Woolsey family letters during the War for the Union

Abby Howland Woolsey to H. Gilman.

Litchfield, Sept. 22.

Charley is trying for a Lieutenancy in one of the new regiments, and Governor Morgan has promised, as all governors do, to “see about it.” This is going to be a great drain on Mother’s spirits and strength, if the application succeeds, and will bring us all continued personal interest and anxiety.

Georgy was telegraphed ten days ago to come immediately to Newport to a great military barrack hospital.

The interchange of letters between Miss Wormeley and G[eorgeanna] ended in an agreement that they should join hands again for hospital work at Portsmouth Grove, and as G. made bold to propose… Jane and Sarah Woolsey as co-laborers, all three of them were given the chance they coveted. Miss Wormeley’s plan for organizing will give you an idea of … [their] duties …..

Miss Wormeley to Georgeanna Woolsey

NEWPORT, Sept, 5th, ’62.

My dear Georgy: I found the new surgeon inclined to one woman for each ward (twenty-eight wards or barracks, of sixty men in each). I hunted him out of that idea however. Everything in the domestic management of the hospital being left to me, I shall gently avail myself of the courtesy. Now then for your advice. My ideas are these. Please give your decided opinion on them. To give five wards, sixty beds to each ward, to the superintendence of five friends—you, your sister, cousin, H. Whetten, and a lady here whom I esteem and consider efficient. Under these I should put one, two, or three women nurses, as occasion may require. These five ladies would be responsible for everything connected with their wards, in general.

You know what general supervision means,—cleanliness, beds, linen, due washing thereof, etc., etc., in all of which the women under you should do the actual work whilst you see that they do it. . . . I want to have the men intelligently looked after, as only a lady can. I should therefore wish that the ladies should go round with the surgeons invariably—to make short notes of each patient’s treatment, medicine, and diet. Medicines I should want her to make sure were properly and timely given. The special diet lists ordered by the surgeon I should wish to be handed in to me as soon as practicable. I shall put a special diet kitchen at each end of the Barrack St. with a female cook in each, whom I shall attend to myself. . . .

This is in general a sketch of my ideas. What do you say? Will you come? . . . I want to point out to you that no ladies have ever been allowed to come into a U. S. General Hospital in this way—much less warmly requested, and thanked, and confided in, as we are,—for of course it has nothing personal to myself in it; it is General Hammond’s first cordial reception and experiment of ladies in hospital, and is in consequence, as he told me, of the grateful sense he had of what we did at White House. . . .

Now as to our own living there. A house is building for us, to be finished by the 12th of this month. It has bedrooms for all the female nurses, a dining-room for ditto, an office for me. We shall have to carpet our own rooms, and adorn them as we see fit; the Government supplies the common necessities of a bed, etc., for the nurses in general. . . .

I should want to have you with me at the start. Can you arrange to come? . . .

Write me at once, please. What a vile place you are in; the mails take a week to go.

Mr. Lincoln’s call for 300,000 more troops was being answered. All over the country camps were being formed and boys drilled in all the pleasant villages of the land. Mother and all of us went to rest awhile, after Charley and G. came home, in Litchfield, and watched the drilling and recruiting.

Abby Howland Woolsey to H. G.

Litchfield, Sept. 3, 1862.

My dear Hatty ( Gilman): I should like you to see the beautiful camp of the 19th C. V. here before it is all broken up. We are to have a flag presentation from Mr. Wm. Curtis Noyes, and a religious farewell service was appointed to be held to-day in the Congregational Church. Good Dr. Vail will pray, I dare say, as he did on Sunday: ” God bless our 19th Regiment, the colonel and his staff, the captains, and all the rank and file.” . . .

The calm air, the physical comfort and peace we have here, make mental peace easier I suppose. We cannot be too thankful, we say to each other, that we are not in New York, heated and tired and despondent. It is infinitely sad, all this desperate fighting and struggling; this piecemeal destruction of our precious troops, only to keep the wolves at bay. But how well the country is going to bear it! I suppose these poor, innocent, confident new lives will be in the thickest of the fight at once. They will have their wish! be put to the immediate use for which they enlisted. . . . I grow stony and tearless over such a mass of human grief. I am lost in wonder, too, at the generalship, the daring and endurance of the Southern army. We are to fight it out now, even if it becomes extermination for us and them. . . .

Chaplain Henry Hopkins to Georgeanna Woolsey.

Alexandria Hospital, Sept., 1862.

