 | MISS REBECCA R. USHER. Women of the war : |  |
MISS REBECCA R. USHER.
VERY early in the struggle the people of Maine entered
warmly into the plans and labors of the Sanitary
and Christian Commissions. But in addition to these
national organizations it was generally felt that some more
special and direct system was required for reaching all the
Maine boys in the army, and making sure that the bountiful
supplies given by the people at home did not fail of their
purpose.
More effectually to accomplish this object, a society was
formed in Portland, in the fall of 1862, called the "Maine
Camp and Hospital Association," the various members of
which held themselves in readiness to respond to any call
for hospital nurses that might reach them from the front.
Aside from Mrs. Fogg and Mrs. Eaton, who were the pioneers
from the state in sanitary labor, Miss Usher was
among the first to enter upon the work of humanity, and
devote herself to the alleviation of the untold and unmeasured
sufferings produced by the great war.
Her first experience was at the General Hospital at
Chester, in Pennsylvania. This had been opened early in
the spring of 1862, at the time of the Peninsular campaign,
and was for some weeks supplied with nurses by the ladies
from the village. As some disagreement arose between
sought to change the system of hospital service, and secured
Mrs. Tyler, of Baltimore, as lady superintendent,
requesting her to call to her aid a suitable corps of skilful
and permanent assistants.
Mrs. Tyler sought volunteers exclusively as being more
intelligent, more refined, and more devoted to the welfare
of the soldier than those whose labor was salaried.
The little band she secured as aids was composed of
Miss Sarah Tucker and Miss Kendall, from Boston; Miss
Dequindre, from Michigan; Miss Hattie Southgate, daughter
of Bishop Southgate, of New York; Miss Ellis, of
Bridgewater; Miss Titcomb and Miss Newhall, from Portland;
and Miss Usher, from Hollis, Maine.
The large building erected for a normal school was appropriated
to the use of the surgeons and the ladies of the
hospital. Most of the amputations were performed here,
and the building was also used as a special ward for such
patients as were so ill as to be disturbed by the noise of
the crowded wards, and whose recovery depended on the
most watchful attention. They had under their care nine
hundred patients in the fall, and during a considerable part
of the winter of 1862 and 1863. These were distributed in
barracks, each barrack being divided into wards, with from
sixty to seventy men in each; every lady having a ward in
her special charge, except Mrs. Tyler, who was lady superintendent,
and visited all. The immediate and constant
nursing was performed by soldiers detailed for the purpose.
Government supplied the ladies with a daily ration costing
fifteen cents, and a free pass on the cars; and this was all
of doing good, and a conviction that their labors
directly promoted the final success of the Union arms.
Among the severely wounded, requiring special attention,
was a Confederate officer from South Carolina, who had
been captured in one of the great battles on the Chickahominy.
The bone of his shoulder had been terribly
crushed by a fragment of a shell, so that his right arm was
lashed to his side for eight months. He was in Miss Newhall's
ward; but Miss Usher often called to see that all his
wants were supplied, and became quite interested in him
as the first specimen of a genuine and full-blooded Southerner
that had come under her notice in the hospital. At
times he would grow strong enough to walk up and down
the halls every day for a week or two; and then, his wound
opening afresh, he would sink almost to the verge of the
grave. He was but twenty-one years of age, and as his
wound became worse, his suffering depressed his spirits to
the lowest point. At such times the ladies used every
method to cheer him. They found him well educated, and
intelligent, gentlemanly and refined in his language, and
polished in his manners. He was graceful, yet abundant, in
his expressions of gratitude for the kind treatment he received.
One day, when Mrs. Tyler's name was mentioned,
he exclaimed, "She's a noble woman, and ought to live
forever!"
He spoke freely of the conflict going on between the sections,
and seemed to regret it very much, saying, if the
southern and northern people could have been brought together,
and exchanged their real sentiments on the value of
and no war, and added that, if he ever lived to get
home, he should do all in his power for the Union prisoners.
One day, in the spring of 1863, he asked Miss Usher if
the North considered their currency worth anything. "O,
yes," was the reply. "If I had money to invest, I should
put it into United States bonds in preference to anything
else." He looked surprised, and added, "Well, we know
ours is worthless." In another conversation that took place
soon after, the young South Carolinian gave a chapter from
his plantation reminiscences that seemed strangely in contrast
with the refinement he had hitherto manifested.
"He was telling me about his father," says Miss Usher;
"what a careless and indulgent master he was, and that he
wanted him to take charge of the plantation. `This,' he
went on to say, `I agreed to do on one condition — that I
should have entire control of the negroes. After some
hesitation, father consented, and I went to work and laid
down the rules for them. They early found out that I
would as soon flog father's favorite negroes as any others,
and they began to be afraid of me.
