Nashville Tennessee

Civil War Women: Clara Judd, Confederate Spy

/ sandramervillehart

Clara Judd, a Northerner, had moved to Winchester, Tennessee, in 1859 with her husband and eight children. He and one of their children was killed in an accident two years later. The widow found jobs at a government factory for her older sons.

Union armies controlled Winchester five times during the first two years of the Civil War (1861-1862) and Clara hosted them. A Union officer warned her that they’d been ordered to destroy her crops “except enough to last six weeks” and that she should leave.

Losing her possessions probably embittered her toward the Union soldiers.

She eventually ended up leaving her children with her sister in Louisville. Obtaining Union passes to travel to Atlanta to visit her son and Louisville to visit her youngest children enabled Clara to learn troop movements and other military information for the Confederacy.

Confederate Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan, while planning his famous raid, contacted Clara in December of 1862. He asked her to discover Union troop locations and strength of those controlling the railroad. She agreed.

While traveling north, she was stopped in Murfreesboro and had to wait three days for a pass to Nashville. Unable to find transportation, she walked.

Delos Thurman Blythe, a Northern counterespionage agent posing as Southern paroled prisoner, offered her a ride in his buggy. Blythe’s pass into Nashville was accepted but not Clara’s. He overheard a Confederate soldier giving her information about getting through Union lines and became suspicious.

Clara received a pass to visit her children and then told Blythe everything. He promised to help her.

His pretense of loyalty to the South had worked. He reported her to Union authorities yet advised them to give her the passes she requested.

They traveled north by train. Clara, from her window, asked folks at each station about troops in the area. In Louisville, Blythe escorted her in all her errands and took her to dinner. She fell in love with him. Meanwhile, Blythe asked the authorities to arrest him and Clara in Mitchelsville, Tennessee.

On their return trip, military police arrested them in Mitchelsville. Goods and drugs for the Confederate army were found in her bags—quinine, nitrate of silver, and morphine.

Placed under guard in a Nashville hotel shortly before Christmas, Clara told her captors that Blythe was innocent. She didn’t know that he had already been released or that loving her had been an act.

Charged with espionage, she went to prison in Alton, Illinois for about eight months before being paroled due to poor health.

-Sandra Merville Hart

 

 

Sources

McCurry, Stephanie. “Clara Judd and the Laws of War,” HistoryNet, 2019/08/16 https://www.historynet.com/clara-judd-laws-war.htm.

Winkler, H. Donald. Stealing Secrets, Cumberland House, 2010.

 

Civil War Women: Mary E. Shelton

/ sandramervillehart

Iowa president of the Ladies’ Aid Society, Annie Turner Wittenmyer, had grown so busy establishing new local aid societies, providing hospital supplies, and visiting wounded soldiers in Union soldiers that she needed a secretary by the summer of 1863. Miss Mary E. Shelton quickly proved her worth as Annie’s secretary.

On August 10, 1863, Mary left Keokuk to accompany her new boss to St. Louis. Along the way Mary answered many heartbreaking letters for Annie. One father, grieving one son who died, asked Mrs. Wittenmyer to check on his other son who was ill with consumption.

The wife of a soldier had written to Mrs. Wittenmyer on behalf of her husband, who was dying from consumption. She requested he be sent home to die surrounded by his young family.

A frantic mother requested that Mrs. Wittenmyer find out news of her sick son.

These requests—and so many more—were the tip of the iceberg for what the compassionate secretary would experience.

After arranging the delivery of future supplies to the Western Sanitary Commission, the ladies traveled to Helena, Arkansas. A division had moved through Helena on the way to Little Rock and left their sick in the streets. The medical director told Annie that 13 soldiers died the first night. They needed nurses and medical supplies.

Annie left immediately and got the supplies from St. Louis. Then Annie and Mary visited the soldiers. They found dirty rooms. Unbathed men still wore their battlefield clothes. By the time they left at twilight, the hospital steward had assured them he’d clean every room. He had orders to change the patients’ clothing.

The two ladies then wrote letters until midnight. But their day’s work bore fruit—the next day, they found patients wearing clean clothes in clean rooms.

They walked to a convalescent camp about a mile outside Helena where a bedridden soldier called Mary to his side. He told her that they had only eaten bean soup for many days. He was so tired of it that he had wept when offered the soup a last time. Through his tears, he prayed. As soon as the prayer was uttered, his nurse announced, “Mrs. Wittenmyer is coming with two loads of sanitary goods!” Hearing the wagon wheels, the men cried for joy. Then Mrs. Wittenmyer brought them chicken and fruit. The soldier believed the food and other sanitary supplies had saved their lives.

Annie and Mary traveled to Vicksburg from Helena. The hospitals there were well-run. They returned to Iowa that fall. Mary, having seen so much need, wrote letters and spoke with her fellow citizens on behalf of the wounded. She urged greater generosity for the suffering solders.

Mary was constantly in the field, visiting hospitals and running hospital Diet Kitchens. Her work often took her to Nashville and Wilmington and lasted beyond the end of the war.

She wrote many of her experiences in a journal.

-Sandra Merville Hart

Sources

Moore, Frank. Women of the War, Blue Gray Books, 1997.

 

Civil War Women: Annie Turner Wittenmyer, Diet Kitchen

/ sandramervillehart / 1 Comment

Annie Turner Wittenmyer, a wealthy widow by the time the Civil War began, threw her efforts into providing hospital supplies needed by Union soldiers. The Iowa resident visited soldiers in army camps.

She established local aid societies throughout Iowa to collect hospital supplies. Her efforts were recognized. She was appointed the leadership of the Iowa State Sanitary Commission in September of 1862.

Annie continued to bring food and blankets to soldiers in army camps, field hospitals, riverboats, and on the battlefields. While there, she saw the food given to soldiers, such as hardtack and greasy bacon, and it distressed her. The men suffered from scurvy and typhoid.

Her brother, David Turner, was in an army hospital in Sedalia, Missouri. While she was with him, David was given fried bacon, bread, and strong coffee. Though she nursed him back to health, the problem of the food given to wounded and sick men remained on her mind.

An idea for a Diet Kitchen at army hospitals came to her in December of 1863. She proposed her idea to Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, and President Abraham Lincoln.

Receiving charge of kitchens in all Union army hospitals, Annie started in Nashville, Tennessee. She trained female workers to prepare light meals with individual attention to each patient’s needs. By working with each patient’s doctor, the ladies gave nourishing meals.

Over 100 Diet Kitchens, staffed by two trained women, had been established by the end of the Civil War. By then the army’s medical department had generally adopted the Diet Kitchen.

These kitchens offered another way for women to serve.

-Sandra Merville Hart

Sources

“Annie Turner Wittenmyer,” Brittanica.com, 2018/12/28 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Annie-Turner-Wittenmyer.

Longden, Tom. “Annie Wittenmyer,” Des Moines Register, 2018/12/28 https://data.desmoinesregister.com/famous-iowans/annie-wittenmyer.

Williams, Rachel. “The United States Sanitary and Christian Commissions and the Union War Effort,” National Museum of Civil War Medicine, 2018/12/27 http://www.civilwarmed.org/commissions/.