Battle of Shiloh

Civil War Women: Kate Cumming, Confederate Nurse and Diarist

/ sandramervillehart

In the 1840s, Kate Cumming’s family emigrated from Scotland when she was a child, eventually settling in Mobile, Alabama.

Her mother and two sisters went to England when the Civil War started. Kate stayed in Mobile with her father. Her younger brother enlisted in the 21st Alabama Infantry as part of Ketchum’s Battery. Kate gathered hospital supplies to support wounded soldiers.

In 1862, Reverend Benjamin M. Miller’s speech encouraging women to serve in the hospitals stirred Kate. Inspired by this speech and Florence Nightingale’s example, Kate joined forty other women in Corinth, Mississippi, to nurse Battle of Shiloh wounded—despite her family’s objections.

She briefly returned home that summer yet yearned to continue nursing the soldiers. She traveled to Chattanooga with two other women to volunteer at Newsome Hospital. Her nursing help was eventually accepted.

In September of 1862, the Confederate government began allowing nurses to be paid. Kate enlisted in the Confederate Army Medical Department. Despite her personal sadness at watching soldiers die and battling poor hospital conditions, she worked as matron with Dr. Samuel Stout, medical director for Army of Tennessee, in various locations in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia.

As a matron, Kate managed hospital departments, nursed soldiers, foraged for supplies, cooked, sewed, wrote letters, and supervised other workers.

She also maintained a detailed diary. This honest account of day-to-day nursing tasks and the men she served also shows tragedies Southerners faced in increasing measure as the war progressed.

After the war, Kate published her diary, A Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee from the Battle of Shiloh to the End of the War: With Sketches of Life and Character, and Brief Notices of Current Events During that Period.

The author’s introduction was written in 1865—before publication. Kate is bitter about treatment from the North after the war’s end and urges all to unite. Her hope in publishing her diaries is to show Northerners how all have suffered. She wants reconciliation.

-Sandra Merville Hart

Sources

Cumming, Kate. Edited by Harwell, Richard Barksdale. Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse, Louisiana State University Press, 1959.

Hilde, Libra. “Kate Cumming,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, 2019/04/11 http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1101.

“Kate Cumming,” National Park Service, 2019/04/11 ttps://www.nps.gov/people/kate-cumming.htm.

“Kate Cumming,” Wikipedia, 2019/04/11 ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Cumming.

Rohrer, Katherine E. “Kate Cumming (ca. 1830-1909).” New Georgia Encyclopedia. 08 June 2017. Web. 11 April 2019.

 

Civil War Women: Sister Anthony, Angel of the Battlefield

/ sandramervillehart

Mary O’Connell’s family emigrated to Boston from Ireland in 1821 when she was about seven-years-old. After joining the Sisters of Charity, she became known as Sister Anthony.

In 1837, she began working at St. Peter’s Orphan Asylum and School for girls in Cincinnati. Later she was given charge of a new hospital, St. John’s Hotel for Invalids.

Camp Dennison, a Civil War training camp about fifteen miles from Cincinnati, required nurses for sick soldiers after the war began. Sister Anthony and five other nuns rode the train and then walked two to three miles to visit the regimental hospitals every day. To save this daily expense, the sisters stayed at a small wooden church near camp.

Requests for nurses prompted Sister Anthony and others to care for wounded on a hospital ship with Dr. George Curtis Blackman at the Battle of Shiloh. Dead and dying soldiers filled the decks. One overcrowded ship had seven hundred patients.

Because the sisters didn’t give preferential treatment, they were asked to care for wounded prisoners.

Sister Anthony helped bring wounded soldiers from the battlefield. She is credited with developing Battlefield Triage, earning President Lincoln’s praise.

After caring for wounded at Shiloh, she became known as the “Angel of the Battlefield.” Sister Anthony served at several battlefields, including Nashville, Cumberland Gap, Richmond, Lynchburg, and Culpeper Court House.

She didn’t distinguish between Union and Confederate soldiers. She knew generals on both sides and was acquainted with Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Joseph C. Butler and Louis Worthington gave a large Cincinnati building at Sixth and Lock Street to Sister Anthony in 1866. The hospital, meant to honor her and the other sisters’ war service, had two stipulations: exclude no one because of religion or color and they were to name it “The Hospital of the Good Samaritan.”

St. Joseph Foundling and Maternity Hospital opened later that year. It’s not clear why the name changed.

-Sandra Merville Hart

Sources

“Battle Nurses,” Newspapers.com, 2019/03/30 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/18267260/civil_war_nurses_catholic_sisters_in/.

Graves, Dan, MSL. “Sister Anthony, Battlefield Heroine,” Christianity.com, 2019/03/30 https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1801-1900/sister-anthony-battlefield-heroine-11630652.html.

“Mary O’Connell,” Wikipedia, 2019/03/30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_O%27Connell.

Wimberg, Robert J. Cincinnati and the Civil War: Off to Battle, Ohio Book Store, 1992.