Act 2

I realized today that I haven't explained the new 'countdown' under the Final Tally, or said anything about what I'm doing now that I've finished the database.  Way back in June when I started this blog I said that this is for my senior Honors thesis.  Now that I'm back at school, the next step is to start writing.  I sat down with my adviser a few weeks ago and came up with a schedule--one chapter (in rough draft form) every three weeks.  With any lucky, I'll be done with the entire rough draft just before Christmas.  After that, we'll go over it, refine it, figure out if I need to do more research in certain areas, etc.  The 'Days Till Final Submission' countdown is the number of days until I have to submit my final draft: April 14.  Once that's in, it'll go to my examining committee, who will read it and decide whether or not it's acceptable.  If it is, I'll go through an oral examination, and they'll decide whether to award me Honors, High Honors, or Highest Honors.
But, like I said, that's in April.  There's plenty of time between now and then to work on this project (I keep telling myself this...self has yet to believe me).  The rough draft for my intro is due next week, so I'll be spending the weekend in the library pounding that out.  Trying to drag myself out of the details and look at the big picture again so I can write this introduction is probably the hardest thing I've had to do so far with this project.  If you couldn't tell, I love my rabbit holes.  I want to find out as much about each woman as possible, both for the thrill of the hunt, but also because I want to do these women justice, and the best way to do that is to have as much information as possible.  But since this is not a dissertation (as I am constantly reminded), I have to focus.  And, as a historian, looking at the big picture, and answering the bigger, over-arching questions is my job.  So, it's not going to be easy, but that is why this is a rough draft: so I can check myself when I start to slip.
I should probably go invest in some red pens...lots of 'em...
Wish me luck!

Alice Kelley

Pension File: 601310, 353717
P.O.: 1235 Pennsylvania Ave., D.C.
Service: 5th Corps Field Hospital, Navy Yard
Applied: 1886 (Special Act)
Status: Accepted

Since I've finished the database, I don't have a set system for going through my pensions and posting here, so I'm pulling random files, and double-checking my database as I go.  Tonight's pick is Alice Kelley, one of my special act pensioners.  She also lived on Pennsylvania Ave, right across from the Post Office building--which means I walked by her home practically every single day this summer!
Generally army nurses acted independently of one another or in groups.  If they reported to someone, it was either the hospital doctor, or someone hundreds of miles away.  Kelley, however, worked as personal assistant to Harriet Fanning Read, a well-known army nurse, and a poet.  The two attached themselves to the Fifth Corps in the summer of 1862, and followed the corps through every campaign until September, 1864, when Kelley was ordered to report to the Provost in D.C.  She spent the last few months of the war nursing men at the Navy Yard per the Provost's orders.  And, typically, after that the record goes blank.
Kelley was one of the nurses who managed to get her pension act passed before Senator Cockrell et. co. passed the unwritten rule that nurses could only get $12 pensions.  Because of that, she managed to get $20.  Apparently this wasn't enough, because when Kelley heard that Mary Hill had received a $25 pension in '89 for her service, she demanded an increase, declaring she was "entitled to like pension, and have been from the first allowance."  And to give her claim a little more weight, she had Hill give a statement on her behalf, stating that Kelley's services were "of the precise character of my own...[and that she] very much needs and deserves the relief she asks.  She also had her doctor, Edgar Janney, testify to her inability to support herself.  Then, in case she still didn't have enough support, Harriet Corts, Secretary for the Army Nurses Association, wrote a letter endorsing her (Kelley was apparently a member).  In fact, if I'm right about the hand-writing, Corts actually wrote Hill's testimony (Hill could sign her name, but nothing beyond that), and Kelley's petition (Kelley signed with a mark--probably illiterate).  Networking!
Despite her efforts, Kelley did not receive the increase, and continued to draw the $20 until her death in 1891.  What struck me looking at the date was something one of Kelley's witnesses wrote: "This noble woman is now growing aged, her feebleness is increasing daily; she could not long be a pensioner on the bounty of her country; but if her few remaining years could be made more comfortable by a feeling of independence and the knowledge that at last her services had been recognized by those whom she had served so faithfully and so well in their time of need, then would both justice and charity have been satisfied."  So what was it? (And here I play the cynic).  Was it the fact she could not long be a pensioner?  Or was it charity and justice?  If I can answer that question...well, then I'll have my thesis.  Or part of it, anyway.  So much information!

