Mary A. Newcomb

Pension File: 808881, 504066
P.O.: Effingham, Illinois
Service: Regimental nurse for the 11th Illinois Infantry
Applied: 1890
Status: Accepted (Special Act)

Turned in the rough draft for my introduction on Friday.  Nine pages done, and probably a couple more added on once I break out the red pen.  There are a couple sections too that I haven't fleshed out to my satisfaction.  But for now, I'm starting work on the first chapter, focusing in on special acts: who applied for them, who won and who lost, the tactics they used, etc.

In keeping with that, I'm going back over my special act ladies, like the opinionated Mary A. Newcomb.  Her file is sparse--the majority of it pertains to her widow's pension, and I don't have her legislative file.  But she published a memoir of her army experience in 1893 (or, rather, it was posthumously published, since she died that year).  I've only read the first two chapters but she's already proving herself to be a character.  My favorite anecdote comes just after orders come down from on high that women cannot stay with the army unless they work for Dix.  Newcomb didn't much care for it.  "It is possible that Miss Dix was a very nice woman," she wrote in her memoir.  "She had power invested in her and she meant well, but she knew as little of the wants of a hospital as Queen Victoria."  I know it's supposed to be biting, but I find the comparison of Dix and Victoria is fabulous.
Anyway, Newcomb's husband Hiram was an orderly sergeant in the 11th Illinois, and when they settled for the winter at Bird Point, Mary came down to be with him.  She remained with the regiment off and on until the siege of Fort Donalson, when her husband was shot through the lung.  Newcomb succeeded in getting him to her son's home before he died.  After his death, Newcomb returned to the front and resumed her work.  She also applied for a widow's pension.  To prove her marriage she sent in two pages from the family register, one with the date of her marriage, and the other with the dates of the births of her seven children.  The application went through apparently without a problem, and she continued drawing it until 1890 when she got a special act past Congress granting her $24 a month for her service as a nurse.  There is absolute diddlysquat on that process, but I have a sneaking suspicion that those contacts from the army came in handy getting this passed--for starters, the colonel of the 11th Illinois became a brigadier general.  There's probably a couple more high-ranking friends tucked away somewhere in her memoir.  The only other thing I could glean from her file was that her daughter tried to get the arrears on her pension after Newcomb's death in '93, but was denied.  The correspondence regarding this though is gone.  All I have on this comes from a few scribbled notes on the back of her file jacket (the Bureau kept a running log of what had happened in each case on the outside of the jacket.  Most of the time it's Bureau shorthand and I can barely translate it into English--and they say my handwriting is difficult to read!).  Anyway, it's another reminder that government record keeping is not perfect, and that there may be papers missing.  The usual frustrating reality of working with history--not everything makes it.  Grr.