by David Flint
Speaking at the Stephentown Heritage Center on Monday evening, Clara Barton (alias historic interpreter Phyllis Chapman) gave a riveting and entertaining talk about her battlefield experience in the “late Great War of the Rebellion.” Born and raised near Worcester, MA, Barton was drafted as a teacher at the age of 15. Having learned to deal successfully and non-violently with unruly boys, she much later took a job in Washington, D.C. at the U.S. Patent Office just before rebel guns fired on Fort Sumter.
[private]As northern troops, including many of her former students, began moving down to protect Washington, Barton saw that in most cases they were pathetically ill-equipped, reflecting in fact the woeful unpreparedness of both sides for waging war, let alone dealing with sickness and injuries. For one thing, with summer coming on in the American southland, the soldiers had been issued only heavy woolen uniforms. A self proclaimed “formidable woman” who “needed to be needed,” Barton set about collecting supplies, bandages, food and shirts to provide for the needs of “my boys.”
Barton eventually had three warehouses filled with supplies, and, with battles commencing, she wanted to get these supplies right to the battlefields. Barton said she was not, as some would have it, a Civil War nurse but rather “a getter of things.” Having wheedled the necessary permits from Chief Quartermaster Daniel Rucker, the first battle she witnessed was at Culpepper, Virginia, a horrible example of what happens when military strategy lags behind advances in weaponry. Soldiers advanced in rows and were mowed down in rows The minie ball fired out of a rifled musket had the effect of disintegrating bone and leaving a gaping exit wound.
Barton found conditions at field hospitals to be shocking. Each regiment had only one surgeon who worked only with that regiment. There was no concept of sanitation; bandages were reused. There were no ambulances; transport to city hospitals was by oxcart. For amputations, the Union army generally used chloroform or ether for anesthesia, but the Confederates had little of that and relied largely on whisky.
Drafting Historical Society Treasurer Bill Zimmerman to portray a soldier with a leg wound, Barton proceeded to give a grisly demonstration of how a field surgeon would go about removing the leg. Needless to say, there was a lot of gangrene and septicemia following these operations.
Barton recalled other battles she had witnessed at Fredericksburg and at Antietam – the latter being the bloodiest battle in U.S. history with over 22,000 casualties on both sides in a single day. Bad as the battles were, many more soldiers died from dysentery than from battle wounds. Other diseases from contaminated water included typhoid and cholera. But this was the era of “Heroic Medicine” which meant seeking a balance of the four humours: phlegm and red, yellow and black bile. If you were sick it was believed you had too much of one of these so the treatment was to reduce it by purging, bleeding, sweating or blistering. Other remedies included medicines such as turpentine or mercurious chloride, a combination of mercury and chlorine. One medicine, quinine with a dose of alcohol, actually proved to be a reliable cure and preventive for malaria.
With her need to be needed continuing after the war, Barton set up an Office of Missing Soldiers. People would come in searching for a missing relative, and Barton would try to track them down. More than one soldier that she found protested that, “I’m lost and I want to stay lost!” Barton also worked with Dorence Atwater who, as a prisoner of war at the infamous Andersonville prison, had kept a secret list of soldiers who had died there and their gravesites. For his efforts Atwater was rewarded with a jail term for stealing government property.
After the war Barton also became interested in the Treaty of Geneva of 1863 that led to the establishment of the International Red Cross. She tried to get the U.S. government to sign on but that didn’t happen until 1882. The previous year Barton founded the American Red Cross, which dramatically proved its worth soon thereafter providing aid and supplies to survivors of the Johnstown Flood of 1889 and the hurricane that wiped out Galveston in 1900.
“There’s always going to be a need,” Barton said. “And that’s what I sought my whole life to do, to see a need and fill it…Many today do the same thing on many levels, within your family or nationally or locally, and I salute them.”[/private]