Day 25. March 25, 1862.
25
Ephraim wrote 3 pages today. First page is the post header.
rolling a piece of lint in his hands and rubbing the floor with it….
March Tuesday 25
Quite cool this morning. I got up felt somewhat rested. I got up eat some few crackers for breakfast. I was helping to dress the wounded men. There was 4 amputations performed today 3 above the knee 1 below. It is hard for men to serve their country and then lose their limbs or arms* and very very often their lives. There has been a fight out at Cedar Creek and driven back on the other side of Strausburg where they made a stand on the old battleground March 19 1862. They were soon rooted out of that place and fell back and losing their men and retreating all the time and I have not heard the result yet. I am now at the Union Hospital Winchester. The ladies are bringing in a grate many things for the wounded soldiers. There was a CS Captain died last night and a Lieutenant of the CS. There was some 6 died last night. There are a good many that have died of their wounds. It is awful to think of these things. I have saw a grate deal and I hope I may live so I may always live and put my trust in him the allwise being and the giver of all things and believe in him the allwise giver oh I wish and pray that this war may soon come to a speedy close and peace be restored to our country and prosperity will or may attend us again. There was news came that there was a large lot of supplies coming on for the wounded soldiers and the sick. There a large lot of them. The poor wounded have to suffer much. I think the Doctors do not do their duty or as much as they have a right to do and many a poor soldier die for the want of proper attention. Oh I hope they will be attend in due time. They complain very much of having too much to do but what are they for. I do solemnly say they do not do as much as they are bound to do by their solemn vows and I hope the day may soon come that all such may be attended to and the needs relieve of their pains
* Flap (healed faster) and circular (open wound at the stump) amputations were the two usual types during the war. It went tourniquet, scalpel, Caitlin knife, bone saw, then tying off the arteries with various substances like horsehair or cotton. Surgeons had the most success if they could get a limb off within 48 hours of injury.
Note: Likely supply wagons: https://www.loc.gov/item/91787203/
Ephraim’s doctor comment:
I think Ephraim feels very strongly about the doctors’ behavior at the Union Hotel/Hospital today, March 25, as this is the longest topic he’s delved into specific to how the medical side of the war is run thus far. He seems crushed. Any other medical-related words Ephraim ever used regarding his work as Steward were short, like packing up the medicines, losing the medicine box during battle, or noting briefly it’s hard to see men have limbs taken off.
Plus, Ephraim had, right up until tonight, when he sat to write this entry, been quite direct with his thoughts and feelings about his surroundings. Up to tonight he had yet to write anything negative about anyone but the Secesh. Not until March 30 will he will complain about anyone again, & yet again, no names: some of our chaplins are rather careless and I think that some of them don’t think much about the future wellfare of their fellow men. Ephraim must know the 110th chaplain’s name is Jeremiah Schindel… Schindel will get court-martialed eventually (see March 30).
So why Ephraim did not include any anecdotes or asides about the doctor he worked with daily (& even travelled with outside camp) for 3 ½ months is a mystery. Contrast how much “the ladies” tried to alleviate suffering while the male doctors neglected basic duties; tonight’s entry would have been a prime place to have Hays shine for all the work he did around the clock at the hotel/hospital.
It’s clear Ephraim is disgusted with more than one doctor because he refers to them in the plural. But were he not referring to Hays, he might have written something along the lines of (if this were in his voice), “Except for our 110th Dr. Hays,” or, “I am thankful to the Lord our doctor worked hard for the suffering.”
On the topic of medical neglect: A week after Ephraim leaves (June 13) the field for good, Hays gets summoned to D.C. to defend himself before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War for his supposed gross negligence for mid-June abandoning trains of injured soldiers. And Huyett will travel to D.C. to testify on Hays’ behalf, too. Ephraim was in D.C. right then, as well, but didn’t know to stick around for a few days to wait & testify on Hays’ behalf because it’s not like he had a cell phone to take Hays’ or Huyett’s call to remain in D.C. for court. Ephraim was unreachable. It could be Hays very much wanted Ephraim to testify on his behalf alongside Huyett. These were formidable men interrogating Hays, but he held up beautifully despite the absurd circumstance of the two lost dispatches, two dispatches that will affect the rest of his life, and his wife’s. It’s truly kafkaesque.
