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Gathering equipment, livestock, and wounded men in haste, Lees Army of Northern Virginia
retreated south toward Emmitsburg, Maryland, with the object of reaching the Potomac. Yankee
artillery and cavalry pursued the nineteen-mile-long train of Confederates and inflicted further
damage. Coming in the opposite direction was a band of thirteen sisters of charity from
Emmitsburg, who described a harrowing journey of dodging corpses in a carriage with bloodspattered wheels. The sisters were from an order known for its nursing mission. Once in
Gettysburg, they took up residence in McClennens Hotel and went to work in the courthouse,
the churches, and the local college, dressing the wounds of men from both armies who had not
already landed in one of the several corps hospitals ringing the town. On her way out to soldiers
who had not yet found shelter, Sister Camilla OKeefe noticed a sign in the woods that read,
17,000 wounded down this way.[1] Here she and her band encountered men, whose wounds
were crawling with maggots, lying on the ground; both the nuns and their charges battled lice.
Many surgeons expressed gratitude for the services of female volunteers, even those whom
Army Nursing Superintendent Dorothea Dix had barred from the environs on account of their
youth. The tireless proponent for the reform of mental illness ultimately appointed more than
3,000 women as nurses during the war, but Surgeon General William Hammond would
circumvent her authority less than three months after Gettysburg by encouraging surgeons to
appoint their own female staff. Given the press of sick and wounded, it was surely more
practical to put surgeons in charge of hiring, and more than 20,000 Union women ultimately
provided domestic and medical relief during the war with at least 10,000 Southern women,
many of them slaves, providing the same services.
One of those whom Dix turned back was 23-year-old Cornelia Hancock of New Jersey, who
tagged along with her surgeon brother-in-law, flouting Dixs injunction; her first glimpse of
Gettysburg was a pile of amputated arms and legs. Given her Quaker background, it is
surprising how quickly Hancock acclimated: You will think, she told her mother in her third
week as nurse, it is a short time for me to get used to things. Anxious to allay family
disapproval, she wrote to another, I am better than I am at home. I feel so good when I wake up
in the morning.[2] Sophronia Bucklin, a seamstress from Auburn, New York, also in her
twenties, was similarly barred but to no avail. Upon arrival, Bucklin encountered a line of
stretchers a mile and a half long, with rain pelting those awaiting their turn with the surgeons.
Passing the night on a bare iron bedstead, she fished up her shoes with the handle of her
umbrella in the morning and learned how much, which at home we call necessary, can be
lopped off, and we still be satisfied.[3] Nursing Southern soldiers was not easy for her. She saw
weaknesses of character, as did Emily Bliss Souder of Baltimore, who branded the rebels
crybabies. Imperious in their observations of the enemy, Union nurses like Georgeanna
Woolsey, a blue-blooded New Yorker with six siblings in the war effort, still insisted that relief
workers treated Northerners and Southerners alikewith sympathy and delicacyand that the
mens weakened state fostered a surprising spirit of conciliatory brotherhood in hospital tents.
With so much work to be done, few medical officers worried about the scores of women who
came to town in the second week, hauling baskets of food and bedding. But there were those
like Franklin Dyer, surgeon of the 19th Massachusetts assigned to the 2nd Corps, who wanted
the women to disappear, presumably because they disrupted surgical focus. Dyer observed that
six months earlier at Fredericksburg, a colleague had told him that the famed Clara Barton
plagued me so that I had to get her out of the cook house and put one of my own men in
charge.[4] Like other sleep-deprived surgeons, Dyers patience was fraying and he found no
solace in the high prices that the people of Gettysburg were charging for food from their larders.
Prejudices aside, there was little anyone could do to prevent civilianssome who wanted to
help and others who wanted to gawkfrom flooding the town.
