Blue, Gray, and Red

Blue, Red and Gray

This month I offer comments about a great reference book which I recently completed: Blue, Gray, and Red: Two Nurses’ Views of the Civil War. I received this book as a gift from my good friend, John P., whom you may recall gave me Statesmen of the Lost Cause, a reference source about political events at the highest level within the Confederacy.

Blue, Gray, and Red provides us with the reminiscences of two women, one from Concord MA and one from Mobile AL, who went to work in the army hospitals for each side. Most people will recognize the Massachusian: Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), but I suspect fewer know of Kate Cumming (1836-1909). The book is actually a reprint of their two memoirs originally printed in 1869 and 1866 (reprinted in 1890) respectively.

The book’s premise seemed promising in comparing the circumstances of women in parallel situations but that promise was not met. The two women had vastly different experiences. Alcott served but six weeks in a Georgetown DC hospital (Dec 1862 – Jan 1863) before she contracted typhoid fever and was sent home, while Cumming served in numerous army field hospitals in the Army of Tennessee from the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 until she was ordered home from Georgia in May 1865. Alcott’s story suffers further from the fact that she chose to tell the story as a novel, Hospital Sketches. This, she wrote in the florid and profligate style of late 19^th century novelists with run-on sentences and paragraphs which cover entire pages. Also weakening the narrative is the fact that of the 58 pages assigned to Alcott’s story, nearly a quarter describe how she made the decision to serve and her difficulties in traveling from Concord to Georgetown. 

Kate Cumming, CSA

By comparison, Cummings writing style, although covering essentially the same topics, flows easily and is quite modern, except for its biblical and mythological references. Cumming, who was in her late twenties at the time, saw enough of the destruction of war that her narrative becomes more mature in its outlook as the work progresses.

Unlike Alcott, Cumming’s family found themselves dispersed in England, New York. and Mobile at the start of the war. Later, she had a brother and many close friends in the Army of Tennessee. Here is a summary of Cumming’s service, taken from the University of Alabama Reynolds-Finley Historical Library website:

Kate Cumming was born in Scotland and, as a child, moved to America with her large family, first to Montreal, then to New York, and finally in the 1840’s to Mobile, Alabama. There she spent the remainder of her youth and early adulthood.  By the 1860s, Cumming had been in the South for many years and identified the Confederacy as home and “the cause” as her own. Several months after the start of the Civil War, Kate was much inspired by an address given by family friend, Reverend Benjamin M. Miller, at a local church. In his speech, Miller called for Southern ladies to help the wounded and sick by becoming nurses at the war front. Cumming was discouraged from volunteering by her respectable Southern family, who thought that “nursing soldiers was no work for a refined lady,”. Therefore, initially she relegated her involvement to assisting other volunteers in their preparation to leave for the hospitals. However, when a regiment of old school and church friends were sent off to war, Cumming was compelled to offer her services to Mr. Miller despite her family’s disapproval and her own lack of hospital training. In April of 1862, Mr. Miller summoned his volunteer ladies to head north to Mississippi to help those returning from the battle at Shiloh.

Conditions in the hospitals of Okolona and Corinth, Mississippi were so horrible that only Cumming and one other nurse stayed beyond a week. Despite the hardships, Kate remained through June and returned to serve in Chattanooga that fall. Her duties were many faceted – delivering food and medicine, managing laundresses, writing letters, keeping clothing and bedding fresh, and even cooking. In September of 1862, new laws allowed the employment of women to be officially recognized by the Confederate medical department, and at that time, Cumming received the rank of matron, or hospital supervisor. She worked in Chattanooga until the summer of 1863, and then traveled with Surgeon Samuel Stout’s medical corps in the Army of Tennessee, which was constantly moving as General Sherman swept through Georgia and the Carolinas. Stout was first hesitant to accept the role of women in the hospital, but was soon convinced, and commended them in his personal narrative. He specifically names Cumming and two others as “the first refined, intellectual, self-denying ladies, who in the midst of the suffering soldiers, served at their bunkside at night as well as day. Their self-denying and heroic benevolence inspirited many other educated and refined ladies to imitate their examples,”.

While traveling with the Army of Tennessee, Cumming faithfully recorded her experiences in a journal, which became her great contribution to history. Hastily published within a year of her return to Mobile after the war, Kate Cumming’s journal did not receive the readership it deserved, perhaps because it was too close to the events or because of the influx of Confederate narratives at the time. However, the journal is invaluable from a historical perspective because it is the most complete and realistic record of the workings of Confederate hospitals and the services of matrons. Later, in 1890, she republished the journal under the title, Gleanings from Southland. This shortened, edited version experienced more success in a market “hungry for ‘the romance of reunion’” . Cumming moved to Birmingham in 1874, where she remained until her death in 1909.

I found Cumming’s narrative both informative and compelling in an area of the Civil War where I had never before paid much attention. In addition, we catch glimpses of the social standards of the era and relationships among the Southern upper class and between the upper class and the lower orders. The reader is also treated to her understanding of the meaning of the war from the Southern perspective which I found worth consideration. Throughout the narrative, Cumming keeps a restrained tongue in describing the Federal soldiers.  I suspect that in the 1890 edition used in this book, she edited-out the more “colorful” names she may have used at the time. Of course, every single one of the Southern soldiers in her book is a hero. 

