We entered gayly on our great contest. At the first sound from Sumter,
enthusiasm blazed high and bright. Bells rang out, flags waved, the
people rose as one man to cheer on our troops, and the practical
American nation, surveying itself with astonishment, pronounced
itself--finger on pulse--enthusiastic; and though, in the light of the
present steadily burning determination, it has been the fashion gently
to smile at that quick upspringing blaze, and at the times when it was
gravely noted how the privates of our army took daily baths and wore
Colt's revolvers, and pet regiments succumbed under showers of
Havelocks, in contrast with the grim official reports of to-day, I
cannot but think that enthusiasm healthful, and in itself a lesson, if
only that it proves beyond question that our patriotism was not simply a
dweller on the American tongue, but a thing of the American heart, so
vitalizing us, so woven every day into the most minute ramifications of
our living, so inner and recognized a part of our thinking, that there
have been found some to doubt its existence, just as we half forget the
gracious air, because no labored gasps, in place of our sure and even
breathing, ever by any chance announce to us that somewhere there have
been error and confusion in its vast workings.
Bitterer texts were ready all too soon. When we heard how one had
fallen, bayoneted at the guns, and another was struck, charging on the
foe, and a third had died after long lingering in hospital,--when we saw
our brave boys, whom we had sent out with huzzas, coming back to us with
the blood and grime of battle upon them, maimed, ghastly, dying,
dead,--we knew that we, whom God had hitherto so blessed that we were
compelled to look into the annals of other nations for misery and
strife, had now commenced a record of our own. Henceforth there was for
us a new literature, new grooves of thought, new interests. By all the
love of father, brother, husband, and children, we must learn more of
this tragic and tender lore; and our soldiers have been a thought not
far from the heart and lips of any one of us, and what is done, or
doing, or possible for them, held worthiest of our thought and time.
Respecting these, we have had all to learn. True, with us, satisfaction
has at all times followed close upon the announcement of a need; but
wisdom in planning and administering is not a marketable commodity, and
so we are educating ourselves up to the emergency,--the whole mighty
nation at school, and learning, we are bound to say, with Yankee
quickness. Love has been for us, also, a marvellous brain-prompter. Some
of our grandest charities--I mean charities in the broadest and sweetest
sense, for it is we who owe, not our soldiers--have been the inspiration
of a moment's need,--thoughts of the people, who, in crises and at
instance of the heart, think well and swiftly. Take this one example.
When New England's sons seized their arms, the first to answer the
trumpet-call that rang out over the land, and went in the spirit of
their fathers to the battle,--when these men passed through
Philadelphia, hungry and weary, the great heart of the city went out to
meet them. Citizens brought them into their houses, the neighboring
shops gave gladly what they could, women came running with food snatched
from their own tables, and even little squalid children toddled out of
by-lanes and alleys with loaves and half-loaves, all that they had to
give, so did the whole people yearn over their defenders; and then it
was seen how other regiments would come to them, ready for the fray, but
dusty and way-worn, and how the ambulances would bring them back parched
and fainting, and--it was hardly known how, only that, as in the old
times, "the people were of one mind and one accord," and brought of such
things as they had; but on that sad, yet proud day, that brought back to
them those who fell in Baltimore on the memorable nineteenth of
April,--the heroes in whom all claim a share, and the right to say, not
only Massachusetts's dead and wounded, but ours--there was ready for
them a shelter in the unpretending building famous since as the Cooper
Shop. There the people crowded about them, weeping, blessing, consoling;
and from that day there has no regiment from New England, New York, or
any other State, been suffered to pass through Philadelphia unrefreshed.
Water was supplied them, and tables ready spread, by the Volunteer Corps
always in attendance, within five minutes after the firing of the gun
that announced their arrival. There was shortly added, also, a volunteer
hospital for the more dangerously wounded when first brought from the
battle-field, and of it is told a story that Americans will like to
hear.
It is of a Wisconsin soldier, who, taken prisoner, effected his escape
from Richmond. Hiding by day, he forced his way at night through morass
and forest, snatched such sleep as he dared on the damp and sodden
earth, went without food whole days, reached our lines bruised, torn,
shivering, starving, and his wounds, which had never been properly cared
for, opened afresh. Let him tell the rest, straight from his heart.
