Amanda Watson Bowler

Pension: App. 808716, Cert. 504569
P.O.: South Hancock, ME
Service: tended Union POWs in Memphis, Tennessee, from fall, 1861 to June, 1862, when the Union army took the city
Applied: 1890
Status: Accepted (SA)

I don't often get to see how things were going south of the Mason-Dixon line--working with federal pensions means that, unfortunately, I'm currently dealing only with northern nurses (methinks I see at least one more chapter in my dissertation...).  Bowler's application provided me a rare glimpse into the southern experience, albeit through the eyes of a northern woman.
Bowler was born in Fayette, Maine, in December, 1828, to Permelia and Richard Watson, a clergyman.  She seems to have lived all her early life in Maine--the 1860 census lists her as living with her parents and three siblings in Hancock, Maine--but for reasons never made entirely clear in her pension record in 1860/1861, before the outbreak of the war, she came to Memphis to work as a music teacher.  When the war broke out, Watson was stuck in the city.  She quickly volunteered her services at Overton Hospital, one of many hospitals that had sprung up in Memphis.

Overton Hotel, on the corner of Main and Poplar, was taken over as hospital
and quarters for both sides. 450 beds. Photo taken 1910.

Despite being caught in Confederate territory, Watson hadn't given up on her Yankee sympathies and immediately volunteered to nurse the Union prisoners being taken to Overton.  They were in rough shape.  Watson recalled that many of the men lay in their cots, still wearing the clothes they'd arrived in, and vermin were pervasive.  They were also housed at the top of the building--Watson complained years later that running up and down five flights of iron stairs gave her serious knee problems.
Watson was ostensibly assigned to tend to both Confederate and Union patients, but Confederate patients of course took precedence, and often she had to tend to her Union patients on the sly, usually at night, with the help of two unidentified negroes.  She was very protective of her patients, going so far as to destroy doctor's prescriptions if her patients worsened, and prescribing her own, "never losing a patient that I could control." (I suspect that a number of nurses did the same in northern hospitals, but refrained from mentioning it in their pensions.)
Watson's nighttime activities however quickly attracted attention.  She shrugged off the attention by insisting that cleanliness was "indispensable to all the patients," and continued her evening activities, even hiring a kind-hearted woman to take her place when hospital personnel became suspicious.  The Memphis Vigilance Committee, however, was not convinced, and sent Watson a message, saying "that I had been circulating contraband news, + that if I did not leave the hospital they would arrest + confine me," but that if she agreed to nurse Confederate soldiers only she would be allowed to remain.  Watson did not reply, and continued to nurse Confederates by day and Union by night, working herself to exhaustion until a change in administration at the hospital made it possible for her to nurse the Union POWs with more freedom.  She remained at Overton until Memphis was taken by the Union army in June, 1862.
After the war, Watson returned to Maine.  She applied for her pension in 1874 after seeing that several of her fellow nurses had successfully received pensions.  It took years, affidavits from several Confederate surgeons she had worked for (now there was a surprise!) and several Congressmen, to push her pension through.  The entire process seems to have frustrated Watson.  In one of several letters to the Congressmen handling her case she wrote about the officer's daughters who were receiving $75-$100 pensions.  "Why should the government not compensate me when I readily and voluntarily gave myself up to the hard labor and filthy surroundings?" she asked.
It's sentiments like this that strongly suggest that Watson's application was not motivated solely by her financial situation.  Watson felt she deserved treatment equal to, if not better, than the daughters of officers and other dependents.  Typically, nurses prided themselves on volunteering.  Taking pay was considered vulgar, it made them laborers in a sense--a feeling that didn't sit well with many middle-class women.  That same mindset surfaces in a number of pension applications, nurses who see pensions as a last resort, something they turn to when all other avenues are exhausted.  Bowler, however, turns this idea on its head.  To her, the very fact that she volunteered her labor (something those officers' dependents never did) entitles her to compensation and consideration.
There are, of course, ramifications with this line of thinking.  If Bowler is not a dependent, but is instead basing her pension claim off her own volunteer work (though apparently this volunteer work should be compensated), it puts her in company with the only other non-dependents now receiving pensions, and the other volunteers in the war: the soldiers.  The idea isn't very well developed in Watson's application, and I'm fairly sure Watson herself would object to my pointing it out, but the seeds of the idea are there.  It was simply up to groups like the Woman's Relief Corps and the Army Nurses' Association to see them through.
Watson married James R. Bowler in the 1880s.  He died not long thereafter, and Annie, as her husband called her, returned to teaching music.  She died in August, 1894.  As testament to her work, the Daughters of Union Veterans in Franklin named their tent in her honor.

