The Union Women of “Valley Forge”
There was a female element of the Union “Valley Forge.” Like the men of the Army of the Potomac, these women served their country well, and represent some of the best of the women of that Civil War era. Their faith in God and country sustained their extraordinary service. Like the soldiers of the eastern army, they risked everything and paid the price in many ways, including damaged health. Some paid with their lives.
It has become commonplace for modern historians to assume gender bias in records and to refer to “untold stories” of Civil War women. What is not widely known is that Union women have been documented in two 500-page books published within two years of the war’s termination. It is fair to state, however, that they were subsequently forgotten and their known stories were relegated to the “dusty recesses of history.”
A brief summary of their lives and work complements the known record of the “Valley Forge” period and provides another dimension to this book’s thesis. Each was associated with the U. S. Christian and Sanitary Commissions, as well as ladies’, soldiers’, or state aid societies. Each woman came to Stafford on her own initiative as a volunteer.
In 1866, just a year after the end of the war, Frank Moore wrote Women of the War: Their Heroism and Self-Sacrifice. He identified seven women with the “Valley Forge of the War”: The married Mary A. Brady, Isabella Fogg, Mary W. Lee, Ellen Matilda Orbison, Charlotte E. McKay, Mary Morris Husband, and Miss Amy M. Bradley. Curiously, he omitted well-known women like Clara Barton, Dr. Mary Walker, and Dorothea Dix, who I included here. Moore used the phrase “Valley Forge” throughout his book, which was published 20 years before Rufus Dawes’ December 1862 letter was made public.
The following is a brief biographic summary of these ladies, emphasizing their wartime service before, during, and after the Union “Valley Forge.”1
Mary A. Brady, born in Ireland in 1821, had married an English lawyer in 1846; they lived in America before the war. During the war, after some preliminary hospital work at Satterlee Hospital in West Philadelphia, she served by drawing supplies from the Fifth Street Depot and distributing them to the hospitalized men, mostly from the Peninsula fighting. Concerned that supplies shipped to Virginia were not reaching their intended destinations, Mrs. Brady left home and family (five children) to work at the front, where she served until 1864, excepting brief visits home. Traveling from Alexandria and Fairfax, she joined the army in Stafford. An early connection came in a January 19, 1863, letter from Joseph A. Winters of the 7th Pennsylvania Infantry from “Camp near Belle Plain, Va.” asking her to visit a comrade, Henry Griffin, in Ward H.
As Moore related, “The army was greatly used up and demoralized, and the sick list was fearful.” Brady conveyed 60 boxes of food and supplies from Philadelphia, although some were distributed in Washington hospitals. She also reported working in a convalescent hospital of 12,600 patients between Alexandria and Falmouth. A month later, she returned with another 60 boxes, which were distributed within the army’s perimeter. Brady took a four-mule wagon and stopped at every tent where a “little red flag, indicated a sick tent.”
She went home in April for more supplies and returned with 45 boxes and two cooking stoves for the Chancellorsville battles. Working at the VI Corps hospital, she provided the wounded with food supplements. Sparing no expense or effort for the hospital’s needs, she requested Philadelphia for “fifty dozen cans of condensed milk, a hundred dozen fresh eggs, thirty boxes of lemons, ten boxes of oranges, one and fifty pounds of white sugar, two hundred jars of jelly, and twelve dozen of sherry,” urgently adding, “Everything is wanted.” Mary cooked all day, and visited the sick and wounded at night. At 5 a.m., she started her cook fires again for the next day’s work. Following that routine until June, she went with the army to Gettysburg and worked in hospitals there until August.
Returning to Philadelphia, she renewed her hospital work and began fund raising. An incident that must have convinced Brady that her duty had been faithfully performed:
[A]s she entered a [crowded] street car … she noticed that a soldier was looking very steadily at her face. His sleeve was empty. Presently the maimed warrior called out, with some emotion, “Don’t you know me, Mrs. Brady?” “Really,” she replied, “I can’t quite recollect you, I see so many of Uncle Sam’s brave boys.” “Not recollect me, Mrs. Brady?” said the soldier, his eyes now filling with tears: “don’t you remember the day you held my hand while the doctors cut my arm off? You told me to put my trust in God, and that I should get well over it. You said I was sure to recover; and here I am, dear madam, thank God!”
Brady returned to the army in the winter of 1864 for the Overland Campaign. By April and May, the hard winter had taken its toll and she was suffering from some heart ailment. On May 27, 1864, she died, not yet reaching her forty-second birthday. No less so than the soldiers she had served, Mary Brady had died on the field of honor.2
Isabella Morrison Fogg entered the war when her son enlisted. Volunteering her services to Maine’s governor and state surgeon-general, she accumulated medical stores and supplies. She left the Pine Tree State in 1861 with a regiment and went to Annapolis, Maryland, where she worked for some months in a general hospital’s fever ward; in spring of 1862, she joined the Sanitary Commission and went to the Peninsula. Fogg aided in transporting wounded, and then went to Antietam.
In December 1862, Fogg joined the army in Stafford, serving with hospitals that served Maine units. That month, she and Mrs. Harriet Eaton shared dinner on tin plates with Lt. Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20th Maine.3
Moore recorded Fogg’s daily diary entry for a typical day during the “Valley Forge”:
Started with ambulance filled with necessary stores of all kinds, such as bread, soft crackers, canned chicken, oysters, dried fruit, preserves, condensed milk, dried fish, pickles, butter, eggs, white sugar, green tea, cocoa, broma, apples, oranges, lemons, cordials, wines, woolen underwear, towels, quilts, feather pillows, all invaluable among so many sufferers so far from home and its comforts. My first visit was directed to those regiments where the wants were most pressing; but my special mission was to those who languished under bare shelter tents, they being entirely dependent on their ration, and seldom or never reached by sanitary and hospital stores. In company with the surgeons, who always welcomed us, we made the tour of the camp, going from tent to tent, finding from one to three in each of those miserable quarters, suffering from camp diseases of every form, distributing our stores at the surgeons’ suggestion. We left reading matter generally in each tent. Then we would hasten away to the General Hospital, and pass the latter part of the day in reading the Bible to some dying soldier, or write out his words of final and touching farewell to the loved ones at home, then battle fevered brows, moisten with water and refresh with cordials mouths parched with fever, and, adjusting pillows under aching heads, bid our patients farewell. Weary, but glad at heart for having put it in our power to do so much for our boys, we sought our tents, which scarce protected us from snow and rain, but we were happy in a sense of duty discharged, and enjoying the grateful love of our sacrificing heroes.
