One Week Left!

One Week Left!

When I started this project, my first goal was to put together a list of women who applied for pensions between 1866 and 1892.  My total is somewhere around 625—and if fold3 would update its database every once in a while, and Ancestry let me limit pensions by year, it’d be much bigger.  Anyway, since the Archives only allow a certain number of pulls a day, and I’m only here for five weeks, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to pull all 650, so I printed out a list, highlighted every other name, and hoped that this would be a good random sampling.  And if it wasn’t, well, in five weeks I can pull a maximum of 400 pensions, and since 625 divided by 2 is 312.5, I have some wiggle room.  One week, to be precise.  Next week.

Which is why yesterday there was no post.  I know I can always come back to D.C. this summer, or come up in the fall, but I want to get as much done now as possible.  So yesterday was planning.  And here is the to-do list:

I have time for 72 more pension pulls.  Go back through the rejection slips (you know, I got 9 yesterday. 9!!  And Harriet Stinson Pond is not an officer from a Kentucky regiment! Geez…), and decide which ones I want to/can request again.  Then, go through the master list and see if I missed anyone I particularly wanted to pull—blacks, nuns, women who are particularly well-documented.  Random sampling for the rest of the list.  DONE

Legislation has the list of Special Acts I want to see.  Pull those, go through.  Make sure to check for women not on the list.  Also go through the other file related to the 1892 Act.

Put together a list of the Congressmen on the Committee on Invalid Pensions and see if they have papers here or at the LoC.  I have a few letters between the WRC and various Congressmen, so I know the correspondence is there, it’s just a matter of finding it.

Check to see if the LoC of the Archives have anything on the WRC women on the National Pension Committee: E. Florence Barker, Kate B. Sherwood, Lydia A. Scott, Mary A. Logan, Sarah E. Fuller, Clara Barton and Annie Wittenmyer (technically she’s not on the Committee, she’s the WRC president, but she’s endorsing so many applications she might as well be on the committee).  Also, see if there’s anything on James Tanner—Tanner was Commissioner of Pensions in 1889 and had very liberal policies about who he gave pensions too.  After he exceeded the Bureau's budget and had to resign, he set up a private law firm, specializing in pensions.  In 1892, he offered to help nurses obtain pensions.  Legally, he couldn’t ask for a fee for his work; it all had to be pro bono.  But, he still offered, and a significant number of the nurses on my list have power of attorney papers giving him the ability to prosecute their case, or affidavits and forms with his firm’s stamp on it.  If he has papers, they could shed some light on how these women found out about the pensions, the process of applying, and why so many women chose him to act for them.

If there’s time, go through the microfilm of letters to/from the Pension Office from 1860s to 1890 and see if there are letters relating to the project (they have the letters from 1890 onward nicely indexed by subject and sender, but not these—why?!).

A number of my nurses lived here in D.C. for a time, like Susan Edson and Caroline Burghardt (I actually live a block and a smidge from one of them—her home is now a Bertucci’s…).  Check the D.C. historical society and see if they have files on these women.  Chances are slim, since the last time I checked they were looking for a new head librarian, and have been closed for nearly a year, but you never know.

Finally: if the weather ever cools down enough to leave air-conditioned comfort and permit long walks, I want to go to Arlington.  A few of my nurses are buried there, and I’d like to see them and get pictures for their files.

So, no problem, right?  Right.

One more week, guys! Keep your fingers crossed it’s a good one!

Susan Barry

Pension File:  599141, 352072 (Special Act)
P.O.: San Francisco, CA
Service: served under Dix at at least 11 different hospitals from 1861 to 1864.
Applied: 1887
Status: Accepted

Susan Barry's file was really two files in one.  One was her husband's pension file; the other was hers.  Robert, the husband, emigrated from England as a child.  Susan was a native.  Robert enlisted in the Stokes Battery, Illinois Light Artillery; Susan was selected as a nurse in May of 1861 and began courses at Bellevue Hospital.  After two months, Dix assigned her to Alexandria, Virginia.  She stayed there for eight months before being transferred to Winchester.  From then on, every few months found her at a new hospital: Harpers Ferry, Georgetown, Aquia Creek, Murfreesboro--she was everywhere.  There's no indication in the records as to how Robert and Susan met, but the two were married in May, 1866, at Hoomer, New York.
Robert almost immediately began to suffer from neuralgia and a variety of other maladies which he traced back to his service.  The Bureau, however, didn't buy it until 1890, and in the meantime, Susan applied for a Special Act of her own.  In 1887, Congress granted her a $12 pension.  Once again, the file's a little sparse on exactly how Barry pushed through a Special Act, but given the trouble Robert was having getting his own pension, it was probably a good thing.  The Bureau didn't think his disabilities kept him from doing manual labor in any significant way, and there were allegations that his 'nervous prostration' was due to some excessive drinking.  Susan, however, supported her husband's claim, writing letters, signing affidavits, and helping with the special investigation launched in 1900.  Robert died in 1905 at the age of 67; Susan passed a few years later in 1912.
No big surprises, no intriguing mysteries or hints, just a simple story of a woman and her husband and their experiences.  Though...Susan has a special act file buried somewhere in the depths of the Archives--with four years of service, I bet there'll be some interesting finds!

51A-H10.1

Today promised to be a big day.  Wednesday is the first day of the week I can put in twenty pull requests instead of sixteen.  And this Wednesday I was going to finish Mary E. Walker's microfilm, and look at the rest of the 51st Congress Senate Private Acts and move on to the 52nd.  The cherry: legislation pulled 51A-H10.1, the Committee on Invalid Pension's file on the Army Nurses Pension Act.  All kinds of good things lined up.
And it didn't disappoint.  Walker is finished and I'm in the midst of transcribing the documents; the 51st and 52nd Congress Private Acts are done, and I have a couple extra nurses who weren't on my list. And 51A-H10.1 is photographed.  I feel virtuous.
51A wasn't what I expected though.  I was hoping for correspondance between committee members and members of the WRC arguing for support, letters between committee members debating the merits of the bill, or discussing who they needed to persuade and how to go about it.  I didn't get much of that, though.  There were two identical letters, sent to George Seney and D.B. Henderson by Kate B. Sherwood, the Chairman of the National Pension and Relief Committee for the WRC, presenting the Army Nurses Bill and asking for support.  There's no indication of whether or not either Congressman gave the bill their support.
There were also more of the petitions I'd found earlier--apparently Indiana sent theirs in late.  Their late arrival necessitated a letter from Armilla Cheney, the WRC treasurer explaining the situation, and a letter from Clara Barton to Mr. Cogswell forwarding them on to him.
I don't remember if I mentioned this in previous posts, but Barton was an active member of the WRC.  She served on the WRC Pension Committee until the bill finally passed, and also served as National Chaplain for a number of years.  She was so often in D.C. that the Pension Committee effectively made her their agent in the capitol.  What exactly being that agent entaled I didn't know until I read this letter, which reveals a little of what Barton was up to.  Apparently, the petitions I looked at earlier were sent to Barton, and she in turn sent them to Senator Blaire, the head of the Committee on Invalid Pensions and a strong advocate for the Nurses Pension Act.  When these stragglers arrived, Barton sent them on to Mr. Cogswell to add to the petition; as Barton put it, "from the size of that 'cart wheel' roll one would judge that it needed no further accessories--but vast as the sea is, the drops still fall in it and the little brooks flow to it, so I suppose it's all right."
I also found an intriguing little pamphlet tucked in the folder: Joint Resolution No. 3. from the General Assembly and Governor of Iowa, "asking Congress to enact a law providing for pensioning certain women enrolled as Army Nurses."
Any ideas why Iowa of all states is endorsing the Nurses Pension Act?

