Civil War Oddities #88

Massachusetts’s clergyman Stephen Barker was so stirred by Lincoln’s first call for volunteers that he gave up his parish and became chaplain of the Thirteenth Massachusetts Regiment.

This regiment was organized in July 1861 as the Fourteenth Massachusetts Infantry (but afterwards changed as above) under the command of Colonel William B. Green, of Boston, and was immediately ordered to Fort Albany, which was then an outpost of defense guarding the Long Bridge over the Potomac, near Washington. Refusing to be left behind, his wife became a nurse. Though she had no formal training, she served in field hospitals for more than three years before becoming a superintendent for a U. S. Sanitary Commission.