"When I had my rubber blanket to wrap about me, I was comfortable, and,
snug and warm in the cars, I thought myself happy; and when I heard them
talk of the 'Cooper Shop,' I said to myself, 'A cooper's shop! that will
be the very place of all the earth, for there I shall have a roof over
me, and the shavings will be so warm and dry to lie upon!' but when they
carried me in, and I opened my eyes and saw what was the Cooper Shop,
and the long tables all loaded for the poor soldiers, and when they took
me to the hospital up-stairs, and placed me in a bed, and real ladies
and gentlemen, with tears in their eyes, came and waited on me, my
manliness left me."
A want of manliness, O honest heart, for which there need be no shame!
Precious tribute to our country's great love for her sons! For this is
no sectional charity, only one example culled from thousands; for the
land must, of a necessity, be overshadowed by the tree that has a root
under almost every Northern hearth-stone; and then see how we are all
bound together by the heart-strings!
Forty thousand men-at-arms are looking gravely at the height towering
above the valley in which they stand. "Impregnable" military science
pronounced it; but the men scaling it know nothing of this word
"impregnable." They have heard nothing of an order for retreat,--they
are filled with a divine wrath of battle, and each man is as mad as his
neighbor, and the officers are powerless to hold them back, and catch
the infection and are swept on with them, and climbing, jumping,
slipping, toiling on hands and knees, swinging from tree and bush, any
way, any how, but always onward, never backward, they surge up over the
mountain-top, deadly volleys crashing right in among them, and set on
the Rebels with a wild hurrah! and the hearts below beat faster, and
rough lips curse the blinding smoke and fog that veil all the crest, and
on a sudden a shout,--such a one as the children of Israel gave, when
the high-piled walls of water bent and swayed and came waving and
thundering down on Pharaoh's hopeless hosts,--for there, high up in
heaven, streaming out through parting smoke, is the flag, torn,
blood-stained, ball-riddled, but the dear old red, white, and blue,
waving over the enemy's works; and then the telegraph flashed out the
brave news over the exulting country, and the press took up the story,
and women said, with kindling faces, "My son, or my brother, or my
husband may be dead, but, oh, our boys have done glorious things at
Lookout Mountain!"--and History will tell how a grander charge was never
made, and calmly note the loss in dead and wounded,--so many
thousands,--and pass on.
But we are not History, and our dead,--well, we will give them graves
that shall be ever green with laurels, and their swords shall be our
most precious legacy to our children, and their memories shall be a part
of our household; but our wounded, for whom there is yet hope, who may
yet live,--the cry goes up from Wisconsin, and Maine, and Iowa, and New
York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Where are they, and how cared
for? We are all, as I said, bound by the heartstrings in a common
interest. The Boston woman with her boy in the Army of the Cumberland,
and the Maine mother with one in New Orleans or Texas, and the Kansas
father with a son in the Army of the Potomac, all clamor, "Is mine among
the wounded, and do care and science for him all that care and science
should?"
The Field Relief Corps of the Sanitary Commission are prompt on the
battle-field, reaching the groaning sufferers even before their own
surgeons. Said one man, lying there badly wounded,--
"And what do they pay yez for this? What do you get?"
"Pay! We ask nothing, only the soldier's 'God bless you.'"
"And is that all? Then sure here's plenty of the coin, fresh minted! God
bless you! God bless you! and the good Lord be good to you, and remember
yez as you have remembered us, and love yez and your children after you;
and sure, if that is all, it's plenty of that sort of pay the poor
soldier has for you!"
God bless such men! we echo; but after that, what then? Our beloved are
taken to the hospitals, and we know, in a general way, that hospitals
are buildings containing long rows of beds, and that science is doing
its utmost in their behalf; but when our friends write us from across
seas, they tell us, not only how they are, but where,--jotting down
little pen-and-ink pictures to show us how stands the writing-table, and
how hangs the picture, and where is the _fauteuil_, that we may see them
as they are daily; so we crave something more, we feel shut out, we want
to get at their daily living, to know something of hospital-life.