Mary A. Huff

Pension File: 1133684, 815217
P.O.: Nova Scotia
Service: Nurse at Carver Hospital, D.C.
Applied: 1892
Status: Accepted

I know I promised you Mary Walker, but her papers are a two-day project.  So, in the interim, I pulled out Mary Huff's file.
Mary Huff is one of those wonderful occasions where someone kept track of who served at the hospital, and the War Department managed to find it.  She served at Carver Hospital in Washington, D.C. from October 17th, 1864, to June 3rd, 1865 alongside a number of other women whose pension files I pulled, like Mary A. McKee, Waitie Harris, and Sarah Cowgill.  The catch (it's not a real blogpost if there wasn't a catch): the rolls listed her as a cook, which meant she didn't fall under the 1892 Act.  She was also no longer a resident of the US.  There's nothing in the file on the problems created by Huff living in Canada. There is, however, tons on the problem created by listing her as a cook.
In fact, it looks like the Bureau had a minor meltdown.  Huff's file is full of official letters, briefings, and legal decisions centered on the specifics of the 1892 Act.  I promise I'll try to keep the legalese to a minimum.
There were two major problems.  By 1892, many surgeons and stewards who could testified to a woman's service were dead, and nurses had to rely on the testimony of enlisted men and nurses.  The issue here was whether or not that testimony was sufficient to establish service under a competent authority.  The other problem was the exact status of the women who worked for Annie Wittenmyer in the special diet kitchens, since they served both as nurses and cooks--cooks, of course, being completely left out of the 1892 Act.
Hoke Smith, the Secretary of the Interior at the time, made the final legal ruling.  The "fact of service," or whether or not a woman served as a nurse under competent authority, could be proved by any competent witness, including enlisted men and nurses.  However, they did not have authority to employ nurses.  Self-explanatory.  As to the women employed by Wittenmyer,

"the dietary nurse sustains a relation to a patient which is much akin to that of a medical adviser.  Physicians are themselves constantly urging the efficiency of diet as a safeguard against disease as well as a remefy therefor.  It requires intelligence as well as delicate knowledge of the nature and effect of certain foods to fit a woman for such a position.  They often have, for this, a peculiar fitness, and the services rendered by such women are invaluable and entitled to great consideration."

Therefore, Smith considered their pensionable status under the Act "unquestionable."
There were also two substantial "opinions."  As dull as it sounds, the briefs answered some of the questions I kept asking as I went through the files.  One brief, an Opinion in re Nurse Pension Act acknowledged just how difficult it was to establish a nurse's service using service records or testimony.  Some times, no evidence could be found, and other times the record listed women as cooks, laundresses, waitresses--positions other than nurses, as was the case with Mary Huff.  They were listed as such, the opinion stated, "presumably in compliance with a request from the Surgeon General's Office, that [because] a larger number of nurses had been accepted in the Department...than had been intended," they should be listed under another name, but given the same pay.  The problem here was finding evidence to controvert the records.  Then there was my favorite: sometimes the records showed a woman paid for less than the required six months (usually because the records were spotty or the women signed vouchers allowing the Surgeon to draw their pay to buy things for the soldiers), but the woman claimed more than six months service.  And then there were the people whose homes were used as hospitals and they themselves worked as nurses.
What to do, what to do?
Here's the short answer.  Yes, you can get a pension if you are listed as something other than a nurse, so long as you can deliver proof and were appointed by a competent authority.  So, if you were listed as a cook, laundress, or opened your house, as long as you actually nursed, you come under the Act.  No, you can't deny a pension based solely on payment records (or lack thereof).  Payment records are only corroborative evidence.
So why do payment records still have so much 'oomph' in later records?  And why are Wittenmyer's nurses still having issues getting pensions a few years later?  In short, why do they make a somewhat hasty retreat on all these decisions within months?!

Sarah Ingalls

Pension File: 745503
P.O.: Lowell, Massachusetts
Service: Nurse at Point Lookout and Washington hospitals
Applied: 1889
Status: Abandoned

There are three things that make Sarah Ingalls' file stand out to me.  One: it's only five papers.
Two: The date Ingalls filed her application.
Three: The date Ingalls "abandoned" her claim.

Because Ingalls' file is so small, there's not a great deal of information in it, but enough to put together a brief sketch.  Ingalls was a trained nurse, and served in that capacity at Capital Hospital, Cast Paris Hospital, and at Point Lookout from summer, 1862, to winter, 1862, when she caught malaria and left the service.  The record's silent until 1888, when Ingalls filed for a pension.  She altered a widows' claim, filled in as much pertinent information as possible, and sent it in.
Ingalls is the latest in a long line of women who filed for a pension prior to the 1892 Act--and the latest in a long line of women who felt they were entitled to a pension based on their service, whether or not there was a law explicitly allowing it.  I haven't gone over my files in detail and starting putting together numbers and patterns, but it appears that there's no pattern to who applied for a pension before the Act.  They simply applied because they needed the help the pension would give them.
True to form, the Pension Bureau rejected Ingalls' initial claim on the grounds that she had no title under present law.  Ingalls re-opened her claim in October of 1892, just after the passage of the Act.  The Pension Bureau didn't reply to her letter until October of 1893--and had the gall to begin its letter with "in response to your communication of recent date."  The letter simply informed Ingalls that she could apply for a pension based on the '92 Act, and they were sending her a blank for her to fill out and return.
The last paper in the file is an envelope, which presumably contained the letter.  A stamp says, Return to Writer, and a note scribbled on it reads, "This lady died last June...please correct your rolls."
And so, Sarah Ingalls claim was "abandoned."
I will say a lot of things against the Pension Bureau over the course of this project.  I'm dealing with government here, and government policy.  Government always offends someone.  But waiting an entire year to respond to a woman, asking for a pension, only for her to die in the interm is completely unacceptable.  I think I can safely say that I have never been more furious with the bureaucrats running that Bureau than I am now.
I'll try to find a happier pension file to write about for tomorrow.  I have Dr. Mary E. Walker's papers waiting for me in the morning.  Those should work.

Mary E. Hooker

Pension File: 907755
P.O.: Goshen, Indiana
Service: Private, Co. F, 26th Ohio
Applied: 1891
Status: Rejected

The first sign that this folder was going to be fun was the alias after Hooker's name: Charles E. Dewey, Co. K, 26th Ohio.
The second was the headline on the newspaper article I found tucked into this file read: "A Romance of the Late War Comes To Light Through An Application For Pension."
Did it live up to the hype?
Oh yeah.