While she remained a patriot to her state and to the Confederacy but a traitor to the Nation, one cannot help but be impressed at the hardships she and the others overcame. The descriptions of the fear of marauding Federal raiders and the war-time destruction in Georgia and Alabama at the end of the war were particularly moving for me. As a citizen of a united America, I find it a great shame that the service of Kate Cumming and those women who served with her are not as well recognized as those of Clara Barton or Mary Ann Bickerdyke.

Cumming returned to Mobile after the war, and in 1866 she first published her journal. In 1874 she moved with her father to Birmingham, Alabama. She never married but resided in Birmingham as a teacher and active member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy until her death on June 5, 1909. She is buried in Mobile.

Many ideas here for Katie Malloy, my own nurse-in-training.

SEAN GABHANN

Sean Kevin Gabhann is a Vietnam-era combat veteran of the US Navy.  He first became interested in American Civil War history during the centennial celebration and he owns an extensive library of primary and secondary material related to Civil War.  He especially wants to write about campaigns in the West because of a fascination with the careers of U.S Grant and W.T. Sherman.  Gabhann lives in San Diego, California, where he works diligently on completing Book Three of the Shiloh Trilogy: Harper's Shiloh.

Sean's published works are available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.

http://harperswarstories.com  

The Model 1859 Sharps Rifle and Telescopic Sight Used in Harper's Donelson

When planning to write a series of historical novels set in the American Civil War (ACW) I needed to decide what would be the firearm of choice for the main character, James (Jamie) Harper.  Although he serves in an infantry unit, I wanted Harper and his battalion to carry a weapon other than the Springfield rifled muskets assigned to most of the Federal infantry regiments.

Sharps Rifle Model 1859

I needed a weapon which had distinctive properties and which had existed long enough prior to the war that Harper could have used it when he served as a U.S. Deputy Marshall in the Nebraska-Dakota territory.  It did not take long to settle on the Sharps rifle as Harper’s weapon of choice because of its relative uniqueness on the Civil war battlefield, the reputation of the weapon with the First and Second U.S. Sharpshooter regiments, and because they were produced in sufficient numbers that the purchase of six hundred rifles by a battalion benefactor was a plausible premise.

The Model 1859 was reported to have a maximum effective range of one thousand yards.  When I was writing the first drafts of the Shiloh Trilogy, I accepted this number at face value and had my characters, happily blazing away at hapless Confederates from ranges over half a mile.  That was until I moved into an office with a window.

One day while busily writing away, I happened to gaze out of the window and mentally go through a sniper’s checklist on a target on the other side of the freeway.  While doing so, it became obvious that trying to sight onto a target the size of a single man over that distance would be very difficult without a telescope.  The apparent target size is about the same height as the front sight of most rifles.  Out of curiosity, I checked Google Maps and discovered that the house across the freeway was only six hundred yards away!

So, if my hero was to earn his reputation as a marksman, either he would have to have supernatural eyesight, or he would need a telescope on his rifle.  This set me on a quest to discover whether a telescope had ever been used with the Model 1859 Sharps Rifle.  I checked the websites of the two companies currently manufacturing this model or its successor, the model 1862.  No, they did not manufacture telescopes for the rifles, nor did they provide any modifications which would allow a scope to be mounted and aligned on the weapon.

Next, I did a search of antique firearms dealers and contacted many of them via email or telephone.  All returned the same response: the Model 1859/1862 Sharps Rifle did not use a telescopic sight.  So, I resigned myself to rewriting those chapters where Harper takes on targets at extreme ranges.

Fortunately for Harper and his men, I did one final internet search, trying to prove that the Model 1859 could mount a telescope.

Voila!  The Horse Soldier, a military antiques dealer in Gettysburg Pennsylvania showed exactly the weapon of Harper’s dreams in their on-line catalogue: a Model 1859 Sharps Rifle with a telescopic sight manufactured by William Malcolm of Syracuse, NY.  The Horse Soldier description of the rifle included a serial number associated with those on the weapons issued to the USSS regiments.

Sharps Model 1859 with Malcolm Telescopic Sight

So now, I can show the documentation proving that such a combination could have existed at the time in which the Shiloh Trilogy takes place. Unfortunately, I did not have the $12,000 asking price for the weapon and even if I had, it sold the same day that I found it.

My thanks go out to the National Museum of American History for use of the photo with the open sights and to The Horse Soldier for allowing the use of their photograph with the Malcolm sight.  

 

 

 

Harper's Donelson is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble On-Line, Smashwords, and Kobo.

 

Sean Kevin Gabhann is a Vietnam-era combat veteran of the US Navy.  He first became interested in American Civil War history during the centennial celebration and he owns an extensive library of primary and secondary material related to Civil War.  He especially wants to write about campaigns in the West because of a fascination with the careers of U.S Grant and W.T. Sherman.  Gabhann lives in San Diego, California.