 | WOMEN OF THE WAR. Women of the war : |  |
WOMEN OF THE WAR.
MRS. FANNY RICKETTS.
NO page in the history of the bloody war which has
just now come to an end is so brilliant as that illuminated
by a record of the noble sacrifices and exploits of
heroic women.
The historian of other wars can point to affecting though
isolated cases of courage and devotion, but no annals are so
rich as ours in those deliberate acts of unquestioning self-sacrifice,
which at once ennoble our estimate of human
nature, and increase the homage we pay to the virtues of
woman.
American mothers, with more than Spartan patriotism,
sent forth their sons to fall by rebel bullets, or to languish
in rebel prisons. Many loyal women along the vexed
border, and within the lines of the enemy, exhibited a
more than human courage for the Union and its glorious
banner, in the face of persecution and danger. In the hospital,
and amid the stormy scenes of war, they displayed a
the charity of Florence Nightingale, and repeated the
humility and gentle sacrifices recorded of Mary in the
sacred Scriptures.
Every one, thoughtful and true, must admire and appreciate
the memorable conduct of the young wife Gertrude, of
mediæval times, who knelt at the foot of the wheel upon
which her unfortunate husband hung in excruciating torture,
praying for the wretched sufferer, whispering words
of consolation, and sustaining him with exhortations to
look at the joys beyond. "He had ceased to try to send
her away," says the historian, "and still she watched when
morning came again, and noon passed over her, and it was
verging to evening when for the last time he moved his
head, and she raised herself so as to be close to him.
With a smile, he murmured, `Gertrude, this is faithfulness
till death,' and died."
Mrs. Hemans, in her exquisite way, has given utterance
to this elevated sentiment of self-sacrifice in the beautiful
lines, —
Of glory and of bliss;
Doubt not its memory's living power
To strengthen me through this.
And thou, mine honored love and true,
Bear on, bear nobly on;
We have the blesséd heaven in view,
Whose rest shall soon be won."
Similar in intensity and fortitude was the spirit manifested
by the lady whose name heads this chapter. More than once
was her husband mangled under the iron wheel of battle.
sword were brought to the agonized wife. But she overcame
all obstacles, penetrated the hostile lines, reached the
side of his bloody stretcher, went into captivity with him,
and made his spared life and recovered health the monument
of her unwavering and heroic devotion.
The father of Mrs. Ricketts, Mr. J. Sharpe Lawrence,
was an Englishman of wealth, possessing large estates in
the Island of Jamaica, where he met Miss Ricketts, the
youngest daughter of Captain Ricketts, of the British
army, and Sarah Livingston, whose American connections
have been celebrated in our history from colonial times.
The father and mother of Mrs. Ricketts were married at
Elizabeth, New Jersey, where, after some years of migratory
life between England and the West Indies, they
decided to remain, and where their third daughter, Fanny
Lawrence, was born.
Her education was principally conducted by that best
of all teachers, her mother, who brought to the delightful
and sacred task not merely the love of a mother, but a
mind of uncommon clearness, which had been admirably
trained and stored by life-long habits of close observation
and wise reading.
In January, 1856, Miss Lawrence was married to a distant
relative on her mother's side, James B. Ricketts, then
a captain in the first artillery U. S. A., and immediately
went with him to the distant south-western frontier of the
republic, on the Rio Grande, where his company was
stationed.
Here she remained with him for more than three years,
to the long-contested battle-grounds along the Potomac.
Their life on the Mexican frontier was full of interest,
novelty, and adventure. The first artillery was often
engaged in repulsing the irregular and roving bands of
Cortinas, who rode over the narrow boundary river in
frequent raids and stealing expeditions into Texas. When
in camp, Mrs. Ricketts greatly endeared herself to the men
in her husband's company by constant acts of kindness to
the sick, and by showing a cheerful and lively disposition
amid all the hardships and annoyances of garrison life at
such a distance from home, and from the comforts and
refinements of our American civilization.