Abby F. Harris

Pension: 1138529, 854430
P.O.: Scituate, Rhode Island
Service: Howan Hospital, Nashville (also known as No.1 and No. 4)
Applied: 1892
Status: Accepted

Let me just state up front that I went "down the rabbit hole" on this one, and checked out Ancestry. A lot.
Abby F. Harris was born Abby Francis Allen on June 15, 1828, the oldest of five children born to Reuben and Phebe Allen. She first appears in the records in the 1850 census, at age 21, living with her parents in Scituate, Rhode Island, where her father was a Baptist minister.  I haven't found an 1860 census record yet, but the pension file fills in some of the gaps.  In May, 1862, Harris began working as a contract nurse at Howan Hospital in Nashville under Dr. James F. Weeds (I'd love to know how in the world a contract nurse managed to wrangle a position in Tennessee!).  She continued to work there until she was discharged in June, 1865.
By 1870, Harris was living in Scituate with her father and her sister Mary.  She was still single, and teaching school--yet somehow her sister, who was "keeping house" was the one with $300 in personal property.  Go figure.  By 1880, she'd stopped teaching, and both sisters were living together.
Then, in 1883, she married James A. Harris.  The marriage didn't last long.  James died in 1891 after an illness of several years (Harris mentions this in her pension file), and Harris was left alone.  She applied for her pension in October, 1892, on the grounds of old age, nervous prostration and general debility due to her service in the war.  And the Bureau (ye old speed demon) actually managed to process it and accept it by March, 1893.  The records were all there, Harris didn't have to jump through any hoops, so the pension file is pretty empty.  The only papers left were the ones cancelling the pension after her death in 1914.
It is, in all honesty, a rather nondescript file, and the census records don't add a great deal more depth, but there are some intriguing little bits that I hope I can track down...especially that bit about Tennessee...I love a good challenge.

Jane Howard

Pension: 1131824, 833797
P.O.: Birmingham, New York
Service: Columbian College, Harewood Hospital, Slough General Hospital, and Alexandria
Applied: 1892
Status: Accepted

As promised, here is Jane Howard's pension file.  I managed to find both a special act file and a general pension file for Howard.  The general file reveals that Jane Howard was one of Dix's corps of nurses, and served from October, 1864 to 1865.  There was no mention of her service exhausting her or destroying her health like so many other women; instead, she suffered mainly from "advancing age."  And for witnesses: Ellen S. Tolman, pension attorney, and Caroline Burghardt, M.D.
While having Tolman and Burghardt as witnesses is certainly not typical (I'd dearly love to know how she pulled that off), the rest of the file isn't anything special.
Ah, but don't forget the special act file!  It's three papers, nice and substantial.  And it conveniently reports that "the official records show that Jane Howard, colored female nurse, was on duty at the Patent Office general hospital...November 15, 1862."  Problem is: it's not this Jane Howard.  So I have to be doubly careful checking records now to make sure I don't mix them up!
I've tried to track Howard down using the census records, and apparently she had a family bible which hopefully someone kept, but the lack of information in the pension file and the destruction of the 1890 census means I've come up with nothing so far.  But I will definitely be looking into her more when I have the chance.

The Database is Finished!

It took me two months, but the database is finally finished!  Woot!!
One of the things I was very interested in seeing was just who these women worked for.  Dix only recruited so many women--so where did the rest of the women fit in?  Here's the breakdown:

• 21% were contract nurses: women who enlisted or made contracts with individual doctors or surgeons rather than going through Dix, the USSC, or the USCC.  These women were paid 40 cents a day.
• 18% enlisted under Dix and were a part of her nursing corps.  They also received 40 cents a day.
• 11% were regimental nurses, who traveled with the regiment to the front lines.
• 11% served with the Sanitary Commission
• 3% served with the Christian Commission
• 12% volunteered their services and were never paid, per their own request.  They didn't work for any larger organization.
• 2% worked directly for the army in some capacity--these are my "outliers," women like Kady Brownell, Mary E. Walker, and Mary Hooker, who served as soldiers, spies, or surgeons.
• .1% were arsenal workers--poor Mary Dougherty was the only one I found.
• 22% I couldn't identify.  Sometimes it was because there was nothing in the file.  More often, however, it was because these women called themselves "volunteer nurses" which could mean anything under the sun.

