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