Heroines of Mercy Street Read online

  The fort, held by sixty-eight Union soldiers under the command of Major Robert Anderson, had become the emotional focal point of the conflict between North and South in the weeks since South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860. The small garrison was cut off from resupply or reinforcement, but the soldiers there refused to surrender the fort to Confederate control. Anderson, a Kentucky native and former slaveholder, was praised as a hero in the North and reviled as a traitor in the South. President James Buchanan, at the end of his term of office, was unwilling to trigger civil war by attempting to relieve the besieged unit and equally unwilling to trigger a public outcry by recalling the troops from Sumter. “If I withdraw Anderson from Sumter,” he said in late December 1860, “I can trail home to Wheatland [Pennsylvania] by the light of my own burning effigies.”3 He chose instead to leave the problem for his successor.

  When Abraham Lincoln took office on March 4, the garrison at Sumter had less than six weeks of food left. Lincoln’s cabinet told him it was impossible to relieve the fortress and urged him to evacuate Anderson’s troops as a way of reducing tension between North and South. Popular opinion screamed for Lincoln to reinforce the “gallant band who are defending their country’s honor and its flag in the midst of a hostile and traitorous foe.”4 With public opinion eager for action, and no sign that delay would improve the chances of reuniting the country, Lincoln chose to resupply the garrison but not send reinforcements unless the Confederates attacked either the fort or the supply ships, a compromise that pleased no one.

  Shortly after midnight on April 12, with resupply ships on the way, the Confederate government gave Anderson until 4:00 a.m. to surrender. Anderson refused. At 4:30 a.m., the bombardment began. Although they had neither the men nor supplies to mount a meaningful defense, the Union forces held out for a day and a half before surrendering.

  Almost before the echoes of the first gun shots died away, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 militia volunteers to serve for ninety days, certain that would be enough time to put down what he described as a state of insurrection, not a state of war. The public’s response was immediate and overwhelming. Men thronged the army’s recruiting offices. The first two Massachusetts regiments marched toward Washington and Fort Monroe two days after the president’s call; two more followed within the week. Individual states filled their recruitment quotas and offered more. The governor of Ohio, having raised the thirteen regiments requested, telegraphed the War Department to say, “without seriously repressing the ardor of the people, I can hardly stop short of twenty.”5

  Citizen soldiers were not the only volunteers to respond to the president’s call. Even though Lincoln had said nothing about nurses—and had certainly not called for women to come to their nation’s aid—Dorothea Lynde Dix, a fifty-nine-year-old reformer dedicated to improving the treatment of prisoners, paupers, and the mentally ill, set out immediately to volunteer her services to create an army corps of female nurses to care for wounded soldiers, modeled on the group of nurses who followed Florence Nightingale to the Crimean War.

  A Useful Life

  Dorothea Dix was born in1802 in a small frontier settlement in northern Massachusetts (now a part of Maine). Her childhood was difficult and often lonely. Her grandfather, a successful Boston doctor, had purchased thousands of acres of undeveloped land with the intention of building new towns, and he sent her father, Joseph Dix, to manage the property. By the time Dorothea was born, he had carved out a small piece of farmland from the wilderness and built a plaster-chinked log house. It would have been a hard life even if Joseph Dix had been a dedicated farmer—and he wasn’t. Instead of concentrating on farming and developing the land, he became an itinerant Methodist minister and was often away from home, supplementing his meager income by selling printed copies of his sermons. Dorothea had the hated job of cutting and folding the printed sheets and sewing them into pamphlets. Her mother was no help; she took to her bed after the birth of Dorothea’s second brother and remained a semi-invalid who suffered from what sounds to a modern reader like debilitating bouts of depression. As the oldest of three children, Dorothea became responsible for much of the work of the frontier household at a very early age.

  When Dorothea was twelve, she escaped to Dix Mansion, her widowed grandmother’s home in Boston. Life was better with her grandmother, but the two Dix women soon butted heads. The senior Mrs. Dix was determined to turn her backwoods granddaughter into a lady, and Dorothea rebelled. After two years, Mrs. Dix realized she didn’t have the strength to take care of a strong-willed teenager and sent Dorothea to her great-aunt Sarah in Worcester, forty miles west of Boston.

  In a warm and loving environment for the first time, Dorothea thrived with her relatives in Worcester, but she was used to working. She needed more to do than the picnics, garden parties, and teas that occupied her contemporaries there. With her aunt’s permission, she opened a school for young children in an old printing shop, where she taught reading and writing, Bible studies, and the kind of manners she herself had resisted learning in Boston. Dix was only fourteen, but the school was a success, with as many as twenty children attending at a time.

  She ran the school in Worcester for nearly three years, until her grandmother, now seventy-three, asked her to come back to Dix Mansion. In 1819, she returned to Boston where she made an unobtrusive debut in society, studied with private tutors, attended public lectures, and discovered the Unitarian religion, which flourished in Boston during the period. She also met Anne Heath, whose friendship would be a constant comfort for the rest of her life. In 1821, she convinced her grandmother to allow her to open a charity school in the barn behind Dix Mansion. When the school proved to be a success, she opened a second one within Dix Mansion itself, aimed at students who could afford to pay tuition. During this period she also began to write textbooks for children. One of these, Conversations on Common Things, published in 1824, enjoyed a surprising success; by the time the Civil War began, it had been reprinted sixty times.

  Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, Dix suffered from respiratory problems, fatigue, and depression. Her poor health made it difficult to teach on a regular basis. In 1836, she suffered a serious physical and emotional collapse and was forced to close her school. Her doctor and friends encouraged her to take a restorative trip to England, where she convalesced for eighteen months in the home of fellow Unitarian William Rathbone. At Rathbone’s home, Dix was introduced to a circle of reformers concerned with the social problems created by a half century of industrialization in England, among them utopian socialist Robert Owen, prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, and Samuel Tuke, founder of the innovative York Retreat, an asylum for the mentally ill that emphasized humane treatment, healthy diet, exercise, and productive work. Dix’s involvement with the Unitarian congregation in Boston had already introduced her to ideas of liberal Christianity and social reform, but now she discovered a new way of thinking about social problems that utilized direct observation and data collection to argue for change.

  Dix was not well enough to make the trip home until the fall of 1837, several months after the death of her grandmother. Between the money she inherited from her grandmother and the income she received from her books, she had enough money to allow her to devote her time to reform and charitable work. Being a woman of independent means would be a crucial element in her success as a reformer.

  For several years after her return, she traveled in search of both a home and a cause. She found her true calling at the age of thirty-nine, when a friend asked her to take over his Sunday school class for women inmates at the East Cambridge Jail. On March 28, 1841, she arrived at the jail, prepared to lead the twenty waiting inmates in a Bible lesson, a prayer, and a hymn. When the lesson was over, she asked the jailer for a tour of the facilities, a standard activity among the nineteenth-century reform community. What she found shocked her, particularly the section of the prison where the mentally ill were kept in small cells without
furniture and no stove to keep the inmates warm. When she asked why they didn’t have heat in their cells, she was told it was unnecessary and dangerous: because they weren’t in their right minds they didn’t feel the cold, and, besides, they might start a fire and burn down the prison.

  Outraged, Dix took the matter to the county court. Women were not allowed to speak before the court, but they were allowed to state their case in writing. Dix described the conditions she had seen and appealed to the court to at least provide stoves for the inmates. At first she was greeted with anger and disbelief, but she wrote letters to prominent Bostonians and finally caught the attention of Samuel Gridley Howe, who was doing similar work on behalf of disabled children, and of Boston legislator Charles Sumner. When they took up Dix’s cause, both the public and the court listened. The mentally ill inmates of the Cambridge jail got their stoves.

  While she campaigned on behalf of the inmates of the East Cambridge Jail, Dix began to investigate how the mentally ill were cared for elsewhere. For a year and a half, she traveled across the state of Massachusetts, investigating conditions in every poorhouse and prison, public and private, that she could gain access to. She quickly learned that the conditions at East Cambridge were not unusual; in fact, in many places they were much worse. The wealthy could pay for attendants to care for mentally ill family members at home or pay for them to be housed in private hospitals, but the poor had nowhere to go. In 1841, there were only fourteen mental hospitals in the country. Most of the mentally ill were housed in prisons and poorhouses, and even those housed in asylums were often brutally treated. Appalled, she set out to reform the treatment of the mentally ill in Massachusetts, replicating her East Cambridge campaign on a larger scale.

  Dix had found both her cause and her mode of operations: painstaking investigations, dramatically written descriptions of conditions, and the help of powerful men to apply pressure on the political system. Between 1843 and 1845, she traveled more than ten thousand miles and visited hundreds of institutions, often at the request of concerned citizens in other states who wanted help in undertaking asylum reforms.

  By the time the Civil War began, Dix had spent twenty years working to change the way people thought about the mentally ill. She traveled almost continuously at a time when few people traveled more than a few miles from home and women seldom traveled alone. Railroad companies gave her free passes, and freight haulers carried her packages to prisons, hospitals, and asylums at no charge. Most importantly, she had convinced politicians at every level of American government to support prison reform bills and to build insane asylums. She had even worked for reform at the federal level. In 1848, she lobbied for a bill to grant the states more than twelve million acres of public land to be used for the benefit of the insane, deaf, dumb, and blind. The bill passed both houses of Congress. President Franklin Pierce ultimately vetoed the bill, but Dix made important connections in Congress in its pursuit, a fact that meant her proposal for an army nursing corps got a fair hearing.