Fogg returned to Washington periodically, picking up supplies “regularly shipped from Portland and other places in Maine” to the camps. She contracted pneumonia and did not recover till spring. During Chancellorsville, she and Eaton spent five days at U. S. Ford dispensing food to the wounded. On May 4, they came under artillery fire.
In the spring 1864 she was back for the Overland Campaign and worked in Fredericksburg hospitals. However, the war had taken its toll. “The close of the war found her a permanent invalid among strangers,” Moore wrote. “But this affliction was as nothing in her estimation. Her son was a cripple for life. She would never enjoy health again. But, to use the language of her diary, she is daily solaced and penetrated with deep gratitude to God that he so long preserved her in health and strength, to witness the triumph of the right, and the dawn of peace, and the days when the patriot, no longer languishing in camp nor agonizing in the field, will not suffer for what woman, in her tenderness, can do for him.” No less than the soldiers, Isabella Fogg had given everything for her country.4
A modern account provides supplemental information on Isabella Fogg. She was from Calais, Maine—one of the most remote areas of coastal “Downeast.” Her son, Hugh, was in the 6th Maine Infantry, and she began her volunteer work in Washington for the Maine Camp and Hospital Association of Portland. She assisted in the Annapolis hospital during an outbreak of spotted typhus fever in September 1861. That work lasted until spring 1862, when she joined the Hospital Transport Service under the U. S. Sanitary Commission in the Virginia Peninsula. Afterward she returned to Washington, working for the Maine Camp and Hospital Association and the Maine Soldiers’ Relief Agency, headquartered there. That led her to the Antietam/Sharpsburg battle area in November 1862, where she and others assisted the wounded from the September battle. Working with Harriet (Mrs. J. S.) Eaton and Charles C. Hayes, they were “horrified to find sick and wounded soldiers, supposedly long since removed, still languishing all over the area.”
On November 10, Fogg described the Smoketown Hospital, where she had found 30 Maine soldiers. “This place is in the most miserable condition,” she wrote. “[T]he men complain very much. The effluvia arising from the condition of these grounds is intolerable, quite enough to make a man in perfect health sick, and how men can recover in such a place is a mystery to me.” They dispensed their supplies and went to Bakersville by wagon, found 20 wounded from the 5th Maine, and continued on to hospitals at Sharpsburg, Berlin (Brunswick), Harpers Ferry, Keedysville, and Hagerstown. Returning to Washington, they replenished and returned to disperse supplies at those hospitals.
Fogg and Eaton went to Stafford and cared for Maine and other soldiers. Isabella also served at Gettysburg, the Bristoe and Mine Run campaigns, and during the Overland Campaign at Belle Plain and Fredericksburg). During the winter of 1864, while visiting home, she received “a sizeable sum of money to be placed at her disposal by the [Maine] Legislature, to be spent at her discretion for the comfort and care of Maine soldiers.”
Previously, during the fall of 1864, she had received word that her son had been “mortally” wounded at Cedar Creek. Quickly going to Martinsburg, West Virginia, she discovered Hugh had been wounded and his leg amputated. He was evacuated to Baltimore. While tending him there, Fogg’s health broke down and she went home to recover. By November of 1864, she was back in Washington, where she joined the U. S. Christian Commission’s “Special Diet Kitchens in Hospitals” unit under Mrs. Annie Wittenmeyer. Mrs. Fogg, assigned to duty on the hospital ship Jacob Strader on the Ohio River, operated the ship’s special diet kitchen. She accidentally fell through an open hatch and severely injured her spine; she remained an invalid thereafter. Generals Chamberlain, Meade, and Grant aided in securing her a pension.5
Mary W. Lee, a child immigrant from Great Britain, was led by patriotic zeal to war work, starting in Philadelphia’s Union Refreshment Saloon. After a year she joined Ellen Harris and others in caring for the transported wounded and sick from Virginia. She served at Antietam in field hospitals of Sedgwick’s division and was a mainstay of the Smoketown Hospital. Lee moved with the army to Stafford in November 1862 and participated in its “Valley Forge” with only a brief respite to nurse her sick son at home in March. During Chancellorsville, she worked at the Lacy House (Chatham), where she and others witnessed the VI Corps’s assault on Marye’s Heights. As Moore related:
When that fierce engagement was at its height, the men that had been wounded in the skirmishes of the days previous, all dragged themselves to the galleries and terraces of the house, Mrs. Lee helping them, and watched the conflict with eager forgetfulness of their own sufferings. When at length Sedgwick, and the brave Sixth corps, after two repulses, made the final and triumphant charge, sweeping over the battlements from which Burnside had been so terribly repulsed in December, everybody that had a well arm raised it, with ringing cheers, over his head, and shouted, till their brave companions on the other side heard and answered back their triumph. Mrs. Lee stood by her little cooking tent, whipping dishes, and joined in the general delight by waving her towel, as a flag, and shouting with the rest. She did more than this. She fell upon her knees, and thanked God that those formidable lines, from which the Union forces had been so often repulsed with frightful carnage, were at last carried, and the national flag waved in triumph over them.
The triumph may have been complete, but the butcher’s bill was due. Some 8,000 wounded were carried across the river to the Stafford hospitals. Lee worked at Chatham and followed the army to Gettysburg. Forced to interrupt her service and remain at home with sick family in the winter of 1863-1864, she rejoined the army in 1864 at Brandy Station and followed it on the Overland Campaign (where she again worked in Fredericksburg). Lee continued serving until the war’s end, which found her in Richmond hospitals a month after the Army of Northern Virginia’s surrender. There, she met President Lincoln, who went through the wards and talked and shook hands with each man.