Amanda Watson Bowler's Gravestone, Riverside Cemetery, Maine

Esther Graves

Going through this file reminded me of one of the reasons I post about these women--not just to share their stories, to pull this women out of the shadows, and preserve and share those stories somewhere so they don't disappear into the shadows again.  It's also to gather information, to reach out, because there is no one way I can tell each story on my own.  And because if I don't, Esther Graves will likely remain something of an unknown.

Pension File: Cert. 120147
P.O.: Bowdoinham, ME
Service: regimental nurse with the 3rd Maine
Applied: 1868
Status: Accepted (SA)

This file was practically empty.  Now in some cases, that's entirely normal.  I've come across files with as few as seven papers.  But the difference is, all the necessary paperwork is there, I can watch the bureaucratic machinery at work, so to speak.  Not with Graves.
Graves' paperwork went missing in 1875.
So what little do we know about her?  The pension records reveal that she died December 28, 1888, that to that point she'd been receiving an $8 pension, which she'd received in 1868, but which Congress backdated to January 1, 1865, which suggests she ended the war destitute, very ill, or both.  We also know she lived in Bowdoinham after the war.  But that is it.
The census records were a little more helpful.  The 1870 Census shows her living in Bowdoinham, working as a milliner.  By 1880, she'd expanded a bit, and was running a boarding house while keeping up with her millinery.  Without an idea of how the milliner business was going, however, its hard to say if taking in boarders was a sign that she needed the extra income, was a budding entrepreneur, or simply wanted company.  We also know she was a Universalist--she is mentioned in passing in Our Women Workers: Women Eminent in the Universalist Church by Mrs. E.R. Hanson.
But none of these tell me what she did in the army.
There are days I thank my lucky stars that people during the late 19th and early 20th century expressed a keen interest in local history, and wrote dozens of books on their town's history.  Where would we be without The History of the Town of Bowdoinham, 1762-1912?  This books is, as far as I know, is the only piece of evidence that tells us anything about Graves' wartime experiences.  "She went out upon her own responsibility," author Silas Adams wrote, not something you usually see in regimental nurses, but not unknown either.  Graves served all four years of the war, following the 3rd until midway through 1862 when she was transferred to Port Royal Island.  Most of the time she received no pay.  She came out of the service with just $24, all she had saved after four years of hard labor--that boarding house is starting to look like an economic necessity.
Adams also mentions there was a second female nurse in the regiment: Sarah Sampson.  There is much better documentation for Sampson than Graves, but I have yet to find anything that links the two other than their simultaneous service in the 3rd.  For now, though, Sampson and the 3rd Maine remain my best leads on Graves.  Hopefully I'll be able to turn up something!

Emily P. Collins

Emily P. Collins

Pension: App. 981709, Cert. 539617
P.O.: Hartford, CT
Service: Martinsburgh, WV, May '64-fall, '64
Applied: 1891
Status: Accepted (SA)