The newspaper article explains it all.  Mary E. Hooker, then Mary E. Dewey, was a young woman engaged to be married to Benjamin Brown.  The date for the wedding was set, and then Lincoln issued his called for volunteers.  "Benjamin's heart was filled with martial ardor," the article declared, "and insensible alike to his own safety and the protests of his sweetheart," he enlisted in the 26th Ohio.  For Mary, well, "Benjamin might be happy without her, but she could not live away from her lover," so she disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the same company as Benjamin.  They continued to fight side by side, even after Mary was wounded in the knee at Spottsylvania Courthouse.  When the war ended, the pair returned home and were finally married.  Benjamin died years later, and Mary married Mr. Hooker.  Without access to a widow's pension, since she was a married woman, she applied for a pension based on her service as a soldier.  Hence the newspaper article.
Sounds credible so far, right?  From what I could make out of the surgeon's affidavit (the combination of technical terms and spidery hand-writing makes it almost impossible to make out), Hooker did have a scar on her left leg just below the knee, but apparently it was inflicted at Antietam.
So, was it Antietam or Spottsylvania?
Turns out, doesn't matter.
The next paper was a letter from Alexander Fraser, the lieutenant of Co. F, 26th Ohio, to the Pension Bureau stating that there was no such persons as Charles Dewey or Benjamin Brown in the 26th, nor did the regiment fight at Spottsylvania, or Antietam.  In fact, the regiment was mustered out in June, 1862.
Oops.
Needless to say, Mary Hooker did not receive a pension for her service in the line of duty.  That should be the end of it, but it leaves me with a question.  Mary Hooker really had no chance of gaining a pension by lying about her service.  The military records are complete enough to demolish her claims.  For nurses, however, the records are practically non-existent.  Almost every file has a letter from the Bureau to the War Department asking them to examine the records for a specific woman.  The problem is, however, since these women were rarely considered actual military personnel, they're almost never in the records!
Mary Hooker couldn't put forward her fraudulent claim as a soldier, but a woman like Mary Hooker could put forward her fraudulent claim as a nurse with great ease.  Here's the question now that's eating me: how do I tell the difference between a woman who really served, and a woman who's lying?

Hannah Babb Hutchins

Pension File: 816506, 505146 (Special Act)
P.O.: Freeport, Maine
Service: one of Dix's nurses in Washington, D.C.
Applied: 1886
Status: Accepted

Hutchins was one of over twenty Special Acts I found today (let's hear it for the guys in legislation! I don't know how they find this stuff, but whatever they're doing, it's working!).  Her story is simple enough compared to others I've described here: her husband and four children died just before the war began, and she enlisted as a nurse in June of 1862.  Hutchins served for three years and three months in various hospitals in D.C., in particular Armory Square and Harewood Hospital, and (here's a rarity) was paid for her services, though all of it went to purchasing things for the soldiers.  On New Years Day, 1865, Hutchins slipped on the steps between wards at Harewood Hospital and fractured her ribs.  It was enough to keep her confined to her quarters for a month.
Hutchins was discharged in May, 1865 and went home to Maine.  She married again, to one Solomon S. Hutchins, who died in 1880 and left her with no money to her name.  By this time she was into her seventies, her injury kept her from supporting herself, and the chronic diarrhea she had also contracted from her wartime service was growing worse.
In 1886, Hutchins applied to Congress for a pension, believing "she is justly entitled to aid from the nation precisely as if she had been a soldier and been incapacitated from labor by injury received in the line of duty."  Congress, in its infinite wisdom, decreed that since Hutchins was paid while enlisted as a nurse, she did not merit a pension larger than $12.
I give you an extract from one of many letters in the same vein sent from Hutchins to her friend Harriet Corts:

"You, and also Mr. Reed, want to know my financial condition; --I got the 12 dollars pension last week, $36., paid $15 interest on mortgage; $14.33 to Gore & Davis, $5 to Dr. Burbank, I had $1.62 left; there are debts and must be paid.  I never was rich, and surely never was in such straitened circumstances...This has been a very hard winter, it is so very col,d and coal $8 per ton.  It seems as though I should perish, and this diarrhea,--up 4 and 6 times in a night; hardly get warm before i have to get up again. My living is mostly Graham crackers, it don't take any fuel toc ook them; it is not very luscious diet to live on!  Hattie, you  don't think I had better go to the poor-house now? I don't want to go there, it would not be anyt credit to the country.  Oh dear! I don't know what to do, can you tell me? what in the world is there for me to do? Oh please let me hear from you soon...P.S. This is very humiliating to let anybody know how reduced I am; it makes me very nervous to think of it..."

Luckily for Hutchins, she had a good friend in Harriet Corts.  And Corts happened to be the Secretary for the Army Nurses Assocation.  The ANA, as far as I can make out, was a Dix brainchild, an organization of women who had worked for her during the "last unpleasantness."  It was also the other major organization mixed up in trying to get the Army Nurses Pension Act passed, and supporting various pension claims.  Hutchins's pension file is the first time I've seen the ANA petitioning on behalf of a nurse.  There's no fancy letterhead like the WRC, but from the little I've seen it's much more aggressive. There are a couple more nurses I pulled today who were also endorsed by the ANA--they're high on my list of nurses to go over.
Anyway, back to Hutchins and the ANA.  Corts rallied the troops, sent in evidence pertaining to Hutchins' desperate need for an increased pension, and wrote her own biting letter to the Chairman of the Pension Committee.  The end result?  Hutchins's pension was increased to $25 in 1888.
So, my question is: where is the ANA later on in the fight for the Pension Act?  Why can't I find more on them?  And what exactly is their angle?
So many questions!!!

Mary Dougherty

During spring semester, while Professor Sheriff and I were discussing different directions I could take this project, she mentioned looking into the women who worked at federal arsenals in the north, particularly Alleghany Arsenal.  I didn't find any arsenal workers while I was putting together my list of pensioners, but today, I found Mrs. Mary Dougherty.
Mary Dougherty moved to Washington, D.C. with her family in 1863.  Her husband, Daniel, enlisted in the 34th NJ Volunteers shortly after, and Dougherty landed a job at the Washington Arsenal.  Then, on June 17, 1864, an explosion rocked the arsenal.  The newspaper articles reporting the event paint a nauseating picture, though luckily it didn't reach the level of the Allegheny Explosion in '62: (http://www.congressionalcemetery.org/newspaper-clips-1860-1869#june20a).  19 women were killed, and dozens more severely burned.  Dougherty herself was severely burned, and "internally injured, besides being mentally injured by the fall from the height to which I was thrown through the force of the explosion.  My flesh was burned, as scars will show, and I inhaled the fire.  My collar bone was also broken.  I was unconscious when found and became insane from the injuries received" for four years.  And Dougherty's problems did not end there.  Her eldest son, who worked in the navy yard, was killed by machinery some time after.  Her next son went missing on the third day of the grand review of the Army after the close of the war--Dougherty insisted he was "stolen by an officer of the Army."  Then, her husband deserted her because of her injuries.  Assuming that he was dead, Dougherty applied for and was granted a widow's pension in 1878.  But a few months later, the pension was canceled because David was not, in fact, dead, and had just put in an application of his own.
Oi...
The one thing Dougherty seemed to have going for her was connections in high places.  Those connections, including Admiral David Porter, Commodore Nicholson, Rev. Leonard, and George Bancroft, a former Sec. of the Navy., put together a petition to Congress on her behalf, testifying to her integrity and the merits of her claim as well as her crippled condition.  Congress granted Dougherty a $12 pension on March 8, 1888 based on her service at the Arsenal and her injury in the line of duty.  After all that woman went through, I think it was the least they could do.