Hospitals have sprung up as if sown broadcast, and these, too, of no
mean order. True, in our first haste and inexperience, viciously planned
hospitals were erected; but these and the Crimean blunders have served
us as beacons, and the anxious care of the Government has been untiring,
the outlay of money and things more precious unbounded; and those who
have had this weighty matter in charge have no reason to fear an account
of their stewardship. The Boston Free Hospital in excellence of plan and
beauty of design can be excelled by none. Philadelphia boasts the two
largest military hospitals in the world. Of the twenty-three in and
about Washington many are worthy of all praise. The general hospital at
Fort Schuyler is admirable in plan and _locale_, and this latter
condition is found to be of vast importance. A Rebel battery, with an
incurable habit of using the hospital as a target, would scarcely be so
dangerous as a low, water-sogged, clayey soil, with its inevitable
results of fever, rheumatism, and bowel-complaints.
Spotless cleanliness is another indispensable characteristic,--not only
urged, but enforced; for there is no such notable housewife as the
Government. The vast "Mower" Hospital at Chestnut Hill, the largest in
the world, is as well kept as a lady's boudoir should be. It is built
around a square of seven acres, in which stand the surgeon's
lecture-room, the chapel, the platform for the band, etc. A long
corridor goes about this square, rounded at the corners, and lighted on
one side by numerous large windows, which, if removed in summer, must
leave it almost wholly open. From the opposite side radiate the
sick-wards, fifty in number, one story in height, one hundred and
seventy-five feet in length, and twenty feet farther apart at the
extremity than at the corridor, thus completely isolating them from each
other. A railway runs the length of the corridor, on which small cars
convey meals to the mess-rooms attached to each of the wards for those
who are unable to leave them, stores, and even the sick themselves; and
the corridor, closed in winter and warmed by stoves, forms a huge and
airy exercise-hall for the convalescent patients. As for the
cooking-facilities, they are something prodigious, at least in the sight
of ordinary kitchens, leaving nothing to be desired, unless it were that
discriminating kettle of the Erse king, that could cook for any given
number of men and apportion the share of each to his rank and needs.
Such a kettle might make the "extra-diet" kitchen unnecessary;
otherwise, I can hardly tell where improvement would be possible.
But though, with the exception of the West Philadelphia, none can
compare in hugeness with this Skrymir of hospitals, the
hospital-buildings, as a rule, have everywhere a strong family-likeness.
The pavilion-system, which isolates each of the sick-wards, allowing it
free circulation of air about three of its sides, is conceded to be the
only one worthy of attention, and is introduced in all such buildings of
modern date. Ridge-ventilation, obtained by means of openings on either
side of the ridge, is also very generally used, and advocated even in
permanent hospitals of stone and brick. Science and Common Sense at last
have fraternized, and work together hand in hand. The good old-fashioned
plan of slowly stewing the patient to death, or at least to a fever, in
confined air and stale odors, equal parts, is almost abandoned; and to
speak after the manner of Charles Reade, "Nature gets now a pat on the
back, instead of a kick under the bed." Proper ventilation begins, ends,
and forms the gist of almost every chapter in our hospital-manuals; and
I think they should be excellent summer-reading, for a pleasant breeze
seems to rustle every page, so earnestly is, first, pure air, second,
pure air, and third, pure air, impressed upon the student, "line upon
line and precept upon precept."
The Mower Hospital, which employs ten hundred and fifty gas-burners,
uses daily one hundred and fifty thousand gallons of water, and can
receive between five and six thousand patients, is free even from a
suspicion of the "hospital-smell." The Campbell and Harewood, at
Washington, are models in this respect, and can rank with many a
handsome drawing-room. The last-named institution is also delightfully
situated on grounds once belonging to the Rebel Corcoran, comprising
some two hundred acres, laid out with shaded walks, and adorned with
rustic bridges and summer-houses,--a fashion of deriving aid and comfort
from the enemy which doesn't come under the head of treason.
On hygienic grounds, all possible traps are set to catch sunbeams. One
hospital has a theatre in the mess-room, of which the scenery is painted
by a convalescent, and the stage, foot-lights, etc., are the work of the
soldiers. The performers are amateurs, taken from among the patients;
and the poor fellows who can be moved, but are unable to walk, are
carried down in the dumb-waiter to share in the entertainment. Another
has a library, reading-room, and a printing-press, which strikes off a
weekly newspaper, in which are a serial story, poetry, and many profound
and moral reflections. The men play cards and backgammon, read, write,
smoke, and tell marvellous stories, commencing, "It wasn't fairly day,
and we were hardly wide enough awake to tell a tree-stump from a gray
coat,"--or, "When we saw them coming, we first formed in square, corner
towards them you know, and waited till they were close on us, and then,
Sir, we opened and gave them our cannon, grape-shot, right slap into
them,"--or good-humoredly rally each other, as in the case of that
unlucky regiment perfectly cut up in its first battle, and known as
"six-weeks' soldiers and six-months' hospital-men."
