The Gulf Shores Museum had a full house at the “Soldiers in Hoop Skirts” event where an Alabama Humanities Alliance speaker shared stories of women who served as nurses, soldiers and …
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The Gulf Shores Museum had a full house at the “Soldiers in Hoop Skirts” event where an Alabama Humanities Alliance speaker shared stories of women who served as nurses, soldiers and spies in the Civil War.
While none of the women featured in Dolores Hydock’s presentation were from the Gulf Coast, several attendees, many of whom were locals, raised their hands when Hydock asked if anyone had relatives in the Civil War.
To connect the audience with the topic, Hydock started by focusing on women everyone had likely heard of before.
Louisa May Alcott, American novelist known for writing “Little Women” who served in the war as a nurse, compiled “Hospital Sketches,” based on letters she was writing home that created one of the first “really honest accounts” of what was happening on the warfront. Hydock said it is considered one of the “truest experiences you’ll ever find.”
At the beginning of the war, there were no hospitals and there weren’t really any nurses either, at least there were no female nurses.
“Because everybody thought the war was going to last, what, a week or two, maybe a few months,” Hydock said. “Nobody had any clue it was going to be four years.”
When soldiers were sick or injured, they were sent home. After a while, recovering soldiers worked as nurses cleaning up messes and holding the hands of those who were dying.
“That’s what the job of a nurse was,” Hydock said.
After about a year of fighting, women were allowed to serve as nurses, but there were particular requirements as many officials had several reasons why women should not take part in the war.
One reason was the “highly improper” medical treatment a young lady would be giving a soldier that required “close, physical contact with the body of a man,” specifically one she was not related to. Some officials were afraid they were “just going to stand around and flirt.” It was also believed that women wouldn’t be able to handle the horrors of 19th century medicine, which Hydock said was probably true as the conditions and treatments were a sight for anyone to behold.
Dorothea Dix, who worked as a social reformer at the time and was “not afraid to speak her mind,” worked for the Union to recruit an “army of female nurses.” To dispel any questions about women becoming nurses, Dix required all recruits to be at least 30 years old, and they could not wear hoop skirts or any kind of ornamentation, making them “devoid of physical attraction,” as Hydock quoted Dix.
Hydock said even with the specific requirements, around 2,000 women applied to be Union nurses.
Many of Alcott's experiences in the war found their way into “Little Women,” including how she had to chop off over four feet of her hair, a typical treatment for typhoid fever, which she ultimately survived.
Hydock then mentioned someone who might have nursed Alcott while she was sick, Mary Johns Cleave.
“We don’t have a picture of her,” Hydock said on Cleave. “We don’t have a picture of the other 1,999 African American women who were nurses in Union hospitals at that time.”
At the time, “nursing was not a profession” but rather just “cleaning up messes,” and that was already assumed to be a woman’s job, Hydock explained.
“So, it was not a subject that historians paid much attention to,” Hydock said, “and they certainly didn’t pay much attention to it when it was done by an African American woman because those women were not even called nurses. They were called cooks and laundresses and maids and housekeepers.”
Susie King Taylor and Ann Bradford Stokes, however, were two African American women whose work was documented.
Taylor was taught to read and write at the plantation near Savannah, Georgia, where she was born into slavery in 1848. At some point during the war, she, along with a few other slaves, escaped to a Union-controlled island. While on the island, at the age of 14, she married a Union soldier from “the first volunteer infantry of South Carolina” made up of African American men. She traveled with her husband’s regiment, doing typical soldier wife duties of cooking, cleaning and doing laundry “for absolutely no pay.”
Sometime later, “a wave of smallpox came through that regiment.” Taylor had been vaccinated against smallpox “back on the plantation,” allowing her to nurse the soldiers back to health without contracting the disease.
Hydock said she continued volunteering in hospital tents after that “first taste of nursing.”
When she was 60 years old, Taylor wrote her memoir, “Reminiscences of My Life in Camp.” Hydock said this is thought to be one of the initial and only first-person accounts “of the experience of an African American woman in the war.”