She was a spirit of mercy as well as good cheer; and
many a poor fellow knew that, if he could but get her ear,
his penance in the guard-house for some violation of the
regulations would be far less severe on account of her
gentle and womanly plea.
In the spring of 1861 the first artillery was ordered to
Fortress Monroe, and her husband, together with the gallant
and accomplished Greble, who fell a few weeks after
at Bethel, carried on an artillery school of practice, where
the future heroes of the Chickahominy, and Fredericksburg,
and Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg were taught to
handle, with fatal skill, the engines of warlike art. A few
weeks before the first advance under McDowell, Captain
Ricketts was ordered to Alexandria, to command a battery
of light artillery. Mrs. Ricketts was constantly with him,
both here and while on the Peninsula. The brave boys
were so accustomed to her presence at headquarters, and
graceful charities away on the distant Rio Grande, that she
remained with them until the eve of the grand advance in
the middle of July, 1861, when she was, for the first time,
separated from her husband by military rules; and while
he and the company moved on to Centreville, and thence
to "battle's magnificently stern array" on the plains of Manassas,
she returned, crushed with a nameless foreboding, to
her temporary home in Washington, to do all that woman
can when she sends her chosen one, and her other self, into
the untold and innumerable dangers of war. She could
only do what thousands of others did — watch, and hope,
and pray, listening with heavy hearts to the far-off roar,
and grasping with wild avidity at every fragment of news
from the hotly-contested field.
On the evening of the 21st, rumors, and then messengers
came hurring to her room, confirming the very worst fears
of an agonized wife. Persons hitherto unknown to her
called to give her the most harrowing details of the wounds
her husband had suffered; and then his death was announced.
All these accounts she persistently refused to credit, clinging
to the mighty hope that nothing but absolute conviction
can quench in the loving heart. At last what seemed to
be fatal evidence was adduced. Lieutenant E. D. Baker,
then aid-de-camp to General Franklin, brought her the
captain's sword, and repeated in her ears his dying words —
"Give this to my wife; tell her I have done my duty to
my country, and my last words are of her and our child."
This was soon afterwards confirmed by the tearful sympathy
of Captain Ricketts's junior lieutenant, the gallant
for the captain's body. At this the agonized wife was
plunged into an abyss of despair, and of painful clinging to
hope against hope, almost as heavy as desperation; and
this dreadful state lasted through two nights, when the
lingering flame of hope was roused into a mighty and controlling
motive, by a telegram from General Wadsworth,
stating that an officer, who met his flag of truce, informed
him that Captain Ricketts was alive, but dangerously
wounded and a prisoner.
Without a moment's hesitation, she determined, at all
hazards and despite all obstacles, to reach his side. Repairing
at once to Captain (now General) Beckwith, of the
subsistence department, he procured for her a light carriage,
drawn by two horses, and a driver, whose southern
sympathies were such as to make him more than willing to
pass within the rebel lines. General Scott gave her a pass
valid to the extent of the Union lines, and thus equipped,
and wholly unattended, she started on the search for her
wounded and perhaps dying husband. She drove on,
without material delay, till halted by the rebel pickets; and
she was obliged to remain lingering in an agony of suspense
and doubt, till a note, written by her to the cavalry
leader, Stuart, whom she had known in sunnier days on the
Rio Grande, had been carried to him, and was returned
with the permission indorsed to advance within the southern
lines as far as Fairfax.
Here, on learning the nature of her errand, he demanded
her signature to a written parole of honor that she would
not act the part of a spy. Notwithstanding her extreme
in pieces before his eyes, replying, "I am no spy, but the
wife of a wounded officer, and will go as your prisoner,
but never sign a parole."
Ex-Senator Wigfall, of Texas, here remonstrated, and
some discussion followed, when Stuart rudely told her to
drive on at once. But she knew too well the difficulties
into which she would be plunged if she drove on as ordered
on a road crowded with rebel soldiers, or through a country
swarming with exultant and straggling cavalry.