"`One day I sent a boy to the grist mill with a load of
corn. He was absent the greater part of a day, and, when
he came back, said the miller wouldn't grind it. I took him
right into the wagon and drove back to the mill, ascertained
that he had been spending the day with the free
negroes in the village, had given out the better part of the
corn among them, and reached the mill too late to have the
grinding done that day. I turned to the boy, and said,
"Jerry, you deserve a good threshing for this, and
"if you dare!" But when he thought about it he concluded
to stop and take the whipping. He was afraid I would
fire. I had no idea of that, but if he had taken to the
woods I would have had my hounds after him, and pulled
him down in five minutes!' His story shocked me," says
Miss Usher; "yet I did not argue the case, but left him to
be instructed by the logic of events. He ran through his
narrative with as much frankness and sang-froid as a
northern man might speak of dismissing a servant that
did not suit him. It had never occurred to him that setting
bloodhounds after an escaping slave was improper
treatment for negroes. Yet towards white people no person
could be more considerate or polite. At another time
he said, `I don't see how you northern people can stand it
to have negroes brushing by you on the sidewalk. I should
knock them down.'" In May, 1863, this polished champion
of southern institutions was so far recovered as to leave
the hospital. He was taken to Baltimore and exchanged,
so that Miss Usher heard no more of him and his views of
plantation discipline.
The next incident that Miss Usher relates is entirely
different.
"One evening," she writes, "Miss Titcomb and I were
sitting in Mrs. Tyler's reception-room when we were
startled by the sound of loud weeping in the hall. It
seemed like the voice of an old man; and we went out to
witness one of those touching reunions that can occur only
amid the desolations and fearful uncertainties of a great war.
"An old gentleman had just arrived from Iowa to see his
of age, and the youngest of five brothers, all of whom
were marching and fighting under the same flag. This one,
while on a visit to his older brother's family, in Illinois,
enlisted in the army of the Mississippi, while his four
brothers were in the Missouri division. The father had managed
with much difficulty to carry on the large farm alone,
as it was found impossible to hire labor. After various experiences
in the West, the youngest of these five soldier
boys had been transferred to the army of the Potomac, and
marched under Burnside to those awful and hopeless charges
on the intrenched lines at Fredericksburg. A minie ball
pierced his breast, wounding the left lung, and coming out
near the spine. Though apparently a mortal wound, the
vigor of his constitution had carried him past the point of
greatest danger, and he was nearly well when he went out
to the water-side to see a monitor launched. The exposure
was too great; a cold fastened upon the injured lung, and
his life was despaired of. When lowest he had sent a message
to his father from ward A to come on at once. But
before his father reached Chester his boy had been removed
to ward D. When the old man arrived, having travelled
night and day fifteen hundred miles, hoping and praying
that it might not be too late, he saw some soldiers, and
asked them if they were from ward A. They said they
were. He then asked if his son was there, describing him
and giving his name. `No; there was no such man in
ward A.' Presently he met another squad from the same
ward, who gave the same report. Then the old man's heart
sank within him. But he came up to the hospital, and
They knew nothing of any such man. Finally, a surgeon
from ward D happened to be present as the father was
repeating the description, and without saying anything,
sent for the young man to come to the office. Summoned
thus peremptorily, the poor boy crept off his cot, and came
slowly forward through the hall, supposing that a false
charge had been made against him, and he would have to
march off to the guard-house. In a moment he found himself
clasped in his father's arms. It was their first meeting
for two years. The father said it seemed to him as though
he had him back from the grave, and, like another Jacob,
he lifted up his voice and wept.
"He was so pleased with the hospital and satisfied with
the attention his boy received, that after much debate he
concluded to leave him there; and yet he would add, his
eye growing moist again, `I don't know but it will kill his
mother, when she sees me coming back without him!'"
In the early part of the summer of 1863 the Chester hospital
was broken up, and for about eighteen months Miss
Usher was not engaged in army work. Early in the winter
of 1864 and 1865 we find her again at the front, near Petersburg,
actively laboring for the Maine boys. The hut in
which she lived and the life of excitement and hardship
which she, with Mrs. Mayhew and Mrs. Eaton, led, are described
in a series of letters addressed to her friends at
home. The following by Mrs. Eaton, dated City Point,
December 8, 1864, gives an account of their establishment
there, and the way in which their log hut was built: —
"For a week we have been very busy. The first Maine
The second and third batteries sent teams to haul it;
the second battery and first battalion of Maine sharpshooters
have sent their men to put it up. We are under great
obligations to them for their kindness, as it is against military
regulations to detail men from these grounds for such
a purpose.
"Our stockade is now all up and chinked, but we have
no door or fireplace. Our roof is of canvas, and we use
rubber blankets, quilts, and bed-sacks for doors. A nice
little army stove was given me for our use on yesterday.
To-morrow we expect to build the chimney; and all this is
being done while we live within. You may imagine the
confusion, with our pile of stores in the centre, to give
room to set up the logs, and a long procession of our boys
continually coming for what is frequently at the bottom of
the pile. The stockade is forty feet by fifteen, and contains
three apartments: at the entrance is a reading-room,
which we mean to make literally a `Soldier's Home,' then
our own dormitory and store-room, and in the rear the
cook-house. We wish to keep our reading-room supplied
with late Maine papers, and with stationery, that the boys
may have facilities for writing here. Sacks, boxes, and
barrels are piled six feet high on every side."