Adelia Ferris

Pension File:  1138500, 858128 (Special Act)
P.O.: Jackson, Michigan
Service: Nurse at Columbian and Mt. Pleasant Hospitals
Applied: 1891
Final Status: Accepted

There's nothing remarkable about Adelia Ferris' file.  Ferris, nee Billings, was widowed in 1858.  When war broke out, she volunteered for service as a nurse and was accepted by Dorothea Dix.  Ferris served for three years until she was discharged in the fall of 1864.  Apparently things did not go well after that.  The Special Act report states that several decades after the war, what little property she had went up in smoke in the Great Chicago Fire--including her commission from Dix and whatever other papers she may have had to back her claim that she had, in fact, served as a nurse.  Luckily for Ferris, the War Department records (for once) showed that she had been commissioned, and that she had been paid $12 a month.  Ferris managed to get a Special Act granting her a $12 pension passed in July, 1892--just before the Army Nurses Pension Act was passed.
So, standard stuff so far, right?
Well, here's the thing I hadn't seen before: a very large certificate from the W.R.C. certifying that Ferris was enrolled as an Army Nurse from November 26, 1862, was commissioned by Dorothea Dix, and served for ten months until honorably discharged September, 1863.
The information on the certificate isn't new.  It's the mere fact that the certificate itself exists, and that Ferris included this in her application that intrigues me.  Not only is the WRC singlehandedly muscling the Army Nurses Pension Act through Congress, and supporting numerous pension claims, they're investigating these women themselves.  This isn't Annie Wittenmyer anymore acting as attorney for the claimant, filing affidavits or what have you.  And this isn't a nurse using the WRC to network and find other nurses she served with who can help her.  This is full on institutional endorsement, with an investigation behind it.
To my wonderful, faithful readers: do any of you know where I can find documents relating to pensions issued by the WRC to its members, the investigations it launched into nurses' service (like Ferris), and/or its National Pension Committee?  Bits and pieces are good for keeping a girl excited and motivated, but I'm going to need a broader picture if I want to do this properly.  Let me know if you think of anything!

A Very Large Petition

Today was one of those days where almost everything seemed to go right.
Negatives: it rained, and they pulled two soldiers instead of my nurses--apparently they had the same file numbers...
Positives: My people in legislation came through for me again.  Apparently, while pulling my nurses' files, he found two boxes on the Army Nurses Pension Act.  What was in them, you ask?
Something that made me grin like a maniac when I opened up the folder.
Petitions.  Hundreds of individual petitions sent out by the WRC to all its Corps to be signed, returned, and sent to Congress to demonstrate just how many people supported the Army Nurses Pension Act.  The names are those of WRC members, GAR members, and "friends of the soldiers."  So far, the vast majority of petitions are from Massachusetts, which, as a native, makes me extremely happy.  There was even one from the West Acton WRC Corps--West Acton is essentially Boxborough, my hometown.  There are also petitions from New Hampshire, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Kansas-there's a second box I haven't even touched so the list will grow.  I found a reference to the petition in a letter written by a WRC officer: there are over 160,000 signatures on the petition. 160,000!  Put this together with the 100,000 members of the WRC...I'm just going to let Sarah Fuller tell you.  She's the genius that put all this together, anyway.

"Our petition, 31,000 feet long, had the bonna fide signatures of 160,000 men and women of the different States, and the W.R.C. now numbers about 100,000 members, this with the endorsement of the National Pension Committee of the G.A.R. authorizing us to speak for the 500,000 comrades, gave us a backing of nearly 800,000 people.  Will our legislators disregard that force?"

Now, here's the thing.  Several other letters I've found suggest that the G.A.R. withdrew its support at one point because the WRC was asking for $25 pensions, and the G.A.R. supported $12 pensions.  The G.A.R was also rather hesitant to push for a pension for Mary Bickerdyke several years earier.  So, what exactly is the role of the G.A.R in getting this act passed, and why do they seem so hesitant at times to give it their support?

Nellie E. Butler

Last week my friend Anthony came to the Archives to help me with my research.  On top of the many abuses I heaped upon him, I also asked him to write a guest blog post about what he'd discovered.  And for some strange reason he agreed to do it.  Thanks, Anthony!

Coming to the National Archives for the first time, I was not quite sure to expect.  I had a vague idea—I do family history research—but I had never been to an archive of comparable size and importance.  At first I was nervous, but I forgot to be as I explored my first file.  Sheer fascination bore all before it.

Today, I met seven women through letters, affidavits and the occasional heated argument.  Each woman had a distinct and interesting story, but one particular woman transcended the merely interesting.  The heading of the newspaper clipping in her file grabbed my attention: MYSTERY OF AN OLD ARMY NURSE.

The story sounded rather like a case for Holmes or Poirot.  In the summer of 1898, a penniless old woman was deposited at a San Francisco hotel by two “friends”, neither of whom were ever heard from again.  She was described by the hotel’s proprietor as “not wholly rational”, and it is obvious that she was senile.  According to the author of the article,

“She talks in a rambling manner and makes many references to people, but no sense can be made of her remarks.  This afternoon she seemed brighter than usual and talked considerably of Bar Harbor, but she could not answer any direct questions about places or people.”

Nellie E. Butler
(Pension File 1138434, 864505 at the National Archives)

Enough information could be teased from her incoherent conversation to identify her as one Nellie Butler, a widowed former army nurse.  Her husband had been killed at Fort Donelson, and her service had left her permanently injured in one leg.  Apart from these few facts, as the author rather melodramatically put it, “her past [was] shrouded in mystery”.  Only one acquaintance could be found, a woman who had known Mrs. Butler a year.  She knew nothing of Mrs. Butler’s past.  “Her residence previous to coming here is unknown and her purpose is no better understood,” the author wrote. 

In poor health, Mrs. Butler was moved to the local hospital, where she was “near to death”.  According to the other records in her pension file, Nellie Butler died within three months of the newspaper article’s appearance.

Reading this, one is left with the same set of questions asked 114 years ago by the San Francisco newspaper.  Who was Nellie Butler?  Why did she come to San Francisco?  Most importantly, how did she come to die alone?