“Then,” Moore added, “when there were no more homeless and suffering patriots; no more wounds to be stanched; no more long trains of ambulances, with their groaning and bleeding freightage; no more caldrons of gruel and mutton soup to be cooked for great wards full of half-famished boys, Mrs. Lee went home, and slipped into the happy routine of domestic usefulness.” She had given her all: three long years of patriotic duty.6
Ellen Matilda Orbison (Mrs. John) Harris began her war work in Philadelphia as a member of a ladies charitable group at “the [10th Presbyterian] church of the Rev. Dr. Boardman.” The group’s secretary, she was mistakenly described as “one of those delicate, fragile, and feeble-looking ladies who are apparently condemned to lives of patient suffering and inactivity by constitutional defect of physical vigor.” When the war began, she buried that description when she “entered upon a selfimposed and self-directed career of Christian and sanitary labors, more extended, more arduous, and more potent for good, than any other that can be found in American annals.” Moore added: “If there were any such vain decorations of human approbation as a crown, or a wreath, or a star for her, who in our late war has done the most, and labored the longest, who visited the greatest number of hospitals, prayed with the greatest number of suffering and dying soldiers, penetrated nearest to the front, and underwent the greatest amount of fatigue and exposure for the soldier—that crown or that star would rightly be given to Mrs. John Harris, of Philadelphia.” Amid such breathtaking praise, though, she remarked: “[N]ot one in all the noble sisterhood is more indifferent than she to all human applause.”
Harris soon aspired to do more than the Ladies’ Aid Society could require of her. She went to Washington after First Manassas, making delivery trips to the quickly expanding hospitals. By spring of 1862, she had visited more than a hundred hospitals, distributing donations from the society.
After extensive visits to Fairfax and Arlington, she served in the Peninsula Campaign. She reported back to her society regularly—a thorough, if self-effacing, record. First, she worked at Fortress Monroe and then with McClellan’s army. It was exhausting, but she took time to marvel at the peculiar reality of wounded and sick boys from both sides—Alabama, the Carolinas, and Massachusetts—lying side-by-side in the hospitals. She divided her efforts and supplies between those transported up the Chesapeake and others who remained in army hospitals. Philadelphians met her requests for more of everything.
Harris worked on ships and in field hospitals with equal vigor. Her drive and energy occasionally put her at cross purposes with a lazy chaplain or recalcitrant surgeon, but in the main she garnered the respect of all, especially the soldiers. She rendered valuable service at Harrison’s Landing and at hospitals on the James River.
The supplies flowed in and included ascorbic foods so critical for health and recovery (then missing from routine army fare). During the final two weeks of August 1862 alone, she distributed 100 baskets, 72 barrels, five bags, and five boxes of onions; eight barrels of apples; three barrels of beets; three barrels of squashes; 18 bushels of tomatoes; five barrels of pickles; one barrel of molasses; two kegs of butter; six kegs of dry rusk and crackers; 80 pounds of cheese; and large quantities of farina, milk, wine and cocoa to the men. Harris moved to Maryland with the army and, at Antietam, she again rendered invaluable service.7
Ellen Matilda Orbison (Mrs. John) Harris. LOC
During the war’s bloodiest day, she found herself leading prayers as much as cooking and feeding the wounded. Amid the dead, wounded, sick, and dying, the women distributed the supplies they had, comforted the men, and sang (she noted “Miss G’s [Helen Gilson] loud, clear voice leading”). They worked at French’s division hospital, and Bolivar and Smoketown hospitals, caring for “a thousand of our wounded, and a number of Confederates.” Her letters from the Peninsula were published and distributed in the North, triggering an extensive flood of supplies, all forwarded directly to her.
With the army’s movement to Stafford, she became identified with what transpired in the “Valley Forge” period. Moore explained:
During the period from October, 1862, to May, 1863, although but one great battle took place in Virginia, Mrs. Harris continued her hospital labors with unabated zeal and devotion. At no time in the long struggle was sanitary service more needed; for the winter of 1862-3 was in the war what that of 1777-8 was to the Continental army under Washington. The troops had been worn down by the unexampled fatigues of the fall campaign, and when the cold weather set in, sickness multiplied at a rate so alarming, as to threaten, at one time, the very organization of the army.
Moore estimated the number of sick and convalescents in camps between the Rappahannock and Potomac at 30,000-40,000. The wounded and more seriously ill in Washington numbered another 30,000. In November and December, she challenged Philadelphians to send more supplies, and that continued throughout the winter. Picket duty in adverse weather was a heavy burden. “Mrs. Harris,” Moore continued, “was for many weeks established at the Lacey [sic] House, where her self-imposed duties were onerous and varied.” Probably operating out of the kitchen out-building, her stove provided endless rations of “Ginger panada” or “bully soup” (compounded corn-meal, ground ginger, wine, and crackers) to the interminable picket shifts numbed by cold and exposure. Her reports included a vivid description of a Sunday at Lacy House:
Could you have looked in upon us at breakfast time this day of sacred rest, your eye would have fallen on scenes and groupings all out of harmony with its holy uses. One cooking-stove pushed to its utmost capacity, groaning beneath the weight of gruel, coffee, and tea, around it clustered soldiers, shivering, drenched to the skin, here and there a poor fellow coiled upon the floor, too full of pain and weariness to bear his own weight. Seated along the table, as closely as possible, were others, whose expressions of thanks told how grateful the simple repast was—bread, stewed fruit, and coffee. All alike were wet and cold, having been exposed throughout the night to the driving snow and rain, the most uncomfortable one of the season.
She recalled 72 haggard men awaiting food in the March 1863 winds. With icicles on their wet blankets, they bolstered themselves for a three- to five-mile march in cold mud after 42 hours of sleepless duty. “Simple as it was,” she reported, “you would feel that God’s own day was honored.” After Chancellorsville, Mrs. Harris reported (May 18):
After seeing Mrs. B. [Brady] and Mrs. L. [Lee] off, we filled two ambulances with bread and butter, prepared stewed fruit, egg-nog, lemons, oranges, cheese shirts, drawers, stockings, and handkerchiefs, and went out to meet a train of ambulances bearing the wounded from United States Ford. Reaching Stoneman’s Station, where we expected to meet the [ambulance] train, we learned we were a half an hour too late, but could overtake them; so we pressed forward, and found ourselves in the rear of a long procession of one hundred and two ambulances. The road being narrow, steep, and most difficult, we could not pass, and were obliged to follow, feeling every jolt and jar for our poor suffering ones, whose wounds had just reached that point when the slightest motion is agony …. When this sad procession halted near the hospital of the Sixth army corps, we prepared to minister to the sufferers. Some gentlemen of the Christian Commission were there to assist us. No pen can describe the scene. Most of these sufferers had been wounded on the 3d instant.
