBS, or just historical dramas, you've probably heard the hype about this little show called Mercy Street.  To my undying consternation, despite having all these pension records, none of my nurses worked at Mansion House Hospital, where the drama is set.  And then I went on a quick research trip to D.C., and lo and behold...

Mansion House Hospital, Alexandria
Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Unfortunately, Rosina Gardner got the short end of the historical records stick.  We know her date of birth--1838.  We also know that she probably worked at Mansion House Hospital from February, 1862 to 1864, though the official records only have her listed from March 1 to May 7th, 1862, and then she appears at Emory General Hospital in D.C. that October as a laundress.  We can also make a fairly safe guess that since Gardner didn't have to work around a name change during the application process she never married.  When Gardner applied in 1892, she immediately ran into problems.  The dates for her service in the official records only totaled three months.  Gardner attempted to get in touch with one of the surgeons she worked for, but two had passed away, and the third, Dr. Summers, never responded to her letter.  As a result, the Bureau had no choice but to deny her claim.  And after that, Gardner disappears from the records.  I've tried tracking her down in Pennsylvania, but nothing as yet.  If anyone else finds something, let me know!  With all the attention on Mansion House Hospital right now, hopefully something will turn up.

Jehiel Baker

Pension File: 1130221
P.O.: Westport Point, Bristol Co., Mass.
Service: contract nurse from Sept./Oct., 1862 to June/July, 1863, and Nov., 1863 to March, 1864, at Portsmouth Grove
Applied: September 6, 1892
Status: rejected

I have to say, this one was a first.  I'm a little surprised I didn't run across one before.
Turns out, Jehiel Baker was a male nurse.
Now, let me be clear: male nurses, or male attendants, as the Hospital Steward's manual terms them, were not that uncommon during the Civil War.  In fact, prior to the war, the only nurses in the army were men--enlisted men and/or walking wounded who were pulled to work as ward masters, or help with things like dressing wounds, administering medicine, cooking, cleaning, etc.  During the war, many surgeons preferred to continue using male nurses rather than allow women to serve.  Male nurses did not disrupt the status quo.
Jehiel Baker, however, might have felt more at home amongst the female nurses, because he didn't quite fit the mold.  For reasons not given in his pension file, Baker was found medically unfit for regular military service.  Still determined to serve in some way, he went to work at the General Hospital in Portsmouth, RI in September, 1862.  Accordingly to the hospital records, he didn't go alone.  Cornelius T. Allen and Pardon S. Allen, also from Westport, began nursing at Portsmouth that September.  All three (and there might have been more!) contracted to serve a year.  Given the dates in Jehiel's file, I have a niggling suspicion that he became ill or something happened at home in June or July, 1863, that necessitated him returning home for a while, but he returned in November to finish out his contract.
After the war, Baker married Abby Lydia Gifford, with whom he had a daughter, Mercy Etta (b. 1876).  (Mercy went on to be a poet and artist--some of her work, mostly of what later became Horseneck Beach State Reservation, which her father owned, is actually featured by the Westport Historical Society, so definitely check it out!)  Jehiel seemed to do rather well for himself.  He owned the largest cranberry bogs on Horseneck, and later filed a patent for a 'sanding machine,' to be used in the cranberry bogs; he became the first Sunday School superintendent at the local Methodist Episcopal church.  When he applied for a pension in 1892, he noted that he had a 2/3 interest in a 20 acre cranberry bog, which brought him about $300 a year, as well as a house and small garden.  He biggest problem seems to have been his health.  When he applied for his pension in 1892, he was 55 years old, yet he was already unable to do any physical labor due to rheumatism and chronic dyspepsia (recurring pain in the upper abdomen), and he had lost sight in his right eye, and was losing it in the left.  Unfortunately, the Army Nurses Pension Act covered only female nurses, which meant Jehiel never received a pension for his work.  He died on March 12, 1915.