My dear Miss Woolsey: In great haste I write to say that to dispense anything which will do the bodies of these poor sufferers good will be a most welcome task. . . . Outside of the house, at the Mansion Hospital, we fed 1,500, 1,900, 2,500, and 1,600 patients passing North on successive days, so that those inside suffer some lack of care and of good food. Last night 75 came in from beyond the lines by flag of truce. I thought I had seen weary and worn-out human beings before, but these bloody, dirty, mangled men, who had lain on the battlefield, some of them two and three days, with wounds untouched since the first rude dressing, and had ridden from near Centreville in ambulances, were a new revelation. We cut their clothes from them, torn and stiff with their own blood and Virginia clay, and moved them inch by inch onto the rough straw beds; the poor haggard men seemed the personification of utmost misery. But some of them were happy. One nobleman who attracted me by the manliness of his very look in the midst of his sufferings, when I spoke to him of the strong consolations of a trust in the Saviour, threw his arms about my neck and told me, weeping, that for him they were more than sufficient. Some of these fellows I love like brothers and stand beside their graves for other reasons than that it is an official duty. . .

It was for such heroic sufferers as the “nobleman” described by Chaplain Hopkins that Mary wrote these verses:

.

“Mortally Wounded.”

.

I lay me down to sleep,
With little thought or care
Whether my waking find
Me here—or THERE!

.

A bowing, burdened head,
Only too glad to rest,
Unquestioning, upon
A Loving breast.

.

My good right hand forgets
Her cunning now;
To march the weary march
I know not how.

.

I am not eager, bold,
Nor strong,—all that is past!
I am willing not to do,
At last, at last !

.

My half-day’s work is done,
And this is all my part:
I give a patient God
My patient heart;

.

And grasp His banner still,
Though all its blue be dim;
These stripes, no less than stars,
Lead after Him.

.

Weak, weary and uncrowned,
I yet to bear am strong;
Content not even to cry,
“How long ! How long!”

The retreat from the Peninsula was almost immediately, (August 29, ’62,) followed by the “Second Bull Run” disaster, which again filled the Washington and Alexandria hospitals to overflowing and taxed the hospital workers to the utmost. Chaplain Hopkins, still on hard service in Alexandria, writes:

Office of General Hospital,
12 O’clock Sunday Night.
Alexandria, August 31st, 1862.

My dear Mrs. Howland: These days are more terrible than any thing the nation has yet seen, and their horrors are at our very doors. Yesterday we sent 375 men to the north, and 433 to-day, and yet to-night we have opened a hall where, strewn on the floor, without even blankets, lie scores of wounded men unattended, with rebel lead festering in their bodies, but thankful for even that accommodation. Many of them came all the way from the battlefield in horrid army-wagons after lying in the rain and mud upon the field through the night; — patient, unmurmuring men. The best of New York and Boston blood oozes from their undressed wounds. I have just come from doing all that I could for them and am resting for the next train, which we momentarily expect at the foot of Cameron Street. . . . You have seen all this at Harrison’s Landing, but in my wildest dreams, when I first reported to you in Washington, I never thought of such scenes. Through all the wards confused heaps of torn and dirty clothes and piles of bloody bandages, tired attendants doing their best to make comfortable the poor fellows torn and mangled with shot and shell in every imaginable way. Things now, from what I hear in the hall, are coming into order, several surgeons having just reported themselves to Doctor Summers, besides large numbers of citizen attendants from the departments in Washington and from this city, too.

By the time this reaches you the papers will have informed you that last night the main part of our army on the left wing was compelled to fall back on Centreville. This morning the whole army was concentrated there, utterly disorganized, with the exception of Sumner’s Corps and some other fresh troops just arrived. They formed in front with their splendid artillery, and the rest of the army began to gather itself up for fresh encounters. The fight began again at three o’clock this afternoon, and men who left there at four o’clock say that it was going against us. God grant that the tide may have since turned.

Don’t apprehend our capture here, for the forts have been fully manned and supplied with ammunition; besides, we are going to whip them on the present battlefield to-morrow. I hear the whistle of the expected train with wounded and must stop this hasty letter.

The tide did turn. Chaplain Hopkins’ prayer was answered. The “fight which began at 3” the afternoon he wrote, ended with the repulse of the rebels by McDowell, and our troops rested that night at Centreville. There was a drop of comfort for H. H.’s poor men in the “knowledge, later, that their courage and suffering had not been all in vain, though the poor army was again, after all its frightful losses, just where it stood in March, six months before.

A camp for sick and wounded had been established at Portsmouth Grove, near Newport, R. I., and as a matter of course it appealed to Miss Wormeley, its near neighbor. She was allowed only a short rest before earnest request came to her to take charge of the nursing there. We were all hankering for our active life in the thick of the fight. Mr. Olmsted used to say.

“My heart’s in the Pamunkey.”

Georgeanna Woolsey to her sister, Eliza Howland.

Litchfield, Conn., Aug. 26, 1862.

