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.