But these are mere surface-facts. Hospital-life is woven in a different
pattern from our own, the shades deeper, the gold brighter, and we find
in it very much of heroism in plain colors, and self-sacrifice of rough
texture.
One poor fellow, yet dim-eyed and faint from long battling for his
ebbing life, will motion away the offered delicacy, pointing to some
other bed:--"Give it to him; he needs it more than I"; or sometimes, if
money is offered, "I have just been paid off; let that man have it; he
has nothing." Then some of the convalescents furnish our best and
tenderest nurses. A soldier was brought from Richmond badly wounded in
the leg. While in the prison his wounds had received no attention, and
he was in such enfeebled condition, that, when amputation became
inevitable, it was feared he would die of the operation. Hardly
breathing, made over apparently unto death, one of these soldier-nurses
took him in charge, for five days and nights kept close by his bed,
scarcely leaving him an instant, watching his faltering, flickering
breath, as his mother might have done, wresting him by force of
vigilance and tenderest care from the very clutch of the Destroyer,
rejoicing over his recovery as for that of a dear and only brother.
Another, likewise brought from Richmond, won the pity of a lady, a
chance visitor. She came to him every day, a distance of five miles,
washed his wounds, dressed them, nursed him back into the confines of
life, obtained for him a furlough, took him to her own house to complete
the cure, and sent him back to his regiment--well.
Over a third, a ruddy-faced New-England boy hardly yet into manhood,
hung the shadow of death, and quivering lips and swimming eyes--for they
come, there, to love our poor boys most tenderly--had spoken his
death-warrant. He was silent a moment. Even a brave soul stops and
catches breath, at the unexpected nearness of the Great Revelation; then
he asked to be baptized,--"because his mother was a Christian, and he
had promised her, if he died, and not on battle-field, to have this rite
performed, that she might know that he shared this Holy Faith with her,
and was not forgetful of her wishes"; and so he was baptized, and died.
There are cheerier phases. Side by side lay a New-Yorker, a
Pennsylvanian, and a Scotch boy, all terribly wounded. By the by, it is
a curious fact that there are few sabre-wounds, and almost literally
none from the bayonet; the work of destruction being, in almost all
cases, that of the rending Minié ball. The fathers of the New-Yorker and
Pennsylvanian had just visited them, and they were chatting cheerily of
their homes. The Scotch boy, who had lost a leg, looked up, brightly
smiling also.
"My mother will be here on Wednesday, from Scotland. When she knew that
I had enlisted, she sent me word that I had done well to take up arms
for a country that had been so good to me; and when she heard that I was
wounded, she wrote that she should take the next steamer for the United
States."
And, as might have been expected from such a woman, on Wednesday she
_was_ by his bedside, redeeming her word to the very day.
Sometimes the men grumble a little. One poor fellow, with a bullet
through his lungs, took high and strong ground against the meat:--"Oh!
God love ye! how could a body eat it, swimming in fat? but the eggs,
they was beautiful; and the toast is good; ye'll send me some of that
for me supper?" But as a rule they are cheery and contented, grow
strongly attached to their nurses and the visitors, and, when back in
camp, write letters of fond remembrance to their hospital-homes.
No one has ever suspected ledgers of a latent angelic principle,--and
yet, if unpaid benevolence, consolation poured on wounded hearts, hope
given to despair, and help to poverty and misery, have in them anything
heavenly, then have our soldiers a guardian angel in the Hospital
Directory. There has been a battle, and three or four days of maddening
suspense, and then the cold, hopeless newspaper-list; and your son,
mother, who played about your knee only a little time ago, and went out
in his youthful pride to battle, is there, wounded,--or your lover,
girl, who has taught you the deeper meaning of a woman's life,--or your
husband, sad woman, whose children stand at your knee scared by your
tears.
