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.