Drew Gilpin Faust, in Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in American Civil War, writes that it was “not the Confederacy’s ladies but its African Americans who care for the South’s fallen heroes. In the domain of nursing, as in the domestic world of cooking and washing, many Confederate ladies would prove themselves less able and less effective than their supposed inferiors.”[1] If Faust has any background research that examines the numbers of White verses Black hospital workers, it is seems to have been left out of her end notes. Of course, part of the problem with Mothers of Invention is that it focuses too much on women from slaveholding families, and not the other 99% of the Southern population.
The work of those
mostly silent voices of Black hospital workers I cover in a post that you can
read here. They were vital members of the staffs of Southern hospitals during
the war. But to say that White Southern women were “less able and less
effective” is a stretch. There were undoubtedly some African-American women who
balked at the sight of the wounded and sick. Their voices are just silent,
unrecorded then as they are now. There were many Southern women who did answer
the call to serve as nurses and matrons in hospitals, and countless others who took
soldiers into their homes to care for them when the hospital system became
overwhelmed.
Others have pointed
out conflicting evidence regarding Faust’s assumptions. In Susan Barber’s
thesis “Sisters of the Capital: White Women in Richmond, Virginia, 1860-1880,”
she found “that more upper class women worked as matrons than Faust suggests in
Mothers of Invention.”[2]
Elise A. Allison in her thesis, “Confederate Matrons: women who served in
Virginia Civil War hospitals,” argues that Faust (and others) “focus their
analyses on the writings left by a few prominent matrons and draw
generalizations about all matrons based on this unrepresentative sample.”[3]
The Hospital Bill, passed into law in September 1862, stated
that each hospital could employ two chief matrons, two assistant matrons, and
two ward matrons for each ward. The chief matrons “exercise a superintendence
over the entire domestic economy of the hospital.” The assistant matrons
supervised the “laundry. . . the clothing of the sick, [and] the bedding of the
hospital, to see that they are kept clean and neat.” The duties of the two war
matrons were “to prepare the beds and bedding of their respective wards, to see
that they are kept clean and in order, that the food or diet for the sick is
carefully prepared and furnished to them, the medicine administered, and that
all patients requiring careful nursing are attended to.”[4]
Ada Bocot was born in South Carolina in 1832. A widow by the
time of the war, she volunteered as a nurse and in December 1861, arrived in
Charlottesville, Virginia, working in the Monticello Hospital. She continued nursing
through 1863 when she returned to her home in South Carolina. Her diary was
published in 1994 and offers glimpses of her life while in Charlottesville. Berlin,
ed., A Confederate Nurse: The Diary of Ada W. Bacot, 1860-1863.
Emily Mason was born in Kentucky, but by the time of the war
was living in Virginia. Mason helped establish the hospital at White Sulphur
Springs, and later worked at hospitals in Charlottesville, Lynchburg, and
Richmond. Her war-time accounts were also published in The Atlantic Monthly:
“Memories of a Hospital Matron,” 90, No.1039 (September 1902).
Kate Cumming, born in Scotland, came to the United States
with her family, settling in Mobile, Alabama. She volunteered as a nurse in
Corinth, Mississippi, in April 1862, and went on to serve in several different
hospitals throughout the war, including those in Tennessee, Alabama,
Mississippi, and Tennessee. Her diary was published in 1866: A Journal of
Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee.
Juliet Opie Hopkins was born in present-day West Virginia,
and after her marriage, relocated to Mobile, Alabama. During the war, she helped
establish Alabama hospitals in Richmond, Virginia, and earned the title “Florence
Nightingale of the South.” She was wounded twice in the left hip while
supervising the removal of wounded soldiers during the battle of Seven Pines in
May 1862. Hopkins died in 1890 and was buried with military honors at Arlington
National Cemetery.[5]
Sallie Chapman Gordon Law was born in Wilkes County, North
Carolina, and later moved to Georgia, and then to Tennessee. In April 1861, she
helped organize a hospital in a home in Memphis. Later, Law worked at Overton
Hospital in Memphis, and then Law Hospital (named for her) in La Grange, Georgia.
In 1892, her story was published in Reminiscences of the War of the Sixties
between the North and South.
Ella King Newsom was born in Mississippi and, after marrying,
moved to Tennessee. She worked on the Southern Mothers’ Home Hospital and the
Overton Hospital, both in Memphis. Newsom also organized or worked in hospitals
in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Corinth, Mississippi, the Crutchfield House
Hospital in Chattanooga, and in Marietta and Atlanta. The Newsom Hospital,
originally organized in Chattanooga, was named for her. Newsom was also called “The
Florence Nightingale of the South.”[6]
Phoebe Yates Levy Pember was born to a Jewish family in Charleston,
South Carolina. She was widowed and living in Georgia when, in December 1862,
she began working at Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. Pember was
chief matron of one of the five divisions at Chimborazo, the largest military
hospital in the world, and left some remarkable and often quoted details of her
experience in A Southern Woman’s Story: Life in Confederate Richmond,
published in 1879.
Kate Mason Rowland was born in Detroit, Michigan, and moved
to Richmond, Virginia, prior to the war. During the war, she worked in several
hospitals and was matron at the Marine or Naval Hospital at the end of the war.
Her diary has never been published.
Sally Tompkins, from Matthews County, Virginia, ran the
Robertson Hospital in Richmond during the war. When the Confederate government
began consolidating small hospitals in the summer of 1861, the Robertson
Hospital, due to its efficiency, remained open. To circumnavigate the
regulation requiring hospital administrators to be commissioned, Jefferson
Davis appointed Tompkins a captain of cavalry. Her hospital had the lowest death
rate of any hospital in Richmond, although many serious cases were sent there. Tompkins’s
hospital remained open until June 1865.[7]
Joanna Fox Waddill was born in Pennsylvania and moved to
Mississippi when young. When the war came, she served in hospitals in Georgia,
Alabama, and Tennessee, eventually becoming a matron in a hospital in
Lauderdale, Mississippi.
Augusta Jane Evens Wilson was born in Columbus, Georgia, and
lived in Russell County, Alabama, and San Antonio, Texas, prior to the war. In
1860, she was living in Mobile, Alabama. She worked at a hospital in Mobile
during the war and corresponded with Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard.[8]
These are just a few of the many women who were clearly able and effective in their roles as caregivers for the injured and sick, regardless of their stations in Southern society.
[1] Faust,
in Mothers of Invention, 112.
[2] Barber,
“Sisters of the Capital,” 103-104.
[3] Allison,
“Confederate Matrons,” 7.
[4] Official
Records, Series IV, Vol. II, 199.
[5] Schroeder-Lein,
Civil War Medicine, 138-39.
[6] Schroeder-Lein,
Civil War Medicine, 229-30.
[7] Schroeder-Lein,
Civil War Medicine, 303-04.
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