She knew the usage to which, by the rules of honorable
warfare, she was entitled, and insisted on being supplied
with a pass and a guide to the headquarters of General
Joseph E. Johnston. This request was at length unwillingly
acceded to, and she was soon face to face with the rebel
hero of Bull Run, who, without much hesitation, allowed
her to drive to a house situated on a part of the field still
crimsoned with the streams of battle, where her husband
had been carried. What fearful and ghastly scenery now
surrounded this young and delicately-reared woman! The
first vision of that terrible picture was stamped on her
brain, to be effaced only by death. Corpses, swollen by
incipient decomposition, stripped of every shred of clothing,
were sweltering all around, under the heat of a July
sun. In the court-yard of the house where she was informed
that her husband could be found, lay rows of the
wounded and the dead. On the door-step, as she entered, lay
an arm, all mangled and bloody, which a surgeon had just
amputated and tossed down there, as carelessly as though
it had been a chicken's leg; while under the window she
of two days' amputation. The hall was narrow and nearly
obstructed by a large mahogany dining-table, on which was
lashed a wretched victim, who was writhing in almost mortal
agony under the knife and saw of the operator. Blood
was over the floor and on the walls, and had spirted
from severed arteries, so that the very ceiling was spotted
with scarlet.
Passing on up stairs, she found six wounded men in a
small chamber, five ranged along the wall on the floor, and
one, more pallid than the rest, very still, on a bloody
stretcher. This was her husband!
At first he was unconscious, but at length feebly murmured
in her ear, "I knew you would come."
A Union surgeon who was in attendance, and whose
unremitting and skilful care saved the limb and the life
of Captain Ricketts, Dr. Lewis, of Michigan, urged upon
her the importance of self-control, and the removal from the
enfeebled sufferer of everything calculated to excite or
alarm; and from that moment on, through all the anxieties
and sufferings that followed, she armed herself in a fortitude
that seemed almost stoical and unnatural.
Though her husband's life was hanging as by a thread,
so that a little neglect might be fatal to him, her woman's
heart could not resist the appeals that all night long came
up from the different rooms of that house of suffering and
of horror for water. She rose from the floor beside her
husband, and taking a part of the small supply that a surgeon
had brought for his hot and swollen leg, from a spring
half a mile distant, she groped her way among the groaning
she was startled by the fearful announcement, made in a
clear voice, that rose above the groaning, "He is gone,
our brave corporal! The Lord gave and the Lord hath
taken away." This called her attention to the speaker,
whom she learned to be Prescott, of the fourteenth Brooklyn
regiment. He, too, poor fellow, was "taken away,"
but not without passing through a furnace of suffering so
terrible that he had occasion to envy the earlier and less
painful death of the brave corporal. His leg was hopelessly
shattered, and was amputated above the knee three
times within a week; and then he was transported to Richmond
in a box-car, where the stump was so bruised that
the artery was opened, and he bled to death at last.
For two weeks Mrs. Ricketts remained with her husband
in the house where she found him. The means furnished
for rendering the sufferers comfortable were of the lowest
possible order, and that, too, in a country abounding in the
luxuries of old civilization, and within a few hours' ride of
the national capital. No food was furnished but raw
bacon and hard-tack, with some coffee and sugar, captured
at Centreville; no cooks, or facilities for cooking, the surgeons,
after their long toils with the wounded during the
day, being obliged to bring water a half mile, and prepare
the food as best they could.
The effluvium from the battle-field was such that the
rebel camps were removed. Finally, the odor became so
intolerable that the guards left. Then appeared that loathsome
curse and epidemic of army hospitals, gangrene, and
it was determined to break up the field hospitals, and
order to that effect was issued on the 3d of August.
Captain Ricketts's wounds were more dangerous, and his
situation more critical, in the early part of August, when
he was removed to Richmond, than at any time since the
battle. He had been hit in three places; but the wound
which gave him the greatest pain, and which for weeks
rendered his recovery doubtful, was from a ball that had
entered his left leg, near the knee joint, shattering the
bone, and followed by such pain and swelling, that mortification
was constantly feared.