The first is answered easily enough, though certain facts escape the record.  Mrs. Butler’s maiden name is notably absent (she was already a widow when she became a nurse), as is her place of birth.  Born in 1839, her first husband was Howard Martin, the man killed at Fort Donelson.  She also lost a brother in the war.  Elizabeth Martin, as she was called then, served as a nurse between 1863 and ’65, at the end of which time she was working at a hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina.  She was a field nurse during some of this period, and received her leg wound at Cold Harbor.  Two years after the war, she married her second husband, David Butler, in Contra Costa County, California, where she would spend most of the remainder of her life.  In 1876, the Butlers suffered a house fire, in which Mrs. Butler lost vital evidence concerning her war service.  This later created some difficulty for her in obtaining a pension.  In the 1880s, Mr. Butler became an invalid, and by the time Mrs. Butler began her quest for a pension in 1892, they were close to destitution.  After receiving a pension of $12 a month in 1894, the pension records are silent until the notice of her death in 1898.

That is who Nellie Butler was, as far as the pension records allow us to see.  Little in them offers an explanation of the strange and sad end of her life.  Mrs. Butler did not have children with either of her husbands, and apart from the brother who died in the war, there is no evidence she had any close relatives.  No other aspect of the record sheds any light on Mrs. Butler’s isolation.  We who read her story can only wonder, as the people of a century ago wondered, what led this brave and determined woman to wander witless from her home to die among strangers.

Mehala Edwards

Pension: 701157
P.O.: New York City
Service: Nurse on hospital boats 'Elm City' and 'Louisiana'
Applied: 1888
Final Status: Rejected

Another day, another find.  Mehala Edwards' pension file was unremarkable until I came to the Surgeon General's report to the Pension Bureau about Edwards' service: "The name of Mahala Jackson [her maiden name] appears on a list of contrabands on board the steamer Elm City July 26" 1862 with remark, 'Received at Fort Monroe.'"
Turns out, Mehala was an escaped slave from King William County.  It looks like she followed the example of so many others and escaped to Fort Monroe soon after the war broke out (either July of 1861 or early 1862), and then enlisted as a nurse.  Mehala served on the 'Elm City' and the 'Louisiana' on the James River until the close of the war.
The pension file is sparse on what happened to Mehala after the war, but what there is paints a picture of a strong woman.  In 1888, she applied for a pension based on her service as a nurse, drawing on the precedents set by the Special Acts.  Her application was ultimately turned down because there was no law allowing pensions for nurses, but the fact that she took the initiative and applied anyway...here is a remarkable woman that the records have overlooked.  And there are probably dozens like her we haven't found yet.  Mehala was a reminder of one of the reasons I do what I do: to give these people a voice.  Hopefully, that's what I'll end up doing.
Cheers to you, Mehala.

Ellen W. Dowling

Pension: 688614, 423631 (Special Act)
P.O.: Somerville, Massachusetts
Service: Nurse at Armory Square Hospital
Applied: 1888
Final Status: Accepted...multiple times

I fully expected Dowling's file to be skinny--hers was, after all, a Special Act, so everything should be in the legislative file.  When it turned out to be rather thick, I thought it was because she'd also applied for a widow's pension and the paperwork had been mixed in a la Mrs. Blaisdell.  Half true.  Here's Ellen W. Dowling's story, as far as I can make out from the file:
Ellen White began working as a nurse at Armory Square Hospital, D.C., in 1863.  Some time that year, Isaac A. Dowling, a private in Co. K, 12th Massachusetts, was admitted for chronic diarrhea.  They married in August of '64, had four children, and a happy marriage.  Isaac, however, never recovered from his service in the army.  His chronic diarrhea worsened, and he also began to suffer from heart trouble.  He applied for and received a pension in the early 1870s--and as his condition worsened, and he was forced to quit work, the amount went up.
Isaac passed on July 9, 1888.  I suspect Ellen had her special act already in the works at that point, because the bill was signed into law on February 12, 1889.  In December, Ellen sent a letter to the Pension Bureau, filing the paperwork needed to claim a widow's pension, and asking for the arrears of said pension from the time her husband died to the time her Special Act was passed.
The Pension Bureau did not like this.  Legally, you can only draw on one pension at any given time, and Ellen was, inadvertantly or not, trying to draw on two.  So, they told her, she had a choice: the widow's pension at $16 a month, or her Special Act at $12 a month.  Ellen replied, "I desire to have my name entered on the pension rolls as Ellen White Dowling, Army Nurse.  I prefer this as it is on my own service, and some day Congress may give my children their just due."
Here's where things get a little fuzzy.  It appears that the Bureau ignored Ellen's request to be listed as a nurse and continued to list her as a widow.  Why is beyond me.  Ellen petitioned to be listed as a nurse again in 1897, and a third time in 1902.  Finally, in 1902, someone listened.  Ellen's motives, however, had changed over time.  A note attached to her nurse's pension form reads: "this claim for renewal of pension, as nurse, is submitted for admission for the reason that a substantial benefit amy accrue to claimant, viz: the privilege of remarriage without loss of pension as nurse."  It's hard to say what Ellen's motivation was for the change: was she considering remarrying?  Or was she the kind of woman who preferred to draw on her own service rather than someone else's, as she'd earlier claimed?  It certainly wasn't because she got more money.  Suffice to say though, she wanted her name entered as Ellen White Dowling, Army Nurse.
Oh, and the note wasn't finished yet.  Apparently, the official processing the claim was just as confused as I was.  "A similar claim [to change to her nurse's pension] was filed in 1897, and approved, but that action was cancelled on the ground that "pensioner was not entitled to a second election."  The decision upon which that statement is based is not mentioned.  Aside from the filing of a declaration, the examiner has not been able to find that claimant elected to take a widows pension."
Oops.
Having finally gotten things sorted out, Ellen remained on the pension rolls as a nurse until her death in 1912.  After that, the file has no further information.
Ellen's case has really peaked my interest.  Why exactly did the Bureau keep her listed as a widow rather than a nurse as she wanted?  And Ellen's avowed motivation for being listed as a nurse--was it that she wanted to draw on her own service?  Or was she keeping the way open for her children to draw pensions as dependent minors?  Also, the bit about being able to remarry and not loose her pension answered a question I'd had in the back of my mind.  Women drawing widows' pensions had to remain widows if they wanted to keep drawing their pension (if you're interested in the reasons behind this, read Megan J. McClintock's 'Civil War Pensions and the Reconstruction of Union Families.').  I've been wondering if Congress's policy on widows had extended to my nurses, but Ellen's papers suggest that they didn't.  For answers to my other questions...looks like another legislative file needs to be pulled.