At the start of each day, stewards set out vials of chloroform and morphine sulfide, anticipating
the amputations that would begin as soon as ambulances could deliver up their harvest of
wounded flesh. Confederate Surgeon Simon Baruch of the 3rd South Carolina Battalion used
whatever came to hand for operations in the field: wagon tailgates, wooden doors spanning
barrels, even a church communion table. After the Confederate retreat on July 3 left him to fend
for hundreds of wounded Rebels on his own, he was the grateful recipient of Union mules and a
wagonload of medicinal and commissary goods sent by Jonathan Lettermanan indication that
medical cooperation sometimes trumped political partisanship. Throughout the three days of the
battle, field surgeons were forced to move their dressing stations to keep up with the fluctuating
line of fire while more experienced practitioners operated in houses and barns impressed by
corps medical officers. Wounded men were sometimes caught in the crossfire, and medical staff
were wounded and killed by stray bullets or shrapnel. When Pennsylvania hospital steward
Spencer Bonsalls horse was shot out from under him, the thousand-pound animal collapsed on
top of him, causing a lengthy hospitalization. Assistant Surgeon Morgan Baldwin of the 32nd
Massachusetts reported that on July 2 alone, his medical unit was compelled to move three
times. At the last place, a soldier with exposed intestines begged him for help, but the man
would die in several hours and Baldwins superior berated him for wasting his time on a dead
man. Later that night, as he returned to the Weikert farmhouse to assist with amputations, he
witnessed hogs on the loose, feeding on the deceased. It was not a good day.
In the days following the battle, vendors selling coffins and offering passage to relatives who
had come to find their soldiers bodies descended upon the town, increasing stress for medical
staff and relief workers who were suffering from physical as well as emotional fatigue. Northern
civilians attempted to secure information concerning the whereabouts of their loved ones
graves, and some 1,500 of them succeeded in getting their boys disinterred and transported
back home. Others searched in vain or arrived too late for parting words, despite the Sanitary
Commissions efforts to make available the location of the wounded. Southerners, if they
ventured to Gettysburg at all, were advised to avoid the notice of vengeful Northern citizens.
One of these, Margaret Bissell, upon coming to bury her husband, discovered that he had been
interred en masse in a trench of more than a hundred bodies.
By early August, Camp Lettermana fully supplied tent hospitalhad been established on the
outskirts of Gettysburg, and the men who remained in temporary corps hospitals were
transferred to the new facility to die in some cases of secondary infections and subsequent
amputations or to recover. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of Maine, one of the lucky ones and a
rhetoric professor at Bowdoin College, led the regiment credited with stopping Confederate
forces at Little Round Top, and went on, despite a bullet to the foot, to become governor of
Maine. As a young member of the medical corps remarked on July 3, A surgeon could get more
experience here in one night than he could get back home in years.[5] Inevitably the horrific
aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg made Americans beg for closure. Even if it provided
abundant living material for surgeons-in-training and advanced the science of evacuation, it did
not spare caregivers trauma, despite what pundits claimed was a glorious turn in Union
fortunes. If anyone had foreseen the casualties that were to come as a result of fighting in 1864,
then those same caregivers might have understood that Gettysburg merely prepared them for
worse.
[1] Unpublished narrative of Sister Camilla OKeefe, St. Josephs Archives, Emmitsburg,
Maryland.
[2] Cornelia Hancock to her mother, July 26, 1863; and Cornelia Hancock to her sister, August 6,
1863, in Letters of a Civil War Nurse: Cornelia Hancock, 18631865, ed. Henrietta Stratton
Jaquette (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1998), 15.
[3] Sophronia Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp: A Womans Record of Thrilling Incidents among
the Wounded in the Late War (Philadelphia: John E Potter, 1869), 145.
[4] J. Franklin Dyer, The Journal of a Civil War Surgeon, ed. Michael B. Chesson (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska, 2003), xxiv.
[5] Clyde Kernek, Field Surgeon at Gettysburg: A Memorial Account of the Medical Unit of the
32nd Massachusetts Regiment (Indianapolis: Guild Press, 1993), 68.
Jane E. Schultz is a professor of English and an adjunct professor of American Studies,
Women's Studies, and Medical Humanities at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
She is the author of Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (2004).