Here's that non-Lovell nurse I promised.
This file just kept getting more and more interesting.
The pension file is straightforward enough, if a bit more detailed and hair-raising than others I've read.  Collins was the daughter of a Revolutionary War veteran, James Parmely.  When the war broke out, she had been married twice, and had two grown sons, one by each marriage.  Both sons enlisted in the Union army--one, Pierre, was a surgeon in the 126th NY, the other E. Burke, was a captain in the 21st NY Cavalry.  According to Collins's testimony, her son Burke was injured in combat, and she immediately went south with her other son (who was on furlough) to tend to him.  There were, however, complications.  Burke was injured too severely to be moved, and General Early was still raiding in the area.  Collins was determined to stay and look after her son and his comrades, but many of the male nurses fled rather than risk capture, leaving only a handful of men, including Pierre and Emily, to look after more than one hundred wounded men.  Sure enough, Early's men raided the hospital, and Emily and her sons were taken prisoner.  Despite this, Burke survived his wounds, but the wound never fully healed, and Burke lost the use of his arm.  He died shortly after the war.
His mother and half-brother, however, lived on, and Emily eventually moved in with her son.  Probably to help with expenses, Collins applied for her pension in 1891.  She managed to secure testimony from an officer in the 21st NY Cavalry to the truth of her statement, which, along with her own testimony, was enough to secure her a pension--she only asked for an $8 pension, but the amount was bumped up to $12, probably as a result of ongoing talks between politicians and the Women's Relief Corps over pensioning all nurses, and their attempts to standardize the pensions being passed by special act.  Collins continued to draw her pension until her death in 1909.
Absent from the pension record, however, is that part of Collins's life that may not have sat so well with a Congress in which many members subscribed to 'traditional' gender norms (just look at their policy regarding widow's pensions).  The first clue was her death record, which listed her occupation as lecturer, reformer, and author.
Well...
A little bit of digging revealed just what Collins was lecturing and writing about.  In her Reminiscences, Collins remembered "from the earliest dawn of reason I pined for that freedom of thought and action that was then denied to all womankind.  I revolted in spirit against the customs of society and the laws of the State that crushed my aspiration and debarred me from the pursuit of almost every object worthy of an intelligent, rational mind."  One way around that was education--Collins attended a girl's seminary in New York.  But apparently that wasn't enough.  In 1849, Collins sent the first petition to the New York legislature asking for the right of suffrage for women.  This petition was backed by the Female Suffrage Society in Ontario County, an organization she had founded just the year before, and the first of its kind.  This petition "created a great deal of astonishment among the men," something that Collins continued to do for the rest of her life.
According to her obituary, Collins also spoke out against slavery alongside the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (in a letter to Stanton she signed herself, "your old disciple"), Lucy Stone, and Julia Ward Howe.  "Southern slavery," she wrote, was "equally applicable to the wrongs of my own sex.  Every argument for the emancipation of the colored man was equally one for that of woman; and I was surprised that all Abolitionists did not see the similarity in the condition of the two classes"--a sentiment she shared with many women in the suffragist movement.
Unfortunately, most of the extant documents I've been able to find regarding Collins and suffragist/reformer activities are pre-war--I've as yet no idea how the war changed Collins' approach to women's rights, if at all.  I am hoping, however, that I can track down some documentation in Seneca Falls or in Hartford that will help me flesh out this woman.  The suffragist movement and the Civil War have a very interesting relationship, and if I want to write a dissertation on nurses' post-war lives, Collins and her suffragist activities could be a fascinating case study of the connections between the two.

Josephine White

Pension: App. 1138733, Cert. 855262
P.O.: 765 Cranstone St., Providence, RI
Service: one of Dix's nurses at Lovell General Hospital, June, 1864-April 15, 1865
Applied: 1892
Status: Accepted

Another Lovell nurse! I'm a little stuck on Rhode Island nurses at the moment, and they all seem to be working at Lovell.  I promise I'll have another hospital for you next week.
So, Josephine White, born Josephine Hazard on January 18, 1838, in Providence to John and Isabella Hazard, one of four children; still single when she began working at Lovell.  Interestingly, Lovell notes that not only did she work the wards like most of her counterparts, she also served as a surgical nurse, which is something you rarely outside field hospitals where there aren't enough hands to go around and needs must.  Luckily for White she was in both the Treasury and War Department records when she applied for a pension in 1892, so there are no exciting wartime documents to analyze.  Instead, the excitement comes towards the end of her life.
Josephine married Amos. A White, a contractor, in Brockton, on October 29, 1884.  It was her first marriage, and his third.  He died shortly after.  Josephine applied for her pension with the help of James Tanner, claiming that she was unfit to perform any manual labor.  The pension went through without a hitch.  By 1900, White was living with her mother, Isabella Tweed (apparently she'd remarried), her stepson Bendett White, a hardware dealer, his wife, and two African-American servants.  The 1900 Census unfortunately doesn't have any information regarding personal wealth or real estate, but the presence of two servants indicates this was a relatively well-off family.  Josephine, however, must have wanted to keep herself marginally independent, and retained her pension as a separate source of income.  It's not entirely normal (most nurses were in fairly rough financial straits when they applied for pensions), but it's also not entirely unexpected.
Then, in 1918, she decided to take a trip to the Isle of Pines, Cuba, and asked for her pension to be forwarded to her for the duration of the trip.  This did not sit well with the Bureau, which promptly informed her they could not forward her pension.  She was still wrangling with them from her hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida (she must have been determined to have that vacation no matter what!) when she died April 10, 1918.  She and I would have gotten along well.