So great was the danger from this latter source, that
twice Mrs. Ricketts had expostulated, with all the earnestness
of woman, with the surgeons, who insisted that amputation
was absolutely necessary. But considering the heat
of the season, the discomforts and privations under which
he was suffering, and the amount of corruption and the
gangrene which abounded among all the wounded, she was
satisfied that his chances of recovery would not be improved
by the dreaded operation.
In the removal to Richmond Mrs. Ricketts was able to
secure for him a hospital car, instead of the rude box cars,
which gave fatal jolts to many a poor fellow who might
otherwise have recovered.
In praiseworthy contrast to the rudeness and indifference
generally manifested by the rebel officers, and the insults
of rebel women heaped upon them at the different stations,
the conduct of Wade Hampton, and of Stonewall Jackson,
and of Major Webb, of North Carolina, was considerate and
generous. Colonel Hampton brought ale and refreshments
after, Mrs. Ricketts was able to repay the civilities of Major
Webb, by procuring his pardon and release from Johnson's
Island, where he was confined as a prisoner.
Notwithstanding the sea of horrors into which this devoted
pair had been plunged by the results of the battle,
and the ghastly surroundings of the battle-field, where
they had remained for two weeks, they found their situation
worse, if possible, in Richmond.
The wounded prisoners were taken to the city poorhouse.
Crowded into those dreary and cheerless rooms,
between bare brick walls and the roof uncieled, these sufferers
lay on the dirty floors, and pined, and languished,
and felt hope and life die out in their breasts, when comfortable
surroundings might have saved most of them.
The fare was coarse and unpalatable to the last degree,
even to persons in health, and utterly revolting to the
patients, whose systems were reduced by loss of blood and
by the nervous prostration of unceasing pain. Captain
Ricketts grew worse, and the gloomiest forebodings pressed
like lead upon the brave heart of the heroic wife. Again
the surgeons consulted over his dreadfully swollen leg, and
prescribed amputation; and again it was spared to the
entreaties of his wife, who was certain that his now greatly
enfeebled constitution would not survive the shock. Much
of the time he lay unconscious, and for weeks his life
depended entirely on the untiring patience and skill with
which his wife soothed down the rudeness of his prisonhouse,
cheering him and other prisoners who were so
fortunate as to be in the room with him, and alleviating
the slow misery that was settling like a pall upon them.
Yet none of the prisoners, at least in the daytime, had
the luxury of being private in their sorrow. At all hours
crowds of curious and listless gazers were permitted to
come and feast upon this spectacle of suffering, as though
these wounded officers and the solitary woman that was
sharing their prison life were savages caught in the act of
cannibalism in the Feejee Islands.
The daily papers of the city were constantly pandering
to this savage taste, by suggesting greater cruelty and
worse hardships as the proper desert of men who had
"polluted the sacred soil of Virginia by the foot of the
invader."
To the credit, however, of some whose public acts were
thoroughly disunion, it must be admitted that in private
they discharged some of the duties of humanity towards
these wounded prisoners. The wife of Adjutant-General
Cooper and the sister of James M. Mason, both repeatedly
sent Mrs. Ricketts and her husband baskets of delicate and
palatable food; and both these ladies, in defiance of the
bitter and vulgar prejudice which was nourished by the
daily press, paid them visits of respect, and manifested a
womanly kindness and regard.
There was also, in the lower walks of life, a touching
instance of womanly sympathy which deserves respectful
mention, even as the charity of Mary Magdalene has been
forever rescued from oblivion by the pen of the sacred
historian.
There was a woman who had formerly lived in New
York, and at that time was living with a well-known gambler
in Richmond, who daily and regularly ministered to
came to the ears of the officials, who forbade her sending
them any more food. But, with the wit and perseverance
of a woman, she at length obtained such a modification of
the order as would allow her once a week to send a basket
to Mrs. Ricketts. This basket, which came each Sabbath
morning, was packed with the most substantial viands, and
gave Mrs. Ricketts the pleasure of providing her husband,
who had now commenced slowly to recover, with food that
he could relish, and, with the rest, broke, at least for one
day, the dreary and tasteless monotony of prison fare.
