Tag: Civil War nurses

Civil War nurses
African Americans, Civil War Women, Educators

Sarah Mapps Douglass

• Maggie

African American Abolitionist and Teacher Sarah Mapps Douglass was born in Philadelphia on September 9, 1806, the daughter of renowned abolitionists Robert Douglass, Sr. and Grace Bustill Douglass. Like many prosperous families, the Douglasses educated Sarah and her brother Robert at home with private tutors. Image: Sarah Mapps Douglass: Faithful Attender of Quaker Meeting: View from the Back Bench by Margaret Hope Bacon Sarah’s grandfather, Cyrus Bustill, was a member of the Free African Society, the first African American charity organization. In 1803, he established a school for black children in his home. The Douglasses were among several free black families who formed the core of Philadelphia’s abolitionist movement. Grace Bustill Douglass ran a millinery store out of her home…

Read Article
Civil War Women, Diaries and Letters

Susan Blackford

• Maggie

Civil War Nurse in Virginia Susan and Charles Blackford agreed when Charles went to war that they would keep all letters that passed between them. Charles wrote home as often as possible, eager to preserve as much of his experiences as he could, realizing that impressions faded quickly. Susan recorded the events on the Virginia home front. Susan Leigh Colston was born in 1835 to one of Virginia’s first families, and she married the distinguished Charles Minor Blackford, a Virginia aristocrat. Charles enlisted in the Second Virginia Cavalry Regiment, Army of Northern Virginia, at the outset of the war. He left their home in Lynchburg, Virginia in June 1861. Image: Letters from Lee’s Army Most of Charles’ service was in…

Read Article
Civil War Nurses, Civil War Women

Phoebe Yates Pember

• Maggie

Civil War Nurse in Virginia Phoebe Yates Levy was born on August 18, 1823. She was the fourth of six daughters of a prosperous and socially prominent Jewish family in Charleston, South Carolina. Her father was a successful merchant and her mother was a popular actress. Members of Phoebe’s family were quite active in public life during the war. Her sister Eugenia Levy Phillips, a Confederate spy, was banished to an island. Her brother Samuel was the highest ranking Jewish officer in Savannah, Georgia. The family’s wealth enabled them to gain acceptance in the community, which wasn’t easy for Jews. They moved among Charleston’s elite until a series of financial setbacks sent them to Savannah, Georgia, in 1850. Phoebe was…

Read Article
African Americans, Civil War Women, Famous Firsts, Women Doctors

Rebecca Lee Crumpler

• Maggie

First African American Woman Doctor Rebecca Lee was born in Delaware in 1833. An aunt in Pennsylvania, who spent much of her time caring for sick neighbors, raised her. Due to her aunt’s influence, Rebecca developed a strong compassion for the sick at a very young age, and learned to care for ill patients. The first formal school for nursing did not open until 1873, so she performed her work without any formal training. By 1852, she moved to Charlestown, Massachusetts, where she worked as a nurse for the next eight years. Her dedication gained her notice from the doctors she served under, and with their recommendations, she entered the New England Female Medical College in Boston in 1860. In…

Read Article
Civil War Spies, Civil War Women, Women in Theater

Pauline Cushman

• Maggie

Civil War Spy and Theater Actress Pauline Cushman, a Union spy, was born Harriet Wood on June 10, 1833, in New Orleans and spent some of her early childhood there. Her father then moved the family to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Pauline did not like it there, and at seventeen she ran away to New York to become an actress. She landed some small parts and caught the attention of a theatre owner from New Orleans, who hired her on the spot. While Pauline was in New York, she married Charles Dickinson, a musician, on February 7, 1853. Sometime after their wedding, Charles and Pauline moved to his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, where he found work as a music teacher. In…

Read Article
Authors, Civil War Women

Louisa May Alcott

• Maggie

American Author and Civil War Nurse Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832, the second daughter of Abigail May, women’s suffrage and abolitionist advocate, and Bronson Alcott, philosopher and education reformer. Louisa and her three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth, and May were educated by their father, and spent their childhood in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts. When Louisa was 10, Bronson enlisted the family in an experiment in communal living on a tract he named Fruitlands, because of its orchard. Six months of Transcendental agriculture left the Alcotts destitute, Bronson suicidal, and the Alcott marriage on the verge of dissolution. A distressed Louisa recorded it all in her childhood diary. At age 15, troubled by the poverty…

Read Article
Civil War Nurses, Civil War Women

Sophia McClelland

• Maggie

Sophia McClelland was a Civil War nurse who was determined to go out onto the field of battle and retrieve the sick and wounded. In the autumn of 1861, she saw wounded soldiers lying near a train platform. She took them to a nearby hotel and brought food and blankets from her own home to help care for them. She enlisted the help of wounded soldiers to serve as nurses, because at times there were few nurses available. Sophia McClelland Sophia wasn’t afraid to challenge the male chauvinism that existed in the Civil War era. She was touched by the needs of the wound, and she was amazed at the ferocity with which she stood up for her patients. She…

Read Article
Civil War Women

Women and Girls in the Browns Island Explosion

• Maggie

Women and Children Killed in Explosion The Confederate States Laboratories (CSL) was located on Brown’s Island in the James River in Virginia. The brainchild of Confederate ordnance chief Colonel Josiah Gorgas, the CSL made small arms and ammunition for the Confederate Army. Image: Monument to the Women and Girls in the Browns Island Explosion This gray granite marker now stands beside the gazebo in Richmond’s Oakwood Cemetery. The names of those who perished and their ages are engraved on the back. Because most of Richmond’s men were serving their country at the front, women and children were the bulk of the workforce at CSL, from the age of twelve to sixty. Their hands were small and well suited to assembling…

Read Article
African Americans, Authors, Civil War Women

Harriet Jacobs

• Maggie

African American Abolitionist and Author Harriet Jacobs escaped from slavery and became an abolitionist speaker and reformer. Jacobs’ single work, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, was one of the first autobiographical narratives about the struggle for freedom by female slaves and an account of the sexual harassment and abuse they endured. Harriet Ann Jacobs was born in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina to Daniel Jacobs and Delilah. Daniel was a mulatto slave owned by Dr. Andrew Knox. Delilah was a mulatto slave owned by John Horniblow, a tavern owner. Harriet inherited the status of slave from her mother—if the mother was a slave, the child was a slave. That…

Read Article
Civil War Women, Gettysburg

Lydia Leister

• Maggie

Home Used as Union Headquarters at the Battle of Gettysburg On July 1, 1863, Federal troops surrounded the Leister farm – it was in the crook of the fishhook battle line along Cemetery Ridge. When General George Gordon Meade chose the Leister house (image left) as the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, Lydia and her children sought shelter with relatives who lived on the Baltimore Pike. Lydia Leister was a widow who owned a modest farm along the Taneytown Road, ½ mile south of Gettysburg behind Cemetery Ridge. Lydia had purchased the property in 1861, and moved into the modest two-room house with her six children, the youngest, only three years old. The widow Leister made her living…

Read Article