Sarah C. Taylor

Pension File: App. 676286, Cert. 418232
P.O.: 33 Bull St, Newport, RI
Service: Contract nurse at Lovell GH in Portsmouth, RI, from October 15, 1862 to at least August, 1865
Applied: 1888
Status: Accepted (Special Act)

Sarah C. Taylor, Courtesy of MOLLUS

Here's another Lovell nurse for you!  Taylor's file is, like most special acts, on the thin side, but whatever it may lack in quantity, it more than makes up for with quality.
Sarah Taylor was born Sarah Catherine Dennis on January 30, 1828, the daughter of Captain Thomas and Margaret Dennis.  I believe I have her in the 1860 census living in Newport with an elder brother, his wife, and mother-in-law.  Ultimately, however, Sarah--or Kitty, as she was called--ended up in Portsmouth, where she began work at Lovell as an assistant nurse, and, over the course of the next three years, gradually took charge of 14 of the hospital's 28 wards.
Taylor quickly learned the love and respect of the men she tended.  She was a "guardian angel," and was "everywhere and at all times, to help the sick and wounded," an anonymous private wrote the Newport Mercury on July 8th, 1865, "not like the many who consider the private so far beneath their notice...No far from that,-she is everywhere among us, and if there is any extra seat in Heaven, I shall cast my vote that she has it.  You may think that I am getting enthusiastic over our 'Kitty,' but you know, Mr. Editor, that a soldier must get enthusiastic over something; and as she is the only one we see worthy of getting enthusiastic over, you must excuse me if a few drops of it fall from my pen, and I for one say 'give honor to whom it is due.'"
And give honor the men did, because Taylor's pension file includes not only the anonymous letter to the editor, but also transcripts of several testimonials signed by the men in the wards.  Several of them are the standard testimonials from her commanding officers--Katherine Wormley, who was matron in charge of the hospital for a number of years, and William Taney Thurston, the surgeon in command of several of Taylor's wards.  Like our anonymous soldier, Thurston had nothing but glowing praise for Taylor: "I am very confident, that to her good nursing, may be under Providence, attributed the restoration to health of a large number of patients, who under ordinary care must have died...the kindness and mildness of her deportment, towards the suffering soldiers, gained the love and gratitude to all to whom she was a ministering spirit."
The remaining testimonials build on what Thurston and the anonymous soldier wrote.  Rather than falling back on eloquent testimonials from individual patients though (that would be fantastic if it were though!), the remaining testimonials emphasize quantity over quality.  And deservedly so. Got up in May and August, 1865, the testimonials list a total of 77 men, all of whom had apparently agreed to not only testify to Taylor's work, but also to donate money to purchase a "suitable testimonial"--what exactly the testimonial was they don't say, or just how much was donated (so frustrating!), but it appears that her patients gave Taylor several gifts of some sort before the hospital was closed in late 1865.  Her file also includes a letter of thanks from the ladies of Fairhaven, MA, "for your very efficient and kind ministrations to our sick and wounded soldiers" (not entirely sure what the connection between Taylor and Fairhaven is, but it's likely either a family connection or that a number of Fairhaven boys ended up in her wards).
It's rare enough to find wartime documents in a pension file, but it's even rarer to find ones of this scope and depth (i.e. I now have 77 individual men to track down, and the archives at Fairhaven to contact to try and dig up more information!).  The language of the testimonials, however, is also fascinating.  Our anonymous private, for instance, is clearly frustrated with people who dote on officers and overlook the lowly privates--a bit of a class dimension to this, then.  And, of course, how Taylor herself is described is revealing: her "sisterly ministrations," a "ministering spirit," and, of course, "guardian angel"--all standard descriptions for a Civil War nurse (at least if you like her), but coached in such a way that the presence of this young, single woman in the masculine world of a military hospital is not deemed a threat to gender norms (is an angel or a sister likely to fraternize with one of her patients?).
Funny that.
On the list of men signing Sarah's testimonial is a Thomas H.B. Taylor, formerly of the 48th Illinois, but, after what was likely an illness, now a private in the 2nd Battalion, Veterans Reserve Corps, and under Sarah's charge.  The pair married after the war and had two children, Frank (b. 1866, who probably did not live past his 13th year) and William (b. 1868).  The marriage didn't last long--the Newport Daily News reported in October, 1875, that Sarah's petition for divorce had been granted--and Sarah and her son William settled down in Newport, where Sarah worked as matron of Newport Hospital.  She was also apparently in touch with MOLLUS (Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the US), because her file also includes a letter from Arnold A. Rand, the commander of MOLLUS, asking for photographs of the hospitals, fellow nurses, or patients, along with signatures and dates, to include in the growing MOLLUS collection (this, by the way, forms the core of the collection at Carlisle Barracks, and is where Taylor's picture up top comes from!).
Taylor applied for and received her $12 pension in 1888.  She died on April 22, 1901, and was buried in the Common Burying Ground in Newport.