Almira Ambler

Pension: 601308, 354176 (Special Act)
P.O.: Danbury, Connecticut
Service: Nurse
Applied: 1887
Final Status: Accepted

Almira Ambler was the first legislative file I pulled this week (they do exist!  Success!).  The difference between the pension and legislative files is striking.  Pension files are bureaucracy gone mad: forms, duplicates, forms, affadavits, forms, forms, forms, forms, forms.  They're incredibly useful, but usually lacking in personality.  Legislative files are completely different.
Here's what the pension file on its own told me:

Almira Ambler

Almira Ambler was granted a $20 pension by Special Act of Congress on March 3, 1887, and continued to draw it until her death on June 26, 1891.  She was a volunteer nurse, acting independently of Dix, the Sanitary Commission, and the Christian Commission.  When the Special Act was passed, she was also a widow, her husband E. C. Ambler having died some time previously.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all she wrote--or, at least, all the pension bureau wrote.
Let's add a sprinkling of what I found in the legislative files:
According to a recommendation signed by 19 officers of the 67th Pennsylvania, Ambler and her daughter worked as cooks at the regimental hospital in Philadelphia from December, 1861, to April, 1862; her husband was chaplain of that regiment and she accompanied him to the front.  She also worked at Annapolis, treating paroled prisoners.  Wherever she went, the men loved her.  To them, she was Mother A.  "As such you have been and such I call you and look up to you," one soldier wrote in a '64 letter.  And the men weren't the only ones with praise for Mrs. A.  Anxious parents and family members often wrote to her, or she to them, asking for or giving information as to the whereabouts of a loved one.  Sometimes she even let searchers stay in her home if they couldn't find other accomodations.  A great deal of Ambler's own money went into purchasing supplies and medicine for the men as well.  This became critical when she applied for a Special Act in the late 80s.
Apart from the wonderful accounts of her wartime service, Ambler's folder also revealed some of how her bill made it through Congress.  In a letter from '85, a Mr. Stone informed Mrs. A's husband that it was unlikely his wife's pension bill would be read that session of Congress, and asked if he wanted his wife's papers back.  So, Mrs. A's bill had been in the works for at least two years before it was passed. Also, it was Mr. A rather than his wife who was pushing this forward, since he's the one the letters are all addressed to, and two of affadavits on his wife's work are his, whereas Mrs. A is only the subject of the papers. Also in the folder was part of a bill granting a pension to another nurse, Ann E. Gridley.  At the bottom of the page, someone scribbled: "Please keep this with the papers I sent you.  I think it a precedent for pensioning Mrs. Ambler, and send it to me with the papers next session."  So, there are two new things to consider. One: Mrs. A's bill was in the works for at least two years before it was passed.  Why did it take so long?  And two: what kind of precedent did Ann E. Gridley's pension set?  Was her pension "the beginning"?  Methinks I shall be pulling Ms. Gridley's pension sooner rather than later.

Cushman Kellogg Davis

If today wasn't quite a banner day, it came close.  There were no rejection slips waiting for me in the Research Room.  There were some interesting tidbits hiding in the files.  And the researchers at Legislation came through for me.  There are legislative files on my Special Acts somewhere in the depths of the Archives!  Now I just need to pull them.  And, since they're not pensions, I can put in requests for as many as I please.  The staff is going to hate me.
Legislation also gave me a rather large interesting tidbit: the transcripts of the Senate debate on the Army Nurses Pension Act.
The Pension Act was submitted previously in 1890 and passed the Senate before getting hung up in the House.  In July, 1892, the House finally passed its own amended version and sent it to the Senate for consideration.  This is where the transcript begins.
Our leading men:

Senator Davis

          Senator Cushman Kellogg Davis: the chairman of the Pensions Committee and the man responsible for putting the bill forward, Davis was its strongest defender in the Senate.  Prior to his election as the Republican Senator from Minnesota (I wonder if he knew Mrs. Blaisdell...) he was a lieutenant in the 28th Wisconsin during the 'War of the Rebellion', and served one term as governor.    
          Senator James Henderson Berry: one of two men heading the opposition.  A Democrat from Arkansas and a former Confederate soldier (he served in the 16th Arkansas as a 2nd Lieut.).
          Senator Francis Marion Cockrell: a Democratic senator from Missouri and the other major source of opposition to the bill, Cockrell was also a brigadier in the Confederate army.
Berry and Cockrell, along with Senator Gray (D-De), had several issues with the bill.  Berry summed it up in two short sentances: "It seems to me...that there can be no justice in placing persons upon the pension roll who were not soldiers, but were simply nurses during the late war.  I cannot see by what rule of justice or equity a claimant can be put upon the pension roll and continued there to increase the enormous pension list whcih we already have."  Army nurses, he argued, had not, as a body, exposed themselves to danger any more than nurses did in modern hospitals.  They were not "actual soldiers" and therefore not entitled to be on the pension roll.  "Service pensions," and the dangerous precedents they set for future legislation, were an evil to be avoided at all costs.  Berry et co. also worried about the strain on the national budget.  The Act would cover far more than the two or three hundred that Mr. Davis insisted it would cover: 6284 women, according to Mr. Cockrell's numbers (personally, I'm inclined to agree with Mr. Cockrell on this point--the numbers, not the strain).  As a bit of background, pensions were already costing the government $150,000,000 a year.  Now, pensioning 6000 old women was not the financial drain these men were worried about--the precedent the bill set, however, for more and more pensions, was.

Senator Cockrell

Here is the cherry on top.  Cockrell mentions the Special Acts.  Apparently, Cockrell was instrumental in establishing a rule fixing pensions for nurses at $12 a month--previous pensions were as high as $20 and $25.  He was also influential in hedging the bill.  Originally the Act allowed any woman who served as an army nurse to apply for a pension, provided she served at least six months.  Courtesy of Cockrell and his supporters, the bill was amended so only women "employed by the Surgeon General of the Army...under contract or otherwise...or who were emploted as nurses during such period by authority which is recognized by the War Department" could receive a pension.  Hedge the bill, the less damage it can do, and the fewer expensive Special Acts will go through the Pension Committee.
And, despite all they'd done to hedge the bill, they still fought for its dismissal.  Luckily for the nurses, their objections were overruled.  The House and the Senate created a committee to settle the disagreement over the amendment (the House's bill didn't have Cockrell's changes), and the bill was signed, as amended, by the Senate on August 1, 1892.  The Army Nurses Pension Act officially became law four days later.
So, the transcript's not a goldmine of information, but it makes a fantastic starting point.  It looks like there's a divide along party lines--not surprising--but a list of who voted for and against the bill is now on my list of things to look out for.  Also, I now have the names of the major players.  If I can get my hands on some personal papers, I might be able to sound out what their not-so-obvious views on the Pension Act were, and what was going on behind the scenes.  I can backtrack to when the first Special Acts started coming through--those oh so evil Special Acts that Cockrell and Berry dislike so much--and see what their reaction is.  Davis also mentions in the debates that he spoke with Clara Barton the morning the bill went before the Senate.  His papers could have more tidbits about who's talking about the Pension Act, who's lobbying for it, etc.
This may take longer than five weeks...