But the abyss of wretchedness was not sounded yet.
Nearly three months of imprisonment had elapsed while
these suffering patriots were languishing, yet hoping that
the great republic, in whose invincible might and perpetual
integrity they never lost confidence, would turn upon her
enemies, and burst their prison doors with a grand and
decisive victory. But, in the last days of October, they
heard the tramp of the prisoners taken at Ball's Bluff passing
through the streets of Richmond, and the jeers and
taunts of the rebel mob that followed at their heels.
There now came an order breaking up the little group
of fellow-sufferers, whose sorrows had united them in a
deep, though sombre friendship. Colonel Willcox, who
was now nearly well of a terrible wound in the arm, was
sent to Charleston, and the other convalescents were to be
confined in Libby Prison. Soon after this removal to that
abode of nameless horror, that has since become famous in
its infamy, Mrs. Ricketts was reclining at night upon the
narrow cot beside her husband's stretcher, when she heard
darkness, and coolly announced that Captain Ricketts had
been selected as one of the thirteen officers of highest rank
in possession of the Confederate government, as hostages
for the thirteen privateersmen held in New York. He was
to go to the condemned cell, and be liable at any moment to
execution, whenever the rebel government might learn of
the execution of their imprisoned sailors. Conceive the
mental suffering of that devoted wife during the long hours
of that dreadful night!
After four months of untold suffering, and having much
of the time hung insensible on the verge of life, he was
now beginning to gain strength, and with fair treatment
might live and be strong again. But on the morrow he
was to be carried away from her, and beyond all her ministrations
or visits, and locked in the felon's cell — a dungeon
reserved for prisoners convicted of infamous crimes, and
liable any day to be dragged out to a cruel death.
But Mrs. Ricketts was not a woman to yield to a disaster
so appalling without using every possible means to avert
the blow. In Mrs. Cooper she thought she had a friend
whose husband had influence at rebel headquarters, and as
soon as daylight enabled her to trace the lines, she composed
a letter, such as only such a wife could write in such
a crisis. Mrs. Cooper was moved, and the rebel secretary,
who on the 11th of November had issued the fearful order
that included Captain Ricketts, on the 12th instructed
General Winder that "all the wounded officers had been
exempted as hostages." The motive which Mrs. Cooper
brought to bear upon his mind was not any suggestion of
might damage the fair name of the Confederacy in the eyes
of the people of Europe.
When the name of Captain Ricketts was first read, there
occurred one of those instances of prompt and manly self-sacrifice,
that elevate our estimate of human nature, and
deserves record and perpetual remembrance. Captain
Thomas Cox, of the first Kentucky volunteers, exclaimed
at once, "What, that wounded man, attended by such a
devoted wife? Let me go in his place!"
The constant draught upon the vital powers made by such
a long series of watchings, sufferings, and by anxiety so acute
and agonizing, at length began to appear in the shattered
health of Mrs. Ricketts; and permission was asked, and,
after long delay, granted, for her to drive out daily, and
for a little while to breathe air purer than that of Libby
Prison.
But before this little boon could be of any practical
advantage, the exchanged officer arrived in Richmond, and
the pallid but now convalescent invalid dragged his still
painful limb across the threshold of Libby Prison, and with
his heroic wife took the first train for Fairfax. It was
now the last week of December, 1861. Some months
elapsed before Mrs. Ricketts recovered her health; but
Captain Ricketts recovered very rapidly, and had the satisfaction
of knowing that government recognized his services
and his sufferings; for in the spring of 1862 he received the
commission of a brigadier-general, and was assigned to
duty in McDowell's corps, at Fredericksburg. Mrs.
Ricketts remained with him for some months that followed,
in the valley, General Ricketts commanded the second
division first army corps, and the corps being constantly
on the march or in battle, she was obliged to retire for a
few weeks to her home in Washington.
