Civil War Oddities #92

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.”

Civil War Oddities #91

When Union Brig. General Francis C. Barlow took a serious wound at Gettysburg, his wife moved heaven and earth in what was initially a futile attempt to go to his bedside. At that time a nurse with Union forces, in desperation she turned to Confederate Brig. General John B. Gordon. Credited by Barlow with having saved Gordon’s life when he lay wounded on the battlefield, the Georgia native provided Mrs. Barlow with a safe conduct that permitted her to pass through confederate lines in order to join her husband.

Civil War Oddities #90

Union Brig. General Henry W. Slocum, a Syracuse attorney who had graduated from West Point and spent four years in the artillery, headed the Twenty-seventh New York Regiment when it was raised. When his unit formed an encampment near Washington, men of the unit called the place Camp Clara, an appropriate name because Mrs. Slocum stayed with her husband much of the time, the only regimental wife to do so. Lt. Charles S. Baker graciously vacated his tent, so that Slocum and his mate could bunk together.

Civil War Oddities #89

Harriet W. E. Hawley, wife of a Connecticut lawyer, became a nurse when her husband donned a blue uniform, and the Hawley’s managed to stay together. Harriet spent most of her days and many of her nights among the sick of the Seventh Connecticut Regiment, led by her husband.

When Hawley was sent to his native state, North Carolina, his wife found a place in the hospital at Beaufort. After following her husband to Florida and South Carolina, she went with him to Washington when his command was assigned to the Army of the James in April 1864. Soon back in North Carolina, where her husband was now in command as Wilmington, the Connecticut woman may have been the only wife of a brigadier general to spend weeks nursing former inmates of Andersonville Prison.

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.