  In the eighteen months before the war, Dix had spent much of her time on the road, touring mental health facilities, lobbying state legislatures for capital appropriations and needed reforms, and gathering local information about the national political crisis, hoping she would be able to use her connections on both sides of the political divide to calm the secession crisis. Her travels took her through more of the country than a nineteenth-century presidential candidate on campaign would have seen. She toured the deep South shortly after John Brown’s raid in October 1859, then turned her attention north and west, where she visited prisons and hospitals for the mentally ill in the pioneer states of Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. In the early months of 1861, she focused her attention on the border regions where the divisions over slavery, agriculture, and industry were most bitter, traveling from Kentucky, to Missouri, Tennessee, and back to Kentucky. As she traveled, she noted the nation’s political dissension with apprehension. In February of 1861, she confided to her lifelong friend Anne Heath that she was grateful to be busy: “I thank God I have such full uses for time now for the state of our beloved country would crush my heart and life.”6

  During this period, Dix failed in her attempts to promote compromise, but she helped prevent a conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln. Her privileged position as a lady and a welcome guest in the South allowed her to overhear details of a plan to murder Lincoln on the final leg of his trip to Washington for his inauguration. In mid-January 1861, she met with Samuel M. Felton, the president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad; she laid out what she knew about a conspiracy to burn the railroad bridges, cut the telegraph lines, and sabotage Felton’s railroad when the president-elect’s train reached Baltimore as the first step in seizing Washington and declaring the Confederacy the de facto government of the United States. Felton had heard similar rumors for some time. He passed the information on to detective Allan Pinkerton, whom he used to police the railroad. Using Dix’s information, Pinkerton’s men confirmed the plot to assassinate Lincoln when he changed trains in Baltimore; spies from the War Department confirmed the story independently. Felton always believed that Dix had changed the course of history by this act alone.

  Dorothea Dix Volunteers

  Dix was taking a well-deserved rest with friends in Trenton, New Jersey, when she heard the news that Sumter had fallen. Without hesitation, she repacked her bags and left that afternoon for Washington, DC, on a trip that would be marked by troop movements, patriotic crowds, packed trains, wild rumors, and secessionist disruptions.

  Her first stop was Philadelphia, which was full of rumors of secessionist plots to cut off Washington by destroying the railroad bridges. Fearing that she might not get through, Dix by-passed the cumbersome horse-car transfer system that took passengers from one railroad terminal to another and raced through Philadelphia at top speed in a rented carriage. She reached the terminal just in time to catch the last southbound train before Confederate sympathizers destroyed the Susquehanna River bridges and cut off the road to Washington.

  She was not so lucky in Baltimore. Three hours before Dix arrived, the Maryland capital erupted into mob violence when the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment arrived in the city on its way to Washington. Cheering crowds and patriotic demonstrations greeted the Sixth at every station for the first three hundred miles of its journey, but railroad officials warned them they could expect a rough reception in Baltimore, which was strongly pro-South and had a long history of urban violence.

  Each railroad had its own system of stations, which meant that passengers traveling from Philadelphia to Washington had to transfer from the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad station to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad station; this process required teams of four horses to pull each car for a mile and a half along tracks from President Street to Camden, where railroad workers attached the cars to a Baltimore & Ohio engine. The regimental quartermaster had issued each member of the Sixth twenty rounds of ball cartridges before they reached the station and ordered them to cap and load their Springfield rifles in anticipation of trouble. The line of seven horse-drawn cars traveled only a few blocks before they attracted an angry crowd. At first the secessionist rioters limited themselves to yelling at the soldiers. The soldiers were anxious to retaliate, but their officers told them to hold their fire. When the crowd escalated to rock throwing and gunfire, an injured soldier in the rear car requested permission to fire back. Permission granted, the soldiers dropped to the floor of the car, loaded their muskets, and rose to fire out the windows. Once the car pulled into the safety of Camden station, windowless and bullet ridden, the mob attacked the horse-car tracks with crowbars and pickaxes, rendering the tracks impassable. The remaining four companies of the Sixth had no choice but to march in columns to the station through the narrow streets of Baltimore, surrounded by rioters. After four blocks of taunts, thrown bricks, and gunfire, the militia fired back. The orderly march turned into street fighting,
leaving four soldiers and eleven civilians dead and dozens of soldiers, rioters, and bystanders wounded—the first casualties in a war that would claim the lives of more than 620,000 soldiers over the course of four years.

  By the time Dix arrived at President Street station, the riot was over but its aftermath remained. She found her way to the Baltimore & Ohio station along the same route taken by the Massachusetts regiment several hours before—disabled tracks, bullet holes, broken store windows, and all. As she wrote to Heath the next day, “It was not easy getting across the city—but I did not choose to turn back—I reached my destination.”7

  Dix reached Washington that evening, several hours after the Massachusetts regiment arrived with news of the Baltimore riots. The city was on high alert. Pickets guarded public buildings and bridges. Soldiers were billeted at the White House in anticipation of a Confederate attack before morning. A less determined woman might have have hesitated, but Dix went directly from the train station to the White House, where she volunteered her services and those of an “army of nurses,” yet to be gathered, to support the Union’s troops.

  If any other woman had appeared unannounced at the White House with such a scheme, she might have been turned away. But Dix, soft-spoken and physically fragile but mentally tough, was preceded by her national reputation as a humanitarian, crusader, and lobbyist. She was used to working with powerful politicians, and they were used to working with her. Even with the threat of the Confederate army at the door, she and her proposal received a warm reception. Lincoln’s private secretary, John G. Nicolay, noted late that night that “we have been much impressed” by Dix’s proposal.8 The army’s Medical Bureau would prove to be less enthusiastic.