Amputations were rampant, she wrote, and many had to be left with the enemy who were overtaxed caring for their own wounded. “By day and by night I see their poor mutilated limbs, red with inflammation, bones protruding, worms rioting as they were held over the sides of the ambulance to catch the cooling breeze!” she lamented. “Those anguished faces—what untold suffering they bespoke! Many a lip quivered, and eye filled with tears, when approached with words of sympathy; and not a few told how they had prayed for death to end their sufferings, as they were dashed from side to side, often rolling, in their helplessness, over each other, as they were driven those 20 weary miles.”
The Philadelphians sent supplies, Ellen noted, to Mrs. Husband and Mrs. McKay. She also mentioned that Miss Dorothea Dix, superintendent of Army nurses, was present and asked her to distribute other supplies to the two ladies. Of critical need was the nourishing food. Each day for a week, Ellen related, they cooked up five gallons of custard, using six dozen eggs each time, and about eight gallons of pudding for the sick and wounded.
In addition to cooking, she conducted prayer meetings. Attendance grew to the point where the meeting had to be held in the main house at Lacy House. “Mrs. Harris assumed the whole responsibility,” Moore explained, “occasionally calling upon clergymen and others, whom she knew, to lead the devotions of the audience.” Harris’s efforts continued until the army left for Pennsylvania. Ellen Harris continued her service at Gettysburg in her own state. After the victory, when she could have easily returned to her home, she resolutely stayed with the army as it returned to Virginia for fall campaigning. In October she returned to Philadelphia. Again, she could have easily retired from her strenuous service; but, instead, she decided to go to the Western Theater and serve there! Her subsequent wartime service took her to Tennessee and Georgia, working with the sick and wounded soldiers, as well as with poor white refugees displaced from their meager farms by war and destroyed economy. Though in broken health, she returned to the Army of the Potomac for the campaigning of 1864 and 1865. Not surprisingly, after Lee’s surrender she finished the war in the Carolinas. She had served through late April “as apothecary, sometimes as physician, constantly as nurse and Christian friend.” Grossly miscast as “delicate, fragile, and feeble-looking” in 1861, Ellen survived until 1902 and died in Florence, Italy.8
Charlotte E. McKay of Massachusetts, after suffering the 1862 deaths of her husband and only child, joined the army in spring 1862 at Frederick, Maryland. There she cared for the wounded from the latest fight at Winchester, and she had the unusual experience of face-to-face contact with the Confederates. The Federals, thinking their hospitals safely tucked behind friendly lines, left them behind as “Stonewall” Jackson’s troops advanced from Harpers Ferry into Maryland in September 1862. Charlotte chose to remain with her charges when home guards faded away and the advancing Rebels swept into the town, taking possession of the hospital and its Federal patients, nurses, and surgeons. What passed between the opposing forces afterward was spirited banter, in which Charlotte took an active part. The Confederates felt unbeatable at that point, but the Federals cordially predicted their demise. Soon South Mountain and Antietam occupied everyone’s attention, and the Rebels returned on their way to Virginia. Mrs. McKay remained at Antietam until the army moved to Falmouth in November 1862.
Initially going to Washington, she nursed there before securing—“after much difficulty”—a pass to Falmouth, where she visited her brother and friends in the 17th Maine and took up duties in the III Corps hospital in January 1863. During the “Valley Forge,” she cared for the sick and wounded and prepared meals for hospitalized soldiers. Assisted by Mrs. Birney, the wife of Gen. David Birney, they labored to make the men more comfortable and supplied them from the U. S. Sanitary Commission’s and other stocks.
Most probably she was the “Mrs. McK” described in a March 24, 1863, letter to the Lewiston, Maine Daily Evening Journal as escorting a group of visiting Maine people to the headquarters of General Howard—then stationed with the 2nd Division of the II Corps—near Stoneman’s Station in an ambulance driven by an orderly from the 17th Maine camp.9
In mid-April 1863, McKay was located at Potomac Creek with the new hospital of the 1st Division, III Corps. When the corps deployed, Charlotte took an ambulance with supplies and followed them over a pontoon bridge to Chancellorsville and “established herself at a large brick house, two or three miles from the front line of battle.” While there, she treated the wounded even as she received the news that her brother had been killed. Perhaps as bad, when the army was ordered to withdraw across the river at U. S. Ford, they knew that they were abandoning many wounded soldiers still on the battlefield.
Charlotte went to Washington while the army deployed toward Pennsylvania in June 1863. The news of Gettysburg came too late for her to move there, so she went to Baltimore, where she found the hospitals were still operative after the Gettysburg battle. She left, arriving in time to work there through August. She rejoined the army in the Bristoe, Mine Run, and Overland Campaigns. During the latter, she served in Fredericksburg.
McKay joined the hospital of the Cavalry Corps and took charge of its special diet department. On December 24, 1864, she was presented with a gold badge by the Cavalry Corps. A few months earlier, she had received the Kearney Medal by the officers of the 17th Maine Infantry.10 Her army service ceased by March 1865. She remained in Virginia, however, for another year, “engaged with the freedmen; nursing the sick, taking care of those who were unable to care for themselves, listening to many a weird tale of cruelty and injustice in the old days of bondage, and giving the rudiments of education to minds that were sitting in darkness.”11
Mary Morris Husband, a granddaughter of Robert Morris, one of the Founding Fathers, was the wife of Philadelphia attorney J. J. Husband, a man of deep pockets whose was prominent in the community. Mrs. Husband began her Civil War service in 1861 with hospital visitations and library work at the hospital at 22nd and Wood Streets in Philadelphia. In July 1862, she joined the transport nursing group in the Virginia Peninsula at Harrison’s Landing. After three trips with wounded and sick soldiers, she assumed a leading role at the National Hospital at Baltimore in August of 1862, engaged with handling wounded from Second Manassas, Chantilly, Harpers Ferry, and South Mountain. She went to the Smoketown Hospital near Antietam Creek and worked there during and, for two months after that battle, cared for the wounded and sick.