It will be June 16, 1862, that Hammond writes Stanton:
“Respectfully transmitted to the Secretary of War. Surgeon Hays has exhibited a total want of comprehension of his duties, if not the grossest inhumanity. Whilst the men were being removed to the hospitals he absented himself, leaving the whole duty of taking care of these wounded soldiers to the medical officers having charge of the ambulances.
I therefore respectfully recommend that severe and summary punishment be awarded to Surgeon Hays. This is the second time within a short period that surgeons bringing sick and wounded to this city have neglected them. An example would be highly beneficial.”
Stanton jumps on it, with:
“Referred to the adjutant general, with instructions to dismiss Surgeon Hays for neglect of duty.”
The marked silence in Ephraim’s entry tonight, March 25th, his lack of words about how Hays did or did not help the injured at the hotel/hospital may mean he was not impressed with Hays today. It’s unclear what Ephraim’s silence meant, or how it can be deconstructed in the light of Hays’ eventual termination then reinstatement.
By the time mid-June rolls around, had Ephraim caught some rumor on the wind Lincoln was about to kick Hays out of the army? If so, Ephraim may have figured out he would either have to act as Hays’ character witness, or not, & say something else. Did Ephraim already know on June 13th that Huyett was going to have to appear in D.C. to defend Hays, too? No, as that’s the day Hays’ trains arrived in D.C. where General Ricketts & Dr. Cox refuse Hays any medicines or dressings, & claim no one knew Hays was arriving because his two telegrams stating he was inbound never got delivered.
The telegrams between Hammond, Stanton, & Letterman are dated June 16, so Hays and Huyett did not yet know about the pending Joint Committee by June 13 when Ephraim leaves. So Ephraim couldn’t have known either, when he left for home, on the 13 & 14th passing through D.C., that Hays & Huyett would have to travel to D.C. for interrogation over those coming two days, June 20 and 21.
Nevertheless, I wonder that something was yet to come on the wind between now & mid-June that leads Ephraim to figure Hays would inevitably get in hot water. I’m dwelling ad nauseam on this because his March 25 diary entry leads me to believe Ephraim is desperately let down by the doctors, if not Hays himself, yet for some reason does not specifically refer to Hays when he sits down to write tonight. The timing is curious in some way for Ephraim’s departure. We watch, day by day, as he sinks further into his bones, then reaches his breaking point where he just can’t take it anymore.
This is Henry H. Smith, Surgeon General of Pennsylvania, for the Joint Committee in June, a letter of support for Hays about Kernstown, the March 23 battle (excerpt):
“After the battle at Winchester, March 23, 1862, I personally witnessed your untiring devotion to your duties in the Union Hotel hospital, and on my return to Pennsylvania I repeatedly spoke of them in terms of praise. The charge recently made against you of “gross negligence of your wounded and inhumanity” has surprised me and all who know your energetic habits, and, I trust may be entirely disproved before a court of inquiry, as, I doubt not, they will.”
And here’s a preview of court in D.C. (excerpt):
Ephraim’s friend 110th Captain Huyett will get sworn in on the 21st before the Joint Committee (his name spelled incorrectly in the record as “Hewitt”); this is part of his testimony re Hays:
Question: You did not come to Washington with him when he came here in charge of the sick and wounded from Front Royal?
Answer: No, sir. In regard to his reputation, I have always thought he had a reputation beyond that of many other surgeons. After the battle of Winchester he was the head of the hospitals there. He not only had his own regiment to attend to, but a half a dozen others to see to at the same time. Among the men of our regiment his reputation is very good; and we all are very sorry, and regret, exceedingly, the misfortune that has happened to him.”
