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In hospitals throughout the world. Thank you. Thank you for coming to hear me speak, its kindness and generosity that I see in your faces today and we are here for a very good reason. We are here because of the nurses. What can I say? But in 1861 hostilities, erupted at Fort Sumter. And our President Lincoln Father, Abraham summoned, our men and our boys to fight our boys in blue. I didn't know what exactly I would do. I was a wife and a mother in Philadelphia. My husband, Joshua husband was in esteemed lawyer. The Philadelphia Bar I saw him in parlors prepare, his case has pleading, for various criminals or individuals. so, I I was, I could cook, I could so I could organize a household. What better thing to do than to be a nurse. Well, when my boys signed up my boys in blue, my son's. My son's. I would give freely to save the union. It is our patriotic Duty in our family. I would not have them die in a filthy army camp someplace. You know, how hard it is to bathe to get boys to bathe? Well, that's how it was. So, I signed up to go on a transport from Philadelphia all the way to Harrison, landing, on the Peninsular campaign that failed campaign of General McClellan. What can I say, who in the right? Mind would send thousands of men and boys into A swamp to camp and then to fight then to get wounded and bloody and then to sit in the mud and get gangrene or typhoid I saw those transports. Hundreds of my boys in blue not my son's, not my boys in blue but my boys in blue. My soldiers writhing in pain and misery and we had nothing. Shortages shortages, shortages, no bandages, nothing no, quinine for malaria. Ria typhoid. I saw their eyes Hollow as they withered away before me. And so I decided to be composed and kind and gentle to have mercy and compassion. What good is kindness when you cannot give it with all of your heart? so that first time after thousands of times that my heart broke in these long years of the Civil War, I gave my heart. And then I think that's when I inquired, what you call a non De Guerre. The soldiers called me mother. Husband mother husband. Oh it was, it was humorous. And I smiled everywhere. I went, I smiled, I lended a hand. I turned a soldier. I save one from bleeding by making a tourniquet. I rolled bandages, I sewed. I cooked, I cleaned. I kept him as clean as I as possible on the transports back and forth. And then we left the peninsula.

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Well, the next time I resolved myself to be the master quartermaster of supplies and a mass supplies were General Pope's Army for the Second Battle of Bull Run, that would be August of 1862 and there, I couldn't get a pass, my sister nurse Clara Barton, who we knew of very well we were so proud of her. She got a pass and she was at Antietam right at the field hospital and that's where I wanted to be but it was not my fate. I would find my true path. I would I truly would it was not my fate, I went over to Smoketown Hospital. but that would be after the Battle of Antietam, you know, it takes months for a soldier to heal months for an amputated, limb to close up and for a soldier to finally learn how to walk, or handle himself without an arm or a hand, Once for the soldier to recuperate and convalesce months away from his loved ones, he's heartbroken from the Carnage. So we gave our hearts and when we do this we would become exhausted ourselves. Well Dorothy Dix. The superintendent of nurses with the u.s. Sanitary Commission Washington, d.c. called me up because she heard about what I did at Peninsula. And what I did it at the end for General Pope's supplies and she called me to Baltimore to head up Hospital. And I did gladly, I served, I felt. It was my duty, and I had faith in what we were doing. We were doing this for our boys, in blue. Because my boys were there out in the field and I did not want them to suffer. So I would not have some other mothers boys suffering as they fought for the union, and for the Republic. So two months, the poor matron before me was exhausted and had to go home to rest. We were not paid. You understand? This was voluntary. My next assignment was with Dorothy was with at Smoketown Hospital. Well, after the Battle of Antietam now, Smoketown hospital was a two days walk from the battlefield. So we saw one day a soldier coming in hanging on the butt of his rifle. Limping He had been shot through his side and had a massive wound. The field Hospital doctor had left him for dead, but the nurse at the field Hospital said no, you get yourself up and you get to the hospital you walk. You'll see, you'll see the ambulance is going in a direction. You'll also see the buzzards in the crows. So, we did and we treated him. Now Dorothy Dix was very much impressed with my sense of organization and that comes from all that church work. I do you know what you do when you join a church? Your bacon cookies, you're cooking, you're cleaning your pitch, it in your running, with the team you're talking and chatting and you get the stuff done with what little you have and that's how it was nursing. I do believe I hear the call of an ambulance. These were tough times. Now I really really agree with Florence Nightingale hoop. Skirts are worthless in a hospital and I have heard rumors from the nurses in Washington. D.c. at Georgetown, Hospital that a lady came in with a hoop skirt and her skirt hooked on the bedstead of a soldier and she turned it and she tossled him and he bled out and died. Now of course it's our another thing there are a necessary evil for a lady. So we'll have to just accept the situation. But really, what a nurse needs is an apron, an apron with pockets Pockets with lots of