Husband’s “Valley Forge”-period service consisted of spending the entire winter as matron of the V Corps’s 3rd-Division hospital. During Chancellorsville, she shifted to the hospital of the III Corps’s 3rd Division. As the army moved toward Pennsylvania in June 1863, Husband briefly served in Alexandria and Washington before moving on to Gettysburg, where she remained until December 1863 taking care of “her boys.”
As a unique sideline, she vigorously advocated appeals of convicted deserters. Usually successful, some of her appeals were personally taken to Secretary of War Stanton and to President Lincoln. Noted for her advocacy for guard-house prisoners, as well, Husband remained with the army through April 1864 when General Grant’s order expelling all women from the army provided her an opportunity for home-rest. Returning after several weeks, she went to Fredericksburg hospitals to resume duty. She ended the war in Richmond where, during an impromptu review of the victorious Union forces, “Mother Husband” was cheered.
Exceptionally large numbers of soldier testimonials were prominent in Moore’s work. No less than the soldiers, she had labored long and hard, with great effectiveness in their behalf.12 A modern summary of Husband’s wartime service adds one final colorful detail: “She was known as the nurse with the apron of miracle pockets, because her deep, wide pockets carried games and reading material that entertained and filled the soldiers’ long hours of recovery.”13
Amy Morris Bradley of East Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a Mainer by birth, born in East Vassalboro in 1823. She commenced her service to the Union shortly after First Manassas. Traveling to Washington in August 1861 with the 3rd Maine Infantry of Colonel O. O. Howard, she took charge of the sick in makeshift hospitals in Powell House and The Octagon House for General Slocum’s brigade. In that capacity, she connected with the U. S. Sanitary Commission, from which she drew supplies. In April 1862, she went with the division to Warrenton Junction and, in May, to the Peninsula. Sharing workloads with several women, Bradley was mildly censured for spending too much time caring for a wounded Confederate, William A. Sewell of the 8th Alabama Infantry. “Doctor,” she replied, “I profess to be a Christian, and my Bible teaches me, if my enemy hungers, to feed him; if he is thirsty, to give him drink; that poor boy is wounded, and suffering intensely; he was my enemy, but now he needs my aid. If I obey not the teachings of my Saviour, I am not a true disciple.” It was an eloquent demonstration of the caliber of all the “Women of the ‘Valley Forge.’”
After the Peninsula Campaign, during which she transported wounded and sick to Philadelphia, Amy went with the army to Aquia Creek, then transited to Manassas. Afterward, she cared for the sick at the Washington Soldiers’ Home. Bradley joined the army under the auspices of the Sanitary Commission in December 1862 and served during the “Valley Forge” as a “special relief agent.” This involved shuttling supplies from Washington and Maryland to the army and giving them to proper agents for distribution.14
A modern account by Maggie Maclean provides details about Bradley’s postwar career. In January 1865, the Soldiers’ Memorial Society, formed by Boston Unitarians, was formed. After the war she went under their auspices to Wilmington, North Carolina. During Christmas 1866, she opened a school in cooperation with other vestiges of the war—the American Missionary Society founded by New Englander Rev. S. S. Ashley, and the General O. O. Howard’s Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands Bureau. After January 1867, initially with three pupils, Bradley operated the Dry Pond Union Schoolhouse, which had been abandoned since 1862. Despite social ostracism from some Wilmington ladies, the school caught on. She did not receive rave reviews from unreconstructed Southerners, but financial support from concerned Wilmington citizens and Northern philanthropists rolled in. After her death, she was buried in Wilmington’s Oakdale Cemetery; her headstone reads, “Our School Mother.”15
Although not included in Frank Moore’s work, Clarissa Harlowe “Clara” Barton was the most famous of the women who worked with the Union Army. The most enduring “human face” personifying the work done in Stafford during the war, Barton also illustrates the “Union Women of ‘Valley Forge.’” Historian Stephen B. Oates tells Clara’s story in some detail and provides tangential information on other women.
Barton, through her postwar lectures across America, brought home the vital role women played in humanitarian efforts supporting the war. Reminiscing about her wartime experiences—particularly her 1862 activities at the Lacy House in Falmouth and in the Fredericksburg churches, and her 1864 activities at Belle Plain and in Fredericksburg—she drew national attention to all of the women.
Oates relates women manned the homefront (running farms, businesses and industries); filled in for government service and war industries; replaced male teachers; and fought (he estimates that 400 Union women served disguised as men). He quotes Jane E. Schultz that more than 18,200 women had worked in Northern hospitals as matrons, nurses, laundresses, and cooks (about 3,214 women had served in Dorothea Dix’s department alone). That figure includes some 2,000 black laundresses and cooks, many of them freed slaves. Like Clara Barton, another 2,000 women worked as unpaid volunteers in hospitals. In all, about 20,000 contributed to the medical side of the war effort. Beyond that, virtually all of the money that was raised (estimated elsewhere at $6 million) and private supplies that were collected was accomplished by women through a myriad of aid groups and events.16
Barton herself could be assertive and self-serving, but her lifetime humanitarian contributions were exceptional by any measure. She came to Stafford four times during the war. She was present during the first Federal occupation of Falmouth, which began on April 18, 1862. She landed at Aquia and, after spending the night, made her way to Falmouth Station and checked in with King’s headquarters at Chatham. Crossing over to Fredericksburg, occupied since May 2, she witnessed her first amputation. She observed the arrival of Burnside’s troops on August 4, and she then distributed supplies to her “pet” 21st Massachusetts Infantry, before returning to Washington. Accumulating more supplies, she went out to Culpeper and the Cedar Mountain battle area.