Question: Do you know why he was transferred from his regiment to the hospital in Winchester?
Answer: I do not know. I thought it was because he was a more thorough-going surgeon than the others.
Question: Have you not heard it remarked that he was one of the best surgeons in your regiments, and that it was for that reason that he was placed at the head of the hospital?
Answer: I do not remember hearing that remark exactly. I thought so myself, I know. The men of our regiment, the 110th, thought he was more competent than other surgeons. Of course, they had more dependence upon and more confidence in him than in any other surgeons.”
And this is Hays, God bless his courage, to the Joint Committee, June 20th, (excerpt):
“Under these circumstances, with these facts existing, I ask my friends, I ask the public, if I am not being sacrificed in order to shield some one in a position much higher than I am from charges of gross negligence? Am I not made the scape-goat of other men’s sins? Who are the men in lucrative offices who should have prepared most bountifully for the reception of these sick and wounded soldiers? Ask the sick men, the wounded men themselves, if I neglected them. Ask the assistant surgeons and attendants. They know if I shirked my work or shunned any responsibility; and let them and the world say if the man who watched over these poor fellows, day and night, for almost a week, ought to be disgraced because somebody failed to provide for their comfort here.”
Conclusion: Yes, Hays got scapegoated. He telegraphed the Surgeon General twice, who should have known about Hays’ incoming trains. Along the rail line to D.C., at Manassas, unbeknownst to Hays, two additional cars got attached to his. Upon arrival in D.C., no ambulances and surgeons were in attendance. Hays asked for then got refused medical supplies. So he went to the War Department, woke up someone sleeping on the floor, asked for the Surgeon General’s home address, but the sleeper he didn’t know it. Meantime, dispatches were piled on the sleeper’s desk, who knew not where to deliver them. The regular telegraph operator was out sick, the Surgeon General was out sick, & it was like an episode of the Twilight Zone. The townspeople helped Hay’s’ assistants feed & care for Hays’ wounded soldiers, 280-325 of them. None died except two at Manassas, of fever. Soldiers on the trains repeatedly insisted they were not neglected on June 13th. Didn’t matter to the Joint Committee. Hammond, Stanton, Letterman, Covode were all determined to ruin Hays. And almost immediately, men start gunning for Hays’ job after Lincoln kicks him out via Gen. Order #66.
But Hays only gets reinstated, months later, because PA’s Governor Curtin will appeal to Lincoln by letter. The testimony regarding Dr. Hays abandoning the trainload of injured soldiers fresh from the battles on June 8 and 9 runs from pages 492-548 and is titled “Wounded From Front Royal, Virginia.” Like much writing about the war, this sums it up: “I thought if you told people facts, they’d draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people.” Babylon’s Ashes P. 169 James S.A. Corey
The sole thing Hays could conceivably get criticized for? He might have known it would look bad– even though his assistants repeatedly assured him the situation was under control & he should go rest– to leave his men & make a beeline for the Willard Hotel, much less drink champagne there (Ted Cruz jetting to Cancun a recent example of abandoning ship). As with any material from that era, the circumstances ideally will be considered in the context of that era’s mores and war emotions. The Joint Committee, the entity that called Hays to court, formed in December, 1861, usually met in secret, & dealt with generals in some kind of hot water with the war’s progress or lack thereof. The Committee investigated military defeats & increasingly threw around words like “traitor” & “disloyal.” The 8 men preferred political appointees over West Point-graduated generals. 272 meetings were held in all. Medical treatment of wounded soldiers was one area the committee was set up to investigate (other areas included illicit trade with the enemy, military contracts, battle losses, availability of horses, etc.) Harry S. Truman actually read various proceedings from the Joint Committee before the first meeting of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, & is quoted, “The nature of the congressional investigating committee has suffered violence at the hands of some who have not understood or appreciated the scope and function of such a committee.”