Here these ladies staid, and devoted themselves to the
work for which they left home, for six months, until Richmond
fell, Lee capitulated, and the war was over.
On the 8th of February Miss Usher writes home as
follows: —
"Our vegetables, twenty-eight barrels, came on Monday,
picked them over, throwing away those that had been
frozen on the passage. There were twenty barrels of good
potatoes to distribute. All day the soldiers roasted them in
the ashes of the reading-room fire; and some would ask us
for a strip of salt fish, and thus made out, as they said, a
luxurious meal. Could you see how glad the men are of
them, you would feel that it pays to send them, even though
a fourth are lost by freezing. The soldiers come in and ask
for a potato, as if it were the most delicious peach, or a
bunch of Hamburg grapes. A Pennsylvania boy, sick in
one of the wards, heard Mrs. Mayhew say our potatoes had
come; but she supposed they were all frozen, they had been
so long on the way. The next day she received a note from
him, asking if she would be so kind as to let him have a
few of those frozen potatoes. Of course we sent the poor
fellow some nice ones."
On the 7th of April, just after the great closing battles of
the war, Miss Usher writes home as follows: —
"Dear E.: The wards are filled with the wounded. It
is estimated that there are ten thousand patients in the
hospitals here, and our Maine regiments have suffered
severely. We are very busy, doing all in our power to
alleviate suffering. Eleven hundred badly wounded were
brought in on one day. In the evening the wards are dismal
enough — long and narrow, without floors, dimly lighted
with lanterns, and resounding with the groans of the sick
and dying. Mrs. Mayhew and Mrs. Sampson go to the front
to-morrow. One of us will work there all the time now.
"A few days ago I saw Bridget, who came out with the
since. She had just come in with the body of a captain
who was killed in a cavalry skirmish. She had the body
lashed to her horse, and carried him fifteen miles, where
she procured a coffin, and sent him home. She says this
is the hardest battle they have had, and the ground was
covered with the wounded. She had not slept for forty-eight
hours, having worked incessantly with the wounded.
She is brave, heroic, and a perfect enthusiast in her work.
Bridget said to me, in her earnest way, `Why don't you
ladies go up there, and take care of those wounded men?
Why, it's the worst sight you ever saw. The ground is
covered with them.' `We should like to go,' I said, `but
they won't let us.' `Well, they can't hinder me,' she said;
`Sheridan won't let them.'"
Mrs. Mayhew, in speaking of her life before Petersburg,
during the winter and spring of 1865, refers to Miss Usher
in the following language: "My labors here were shared
by Miss Rebecca R. Usher, of Hollis, Maine. By her warm
interest in the cause, and her highly cultivated mind, she
added much to my happiness, and lightened those days
of toil."
In a letter home, dated the 28th of May, and written
from Alexandria, Miss Usher gives the following incidents
of her hospital experiences there and at City Point: —
"One of our patients — a young man, twenty-two years
old — had an amputation of the thigh bone, near the body,
and we nursed him very anxiously, hoping he might recover,
yet fearing the worst; but in a few days he was
seized with one of those slight chills which do not seem an
indicate great danger. As he was gradually sinking,
I wrote daily to his mother, informing her of every change.
One morning, as I was standing at his bedside, he took a
package of letters from under his pillow, and handing them
to me, said, `I want you to keep these for me.' Then he
gave me a lady's ring, saying, feebly, `If I die — you —
will answer these letters — won't you? — and return — the
ring.' Waiting some time, to gain a little strength, he
said, suddenly, `Bend your ear close down to my lips.' I
bent over him, and he said, in an earnest tone, as if his
whole heart was in the words, `Tell her I loved her all the
while!' `I will,' I said; when he looked into my face with
a satisfied expression, and soon fell asleep. Shortly after I
found it my duty to open the package and perform the sad
work to which the dying lover had commissioned me.
"Mrs. C., a widow lady, living in Houlton, Maine,
had lost one son in the war, and came to our hospital in
search of her youngest boy, from whom she had received a
letter, stating that in battle before Richmond, he had lost
one leg, was wounded in the other, and was on his way to
City Point. After waiting a fortnight, and hearing nothing
more from him, she set out for Washington, and wrote to
us for information. The state agent, Mr. Hayes, searched
the hospital records through, but could find no account of
him. Then she came down to City Point, but we could
give her little encouragement. The supposition was, that
he had died on the way from one hospital to another, and
was buried as `unknown.' Mr. Hayes, however, offered
to go up to the front, and hunt for him. Next evening he
doing very well in one of the hospitals. `Now,' said I,
`Mrs. C., you'll sleep to-night — won't you?' `O, no,'
she replied; `I'm too happy. I can't sleep now till I'm at
his side.' And the next day she joined her boy."
| MISS REBECCA R. USHER. Women of the war : | |