Not
all wives were content with occasional visits to their husbands or with work as
volunteer nurses. When R. S. Brownell signed up with the First Rhode Island
Volunteers, a ninety-day unit, his wife refused to be left behind. Kady
accompanied her husband to Bull Run in 1861, having already won from Col.
Ambrose Burnside the nickname “Child of the Regiment.”
During
fierce fighting near Manassas, Brownell’s wife stayed on the field to attend
the wounded as best as she could. She was close to the standard bearer of the
Sixth Regiment when he received a direct hit and dropped the flag. Seizing it,
Kady was wounded while carrying it across the field. Although she relinquished
the flag, the wife who went to war picked up and kept for the rest of her life
a trophy that she termed “a Secessia rifle.”