She was back in Washington when she received news of the Second Manassas battles. She went to Fairfax Station, off-loaded her supplies, and she and her two compatriots pitched in as nurses. This was Clara’s first wartime nursing stint. She next served at South Mountain and Antietam Creek in September. Along with some of the other women in this group, Antietam was where they began to understand what could and could not be accomplished by women volunteers.17
Historian Jane Conner provides additional details. Born on Christmas Day, 1821, Barton lived on a farm in Oxford, Massachusetts. She worked as a teacher for two decades in Oxford and in Bordentown, New Jersey, before receiving an appointment as a U. S. Patent Office clerk in Washington. Rising to supervisory clerk for a period, she became the highest-ranking woman in the Federal government. At the beginning of the war, she reconnected with Massachusetts friends in units stationed in the U. S. Capitol, and arranged for items to be sent to her and passed out to these men. In December 1861, the Ladies Relief Committee of Worcester, Massachusetts, to whom she had written asking for help, petitioned her to become their distribution agent. She became adept at soliciting, receiving, storing (stockpiling), and distributing supplies.18
Barton interrupted her work in February 1862 to nurse her dying father. She returned to Washington in July and made frequent sorties with aid for her chosen units. She wanted to provide support in the battle areas and traveled to Falmouth for one of her first such missions. She expanded supply distribution to the 8th and 11th Connecticut regiments. Her next service in Culpeper required five days of work on three hours’ sleep as she cared for almost 1,500 wounded soldiers. She followed the army (her new motto was “Follow the Cannon”) to Second Manassas, Chantilly, and Harpers Ferry, followed by service at Antietam in the Maryland Campaign of September 1862.
Clarissa Harlowe “Clara” Barton. LOC
She had learned she needed more logistical support, which was accomplished with eight to ten men detailed to help her, plus a small crew of male and female followers. Barton stored supplies in advance, expended them, and drew on army and U. S. Sanitary Commission resources thereafter. Working in harness with army surgeons and the commissions they would allow her, she did all she could for her “beloved boys.” Barton was particularly adept at developing sponsors and supporters within the government (e.g., Sen. Henry Wilson) and the army (e.g., Generals Burnside and Sturgis).
During Fredericksburg, Barton and her crew operated from both the Sthreshley (pronounced without the “S”) and Lacy Houses. She nursed and looked to the general comfort of the wounded and recorded as many names as possible. This accounting, lacking in the military medical system, evolved by war’s end into Barton’s primary role. From Chatham, she observed on December 11 the first American combat river-crossing by Hall’s brigade. She also nursed the wounded from that assault. Inside Chatham and its outbuildings, she and the other ladies—mostly from the U. S. Christian Commission—cared for the wounded and dying. She remained there until December 25 and celebrated both the final evacuation of the wounded and her 41st birthday.
Unlike the other women of the “Valley Forge,” Barton did not fade into domestic obscurity at the end of the war or during Reconstruction. She lectured throughout America about her wartime experiences; this obviously drew attention and allowed her to build up a reserve of funds to undertake new projects. For instance, Barton was involved with the International Red Cross in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. After a physical breakdown requiring rehabilitation, she formed the American Red Cross and succeeded in persuading America to subscribe to the Geneva Convention. Her organizations fought forest fires in Michigan, floods in Ohio, droughts in Texas, tornadoes in Illinois, and yellow fever epidemics in Florida. Internationally, they helped with a Russian famine and starvation in Armenia.
In 1884 and in 1902, Barton led the U. S. delegations to the Geneva Convention Conferences in Geneva and St. Petersburg, respectively. She led relief efforts following the Johnstown Flood in 1889, and in 1898, at age 78, she was again with “her boys” in the Spanish-American War.
At 82, Barton finally retired and lived at Glen Echo, Maryland, until her death in 1912. Buried in North Oxford, Massachusetts in the family plot, she had finally gone home. A eulogy by her cousin, Rev. William Barton, was on the mark: “No American woman received more honor while she lived either at home or abroad, and how worthily she bore those honors those know best who know her best.”19
Several other Civil War women of note were also in Stafford during the Union “Valley Forge” and not featured in Moore’s 1866 work including Dorothea Lynde Dix, one of the more famous women in the war. Widely known before the war as a social reformer, she had worked tirelessly for better treatment for the mentally ill and women in prison.
Dix was born in 1802 in Hampden, Maine. She overcame a difficult dysfunctional family and frustrated romantic relationship to head several schools in Massachusetts, investigate mental health and female prison issues of her day, and help establish two state hospitals. At age 59, with the start of the Civil War she volunteered her services and became the Superintendent of Female Nurses for the Union Army. In that capacity she organized the women, placed them in hospitals, and inspected the facilities regularly. Dix also raised money for medical supplies.
Famously known as “Dragon Dix” for her formidable and brusque sternness, she certainly ran a tight ship. She outlawed hiring young and attractive women on the grounds that they would dwell too much on romantic and marriage possibilities. She dressed them in drab black or brown and forbade ringlets, hoops, or jewelry. Despite such draconian measures, Dix managed to assemble a nursing force of more than 3,000 women, who worked predominantly in the wartime general hospitals of the North.
After the war, Dix returned to working for mental health improvements. At 80, she retired and lived in an apartment at the New Jersey State Hospital she had created. Even when invalided in her late years, she maintained an active correspondence from her bed. She died there in 1887 and was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her gravestone is marked with a predictable lack of sentimentality: “Dorothea L. Dix.”
Historian Jane Conner also provides details on Princess Agnes Salm-Salm, who was in Stafford County during the Union “Valley Forge” period as an army wife. An American, her original name was probably Agnes Elizabeth Winona LeClercq Joy. She married a German, Col. Prince Felix Salm-Salm, in August 1862 in Washington, D. C. He was the commander of the 8th New York Infantry and left her in Washington while he went to serve with his regiment in western Virginia. The regiment became part of XII Army Corps and moved into Stafford after the battle of Fredericksburg. Agnes joined him in their camp near Aquia Landing in late December 1862, and in January 1863 they moved their camp to another place along Aquia Creek.20
Princess Salm-Salm according to her own memoir, spent her time looking after her husband and his regiment, and she was not known to have engaged in nursing activities during the army’s “Valley Forge” period. Her activities, however, do provide some insight into the social life of the regimental and more senior officers. They were, especially during the Christmas and New Year periods, extremely active in lavish affairs. At the extreme end, she and her husband participated in a dinner given by Gen. Dan Sickles that was catered by Delmonico’s famous New York City restaurant.