Mary E. Buckey

My first week of research is officially over!  It feels like yesterday was Monday, but I have all these pensions to show for my work--and still, it feels like I've barely brushed the surface of all the information that's in those files.  Next week I should be pulling files for women like Sarah E. Clapp (a contract surgeon rather than a nurse) and Harriet Patience Dame (a regimental nurse who gained wartime fame for her service), as well as lesser known characters like Sarah B. Cross, who came to the US during the war and spent two years at Lincoln General Hospital while her husband worked for the government.  Hopefully the other files will be just as interesting.
As much as I love pulling pensions and getting to know these women, though, the information in the files isn't helping me with my thesis as much as I hoped it would.  I also haven't heard back about the legislative files.  Monday morning, I'm taking in my binder of legislative bills and we'll see what they have.  I haven't given up hope on this yet.
Anyway, on to something relating to the title of this post: Mary E. Buckey.  I like to do profiles of the women I pull--it helps me sort through information, and share some of the more interesting women I've met.  So far I've posted on a famous nurse (Bickerdyke), a hospital nurse (Allen), and a money-grubbing nurse (Blaisdell).  All these women have one thing in common: they volunteered.  Mary E. Buckey did not.

Pension File: 1129426
P.O.: Beverly, West Virginia
Service: Nurse, Med. Dept, US Vols.
Applied: 1892
Final Status: Rejected
In every single pension file I have read so far, the women came to the war, not the other way around.  They had loved ones in the army, or simply wanted to help their boys, or do their bit to defend their country.  If the West Virginia P.O. didn't clue you in, or the suitably obvious intro, the war came to Buckey.  "When the union troops commanded by Geo. B McClellan first entered the valley after the battle of Rich Mt. in July 1861," Buckey wrote in her claim, "sick and wounded union soldiers were brought to my house and placed under my care as nurse.  From that date until the close of the War of the Rebellion I was at no time without union soldiers under my care."
Four years.  Four years she lived with strangers in her house, and not just any strangers: the military.  As far as I can tell she was recognized by the staff at the nearby general hospital (Geoff House) as a nurse, but was never paid or compensated for her work.  In 1892 Buckey filed for a pension based on her four-year service.  Periodic attacks of sciatica made it impossible for her to work steadily and she needed the money.  The Bureau, for whatever reason, took its time processing the claim--three years, in fact.  And in the end, they rejected it on the grounds that Buckey wasn't appointed nurse by someone the War Department deemed to have sufficient authority.
I am quickly learning that the Pension Bureau has a very simple motto: "Rules is rules, even if the rules are unfair."

And you thought I was insane...

Today was a rough day.  Almost half my pulls were denied because the archivist couldn't find them (how they lost Sophronia Bucklin's pension file I'll never know), and I managed to leave my camera charger at the Archives.  Hopefully they won't throw it out.
On the other hand, I spoke to one of the researchers about finding papers relating to my Special Acts--the legislation rather than the pensions themselves.  Apparently the time between 1866 and 1892, the period I'm interested in, isn't very well documented, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  Hopefully I'll know more by tomorrow.


Marie J. Blaisdell
(National Archives)

The Unfortunate Mr. Blaisdell
(National Archives)

I also had a rather large surprise to deal with.  Yesterday I put in a request for the pension of Marie J. Blaisdell.  There was nothing remarkable about the pension.  All I knew was that she'd filed her claim in 1892.  So, when they told me her pension file was seven folders...let me put it to you this way.  A typical pension file is one folder, and a skinny one at that.  Ten, twenty papers is typical, more if someone put in a claim for reimbursement after the death of the pensioner, or if the claim is contested and the would-be pensioner sends in affadavits.  But still, it only amounts to one folder.  Blaisdell's file is 45 pounds of paper crammed into 7 folders.  The staff has never seen anything like it.  So you bet I was hoping for something good.  And I got it. Both Marie and her husband served in the war: she as a nurse for nine months, he as a Brevet Lieutenant in the 5th Minnesota.  Marie came out just fine.  Her husband did not.  Shortly after the war ended he began to show signs of what they called "cerebral softening"--in other words, he'd gone insane.  If you listen to Blaisdell's accounts, he was a real basket case: he had frequent mood-swings, sometimes becoming violent and threatening her.  He'd babble inanely, or lose control of his bowels.  Sometimes he'd run off into the woods and she and the neighbors would have to go and pull him out.  At one point I believe a doctor said he claimed to see balls of fire floating in front of his face, and refused to be left alone.  Frankly, it reads like a bad Victorian novel (think Bertha in Jane Eyre's attic).  Mrs. Blaisdell finally had her husband committed in the 80s.

The result was that her husband's pension now shot up to $75 a month--a typical pension was $8 or $12.  And then, a new administration came in, and its new policies cut Blaisdell's $75 a month to $10 on the grounds that he was not actually insane, or, alternately, that his insanity was not a direct result of his service (they liked to contradict themselves).  After that, well, Mrs. Blaisdell wasn't exactly easy to live with to begin with.  Now, she began a twenty year campaign to have her husband's pension restored to $75 a month and to collect what eventually amounted to $20000 in arrears.  It was a circus.  The papers took to calling her the 'Minnesota Blizzard,' or the 'Queen of the Northwest.'  Someone tried to have her committed.  Everyone at the Pension Bureau avoided her.  Mrs. Blaisdell wrote very bad poetry, tragic tales of her woe and suffering for the papers to lap up, and dozens and dozens of letters to presidents and Congressmen.  She's a stubborn, money-grubbing, self-centered, outrageous woman.  And I can't even tell if she won the case or not!

Mary Ann Bickerdyke

Pension File: 574178 (Special Act)
PO: San Francisco
Service: Nurse, Med. Dept, US. Vols.
Applied: 1886
Final Status: Accepted
This was a file I really wanted to get my hands on.  Bickerdyke was a force to be reckoned with during the war: she worked alongside the Sanitary Commission to supply men on the front lines, helped establish hospitals on and off the front lines, and kept them running, well-staffed, and well-supplied.  If you got in her way, or displeased her, you were out.  A popular Bickerdyke story goes that she found out an assisstant surgeon at one of her wards had gotten drunk one night and, in sleeping off the hangover the next morning, neglected the men in his ward.  Furious, she pulled enough strings to get him discharged from the army.  When the surgeon complained to Sherman, who was in command at the time, the general asked who had procured his discharge.  "I was discharged in consequence of misrepresentation," the surgeon insisted.  "But who caused your discharge?"  "Why...I suppose it was that woman, Mrs. Bickerdyke."  And at this, Sherman replied, "Oh, well, if it was her, I can do nothing for you.  She ranks me."  She was universally loved and admired.  The soldiers adored her.  They called her "Mother Bickerdyke."  After the war, Bickerdyke continued to support her boys by helping many to secure pensions.
As far as I can tell, however, Bickerdyke never applied for a pension herself.  That was done by the Woman's Relief Corps--the female auxilary to the G.A.R. which was instrumental in getting the '92 Pension Act passed.  A Special Act was passed in 1886 granted Bickerdyke a $25 pension (higher than the $16 suggested by the WRC, but lower than the $50 in the original petition).
So, we have a powerful, influential woman receiving a pension she probably never applied for in the first place...this has to be a major file, right?
There were seven papers in that file.  Seven.
All the Special Act pensions I've pulled thus far are like this: depressingly thin.  There has to be another file out there, one for Special Acts, that has more documents.  Tomorrow morning, I'm going to the Resource Room to find them.
One interesting thing I did find: one of the documents in the file contained a note by the Department of State which said,
"The foregoing act having been presented to the President of the United States for his approval, and not having been returned by him to the house of Congress in which it originated within the time prescribed by the Constitution of the United States, has become a law without his approval."
Why would Cleveland do this?  I somehow doubt it's just because he never got around to looking at the bill.  Hopefully the missing files will shed some additional light. Fingers crossed.