Happy 4th, Everyone!

Carver Hospital, all decked out

Diary of Amanda Aiken, July 4, 1864.
     "A beautiful day, with a pleasant breeze.  Gave each of my attendants a dollar for a holiday treat, which seemed to afford them much pleasure.  Wrote out my list of patients since the last engagements.  I remained in the ward to let No. 6, my orderly, and as many of the attendants as possible go out.  The hospital have them an extra dinner, and I made chocolate and treated them in the afternoon, and stewed my last jar of dried cherries for their tea.  Didn't go to the house until five o'clock.  After tea accompanied Miss McClellan home, where we had ice cream.  Misses Merrill and Griggs, with Drs. Bobbin and Eitchings, soon followed us.  It was a pleasant evening."

Georgiana Smith

Pension File: 695671, 550217
P.O.: 145 Haverhill St, Lawrence, MA
Service: contract nurse at Lovell General Hospital, Portsmouth Grove, RI, in Wards 16, 18, and 20
Applied: 1889
Status: Accepted

Every once in a while you come across a file that makes things a little more personal, a little more tangible.  You find a personal connection that reminds you you're only a few degrees removed from everything that happened 150 years ago.
No, there's no long-lost family relative in the file (though I did find out a few weeks ago that a distant cousin of mine served as a nurse--she's on the WRC lists, so guess what I'm looking into next?).  But like I said, it's a small world.
So, Georgiana Smith, born Georgiana Butterfield, daughter of Pitts Butterfield and Lucy Damon, in October, 1820, in Dedham, Massachusetts.  She married Isacchus Smith and had two children, one of whom died young.  The other, a girl named for her mother, was born January 17, 1846.  Isacchus died sometime around 1855, leaving Georgiana to make her own way.  I think she ends up living with her brother and his family in Attleboro, but I'm not entirely sure--if it is her in the census record, her brother and mother are there, but no baby Georgianna...
In March, 1862, however, Georgiana volunteered her services at Lovell General Hospital in Portsmouth Grove, RI (again, I ask, what happens to her child while she's gone?!).  She was given charge of three wards: 16, 18, and 20.
This is where we get into the period documents.  Smith had several in her file: a pass, allowing her to come and go as necessary; a letter dated to 1864 recommending her for a leave of absence due to illness, and a testimonial.
Thrilling, right?
Here's why, in all my nerdiness, I'm excited about these documents.  First, the letter recommending