Salm-Salm was prominently involved in an incident during President and Mrs. Lincoln’s week-long visit to the army in April 1863. General Sickles, while entertaining the first family at his “Boscobel” headquarters, noticed the president’s melancholy demeanor, brought on from hospital visits to the wounded and sick. Sickles persuaded the petite Agnes to go over and kiss Mr. Lincoln to enliven the proceedings. She crossed the room and quietly asked the tall man to bend over so that she could whisper something in his ear. He did so, and she bestowed the kiss, which drew immediate cheery responses from the observers. The president’s mood lightened and, other than the First Lady, all were suddenly happy and festive. “People said his face was ugly,” Salm-Salm recalled in her memoir, “but he never appeared ugly to me, for his face, beaming with boundless kindness and benevolence towards mankind, had the stamp of intellectual beauty.”
After Chancellorsville, Col. Salm-Salm’s 8th New York was mustered-out, and he became the colonel of the new 68th New York Infantry, slated for duty in the West. Agnes traveled with them to Tennessee, and while there—conceivably inspired by the women she had seen in Stafford—engaged with the Christian and Sanitary Commissions in hospital work.
After the war, she followed Salm to Mexico, where he served the ill-starred Maximilian von Hapsburg—and would have suffered the same fate as the emperor had his wife not famously fallen at the feet of President Benito Juarez to beg mercy.
Returning to Germany, Colonel Salm-Salm was killed during the battle of Gravelotte in 1870, and Agnes became a young widow. She continued her hospital work and nursing throughout the Franco-Prussian War and afterwards became a socialite and celebrity in the best circles (including a friendship with Clara Barton which stretched into the twentieth-century).
During an 1899 American visit, Princess Salm-Salm participated in a reunion with 21 veterans of the old 8th New York Infantry Regiment—a regiment that had begun its Civil War service with 1,040 men. In a touching scene, she presented them with the flag of the 8th, which she had brought from Germany. She asked them to pass it from one to another until they were all gone, and then asked that it be turned over to the state of New York for perpetual safe-keeping. “This is my only request,” she ended.
Salm-Salm returned to Germany and lived quietly in Karlsruhe, finally dying in December 1912 (coincidentally, Clara Barton had died that April). The princess from America was buried in Bonn.21
Finally, Jane Conner also describes the Stafford activities of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, one of the more remarkable of the many remarkable Union women of “Valley Forge.” Born in 1832 on a farm in Oswego, New York, Mary Walker defied conventions most of her life. She married and soon divorced, became a physician after graduating from Syracuse Medical School, struggled to practice medicine, and became a member of the “bloomerite” movement to free women from the constricting clothing of that day.
When the war began, she closed her Rome, New York, practice and traveled to Washington to apply for a surgeon’s commission. Her application was rebuffed despite a dire need for medical personnel. She would struggle through the entire war seeking a commission and/or contracts, and was occasionally successful in gaining the latter.
She began at a Washington hospital at the Patent Office under Dr. J. N. Green, who recommended her for a commission to no avail and even offered to compensate her from his own salary (she refused). She labored, basically for room and board and moved on to another hospital near the Forest Hall Prison in Georgetown. In January 1862, she returned to New York City and took some classes at the Hygeia Therapeutic College, which emphasized “natural cures,” water therapies, and loose clothing rather than more traditional medicine. She returned to Washington and then to the army near Warrenton in October or November 1862, where she helped convey sick and wounded soldiers by train to the capital.
She also at that time began wearing a self-designed uniform of sorts—really more of a costume—that combined a dress with trousers and some unique decoration and trim. Perhaps she thought this might endear her to the proverbial powers-that-be and communicate some seriousness in seeking official status. Perceived as just “another lady” helping with the sick and wounded—and, effectively, she was doing little more than they had done and were doing—she persevered.
Walker’s time in Stafford is gleaned exclusively from her later accounts and an article in the New York Tribune. “[A]t one time, when I was down at the Lacy House at Fredericksburg, after the famous battle there.” she wrote, “I was directed by the managing surgeons to take any cases I chose and dress them preparatory to sending them to Washington.” This suggests she worked in the 200-bed tent hospital behind Lacy House, where patients were prepared for evacuation and not in the surgery, although the New York Tribune article stated, “She can amputate a limb with the skill of an old surgeon, and administer medicine equally as well.” No other reference to her performing surgery of any sort has been found.
Walker also ordered hospital stewards to cease carrying patients head-down onto the steamboats’ gangways. This suggests she was at Aquia Landing or conceivably at Belle Plain. Together, both accounts suggest that Mary was involved in transporting the wounded.22
After her Stafford service, Walker worked again in Washington, continually rebuffed in her efforts seeking a commission. In the fall of 1863, she was in Tennessee, where she was slightly more successful in finding duties. She received a contract position and was assigned to unofficially attached duty as assistant surgeon of the 52nd Ohio Infantry in the Army of the Cumberland. However, Walker is not found on any official roster of the 52nd Ohio or of the Union Army, for that matter. The best possible accounting of her service relates she was a “Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian), U. S. Army.” Her places and dates of service include the battle of First Manassas, July 21, 1861; Patent Office Hospital, Washington, D.C., October 1861; Chattanooga, Tenn., following battle of Chickamauga, September 1863; Prisoner of War, April 10, 1864-August 12, 1864, Castle Thunder Prison, Richmond, Va.; Battle of Atlanta, September 1864. Entered service at: Louisville, Ky.”23
The Army of the Cumberland’s medical director, Surgeon Glover Perin, seemed leery of Walker’s service, and he had her examined by a five-member board of surgeons, which found her unfit. Despite the rejection, Walker managed the approbation of Col. (later Brig. Gen.) Daniel McCook, Jr., commander of the 52nd Ohio Infantry; Maj. Gen. Alexander McDowell McCook; Maj. Gen. George Henry Thomas; and Maj. Gen. (later Gen.) William T. Sherman; therefore, she was continued in her duties.24
It does not appear that Walker was in any active combat during her medical service. However, in an effort to assist civilians in the spring of 1864, she was captured as a spy by Rebel troops and sent as a prisoner-of-war to Castle Thunder, one of Richmond’s military prisons. Her four-month incarceration certainly caused a stir in Richmond, and probably prompted her exchange (to her joy, for a Confederate surgeon). She again submitted a request for commission, this time directly to President Lincoln—unsuccessfully.