But Antietam gave him back to her society again, as Bull
Run had the year before, though not under circumstances
quite so painful. He was wounded in the same leg as in
the former battle, by his horse being shot and rolling upon
him. The injury thus occasioned confined him during the
fall of 1862, and in the winter of 1862-'63 he was on duty
at Washington, as president of the military commission.
When the battle at Chancellorsville was fought, in May,
1863, Lieutenant Kirby, who had been a brother officer
with General Ricketts when both were in the first artillery,
was brought to Washington in a very feeble state, having
suffered the amputation of a limb. The poor fellow was
carried to the general's house in Washington, where Mrs.
Ricketts took care of him with that patient kindness which
is so unspeakably grateful to a sufferer. But care and skill
could not save him. He did not live to read his commission
as brigadier. Other officers and sufferers of every
grade now claimed her attention, for Gettysburg soon
followed; and during all that summer and fall she continued
her labors among those who seemed most to require her
attentions, her husband having recovered his health, and
returned to participate in all the battles in which his corps
was engaged.
In the summer of 1864, when Grant advanced on Richmond,
General Ricketts distinguished himself greatly in
of General Meade; and, a few weeks after, his division
fought the battle of Monocacy, the effect of which was to
delay the last rebel invasion, and give the Union troops
time to concentrate for the final repulse of Ewell from
Maryland.
Soon after, in September, 1864, the sixth corps went up
the Shenandoah Valley with Sheridan, and in October the
battle of Cedar Run was fought; and there General Ricketts
received his third serious wound, which came nearer being
fatal than any former injury. A ball pierced his right
breast, and the report came to Washington that his wound
was mortal. His wife's fidelity, and the story of her sufferings
at Richmond, had become known to government, and she
obtained not only a pass, but a mounted escort, who went
with her up the valley, to protect her from the attacks of
Mosby's guerrillas, who were swarming everywhere in the
rear of the battle-field. She found General Ricketts far
more comfortably situated than on that memorable occasion
three years before. The ball had been extracted; but the
nature and situation of the wound rendered his recovery
a long time doubtful, and for four anxious and weary
months she was hanging over his couch, and doing everything
that love and skill could suggest to save a life that
had now become doubly precious to her for the sufferings
and the anxieties which had been devolved upon both by
stern demands of the country. At length, as spring opened
in 1865, and when Sherman had wheeled, in the magnificent
curve of his grand march, from Atlanta to Savannah, and
northward to the rear of the long-beleaguered city, the
General Ricketts was among those who, having suffered so
long and so much, desired to "be in at the death." The
wish was not denied him. In April he was with his old
corps, and chased the routed and crumbling rebel column
to Danville, where the effect of cold and exposure made
both his wounds very painful, and he was obliged to quit
the field. Again, and now for the last time, the devoted
wife hurries along the familiar roads, and presses forward
to where the suffering hero needs her cheerful presence and
her skilful care.
The war is now over. The great events of April crowd
in quick succession — the capture of Richmond, the surrender
of Lee, and the murder of Lincoln; but General
Ricketts and his wife still linger in camp, for his wounds
are still painful. But at length the sixth corps, that had
marched, and suffered, and fought so many hard battles on
the soil of Virginia, moves off northward, crosses the
Potomac; and then, but not till then, the duties of the
heroic general and his no less heroic wife are ended.
With the first boom of the deadly thunder at Manassas,
she had been called away from her life of joyous ease and
peaceful love, and so long as the noise of that long war
lasted, she had known no rest nor intermission in her labors
of womanly care and devotion.
It was not until she had left the soil of Virginia, peaceful
now, but all scarred with battles and drenched in blood,
that she could fully realize that that precious life was now
no longer at hazard in the fierce storms of battle.
Does not every reader join in the prayer that years of
and suffering so great? May we not apply to her the
dying words of the Suabian nobleman to his wife,
"Gertrude, this is faithfulness to the end," and the wish
of the English poet for his friend, whom he compares to
"that fair Syrian shepherdess," —
Sweet rest seize thee evermore"?
| WOMEN OF THE WAR. Women of the war : | |