"The regiment stood like a rock against the enemy's furious onset, and
its blood-stained colors are forever glorious"; but it went out nine
hundred strong, and it comes back with two hundred, and what do you care
now for laurel-wreaths? He is not with them. There are railroads,--you
can near the battle-field, but you cannot reach it; you can inquire, but
the officers must care for the living,--"let the dead bury their dead";
and while you are frantically asking and searching, he is dying,
suffering, calling for you; and then you find that the Hospital
Directory has trace of him, and the kindly, patient members of the
Sanitary Commission are ready with time, and money, if needed, to put
you on it; and if ever you have had that horror of uncertainty strong
upon you, you will not think that I have strained the language, when I
call this most pitiful and Christian charity a guardian angel. Hear the
inquiries:--"By the love you bear your own mother, tell me where my boy
is! only give me some tidings!" "I pray you, tell me of these two
nephews for whom I am seeking: I have had fourteen nephews in the
service, and these two are the only ones left." Words like these put
soul and meaning into the following statistics, given by Mr. Brown,
Superintendent of the Hospital Directory at Washington.
"The Washington Bureau of the Hospital Directory of the United States
Sanitary Commission was opened to the public on the twenty-seventh of
November, 1862. In the month of December following I was ordered to
Louisville, Ky., to organize a Directory Bureau for the Western
Department of the Sanitary Commission, and in January ended my labor in
that department. Returning to Washington, and thence proceeding to
Philadelphia and New York upon the same duty performed at the West, I
completed the entire organization of the four bureaus by the fifth of
March, 1863. Since the first of June, at these several bureaus, the
returns from every United States General Hospital of the army, 233 in
number, have been regularly received.
"The total number of names on record is 513,437. The total number of
inquiries for information has been 12,884, and the number of successful
answers rendered 9,203, being seventy-two per cent. on the number
received. The remaining twenty-eight per cent., of whom no information
could be obtained, are of those who perished in the Peninsula campaign,
before Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, etc."
In the Sanitary Commission, mentioned here, our soldiers have yet
another friend, for whom even our copious Anglo-Saxon can find no word
of description at once strong, wise, tender, and far-reaching; but
perhaps a simple story, taken from the Sanitary Commission Bulletin,
will speak more clearly, and better to the heart, than pages of dry
records.
"Away up in the fourth story of Hospital No. 3, and in a far corner of
the ward, was seen, one day, an old lady sitting by the side of a mere
lad, who was reduced to the verge of death by chronic diarrhoea. She
was a plain, honest-hearted farmer's wife, her face all aglow with
motherly love, and who, to judge from appearances, had likely never
before travelled beyond the limits of her neighborhood, but now had come
many a long mile to do what might be done for her boy. In the course of
a conversation she informed her questioner, that, 'if she could only get
something that tasted like home,--some good tea, for instance, which she
could make herself, and which would be better than that of the
hospital,--she thought it might save her son's life.' Of course it was
sent to her, and on a subsequent visit she expressed her thanks in a
simple, hearty way, quite in keeping with her appearance. Still she
seemed sad; something was on her mind that evidently troubled her, and,
like Banquo's ghost, 'would not down.' At length it came out in a
confiding, innocent way,--more, evidently, because it was uppermost in
her thoughts than for the purpose of receiving sympathy,--that her
means were about exhausted. 'I didn't think that it would take so much
money; it is so much farther away from home than I had thought, and
board here is so very high, that I have hardly enough left to take me
back; and by another week I will have to leave him. I have been around
to the stores to buy some little things that he would eat,--for he can't
eat this strong food,--but the prices are so high that I can't buy them,
and I am afraid, that, if I go away, and if he doesn't get something
different to eat, that maybe,' and the tears trickled down her cheeks,
'he won't--be so well.'
"Her listener thought that difficulty might be overcome, and, if she
would put on her bonnet, they would go to a store where articles were
cheap. Accordingly they arrived in front of the large three-story
building which Government has assigned to the Commission, and the old
lady was soon running her eyes over the long rows of boxes, bales, and
barrels that stretched for a hundred feet down the room, but was most
fascinated by the bottles and cans on the shelves. He ordered a supply
of sugar, tea, soft crackers, and canned fruit, then chicken and
oysters, then jelly and wine, brandy, milk, and under-clothing, till the
basket was full. As the earlier articles nestled under its lids, her
face was glowing with satisfaction; but as the later lots arrived, she
would draw him aside to whisper that 'it was too much,'--'really she
hadn't enough money'; and when the more expensive items came from the
shelves, the shadow of earnestness which gloomed her countenance grew
into one of perplexity, her soul vibrating between motherly yearning for
the lad on his bed and the scant purse in her pocket, till, slowly, and
with great reluctance, she began to return the costliest.
