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!!!
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