Stokes was born into slavery in 1830 on a plantation near Nashville. In the last days of December 1862, she and other slaves escaped to a Union hospital ship, the USS Red Rover, and waited out the Emancipation Proclamation going into effect the next month. Stokes decided to remain on the ship and work as a nurse.
As it was a Naval ship where most of the nurses were Catholic nuns, “you had to either join the convent or join the Navy.” Hydock said Stokes joined the Navy and received a rank as “First Class Boy” or “the lowest possible rank,” typically given to teenage boys who ran away to join the military.
Stokes was paid “not very much” but all the same paid, for her work. After the war, she married a veteran, a man she helped nurse on the ship. The couple moved to Chicago.
“And she decides to apply for a pension as the widow of a veteran, but her application is denied,” Hydock said. “And she felt it was because she couldn’t read or write and someone else had to fill in the application for her, and maybe they didn’t get it quite right.”
In her '50s, she set out to learn how to read and write so that she could reapply “not as the widow of a veteran but as a veteran” as she had served as a First Class Boy for 18 months. At the age of 60, she received military pension of $12 a month, which is “the equivalent of about $400 a month now.”
“She is supposedly the first African American woman to have a rank of any kind in the U.S. Navy,” Hydock said, “and the first woman at all to receive an American military pension based on her own military experience.”
Hydock explained how even though she mostly used Union nurse examples, Confederate nurses and hospitals experienced similar situations with a growing need of full-time female nurses.
Phoebe Yates Pember served as a matron of Confederate hospitals. She, like Alcott, compiled her journals and letters into a book, titled “A Southern Woman’s Story,” providing a “very frank, very honest depiction” of life as an administrator for a Confederate hospital.
“It is an eye-opening look at what that experience was like,” Hydock said.
While the nurses were not allowed to wear hoop skirts, other women still did. Hydock said these hoop skirts could reach up to nine feet in diameter.
“Guess what? That means from the waist out to the edge is exactly the length of Lousia May Alcott’s hair,” Hydock said while asking an attendee to hold one end of a tape measurer for a demonstration. “Can you imagine? There is a lot of real estate under there.”
Hydock said “many women figured out creative ways” to use this free “real estate.”
One woman was caught smuggling seven pairs of boots, five pairs of leather shoes, four pairs of rubber over shoes, three pairs of dancing slippers and a pair of long-legged calvary boots with double soles covered with spikes. All under her skirt.
Another woman was caught trying to smuggle 100 ounces of quinines sewn into her skirt. Others hid secret documents or letters sewn into the fabric.
“Other women used their hoop skirts to kind of enhance their womanly wiles,” Hydock said. “One such woman was Belle Boyd, a Confederate spy.”
Boyd became to be known as “the Siren of the Shanandoah” or “Confederate Cleopatra” as she used her flirtatious charms on Union soldiers and officers. Boyd had several run-ins with Union soldiers, including when she was 16 and “killed her a Yankee” after he talked back to her mother.
Her father was serving on the Confederate side, and Boyd would seduce information out of a Union soldier and report back to him, often by riding there on horseback herself. Boyd also would sneak through Union soldiers' belongings when she visited her aunt, who was forced to house the soldiers. She sent this information off to Stonewall Jackson.
Boyd never used a code and often just wrote out the information in a letter and signed it with her name.
When captured or caught with confidential information, she somehow was able to talk her captors into thinking she really “had no idea” what they were doing in her possession, and they would let her go.
Boyd eventually did get caught and sent to prison in Washington D.C., but she was sent home after contracting typhoid fever, which she survived, and told to “stay out of this war.”
So, after she was healthy, she visited the Davis headquarters and offered her services.
She agreed to deliver letters requesting aid from England as there were many Confederate supporters there at this time. However, the ship she was on was captured by Union forces, and a lieutenant was set to guard her to make sure she couldn’t do any “shenanigans” before the ship reached its destination.
