Vicksburg by Donald L. Miller

Author:Donald L. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

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“This army is in very fine shape, unusually healthy, and in good heart,” Lorenzo Thomas wrote Stanton in April.75 Mild and dry weather was a contributor, as was aid from the outside—boatloads of fresh vegetables and medical supplies from the Sanitary Commission in Chicago. Grant had closed down scandalously bad field hospitals and was sending gravely ill men to a complex of Memphis hospitals administered by a corps of volunteer women nurses under the direction of Mary Ann Bickerdyke, or “Mother Bickerdyke,” as her grateful patients called her. A Galesburg, Illinois, widow who had been a botanic physician before the war, using herbs and roots to cure, she was formidable and hard-willed, a scourge to drunken and incompetent surgeons—and to army bureaucrats who tried, unsuccessfully, to stop her from using escaped slaves as nurses’ aides.76

Bickerdyke had begun her war service as a nurse in the amputation ward of a Cairo hospital, where she befriended camp commander William T. Sherman, who had her set up field hospitals at Fort Donelson and Shiloh. After taking a furlough to care for her children, she went down to Memphis after the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou and began establishing her chain of hospitals.77 Later, Grant named her chief of nursing in his army, and cooperated with her and aid workers from Chicago to improve medical care and sanitation in his Vicksburg camps. Veterans were instructed to teach green volunteers how to keep healthy and clean, and Sherman was seen “going through the camps on foot” to enforce sanitary regulations and visit the sick and wounded. “No one could look after his men more carefully than he does,” wrote a representative from the Sanitary Commission. “With the sick he is as delicate and tender as a woman.”78

While the levee was still honeycombed with graves and the area around the canal remained a miserable mud pond, the camps were cleaner and the men were eating better, their army rations supplemented by boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables collected from western farmers and sent downriver by women volunteers from Iowa and Illinois. On one occasion, Mary Livermore, co-administrator with Jane Hoge of the Chicago branch of the Sanitary Commission and author of a neglected Civil War classic, My Story of the War, arrived at Milliken’s Bend on a steamer laden with five thousand boxes of hospital supplies and crates of vegetables, eggs, lemons, tea, and butter.79 “We are living like kings,” Jacob Ritner wrote his wife. They had canned fruit, apple butter, honey, cheese, dried fruit, and pound cake.80 But the greatest gift was the arrival, finally, of a Union paymaster in early April. Morale soared.81

Grant made Livermore’s friend Annie Wittenmyer part of his army. A wealthy widow residing in Iowa, she had been caring for the wounded and sending medical supplies to the Army of the Tennessee since the opening days of the war. In her midthirties, with prematurely white hair, she was a personal friend of Julia Grant, who would have worked with her had her husband not insisted she give full attention to their children.

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