Amanda Watson Bowler

Pension: App. 808716, Cert. 504569
P.O.: South Hancock, ME
Service: tended Union POWs in Memphis, Tennessee, from fall, 1861 to June, 1862, when the Union army took the city
Applied: 1890
Status: Accepted (SA)

I don't often get to see how things were going south of the Mason-Dixon line--working with federal pensions means that, unfortunately, I'm currently dealing only with northern nurses (methinks I see at least one more chapter in my dissertation...).  Bowler's application provided me a rare glimpse into the southern experience, albeit through the eyes of a northern woman.
Bowler was born in Fayette, Maine, in December, 1828, to Permelia and Richard Watson, a clergyman.  She seems to have lived all her early life in Maine--the 1860 census lists her as living with her parents and three siblings in Hancock, Maine--but for reasons never made entirely clear in her pension record in 1860/1861, before the outbreak of the war, she came to Memphis to work as a music teacher.  When the war broke out, Watson was stuck in the city.  She quickly volunteered her services at Overton Hospital, one of many hospitals that had sprung up in Memphis.

Overton Hotel, on the corner of Main and Poplar, was taken over as hospital
and quarters for both sides. 450 beds. Photo taken 1910.

Despite being caught in Confederate territory, Watson hadn't given up on her Yankee sympathies and immediately volunteered to nurse the Union prisoners being taken to Overton.  They were in rough shape.  Watson recalled that many of the men lay in their cots, still wearing the clothes they'd arrived in, and vermin were pervasive.  They were also housed at the top of the building--Watson complained years later that running up and down five flights of iron stairs gave her serious knee problems.
Watson was ostensibly assigned to tend to both Confederate and Union patients, but Confederate patients of course took precedence, and often she had to tend to her Union patients on the sly, usually at night, with the help of two unidentified negroes.  She was very protective of her patients, going so far as to destroy doctor's prescriptions if her patients worsened, and prescribing her own, "never losing a patient that I could control." (I suspect that a number of nurses did the same in northern hospitals, but refrained from mentioning it in their pensions.)
Watson's nighttime activities however quickly attracted attention.  She shrugged off the attention by insisting that cleanliness was "indispensable to all the patients," and continued her evening activities, even hiring a kind-hearted woman to take her place when hospital personnel became suspicious.  The Memphis Vigilance Committee, however, was not convinced, and sent Watson a message, saying "that I had been circulating contraband news, + that if I did not leave the hospital they would arrest + confine me," but that if she agreed to nurse Confederate soldiers only she would be allowed to remain.  Watson did not reply, and continued to nurse Confederates by day and Union by night, working herself to exhaustion until a change in administration at the hospital made it possible for her to nurse the Union POWs with more freedom.  She remained at Overton until Memphis was taken by the Union army in June, 1862.
After the war, Watson returned to Maine.  She applied for her pension in 1874 after seeing that several of her fellow nurses had successfully received pensions.  It took years, affidavits from several Confederate surgeons she had worked for (now there was a surprise!) and several Congressmen, to push her pension through.  The entire process seems to have frustrated Watson.  In one of several letters to the Congressmen handling her case she wrote about the officer's daughters who were receiving $75-$100 pensions.  "Why should the government not compensate me when I readily and voluntarily gave myself up to the hard labor and filthy surroundings?" she asked.
It's sentiments like this that strongly suggest that Watson's application was not motivated solely by her financial situation.  Watson felt she deserved treatment equal to, if not better, than the daughters of officers and other dependents.  Typically, nurses prided themselves on volunteering.  Taking pay was considered vulgar, it made them laborers in a sense--a feeling that didn't sit well with many middle-class women.  That same mindset surfaces in a number of pension applications, nurses who see pensions as a last resort, something they turn to when all other avenues are exhausted.  Bowler, however, turns this idea on its head.  To her, the very fact that she volunteered her labor (something those officers' dependents never did) entitles her to compensation and consideration.
There are, of course, ramifications with this line of thinking.  If Bowler is not a dependent, but is instead basing her pension claim off her own volunteer work (though apparently this volunteer work should be compensated), it puts her in company with the only other non-dependents now receiving pensions, and the other volunteers in the war: the soldiers.  The idea isn't very well developed in Watson's application, and I'm fairly sure Watson herself would object to my pointing it out, but the seeds of the idea are there.  It was simply up to groups like the Woman's Relief Corps and the Army Nurses' Association to see them through.
Watson married James R. Bowler in the 1880s.  He died not long thereafter, and Annie, as her husband called her, returned to teaching music.  She died in August, 1894.  As testament to her work, the Daughters of Union Veterans in Franklin named their tent in her honor.

Amanda Watson Bowler's Gravestone, Riverside Cemetery, Maine