What does all this have to do with today, March 25? I’m investigating Hays’ culpability & feel torn about his performance today, while also previewing Hays’ eventual demise, then resurrection. I’m most interested in Ephraim’s silence, but the fact Lincoln kicked Hays out with General Orders No. 66, dated June 16, 1862, then rescinds it & lets Hays right back in, well, it goes to show something. The fog of war? The Joint Committee scapegoated Hays for the train incident, when the whole issue was the Telegraph Office’s incompetence. Instead of comprehending where the lack of communication originated, Lincoln & the men ran scared, passed the buck by piling on Hays, & Hays went down for it. Like he needed that on top of sawing off limbs & being directly responsible for all these soldier’s lives. But Hays will bounce back, go on to be in charge of a Gettysburg hospital, & a few other hospitals during the war.
Even when Hays’ diary goes up for auction at Cowan’s Auctions, whoever listed it couldn’t spell his name right. Since then, it’s been listed at “Heritage Auctions” where his name is correct. It’s still wrong on Findagrave. No, his Gettysburg diary still hasn’t been transcribed, which was a supposed selling point of the auction; I guess his ancestors didn’t give a shit. Who knows what’s in it? Aw well, it’s only Gettysburg. “An absolute wealth of heretofore unknown information.” I’d call that “afterfore” because we still don’t know what’s in it:
Then after Hays’ death, because a dismissal was grounds for denial, his wife Mary even suffers, as his pension gets axed. She lives until 1920, but Mary must force an Act through the 57th Congress to get her $12.50 a month in 1902, including showing testimonials to the Chairman of Invalid Pension Subcommittee from the supposed abandoned on the D.C. train soldiers, like “he did not leave us on the night we arrived in Washington until he had made every arrangement for our comfort.’” What is it with these Hays and Congress?
But the last word on Dr. Hays should come from Charles F. Faust, written in 1992, whom I quote at length June 16, as well as Gershman’s The Legislative Branch of Federal Government: People, Process, and Politics on the Joint Committee’s witch hunt nature. These organizations have merely changed names through the centuries like a snake shedding skin then crawling back in, the cast-off skin from a snake from another incarnation.
Self-censorship & code in written documents during the war: Because Ephraim worked so closely with, and directly under, Dr. Hays on a daily basis, he may have been leery about recording names tied to events of medical neglect because his diary could get discovered. Had Ephraim been more specific, direct, & named names, then his diary got lost & read, he may have faced disciplinary action for writing the truth about certain individual doctors’ neglect. Retrospectively dissecting a silence in a diary without context is tricky, but here his silence is embedded in a context, making it a marked silence, so it reads as an intentional code. Surely Ephraim knew these doctors’ names today, because he worked right alongside them, taking orders from them, so I think his lack of recorded names is an intentional & explicit omission. Michel-Rolph Trouillot: “Facts are not created equal: the production of traces is always also the creation of silences.”
Elizabeth Van Lew, on the hazard of keeping a diary, says it best in A Yankee Spy in Richmond (P. 25): “I always went to bed at night with anything dangerous on paper beside me so as to be able to destroy it in a moment.” She buried her journal for a while, then ultimately destroyed all her correspondence with the War Department. Why incriminate herself?
Which brings up self-censorship in letters & diaries in general (for more on the role of wartime diaries, see the introduction, still in-progress, & late June). Henry Hitchcock is an example of a writer aware of the danger should his words be found by the wrong people. In various sections of his collected letters in his book, Hitchcock instructs his wife not to share his letters or parts of his diary with others: “but you will not lend it or put it into anybody’s else hands but your own and Mother’s.” (P. 186) And in another letter home, he writes in the middle of a paragraph not to read whatever the following part was out loud. It was common during the war to read newspapers and letters home aloud to people present in your house in a parlor or wherever after the letter arrived in the mail. These letters they read out loud over & over for guests who would come & go. In a way, it was the early internet. Townspeople had no other access to information from the various fronts, except either via newspapers (of which many likely knew had fake news), or if a soldier came walking back through the town. Someone had to run into someone who was either on the field, or could be deemed an actual reliable source of news.