“By the time they got to Boston, they were engaged to be married,” Hydock said. “He had proposed to her several times, and she’d always turn him down. Finally, she agreed she’d marry him on three conditions.”
One condition, the Confederate captain of the ship she was on was to be released in Boston. The second condition was that he had to join the Confederate army and leave the Union. The third was that he had to hand over his Union Navy signal book so she could hand it over to the Confederates.
He agreed.
The two were caught, and she was exiled to Canada. Then they met back in London and got married. Shortly after, her husband died of pneumonia. To support herself, as she was essentially banned from the U.S. and would have to stay in England, she wrote articles in the local paper of “her experience as a Confederate spy.”
“Modern scholars say she was a really, really good writer of fiction,” Hydock said. “Because, honestly, what she wrote about never happened, but it did allow her to earn a little money until the war was over and she came back and began a career as an actress.”
She traveled in a one-woman show called “Belle Boyd: Rebel Spy” where she would dress in a Confederate uniform and tell audiences of her “escapades.”
“She did this successfully for 16 years,” Hydock said.
A spy on the Union side, Elizabeth van Lew, was the final woman Hydock spoke on.
Lew was a “tiny, bird-like woman” who visited Union soldiers in a Confederate prison and brought books and blankets to the prisoners. She learned to pass on messages, such as troop sizes and formations, from those newly imprisoned through a code within the books she would deliver.
Unlike Boyd, Lew used her own encryption code after she gathered the messages from the prisoners.
She also used the help of her paid servants, which she had inherited as slaves on her family estate and set free, which “didn’t mean a lot in 1850 Virginia.” While several left, many stayed on as “incredibly loyal” servants.
Hydock said Lew’s family house had many secret passages and stairwells where she would hide soldiers when Confederate scouts came looking for newly escaped prisoners. She gave them money, clothes and food during and after their stay.
After the war, she made a little money as the Postmistress of Richmond, Virginia, but after she no longer held that position, she realized she had very little money.
“Her entire family fortune, she had spent during the war helping those soldiers escape,” Hydock said, “and so she was reduced to writing letters to the families of those soldiers asking for financial help.”
One soldier she had helped was the grandson of Paul Revere. His family provided a “little monthly stipend for the rest of her life.”
Women were not only nurses and spies in the Civil War. Hydock said scholars estimate about 400 women on both sides fought in the war. It is hard to determine the total number as the women who were involved “really did not want to be found out.”
They were typically discovered to be undercover as men when they were injured and a doctor had to undress them and operate. Often, Hydock said, the commanders were “so embarrassed that he had been hoodwinked” that they would try their hardest to cover it up.
One group of women that was documented in the war was the Nancy Harts Militia of LaGrange, Georgia. These were wives and female relatives of Confederate soldiers. Women were told to bring their pistols, rifles or whatever they had to learn how to shoot and how to drill, which they did once a week.
“They were unique in two ways,” Hydock said. “They were the only all-female militia that was in fighting trim the entire four years of the war … and they are the only female militia that actually faced the enemy.”
They stood up against Union soldiers who were going to march through their town and burn everything to the ground. The Nancy Harts agreed to let them pass through as long as they didn’t burn the houses, however, they could burn anything else like warehouses and buildings. The soldiers agreed, and the women protected the homes.
When those soldiers reached Atlanta, they discovered the war had been over for more than a week.
Women also participated in the war from home.
“They sewed uniforms and blankets, they knitted socks, knitted gloves, knitted hats and they sold things to raise money,” Hydock said. “They sold paintings, pictures, chinaware, anything they could sell to raise money for children who were newly orphaned, women who were newly widowed and for families that had to spend money to go get a sick family member.”
In Alcott’s “Little Women,” one of the characters, Jo, cuts off her hair and sells it so the family can pick up their father who had fallen ill as he served in the war.
“Writers write what they know," Hydock said.
“While the dark clouds of war hung over this country for four terrible years,” Hydock said, “part of the light behind those clouds was the dedication, the devotion, the talent of these soldiers in hoop skirts. Nurses and spies and other women who fought in their own way during the war.”