Rachel A. Allen

Pension File: 377901
PO: Warsaw, IL, and later Anthony, KS
Service: Keokuk GH
Applied: 1880
Final Status: Accepted, 1893
Rachel A. Allen applied for a pension on June 17, 1880--twelve years before the Army Nurses Pension Act was passed.  She claimed that she served as a nurse at the Estes House Hospital in Keokuk, Iowa from the fall of 1862 until the spring of 1864 and was now permanently disabled and unable to make a living.  In her 'Declaration for an Original Invalid Pension,' Allen claimed a pension for "blood poisoning, chronic diarrhea and sequence chronic (hepatitis), liver disease and disease of the heart and lungs," all as a result of blood poisoning and diarrhea contracted during her service.
Ouch.
My first thought was that some of this, particularly the heart and lungs, could be attributed to age.  If someone paid me a quarter for every time a 75 year old nurse put down general disability as the reason why she couldn't work, I'd never have to pay for copying.  The Declaration, however, also listed physical attributes.  When this was written (1880), Allen was 45 years old.
Her pension finally came before the review board two years later--at which point they rejected her claim on the grounds that "the claimant was a civil employee and not enlisted in the military service of the U.S. and there is no law allowing pensions for disease contracted while acting as nurse."
That seems to be a common problem: if the applicant was not actually enlisted in the army as a nurse, there was no legal precedent, and the Pension Committee was extremely hesitant to broaden the rules.  Allen, apparently, was a gutsy person, or desperate for funds.  After the Pension Act in '92, she applied again, and this time she had Backup (yes, the capital 'B' is on purpose).  If you don't know the name of Annie Wittenmyer, shame on you.  During the war, Wittenmyer organized diet kitchens in Northern hospitals, and probably saved hundreds of lives by actually feeding the men something other than hardtack and salted pork. After the war, not only was she a member of the WRC (Woman's Relief Corps, which was one of the groups supporting the Pension Act), she served as attorney for dozens of would-be pensioners.  I don't know how she did it, but Allen got Wittenmyer to act as her attorney.  The pair of them got their hands on half a dozen affidavits from men she'd treated as well as surgeons and staff on duty at the hospital (including Esther J. Boone, another woman on my list!); and, somehow, the Pension Bureau managed to get its act together and find records indicating Allen had, in fact, worked at Estes House (the record keeping in these places! Sheesh!).  Allen got her pension: $12 a month, the going rate for nurses pensions.
Allen never married--a fact emphasized in the affidavits and applications.  Eventually, as age caught up with her, she moved in with her nephew, F. O. Allen, and his wife.  She died in March, 1913, in Anthony, Kansas.  The remainder of the papers in the pension file document her nephew's application for reimbursement for the care he'd given his aunt.  He got $14.50; he'd asked for $115.

Ten Down, A Couple Hundred To Go

Today was my experimental day, trying to get a rhythm for how to approach my research.  Here is what I've learned:

• It is possible to put in all my pension requests for the day first thing in the morning, so I don't have to drop everything and run down twenty minutes before a pull time to frantically fill out forms.  In fact, I can drop them off the night before and they'll put the slips in the next morning.  This is a very good thing.
• Originally, I planned to photocopy some of the longer, hand-written pieces in the files, and photograph everything else.  That is, until I discovered the Archives let you scan everything to a USB drive...for a price.  I experimented with all three, and found I like having photographs of everything (all to be transcribed later in the day), and then scanning the longer pieces.
• Because these are government papers, there are dozens of forms.  Forms are my friends.  Type up a rough copy of the form, print out multiple copies, and fill out as needed for each pensioner.  Lets me spend more time actually soaking in the information instead of going immediately on to the next document as well as saving me a little extra money on copying.

I put in pull requests for 16 nurses today, and got 13 back.  One pension is still housed with Veteran Affairs, one they were unable to locate, and the third belongs to someone completely different.  Still, 13 was more than enough.  I'll be playing catch-up tomorrow morning once I fill out my pull forms.  Tomorrow I'll have a more detailed profile on one of the nurses to put up, but for now I'll give you a sampling of the women I found: an escaped slave turned laundress, the wife of an army chaplain, a "Mother", and a Sanitary Commission worker.  Now guess: who received a pension, and who was denied?

Getting Underway

I hate introductions.  You feel like you have to say something witty or profound.  Lucky for you, dear reader, you get neither.  Just a simply hello and a brief introduction to what this blog is all about.
I created this blog to talk about my research for my senior Honors thesis, to help me organize my thoughts, make sense of things, and hopefully elicit some feedback.  My research focuses on Civil War army nurses--specifically, those who applied for pensions in the years after the war.  Only a year into the war, the Federal government realized that it needed to provide for disabled soldiers returning home--this was the beginning of a massive expansion of the pension system.  By 1892, it was possible for any white man to receive a pension as long as he could prove he had served in the Union army, and pensions amounted to around half of the federal budget!
And the women?
The women are a different story.
Until 1892, if a woman wanted a pension, she applied for a Special Act of Congress.  It wasn't until the late 1880s that legislation was put forward that would allow women who served as nurses for at least six months to receive a pension.  The Army Nurses Pension Act finally passed in 1892.  In the intervening 27 years, however, hundreds of women applied for pensions.  I want to find out who these women were.  Where did they come from? What was their economic status?  Were they employed?  Were they single, widowed, married and with children?  What drove them to apply for a pension?  Did they succeed or did they fail?  Is there a reason behind their success or failure?  When widows or blacks applied for pensions Congress often played the moralizer: successful petitioners were respectable, literate, and, at least for women, dependent (i.e. still a widow--you could not remarry or they yanked the pension).  Did Congress play the same game with the nurses?
Then there's the Pension Act itself.  What was the drive behind the legislative push?  Why did Congress pass it?  Was this just Congress finally realizing that if the men were getting pensions right and left, they'd better let the women in on the deal too? (Somehow I doubt that...)  Or was there a greater political movement behind the Pension Act?  Were women, in short, becoming politicized, and becoming major political actors in their own right?
The best way to answer these questions is to look first at the pension records themselves.  So, for the next five weeks, I will be pulling pensions as close to 24/7 as I can get.  Every night (knock on wood), I'll report my findings here.
So, here's to five weeks of successful research.  Wish me luck!