I'm a little surprised at the numbers, honestly.  For one, I thought the USCC numbers would be higher, since Wittenmyer (a USCC agent) was operating the hospital diet kitchens, but most of the women who worked in the diet kitchens didn't identify themselves as Christian Commission workers--in fact, the Christian Commission is barely mentioned.  Instead, diet kitchen workers received their pay from the federal government, which effectively makes them contract nurses.
The number of regimental nurses also surprised me.  In early June, 1861, Simon Cameron (Lincoln's first Sec. of War) issued an order that "women nurses will not reside in the camps, nor accompany regiments on a march," and there were several general orders issued throughout the war that removed women from the front lines.  Though, there's not much point in ordering the women away if they aren't already there to be ordered away...so apparently, despite all efforts to the contrary, women did attach themselves to regiments and follow them to the front lines.  At least half of my regimental workers also had a husband or sons in the regiment they were attached to--which gives them a strong reason for staying.
Another aspect I wanted to look at was color.  I managed to positively identify 6 women as black, usually through sheer dumb luck.  I think I mentioned this in a previous post, but color was not something the Pension Bureau asked about.  The only way for them to tell was for the records to say "colored contract nurse" or "contraband" or someone to mention something in correspondence.  Otherwise, short of hitting the census records, there's no way to tell.
4 of my black nurses were contract nurses--meaning they made arrangements with individual doctors or hospitals to work in return for pay.  That I expected.  I also found one women who was part of Dix's nursing corps: Jane Howard; and one woman who worked as a regimental nurse: Patsey Green.  That I did not expect.  I also did not expect Jane Howard's application to have the signatures of Ellen Tolman and Caroline Burghardt.  Then, I started looking at the success rates.  Only two of these women managed to secure pensions.  However, of the four that didn't, only two applied after the ANPA.  The other two were rejected on the grounds that there simply was no legislation that allowed the government to pension women.  Keeping in mind that 6 women does not a full story make, a 50% success rate post-1892 is pretty dang good.
A couple more interesting numbers: the vast majority of women (over 200) had no attorney when they applied for their pension.  Since the ANPA stated that any legal help in prosecuting these pensions had to be gratuitous, I'm not surprised.  James Tanner (the former Commissioner of Pensions who offered to help the WRC nurses) is listed as attorney for at least 20 women, Ellen Tolman is listed in 5 (and acts as witness in several others), and Wittenmyer is attorney in 11 (but is, again, used as a reference in at least a dozen more).  No one else comes close to managing the number of claims they do.
The final stat: success rates.

• 10% were abandoned
• 10% were rejected outright
• 7% didn't state if the claim was successful or not
• 73% were accepted

 Of the 73% that were accepted:

• 60% went through the Special Act process (meaning they could have been passed before the ANPA, or that they fulfilled the spirit if not the letter of the ANPA and got their pension via Special Act post-1892)
• 40% did not

Also, out of that 73%:

• 88% were accepted right off the bat
• 9% were originally rejected and the claimants either filed again or managed to get a Special Act
• 2% were rejected twice, and had to apply a third time
• 1% were rejected three times, and had to apply a fourth time

I know the Special Acts passed pre-1892 are skewing the success rate stats, and I will be going through at some point and getting better numbers on those so I can get a better sense of the ANPA success rate.  But if you halve the number of accepted pensions to account for the majority of the Special Acts (and I know, somewhere out there, a stats person is crying), the success rate suddenly becomes almost 1 in 2, where before it was 3 in 4.  Wonder what the rate was for soldiers...
Okay, no more numbers, I promise!  This week is dedicated to writing the rough draft to my intro, and I promise I'll be posting so you can see what I'm up to.  There's a lot of stuff I haven't touched on yet, and I really want to talk about Jane Howard's file.  So much to do!!