Lovell General Hospital

her for a leave of absence: usually I'm told these women were taken ill during their service thirty years after the fact, and a very brief description--rheumatism, a fever, worn down by service.  Unfortunately the letter doesn't provide details about the nature of Georgiana's illness, but now I have a sense of how that illness was dealt with in the moment--a recommendation from her superior, E.E. Brewster, the lady Supt. of Lovell, for a leave of absence, and just so all formalities and bureaucratic niceties are covered, she even includes the date of her last leave of absence: August (the letter was written in November, '64).  Thirty years removed, its hard to get a sense of the day-to-day operation of the hospital, but here I get a tiny snapshot.
The other thing I found exciting were the testimonials.  Again, most testimonials are given thirty years after the fact, and Georgiana has two of those, but every so often the soldiers at a given hospital decide to write up something for their ward nurse, and, hopefully, the nurse keeps it.  The boys in Ward 18 were among that number.  Edward Kent (13th VRI--probably the Veteran Reserve Corps), Benjamin Sweetser (56th MA), Ephraim Esty (1st MA H.A.), Edwin Flagg (57th MA), Edgar Riddell (2nd US S.S.), Josiah Robbins (22nd MA) all signed,  So did Sylvanus Hunt, 12th MA.
Something like this is a potential gold mine for me.  Given how thin on the ground documents relating to nurses are, any name that appears in the file is a potential new source of information.  And since I've already found several instances of networking between nurses, and between them and their former patients, I have high hopes for this lot.
This is also a non-academic nerd moment.  All the men, for whatever reason, not only listed the unit they served with, but also their home town.  Sylvanus Hunt was from my home town.  All I know about him is that he was a draftee, wounded at Spotsylvania, returned to service following a stint at Lovell, and mustered out in June, 1865.  My home town has been pretty thorough going through all their wartime records and posting them online, so there's no leads with Sylvanus, but it's still a reminder--even my sleepy little town had a role to play.
Back to Georgiana.  The trip home must not have been enough, because Georgiana mustered out in March, '65.  From there, we lose the trail again, until 1889, when Georgiana filed for a pension through the Bureau, with Ellen Tolman as her attorney.  Since we hadn't gotten to the ANPA yet, the Bureau summarily rejected it, and Georgiana started the process of getting a special act through Congress--which is why we have all those wonderful wartime documents.  Congress passed the bill on March 27, 1891, awarding Georgiana $12 a month, and Georgiana went on living her quiet life.  At some point she moved in with her daughter and son-in-law (the 1900 census shows them living together), and presumably she remained with them until her death on December 3, 1904.  She's buried in Bellevue Cemetery, in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Etta Hubbs

Pension File: 1086800, 544771
P.O.: Carthage, Illinois, then Lebanon, Oregon
Service: worked in the diet kitchen at Hickory Street Hospital, St. Louis
Applied: 1891
Status: Accepted (Special Act)

Etta Deuel was born January 22, 1838, in Ashtaula County, Ohio.  On November 4, 1856, when she was just 18, she married Jared F. Hubbs in Ionia, Michigan.  Things were on track for a long, quiet life together--their son Luther was born in 1860--and then the war broke out.  Jared enlisted in Co. D, 3rd Michigan Cavalry, and like so many others caught typhoid fever.  He was sent to Hickory Street Hospital in St. Louis, where his wife joined him to nurse him back to health (and what about little Luther?!).  Etta worked at Hickory Street from September, 1862 to July, 1863.  She started her work in the wards tending to her husband, but presumably as he recovered she began to work in the diet kitchen.  The work, however, began to take a toll on her, and that July she was ordered to take a vacation.  Her husband had been transferred to the 17th Veterans Reserve Corps, Co. D, and was out of any medical danger, so Etta returned home.
Jared made it through the rest of the war in one piece, and the couple moved to Carthage, Illinois, where they had two more children, Emma and Arthur, and Jared got work as a teamster, and then as an express agent at the local train station.
But then Jared's health began to fail.  Jared applied for, and received, a pension in 1890--a whopping $4, which was, apparently, all the money coming in at one point.  Etta's letters to the Bureau reveal her frustration and desperation: "is there anything that can be done for me," she wrote in October. "We both rendered the best service we could."
Turned out there was. My bet is the Woman's Relief Corps tipped her off, because when Etta applied for a nurse's pension, it was with the WRC backing her claim.  In case that wasn't enough, Etta also had affidavits from former patients, a surgeon she had worked for, and several notables in Carthage.  Congress granted her a $12 pension in February, 1891.  Not much, but better than $4.
That seems to have worked for a while.  Eventually Jared and Etta moved to Oregon to live with their daughter Emma and her brood, and in 1912 Jared received a pension increase to $30--it looks like some time in the intervening years he'd lost several fingers on one hand!  It looks like it was the start of a downward swing for Jared though, because he died on August 4, 1914.  Etta lost no time applying for a widow's pension, which paid a little more than her nurse's pension.  It took her a while to get the claim through--she'd lost her marriage certificate , and there was no one old enough to remember her marriage to Jared all the way back in 1856.  It took the Bureau almost two years to the day to approve Etta's claim, but approve it they did.
I was struck going through this file by Etta's letter to the Bureau--"we both rendered the best service we could."  Consciously or not, Etta grouped her work in the hospitals in the same category as her husband's military service--not normally something you see in a period where nurses were increasingly portrayed as idealized, ministering angels separate from the trials and tribulations of army life.  And when she died in 1923, Etta continued that trend.  Rather than buy a generic stone marker, her daughter-in-law applied for a military headstone, to go alongside Jared's.  It may have been in part a financial decision, but it was also a statement about this woman and how she chose to identify herself: that regardless of her gender, Etta Hubbs was a former member of the US Army, and a veteran, and no one was going to place her on a pedestal and put a halo on her head.  This stone was for a woman, and not for an angel.