Returning to the West in September 1864, she was hired as a contract surgeon and assigned as surgeon-in-charge of the Louisville, Kentucky, Female Military Prison. She was again compensated as a civilian. After the war, she returned to Washington and continued her efforts to gain some kind of official status—now working on a second president, Andrew Johnson, although to no greater effect.
One amazing side-effect was that, since the government was unable to commission her, Generals Sherman and Thomas requested Secretary of War Stanton to award Walker the Medal of Honor, a military outrage at that late stage of the war, when medals went for valorous acts exclusively. In November 1865, she was awarded the medal, becoming the first and only woman to receive it. “[S]he was assigned to duty and served as an assistant surgeon in charge of female prisoners at Louisville,” her citation read, noting that she:
devoted herself with much patriotic zeal to the sick and wounded soldiers, both in the field and hospitals, to the detriment of her own health, and has also endured hardships as a prisoner of war four months in a Southern prison while acting as contract surgeon; and Whereas by reason of her not being a commissioned officer in the military service, a brevet or honorary rank cannot, under existing laws, be conferred upon her; and Whereas in the opinion of the President [Johnson] an honorable recognition of her services and sufferings should be made. It is ordered, That a testimonial thereof shall be hereby made and given to the said Dr. [Walker] and that the usual medal of honor for meritorious services be given.25
Walker’s service with the 52nd Ohio was not even alluded to in the citation. Although this appears a lapse of official sanity after 150 years, by way of explanation, it must be recalled that the Medal of Honor was the only official U. S. decoration and had not been exclusively awarded for extreme valor. Early in the way, many similar awards were made—such as awarding the medal to large numbers of men who had enlisted “for the war” at an early, critical stage of personnel shortages and need. The Medal of Honor must have seemed like vindication; she proudly wore her prized decoration for the remainder of her life. That life would certainly see ups and downs.
Walker’s wartime notoriety resulted in postwar opportunities: she was president of the National Dress Reform Association, a delegate to the Women’s Social Science Convention in Great Britain in 1866, a celebrity in Paris in 1867, and a member of the Women’s Suffrage Association in Ohio in 1868. She wrote the book Hit (1871). She also continued to petition Congress—25 times—finally gaining a disability pension in 1874 at $8.50 per month.
In 1878, Walker wrote The Science of Immorality, and continued lecturing on her Civil War experiences and women’s suffrage. An interesting diversion in 1881 was her unsuccessful run for a seat in the U. S. Senate. She did manage to secure a clerkship in the mailroom of the Pensions Office, however, yet due to excessive sick leave, she lost that job in a year. She then began a career of sub-prime lecturing—little more dignified than freak-show work. At the same time, she continued beseeching governments at all levels for funding and subsidies.
Arguably, her low point came in 1917. The War Department had labored since the end of the Civil War to sort and publish the Official Records and, along with those efforts, to recognize the valor of those who had contributed to the victory of Union arms. Many distinguished officers—men such as Joshua L. Chamberlain, Thomas O. Seaver, Daniel Butterfield, and Oliver O. Howard—received their awards of the Medal of Honor in those later years. At the same time, efforts were made to invalidate awards of the medal that had, in retrospect, not been awarded for valor. Nine hundred and ten such undeserving or less-deserving awards were rescinded in 1917—an action unarguable to anyone with a respect for the nature battlefield bravery and the intent to recognize it. Yet Mary Walker steadfastly refused to return her medal and continued to wear it at all times.
While taking her case directly to the Congress, the 85-year old experienced a severe fall and health, never robust, failed steadily thereafter except for a brief turnaround at Fort Ontario hospital. She died in 1919 and was buried in Rural Cemetery, Oswego, New York.
Mary’s fame certainly didn’t die with her. In World War II, where women served prominently in all branches of service, the Liberty ship SS Mary Walker was named in her honor. Later, an Army reserve center and several medical facilities were named for her. In 1982, a 20-cent U. S. postage stamp was issued in her honor.
The most interesting—and controversial—footnote, though, came in June, 1977. Responding to repeated requests by a great-grand-niece, President Jimmy Carter reinstated Dr. Mary Walker’s Medal of Honor with no additional documentation than that used to award it in 1865. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker remains the first and only woman to receive our nation’s highest award.26
1 Moore, Women of the War; Their Heroism and Self-Sacrifice. “Valley Forge” references are on 44, 195, 319. Moore served as assistant secretary of legation in Paris (1869-1872) and died in 1904.
2 Moore, Women of the War, 36-53.
3 Chamberlain documented this meeting in a December 2, 1862 letter.
4 Moore, Women of the War, 113-126.
5 http://www.civilwarwomenblog.com/2008/08/isabella-morrison-fogg.html.
6 Moore, Women of the War, 148-169.
7 Moore, Women of the War, 176-212.
8 Ibid.
10 Moore erroneously referred to this as another medal (the Kearney Cross).
11 Moore, Women of the War, 278-297.
12 Moore, Women of the War, 313-332.
13 www.civilwarwomenblog.com/2008/05/mary-morris-husband.html, accessed on March 6, 2010.
14 Moore, Women of the War, 415-452.
15 www.civilwarwomenblog.com/2006/10/amy-morris-bradley.html; accessed on March 6, 2010.
16 Stephen B. Oates, A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
17 Ibid.
18 Jane Hollenbeck Conner, Sinners, Saints and Soldiers in Civil War Stafford (Stafford, VA:, Parker Publishing LLC, 2009).
19 Ibid.
20 Conner, Sinners, Saints and Soldiers in Civil War Stafford.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 NPS/CWSSS.
24 Conner, Sinners, Saints and Soldiers in Civil War Stafford.
25 U. S. Army, Center for Military History, Medal of Honor Citations Archives.
26 Conner, Sinners, Saints and Soldiers in Civil War Stafford.