Clara Watson

Pension File: 1141792
P.O.: Ebenezer, Pennsylvania
Service: nurse at General Hospital 5, 6, and 7 at Murfreesboro, Tennessee from December 31st, 1863 to end of the war
Filed: 1892
Status: Rejected

Most nurses were well into their seventies when they applied for a pension--by extension, they were in their thirties or forties when they served in the war.  Clara Watson, however, was only 22 when she began to work as a nurse.  She was my age.  And she'd already given birth to two daughters, Susan and Melissa, and had just run away from her owner, Doctor Allison.
Clara was another escaped slave, just like Mehala Edwards.
According to her affidavits, Clara and her two daughters ran away from Dr. Allison's farm on the Manchester Turnpike just after the Battle of Stone River in 1862.  Shortly after she began working at General Hospital 5 in Murfreesboro.  The only compensation she received, she claimed, were her rations.  After a year she was transferred to General Hospital 6, where she was paid $2.50 a week--roughly the same as a regular enlisted nurse.  There's some confusion as to dates, but Watson claimed she was transferred to Hospital 7 in June, 1865, and served there until the close of the war.
Once she was discharged, a man named Frank Speedy took her and her daughters to Indiana County, Pennsylvania, where she settled down.  I checked the census records: in 1870, a woman matching Watson's description was listed in Conemaugh, Indiana County, living with her husband John Watson, a man thirty years her senior, as well as four children: Susan, Frank, Martha, and Banks.  Watson also appeared in the 1880, 1900, and 1910 census.  She apparently gave birth to 8 children, and outlived at least six of them.
Watson applied for a pension in 1892 based on her service in Murfreesboro.  She supplied the names of at least half a dozen doctors and hospital stewards who could testify to her work, and ensisted that someone had placed her name on the rolls on several occasions.  Guess what the Bureau said? "Sorry, no record exists, and most of the people you named are not in our records or are dead.  Got anything else?"  When Watson couldn't produce any additional proof, they rejected her claim--took them three years to tell her.  But Watson tried again.  She sent a letter in 1897 asking what more she could do to prosecute her claim other than getting rid of her attorney, Frank Donahue, who apparently had done a less than stellar job.  "I am entitled to [my pension]," she wrote, "and have furnish [sic] evidence so it is now over four years since I made application."  The same thing happened: no records, no affidavits, rejection.  Watson tried a last time in 1910, this time enlisting her local Congressman.  Third time's the charm, right?  Wrong.  This is the Pension Bureau we're talking about.  Watson never got her pension.
I know that at least two black women received a pension: Ann Stokes and Maria Bear Tolivar.  And I have at least three black women who were rejected.  Time to do some comparisons and see what let those two women succeed where others failed.