Last, on the topic of writing in code, Hitchcock again, as an example of that, tries a cipher 11/17/64, while 1 mile west of the Yellow River on Sherman’s March. It’s his second day out, and this is in a letter to his wife:
“Saw distant smokes to right and left—bds [my editorial note: Hitchcock’s letters: the “d” after the “b” is half the size of the “b,” as is the “s,” & both the “d” & “s” are attached to the “b” with no space between all 3 letters] muc olsdn adra woh, S[herman]—Tonight, says Sherman, “Three days more clear and don’t care!’”
Read backward: “howard and slocum.” At this point, Sherman’s men were divided into two columns: right (Howard) & left (Slocum). To the uneducated (me), it seems he’s telling Mrs. Hitchcock he sees Howard’s smoke on the right, Slocum’s to the left, & Sherman told him if they make it three more days without major attack, they can all join together, or at the least, be out of immediate danger. The puzzling part is Hitchcock thought no one would think to read it backward if his letter got intercepted.
You can find that in Marching with Sherman: Passages from the Letters and Campaign Diaries of Henry Hitchcock, Major and Assistant Adjutant General of Volunteers, November 1864–May 1865 (1927) Major Henry Hitchcock P. 63
All that said (yes, a flowchart would help; I’m writing this last-minute on Thursday to add to tomorrow’s entry so haven’t revised, sorry if it’s confusing), Hays’ situation deserves more investigation. In the summer of ’62, he made newspapers across the North for all this. I’ll just finish with imagine going the rest of your life known as the one Lincoln had to write a Special Order over to kick out of the army due to your neglecting hundreds of men who fought & died for America. Then they get your wife from the grave for it. She’ll have to get an Act past Congress, too! All because your two telegrams never got delivered.
I hope someone takes his case up. It must have also been hard on men like Huyett & others who knew him from home before the war, & the town a bit under a shroud for it. This seems one of the forgotten stories of Jackson’s Campaign, & of the war in general. I only found out about it by accident when I googled David Hays. Even now, when I try to locate what I first read years back, it’s gone. Gone into the ether like his two telegrams. What else went there? The Real War?
On to the regular programming:
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 51
“7a.m. 33; 2p.m. 48; 9p.m. 37. White frost. Richmond sunrise 5:54; sunset 6:06.”
Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia Kathryn Shively Meier P. 173, Footnote 91, quoting Steiner, Disease in the Civil War:
Tripler wrote that “all sorts of doctors– steam, electric, and even advertising quacks- were sometimes commissioned as medical officers… men who had never even seen, much less performed, a surgical operation.’”
Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War George Worthington Adams 1952 P. 61-62
“The faulty ambulance work and the pathetically inadequate field hospitals of most of the battlefields of 1862 bear witness that the medical-administrative system was far from perfect. For this there were numerous reasons. No system can rise superior to the men who administer it, and in the Army no staff corps can work can work effectively without the cooperation of the line commanders. The Regular Army surgeons who held most of the ranking medical directorships were frequently without administrative talent and often of a stubbornly conservative cast. They were hampered by the ignorance and inexperience of the volunteer regimental surgeons, many of whom were insubordinate and undisciplined. They were further hampered by unclearly defined and divided authority. The regulations provided that a division medical director, “after consultation with the quartermaster-general,” had the authority to dispose his men for battle and to set up a field hospital, but only the medical officers, hospital stewards, and nurses of the division were under his command. He had no control over the ambulances and their crews, who belonged to the Quartermaster Corps. The other duties and powers of the medical directors and the chief surgeons of brigades were “never specified or defined by law or general orders– and were only assumed as natural suggestions attaching to the ranking of staff officers, and extended to a general supervision of the affairs of their respective commands.’”
