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.