Hubb's gravestone in Lebanon, Oregon.  From Find a Grave.

Rose Russell

Pension File: 1139608, 868306
P.O.: 819 West Main Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi
Service: Vicksburg Field Hospital and Ward A, McPherson Hospital
Applied: 1892
Status: Accepted

I was originally going to save this for July, but then, after what happened in Charleston, I felt I couldn't wait.
So who was Rose Russell?  Well, for those of you who saw my previous post on her, you know she was a former slave at Glasser Plantation in Mississippi.  Her parents were George Gibson, born in Kentucky, and Hannah, born in Virginia.  Shortly before the siege of Vicksburg Grant's men came to the plantation asking for volunteers to work for the army.  Rose volunteered.  She worked the wards at McPherson Hospital, and helped lift men out of ambulances, where they were "stacked like corded wood," and the blood covered the ground.  She served the entirety of the war, then settled down in Vicksburg, where she married Alexander Russell on March 20, 1870 (she sent in her marriage certificate).  They had ten children, five boys and five girls.
Russell lived a very long life.  She applied for a pension in 1892--the Bureau did actually have her name on record, which is astounding--and sent in a pass, several testimonials from nurses who worked alongside her (Phoebe Davis, Eliza Winston, and Jesse Johnson).  She also managed to get paid for the last two months of her service--apparently they hadn't paid her.  Now that is not something I've seen before.  And, of course, over half the money went to her lawyer.
And then we come to the 75th Gettysburg Anniversary that Russell's son mentions in her file.  My theory is this celebration was held locally, since Russell was nearly 95 years old at this point, but I don't have any evidence to back it up.
In a letter to the Bureau written after his mother's death, Howard Russell described the event, remembering that over the course of the day his mother met a number of ladies who asked after her, including one who turned out to be the granddaughter of the mistress of Glasser Plantation (her former owner).  The plantation, she said, had burned to the ground, as had the family bible with the names and birth dates of all the (now former) slaves.
To find this woman, a former slave, attending the 75th Anniversary of Gettysburg is somehow fitting.  Throughout my own research and my readings for graduate school I've found a great deal about how whites remembered and commemorated the war, but very little about how blacks did.  This single letter, however, is loaded with meaning.
1) Rose chose to attend this celebration, commemorating a symbolic turning point of the war which is typically portrayed as a very white narrative. When, after all, was the last time someone mentioned to you that Pickett's Charge was fought on property owned by a black man? Or that Gettysburg had a substantial black population?  Simply by being there, she is undermining that white narrative, inserting herself into the symbolic interpretation of the war.  She's also perhaps choosing (though we don't know for sure) to not commemorate the fall of Vicksburg, an event which she witnessed--though, given it's Vicksburg, the locals may have chosen not to commemorate it...still the choice of Gettysburg is intriguing.
2) This woman is 95 years old.  She's suffering from feminine problems and dysentery.  She did not make the choice to come to this celebration lightly.  This event meant something to her.
3) It's 75 years after Gettysburg.  If Russell is 95, there aren't that many people left who remember the battle.  So why is Vicksburg (of all places) choosing to celebrate this event, especially when it has nearly passed out of living memory?
4) Look at who she's mixing with!  She's speaking with blacks and whites alike--in Jim Crow Mississippi!  What is going on here that there is not only interracial mixing, but that whites are celebrating Gettysburg?!
I wish I knew more about the celebration as a whole, if there were others like it, the local significance of this event (a lead up to July 4th, or a distinct celebration in and of itself).  This is definitely something I want to explore more--a chapter in my dissertation perhaps?  But that's a rabbit hole for another day.  For now, given what's happened in Charleston, in Baltimore, in Ferguson, I just wanted to share that image with you: an old woman, a former slave, speaking with the descendant of the people who owned her seventy five years ago, commemorating, together, the downfall of that institution and way of life, and the battle and sacrifice that helped to bring that about, in one of the most unlikely places imaginable.  If they can do that in Jim Crow South...maybe there's hope for us yet.