A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War The Diaries of David Hunter Strother David Hunter Strother P. 20
Note: Ephraim is also there at the Winchester Hotel-Hospital today, at the same time as David Strother and other known names.
“MARCH 25, TUESDAY.—Last night I visited the courthouse where a number of wounded of both armies lay. In the courtyard were two pieces of cannon, twelve-pounders, taken from the enemy. In the vestibule lay thirteen dead bodies of United States soldiers and the courtroom was filled to its capacity with wounded, all of a serious character. A Confederate captain, Yancey Jones, was lying there with both eyes scooped out and the bridge of his nose carried away by a bullet. He was sometimes delirious and roared about forming his company and charging. An Ohio volunteer lay on his back, the brains oozing from a shot in the head, uttering at breathing intervals a sharp stertorous cry. He had been lying thus for thirty-six hours. A few stifled groans were heard occasionally, but as a general thing the men were quiet. There was another storeroom opposite Taylor’s Hotel where we saw a number of wounded, all Federalists.
This morning I visited the Union Hotel where I saw two rooms filled with wounded and seven dead. In the room where the dead bodies were, lay a Confederate soldier wounded in the head. He seemed also delirious and was rolling a piece of lint in his hands and rubbing the floor with it. He also pulled the bloody bandages from his head and the soldier nurse told us that he had occasionally got up and ran about so violently that he was obliged to bring him out from among the other wounded. In the next room was a fairhaired man whose fixed eyes and stertorous breathing showed him to be in the agonies of death. Some here were lightly wounded in the limbs and one with a broken thigh showed me the wound and begged I would have it attended to.
The strategy of the movement was said to be feebly managed, but the men fought well and, as soon as permitted, made short work of it. The fire of musketry was the most tremendous on record. The thickets in which the enemy stood were literally mowed down by it. It was a fair, open fight, decided by pluck and discipline, and the Rebels with the self-styled Stonewall brigade were soundly thrashed. We had some advantage in numbers. They had advantage in position and a leader in whom they had implicit confidence. Our troops had no leader but were commanded by a senior colonel. The superior fire and courage of the infantry won the battle for the Government. “Thus endeth the first lesson for this Valley.”
From the commencement of the attack on Saturday evening until Sunday evening the women of Winchester were insolently triumphant. They confidently expected to see the United States troops driven out and as the dead and wounded were brought in during the day, these Rebel dames and maids were on the streets and at the windows radiant with anticipated triumph, insulting the soldiers on duty in the town and families of officers who were there visiting their husbands. As the vending closed, the scene changed. Ambulances came in carrying their own wounded by scores, and escorts with long trains of Rebel prisoners marched through the streets. The she-braggarts disappeared from the streets, doors were closed, and lights put out.”
Note: One question is whether Ephraim, as a Hospital Steward, got treated better than the higher-ups, whom the women apparently snubbed? Because Ephraim agrees with Brand the women these days post-Kernstown were excellent to injured men. Brand’s theory about why women aided injured men:
Army Life According to Arbaw: Civil War Letters of William A. Brand 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Edited by Daniel A. Masters P. 44
“The hospitals, in which reside the wounded of both armies, are visited by the kind and sympathetic ladies of this place. They pay great attention to our soldiers because when they first approached, their whole effect was to comfort the Rebels, and our officers told them that what was brought would be shared with all. This forced them to be kind to our poor fellows so long as the Rebels remained there, but they have commenced moving their wounded to private residences.”
Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia Kathryn Shively Meier P. 90
“While officers and medical directors passed responsibility back and forth, regimental surgeons and hospital staffers ultimately had to treat the sick men and argued their own reasons for what they acknowledged was inadequate care. Olmsted, as usual, had choice words for what he characterized as the surgeons’ neglect. He claimed surgeons had laid the sick and wounded “in tiers in the muddy streets” of Yorktown and “a hundred sick had been left… in the rain, without attendance or food, to die.” Surgeons, alternately, explained that they had not enough hospitals, supplies, or staff to attend to the vast numbers of ailing men. For instance, when Captain Twichell found eighteen men lying out in plain air on the Peninsula, suffering from typhoid, five “dying,” some “insensible, others raving,” and “none of them [with] their clothes off,” he was determined to find the surgeon and make him give an account for such suffering. “We found the Surgeon in charge, who appeared to be a man of energy and ability. He told a sad story of much to do, with nothing to do it with and no one to help.” Confederate surgeon E.A. Craighill explained a similar situation, as he helplessly observed a new brigade of Georgians quickly demolished from measles, pneumonia, and diarrhea. They “had no comforts or hospital accommodations for the poor fellows, not even tents… and their suffering was intense.” But this is not to say that some surgeons did not confirm cases of neglect. Castle man complained bitterly in his diary about “surgeons, whose only notoriety consists in their ability to stand up under the greatest amount of whisky; and also against their re-appointing surgeons under the same influence who, after examination, have been mustered out of the service for incompetency. Under such appointments humanity is shocked, and a true and zealous army of patriots dwindle rapidly into a mass of mal-contents.'”
P. 174, Footnote 122, quoting Steiner, Disease in the Civil War:
“We now understand that soldiers contracted diarrhea for a number of reasons– among them, amoebic, bacterial, protozoal, viral, helminthic, chemical, and metabolic.”
Make Me a Map of the Valley: The Civil War Journal of Stonewall Jackson’s Topographer Jedediah Hotchkiss P. 9
“Monday, March 25th: (note: from a letter home) Marched at an early hour and were going up the hill beyond Tom’s Brook, near the Round Hill, when we saw Gen. Jackson, riding by himself and he ordered us to march back* to Narrow Passage. Our battalion was thrown into a great panic by some one who shouted out that our army was routed and the Yankees were coming on rapidly. At Woodstock we began meeting ambulances with our wounded…
We were much exhausted by our advance and retreat. The army fell back to Cedar Creek and Hupp’s Hill and halted to cook rations but the enemy came on at half-past two in the after noon and forced it to resume the retreat; it then fell back to between Narrow Passage and Woodstock.”
DEATH OF A WISCONSIN OFFICER.
(Excerpt from piece)
“I have noticed that through most of the hospitals that as long as there is any chance for a man, no matter how bad he may be, the surgeon and nurses work hard, sometimes with curious tenacity, for his life, doing everything, and keeping somebody by him to execute the doctor’s orders, and minister to him every minute night and day. See that screen there. As you advance through the dusk of early candle-light, a nurse will step forth on tip-toe, and silently but imperiously forbid you to make any noise, or perhaps to come near at all. Some soldier’s life is flickering there, suspended between recovery and death. Perhaps at this moment the exhausted frame has just fallen into a light sleep that a step might shake. You must retire. The neighboring patients must move in their stocking feet. I have been several times struck with such mark’d effort—everything bent to save a life from the very grip of the destroyer. But when that grip is once firmly fix’d, leaving no hope or chance at all, the surgeon abandons the patient. If it is a case where stimulus is any relief, the nurse gives milk punch or brandy, or whatever is wanted, ad libitum. There is no fuss made. Not a bit of sentimentalism or whining have I seen about a single death-bed in hospital or on the field, but generally impassive indifference. All is over, as far as any efforts can avail; it is useless to expend emotions or labors. While there is a prospect they strive hard—at least most surgeons do; but death certain and evident, they yield the field.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 735-736
HOSPITAL SCENES.—INCIDENTS.
“Ice Cream Treat.—One hot day toward the middle of June, I gave the inmates of Carver hospital a general ice cream treat, purchasing a large quantity, and, under convoy of the doctor or head nurse, going around personally through the wards to see to its distribution.
