Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor
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more than this great caravan of maimed pilgrims.”64 This was how Barton too remembered the battle of Antietam—not as a sea of faces but as the bright image of one or two which appeared through the smoke that blinded and choked and sickened them. She extracted her first bullet at this battle from the face of a youngster who begged her to relieve his pain and let more seriously wounded men be attended to by the surgeons. With her pocketknife she severed for the first time “the nerves and fibers of human flesh,” while a veteran, wounded in the thigh, held the boy’s head. “I do not think a surgeon would have pronounced it a scientific operation,” she said with a quiet pride, “but that it was successful I dared to hope from the gratitude of the patient.” She held another face, offering the man a drink of cool well water, only to hear a soft whir and see his body quiver and lie still: “a bullet sped its full and easy way between us, tearing a hole in my sleeve and found its way into his body.” Still another face that peered anxiously through that sooty haze looked to Clara too soft to be a soldier; the boy was suspiciously hesitant to have his wounded breast dressed. After gentle probing, Barton ascer-tained that the soldier’s name was Mary Galloway. Barton could sympathize with this girl’s spirited defiance of custom and her determination to join her menfolk at the front. She shepherded and shielded the girl, and subsequently located her lover in a Washington hospital. In later years Barton liked to recall that the two had named their eldest daughter for her.65
She cut an eccentric figure, standing over a kettle of gruel, with the hem of her skirt pinned up about her waist, her hair astray, her face covered with gunpowder.66 But no surgeon would have thought to laugh at the sight. She had the habit of command and comfort, and the soldier aides turned naturally to her for instructions, which she always gave in a calm and sometimes infuriatingly unhurried manner. When, exhausted from the unrelieved misery, the medical men denounced the indifferent government that left them to cope in the dark without a single candle, she gently told them of the candles and lanterns she had brought. She would not flinch as she held a leg that was to be hacked off without chloroform, did not cry at the ghastly death of some former pupil. “Now what do you think of Miss Barton?” Surgeon Dunn asked his wife, after describing to her some of these feats. “In my feeble estimation, General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield.67
At the Poffenberger farm Barton saw the worst of the day's fighting and the worst excesses of medical disorder, despite the fact that medical services overall improved markedly at the battle of Antietam. Dr. Letterman had rounded up a team of competent and well-rehearsed ambulance workers, who could proudly claim at day's end that no man was left on the field more than twenty-four hours. Letterman had also begun to slyly supplant the ineffective regimental hospital system, proposing instead field hospitals on the division level with supplies distributed only to the surgeons in charge. It was a radical change for the slow-moving medical department, and one that did not evolve completely until the campaigns of 1864. The conservative career doctors of the army medical bureaucracy frowned on these humane innovations, believing they would cost the army money or slow its ability to move. They had reluctantly supported the newfangled ambulances, only to see the army order large numbers of the ridiculous two-wheeled carts, which caused more misery than relief. But Letterman had the support of Dr. William Alexander Hammond, the aggressive and self-confident surgeon general whose “immense energy and capability” made his promotion of new ideas a valuable asset. Together Letterman and Hammond fought to eliminate “the total want of organization, the drunkenness and incompetency” they had seen at Second Bull Run.68
The Sanitary Commission was also a crucial source of relief supplies during this battle. The organization had been started early in the war when disease and demoralization from filthy camps and inadequate food threatened to undermine the hastily assembled Union army. The prominent New Yorkers who headed the organization rightly predicted that disease and malnutrition would decimate the men more quickly than bullets, and they formed their own army of civilians to inspect camps and distribute everything from onions (to prevent scurvy) to cotton drawers. They fought favoritism to particular regiments with equitable distribution of supplies, administered from a network of regional and local auxiliaries. Not surprisingly, the medical department refused at first to acknowledge them. The Sanitary Commission went blithely on, however, cleverly harnessing the energetic spirits of volunteers from Maine to Kansas. Women from Chicago and Philadelphia organized huge “Sanitary Fairs” to raise money to outfit hospital ships and purchase supplies, and women at home knitted, preserved, and stitched, packing every kind of ware under the label of “sanitary stores.” The goods they collected resembled those solicited by Barton, and they established warehouses similar to hers for collection and distribution. Eventually effective publicity and obvious impact on several battlefields won the commission both recognition with the army medical staff and nationwide fame.69
Alongside the Sanitary Commission labored the Christian Commission and a bevy of female nurses under the superintendence of Miss Dorothea Dix. The Christian Commission, whose purported goal was to “give relief and sympathy and then the gospel,” was a branch of the YMCA.70 It did seek to convert the soldier and warn him against the campfire sins of gambling and drinking, but especially in the latter part of the war, it also provided many of the same comforts as other civilian groups. Dix’s nurses, on the other hand, were a breed apart. Experienced medical men might be unused to women in the sanctity of their wards, but the work of Florence Nightingale in the Crimea had pointed up the terrible need for the kind of routine care and cleaning for which surgeons had little time or inclination. Able-bodied men were needed in the army, and the use of women, however controversial, seemed a pragmatic solution for the understaffed hospitals. Dorothea Lynn Dix, who had gained national prominence for her exposure of the scandalous treatment afforded inmates of prisons and insane asylums, was appointed to head the Department of Female Nurses. She was a small, birdlike woman, flighty and energetic, with a prim, pointed face. At sixty she was determined that no scandal should taint her nurses. She required that the volunteers be over thirty, plain of dress, and strong enough to singlehandedly turn a man in bed. Pretty girls with hoopskirts and wasp waists, or bold personalities who craved adventure, were turned away. For the most part these nurses staffed Washington hospitals and, later, the divisional field hospitals established by Letterman. But Dix lacked executive ability, and this, coupled with her rigidity and nervous temperament, confirmed many a medical man’s worst fears about female nurses. At war’s end Dix left the organization with personal regrets: “This is not the work I would have my life judged by.”71
In addition to Dix’s workers there were countless unaffiliated women who labored as Barton did, with individual initiative and hand-to-mouth resources. Heavyset Mary “Mother” Bickerdyke worked with the western armies, alternately bullying and soothing the men until she gained the respect of surgeons and generals. Upon receiving complaints about her high-handed tactics, General William T. Sherman stated to an aide that he could not correct her for “she ranks me.”72 Frances D. Gage fought in South Carolina for the rights of black soldiers, bucking prejudice in every rank as she struggled for impartiality of treatment. Mary A. Livermore directed the Western Sanitary Commission. Katherine Wormely took hospital ships as her special jurisdiction. In a tribute to these women, written in the 1880s, Barton acknowledged their contribution, and lauded the “hinderance and pain, and effort and cost” of their individual sacrifices.73
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