Miss Wormeley had a nice note from Mr. Olmsted which she sent me to read and which I returned to her—all about “the staff” on the Wilson Small—complimentary, but saying that he wonders at himself for having been at the head, and never could attempt to say how he felt towards all those who were associated with him. She wrote to ask his opinion about accepting the directorship at Portsmouth Grove Hospital. . . . I can’t find her note. It told me that the Surgeon-General, Hammond, had been to see her and had asked her to take the lady directorship. She hesitated and he sent the surgeon-in-charge to see her, who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer; said he liked women, and agreed at once to write for Dr. Robert Ware. He did write, but the Dr. could not be found.[1] . . .

She asks what I think about it. I advised her to take it, and if she could not live in the hospital, to go out several times a week, and keep her paw on it, and insist upon order and system in the housekeeping department and kitchen arrangements. I hope she will, it is too good a chance to miss, and it is certainly a great compliment from the Surgeon-General.

[1]Dr. Ware volunteered for service further South, and died there of fever contracted on duty.

On the 14th of August—McClellan’s attempt to reach Richmond via the Chickahominy swamps having proved a disastrous failure—the transfer of the army to Washington began.

Lieutenant Robert Wilson of J. H.’s regiment wrote home at the time a letter which might easily have come from any regiment in the Army of the Potomac. “Six days’ march,” he says, “to Newport News, choking with dust, parched with thirst, melting by day and freezing by night, poorly fed and with nothing but the sky to cover us. You can judge of our exhausted condition when I tell you that six miles before we reached the camp at Newport News the 16th Regiment, N. Y. Vols., numbered only 184 men in the ranks, though men straggled in, so that there were 400 in the morning, and the 16th is no straggling regiment. Next day embarked on transports and arrived at Alexandria, sorrowful and humiliated when looking back over a year and finding ourselves on the same ground as then. The debris of the Grand Army had come back to its starting place with its ranks decimated, its men disspirited, its morale failing, while the thousands who sleep their last sleep on the Peninsula demand the cause of their sacrifice.”

Eliza Woolsey Howland to her Mother.

Fishkill, Aug. 15.

Dear Mother: In answer to my letter Dr. Draper came up yesterday noon and stayed till this afternoon. . . . The visit was part professional and part for pleasure and was satisfactory in both ways. He finds Joe improving, though more slowly than he had hoped, but he says he must not think of returning to camp. That if fever got hold of him again he would stand very little chance of recovery. It would permanently break down his constitution, if it was not immediately fatal. . . . It is very disappointing. He hoped to gain fast enough to go back the end of this month, and is greatly depressed about it, for he has made up his mind that under the circumstances it is great injustice to the regiment and to Major Seaver to continue to hold his commission, getting the credit as it were, while the Major has all the care and responsibility. He wishes to do only what is most for the interests of the service.

Joseph Howland resigned from the service by the advice of Dr. W. H. Draper of New York, whose medical certificate stated that he was suffering from extreme nervous exhaustion and debility, and was unfit for duty. The resignation was received by his superior officers with expressions of great regret, and letters full of affection poured in upon him.

General Bartlett, commanding the brigade, writes:

Headquarters 2d Brigade.
Sept. 4th, 1862, “Camp Franklin,” VA.

Dear Howland: I received your papers just as we were embarking at Newport News, and you cannot imagine how badly I felt at the thought that perhaps we should never be associated together in the field again, and perhaps never again see each other. We all agreed that you ought not to come back, all seemed actuated by the same feeling of love for you and all expressed their sorrow that you would no longer be with us. . . .

The old 16th are still “A. No. 1.”

General Bartlett writes again:

Headquarters 2d Brigade,
Near Bakersville, Md.
Oct. 1st, .1862

My dear Howland: I enclose to you the acceptance of your resignation and honorable discharge from the service.

I had much rather it had been your appointment as brigadier, for I don’t believe the service can afford to lose many such officers, and yet I would rather see you recover your health and strength than to be made a major-general, myself.

Eliza Woolsey Howland and Georgeanna… were planning to join the hospital service again, and keep near [Eliza’s husband] Joe, under the Sanitary Commission auspices.

Frederick Law Olmsted to Eliza Woolsey Howland

U. S. Sanitary Commission,

New York Agency, 40 Broadway.

New York, 25th July, 1862.

Dear Mrs. Howland: I have just received your note of the 22d.

It is expected that the “Euterpe” will leave here on Saturday for Old Point, there to “await orders.” Dr. Jenkins writes me that Dr. Cuyler changed his mind and his orders about the use of the hospital vessels two or three times a day, and he could form no plans. . . .

I hope some decided and tangible line of work may be determined on. At present everything remains as when we left James River. . . .

The Commission would, of course, be glad to have you and your sister take passage upon the returning hospital ship if you wish; and you can do so without placing yourself under any obligation to remain upon her. You could, upon arrival at Fortress Monroe, determine, by consultation with Dr. Jenkins, whether you could find duty at Berkely. Most respectfully yours.

Early in August Joseph Howland broke down once more with malarial fever and was sent home by the army surgeons, this time not to return to the regiment, and our going to the front was given up.