An Incident.—In one of the fights before Atlanta, a rebel soldier, of large size, evidently a young man, was mortally wounded top of the head, so that the brains partially exuded. He lived three days, lying on his back on the spot where he had first dropt. He dug with his heel in the ground during that time a hole big enough to put in a couple of ordinary knapsacks. He just lay there in the open air, and with little intermission kept his heel going night and day. Some of our soldiers then moved him to a house, but he died in a few minutes.
Another.—After the battles at Columbia, Tennessee, where we repuls’d about a score of vehement rebel charges, they left a great many wounded on the ground, mostly within our range. Whenever any of these wounded attempted to move away by any means, generally by crawling off, our men without exception brought them down by a bullet. They let none crawl away, no matter what his condition.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 745
Note: Despite some reports of ice cream & others treats given in hospitals, men were also known to get awarded a thin slice of raw cornbread, one spoonful of rice, or two spoons of peas, or “soap soup” plus what passed for coffee to last all day. Men didn’t know the worst starvation until they hit the hospitals. And they wouldn’t necessarily have stamp money or paper to write & apprise families of their location, to ask food be mailed. Many men could have lived had basic nourishment been handed out. Meanwhile, Grant refuses all prisoner exchanges. Sergeant Charles Haynes, 20th Maine, July 14, 1864, in Richmond: “Feel bully today, why shouldn’t I be contented, living as I am in a three story brick building situated in the heart of the city where nothing can be seen to interest one in the least and then to have such food, why it is enough to make one wish that he could remain a prisoner.” @SgtMaine
Note: The National Museum of Civil War Medicine 9/18/21 Facebook post:
“What would a soldier dream about after being wounded during the Civil War? Private Charles Johnson was shot in the hip during the Battle of Antietam. The following day, he wrote this in his diary:
“Slept a little last night, and was troubled by a dream in which demons, rattlesnakes, Hell, brimstone, cannon-balls, and railroad iron, bayonets and pitchforks, powder and smoke were all conglomerated into one shapeless, endless whirl, with me in the midst, though suffering no particular harm.’”
*Both Ephraim & Hotchkiss talk about back, falling back.
Note: In 1861 D.C. had only 2k beds. By 1865, the nation had 136,894 beds ready, and the Union itself had 204 hospitals. By war’s end, at Richmond, Chimborazo Hospital had 8k beds, & Jackson Hospital 6k. Richmond built 20 hospitals by 1864. Interestingly, there were entire Venereal Disease hospitals in both sections of the country. Over 73k Syphilis cases; 109k Gonorrhea.
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do solemnly say they do not do as much as they are bound to do….
Amputation was the most common surgery in the war. They’d place porcelain in a wound to see if it turned black. The bullet’s still in if it does, so you’re dead. The bone couldn’t then set, so off it went. A cone-shaped bullet invented in the mid-1850s, a Minie (min-YA) ball shattered the bone past help. It’d hit, expand, tear, splinter anything it touched. Men notched the ends of the balls with a rock to make them spread out more. When they hit they’d shred internal organs, & the exit wound would become many times the size of the entry wound. 46= miles of nerves in a body. Federal surgeons soaked a rag in chloroform or ether then held it over your face (for an interminable five minutes to knock you out). Iron pokers heated to white-hot then stamp-singed on an arm or leg would stop the bleeding. Cauterized. & on & on. Orderlies and doctors were never trained in any hospital corps. They were men off the street. Or farm, in Ephraim’s case. Neither army had any “professional training” (whatever that would mean in the 1860s) before landing on the field. Ambulances were farm wagons, torturous to transport in, and could kill the wounded along rutted roads while streams of blood ran out the back. Ephraim was in the tent assisting with amputations, a pile of appendages that could rise to as tall as a man could stand. They sawed by candlelight, operated sometimes 96 hours straight. The north alone saw 30k amputated limbs.
At night, in his dreams, he watches limbs drop off into piles on the ground. But then they’d hit a wind shear, start to lift. They’d levitate, the limbs, then begin to reattach slowly, joint by joint, like a committee of body meeting again.
He awakens in a fever to see if his are still on.
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