"'Hadn't you better ask the price?' said her guide.
"'How much is it?'
"'Nothing,' replied the store-keeper.
"'Sir!' queried she, in the utmost amazement, '_nothing_ for all this?'
"'My good woman,' asked the guide, 'have you a Soldiers' Aid Society in
your neighborhood?'
"Yes, they had; she belonged to it herself.
"'Well, what do you suppose becomes of the garments you make, and the
fruit have you put up?'
"She hadn't thought,--she supposed they went to the army,--but was
evidently bothered to know what connection there could be between their
Aid Society and that basket.
"'These garments that you see came from your society, or other societies
just like yours; so did these boxes and barrels; that milk came from New
York; those fruits from Boston; that wine was likely purchased with gold
from California; and it is all for sick soldiers, your son as much as
for any one else. This is the United States Sanitary Commission
storehouse; you must come here whenever you wish, and call for
everything you want; and you must stay with your son until he is able to
go home: never mind the money's giving out; you shall have more, which,
when you get back, you can refund for the use of other mothers and sons;
when you are ready to go, I will put him in a berth where he can lie
down, and you shall save his life yet.'
"She did,--God bless her innocent, motherly heart!--when nothing but
motherly care could have achieved it; and when last seen, on a dismal,
drizzly morning, was, with her face beaming out the radiance of hope,
making a cup of tea on the stove of a caboose-car for the convalescent,
who was snugly tucked away in the caboose-berth, waiting the final
whistle of the locomotive that would speed them both homeward."
But for many of our soldiers there is yet another phase in store,--that
sad time when the clangor and fierce joy and wild, exulting hurrah of
the battle are over forever; and so, too, is over tender
hospital-nursing, and they are sent out by hundreds, cured of their
wounds, but maimed, the sources of life half drained, vigor gone, hope
all spent, to limp through the blind alleys and by-ways of life,
dropped out of the remembrance of a country that has used and forgotten
them. They have given for her, not life, but all that makes life
pleasant, hopeful, or even possible. It seems to me, that, in common
decency, if she has no laurels to spare, she should at least give them
in return--a daily dinner. Already, however, has the idea been set
forth, after a better fashion than I can hope to do,--in wood and stone,
and by the aid of a charter.
In Philadelphia stands the first chartered "Home" for disabled soldiers,
a cheery old house, dating back to the occupation of the city by the
British army in 1777-8, founded and supported by private citizens, open
to all, of whatever State, and fully looking its title, a "Home"; and as
the want is more widely felt, and presses closer upon us, I cannot but
think that everywhere we shall find such "Homes," and as we grow graver,
sadder, and wiser, under the hard teaching of our war, and more awake to
the thought that we have done with our splendid unclouded youth, and
must now take upon us the sterner responsibilities of our manhood, that
a new spirit will spring up among us,--the spirit of that woman who,
with a bedridden mother, an ailing sister, and a shop to tend, as their
only means of support, yet finds time to visit our sick soldiers, and
carry to them the little that she can spare, and that which she has
begged of her wealthier neighbors,--the spirit of that poor seamstress
who snatches an hour daily from her exhausting toil to sew for the
soldiers,--the spirit of that mechanic, who, having nothing to give,
makes boxes in his evening leisure, and sells them for the
soldiers,--the spirit of the brooks, that never hesitate between up-hill
and down, because "all the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is never
full,"--the spirit of all who do with love and zeal whatever their hands
find to do, and sigh, not because it is so little, but because it is not
better.
God grant that this spirit may obtain among us,--that our soldiers, and
their helpless families, may be to us a national trust, for which we are
bound individually, even the very humblest and meanest of us, to care.
The field is vast, and white for the harvest. Now, for the love of
Christ, in the name of honor, for very shame's sake, where we counted
our laborers by tens, let us number them by fifties,--where there were
hundreds, let there be thousands.