Amelia J. Gill

Pension File: 574180, 335866
P.O.: 141 Pembroke St, Boston, MA
Service: Sanitary Commission nurse on hospital ships S.R. Spaulding and Webster, Columbia Hospital, D.C., Beaufort and Hilton Head, South Carolina, and in Florida, between 1861 and 1865
Applied: 1886
Status: Accepted (Special Act)

Amelia J. Gill, from the MOLLUS database

Gill's pension file is one of those that could be so spectacular, if only more documents had survived! We know from the few document in her file that she was born about 1823 in Maine, and that she volunteered to work for the US Sanitary Commission shortly after the war began.  She spent the first two years of the war working on hospital ships and in Washington, D.C. until she was transferred to the southern theatre of operations in October, 1863, where she worked in South Carolina and Florida.
This is the part where the benefit of working piecemeal on these pensions for two years comes in, because I can tell you which other nurses Gill likely served with during her time with the army.  Her first port of call, Columbian College Hospital, was full of female nurses, including Charlotte Bradford, Adelia Ferris, Clara B. Hoyt, and Jane Howard.  Working on the Daniel Webster, the first hospital ship commissioned during the Civil War and outfitted entirely by the USSC, Gill likely worked alongside Amy Morris Bradley (whose pension I have but haven't posted...), Annie Etheridge (actually a vivandiere rather than a nurse, but still a woman I'm immensely interested in) and Helen Gilson.  The southern hospitals had significantly fewer women serving in them--most likely because of their nearness to the front lines--but even there Gill likely crossed paths with several women.  Given the overlap I've seen in several pensions, nurses testifying on behalf of each other, etc., I have high hopes that one of those files will have something on Gill.

The Daniel Webster

Gill finally left the service at the close of the war and moved to Boston, where apparently she fell on hard times.  In 1885 she applied for, and received, a $300 annuity from the Massachusetts General Court for her wartime service.  Clearly this wasn't enough, because the next year, Congress awarded her a $25 pension (well done, Gill!).  It probably helped that she produced testimonials from an influential journalist, Mr. Coffin, and Mr. Knapp, who directed the USSC, as well as a pass written for her by President Lincoln himself (which, to my immense frustration, was not in the file!)  After that, however, Gill's file dries up.  It's not even clear when her pension was dropped.  I have tentatively identified a grave in Biddeford, ME, as hers, which puts her date of death at 1889, but at the moment it's impossible to tell.

Return of the Wayward Blogger

Man, it is good to be back!
It's hard to believe it's been over two years since I last posted on 'For A Woman.'  But after two years of slogging through graduate school I finally have the time to go back to my own research and give these women the time they deserve.
My hope is to ultimately turn this blog into a database, a repository of information on Civil War nurses.  The pensions I pulled will serve as the core research material, but I also want to see what I can get my hands on using online resources and local historical societies.  That may mean some significant revisions of some of the pages, or even creating a new site, I'm not sure.  I know it means revisiting some older posts--I'd like to think I've learned a thing or two since undergrad, and I've turned up a few new things about some of these women in the past two years.
And just like 'For a Woman' helped with my undergrad thesis, hopefully this blog will be a jumping-off point for my dissertation (yikes!), focusing on the postwar lives of Civil War nurses: what happened to them? Where did they go? How did they make the transition back to 'normal' life? How did their service change them? How were they remembered?  How did they remember themselves?  We know so much about the postwar lives of male veterans, but so very little about the women.  I plan on changing that.
For now, though, I'm happy just going back through the files and posting profiles.  There are at least 20,000 women listed on government muster sheets and payrolls from the Civil War, and I've posted on a measly 40-odd women!  I've got my work cut out for me.
As always, if you guys see anything in your travels about these women, please let me know!  There is so little on them, and most of it tucked away in forgotten corners, so every little bit helps.