little Trinkets and things games, and toys, to keep the men and boys from the drink and from gambling with cards. And then to, this really helps My little hymnal. No, I have faith, I have faith in the care that I give. I have faith in my boys in blue, that they will be brave on the battlefield. And I have faith in my nurses, the head surgeon and Dorothea Dix, that we are doing the right thing and the good thing and sometimes our boys in blue need help. They need support. And they ask. Can you sing me a a hymn? So, I just opened up my little book and I sing a hymn. I'm not very good at that. So I won't say no. But anyway or I say a prayer or a poem, something that up, lift their Spirits, this is what Florence Nightingale said. Yes you need to keep the soldiers warm and dry and comfortable and boost them a little bit with Spirits like brandy. We would get cases in from some Northern Massachusetts town. The ladies, the ladies of Lowell are the ladies of Boston get together commandeer, those cases into wagons hire two people, one to drive and one with pistols at his hips, to safeguard the supply, and they bring that stuff down to us. We would carefully guard over it, but it was medicine medicine. Now, I really had a keen eye for detail and organization. The head surgeons liked me but the nurses liked me as well because we got along. I knew that even though they weren't as skilled, as I was that their hearts were in the right place and their heart was where my heart was. And so we bonded together we unified, we were sister nurses. and it is truly truly awesome and wonderful in all, I mean, of what we can do as human beings, when we were kind, when we are compassionate, when we are strong, when we are calm, when we are merciful now,

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my heart broke many, many times at Smoketown and at Letterman Camp after Gettysburg. I didn't need to see the battles with the rumors came in. I saw a nurses handling soldiers day in and day out for months. On end. Turning them over. I saw orderlies, carrying in their heavy charges day in and day out into the night. I saw surgeons working by candlelight. Day in and day out and saving lives hundreds of lives, thousands of lives all over this world. The technology that the Warfare that we use was so far Advanced, so far beyond what we would ever understand. But our methods of medicine were so far behind that we were doing ketchup and the nurses, the nurses they were there to fill in that Gap, to clean up, the blood to peel away the Crusty. Muddy clothing from the wound, open up the leg and then clean the wounds of the surgeon could see. See what he would need to do. Being careful, not to come in contact with gangrene. So many of our sisters, died of typhoid, or pneumonia, or tuberculosis or gangrene And yet. We love what we did. We were together, we were unified in this effort with more beautiful and joyous thing. Truly I felt as if the Lord were with me that I had an angel with me every time I worked with a soldier. The next time that my heart broke wasn't Brandy Station in Virginia. There were a group of soldiers who had mutinied against their officers. But I felt that they were innocent And this was my one true path. Do you know what? It's like to find your purpose, your path in life. Do you know what? That's like. How wondrous and beautiful it is. It is almost as if the Lord tells you it's a calling I looked into the eyes. Of that Soldier. And I asked him to tell me his story. and he said, He did this and that, and this but it didn't matter. Because I saw in his eyes that he was innocent. So I resolved in my moral conscience, I could not let this Injustice happen in the camps, I wrote a letter to his Commander asking for clemency. Dare I a woman I'm nurse. I did. Again, I ain't seen how my husband the lawyer had argued cases in our home was a matter of reasoning, finding some key, that would lead the people to Justice. I was refused. The commander said, no never say no to a woman of conscience. I would have won and finally did General Meade and resigning lie, he said no, well there's one final officer and who might that be the commander-in-chief Our Father Abraham Abraham Lincoln. Now Legend has that I went to Washington d.c. to plead his case and well I can say, do you know that at this time we could walk into the capital. There was a guard there but if you were dressed neatly and plainly and you look wised, you could walk right in but you had to wait, maybe a few days because he was so busy seeing people. So noted with cases while I was ushered into this room and there he sat at a desk all towering with peepers map strewn on the floor, a little boy playing in the corner. I was so in awe of Our Father Abraham that I curtsied like a lady and he asked me why I was here to see him and I said well I and then I compose myself and I found in my heart the mercy and the compassion for our boys in blue. I would be their angel, their voice. And I said, well, I'm here to to plea and to argue to reason with you sir president, Father Abraham for the innocence of an unjustly accused Soldier, you see, they say he deserted his post, but when I talked to him he really didn't. He had just gone home to see his family. He needed to see his family. We cannot lose one soldier who could fight for the Republic who could fight for the union. Maybe he just needed to go home to his family and to see his children, or his wife or his mother. And what is your name? And I looked into Abraham, Lincoln's eyes and I saw Care Warren reason. Compassion. I saw a depth of thinking I had never witnessed before in any human being in any man. And I just calmly said, I think we should play clemency for this person. He said I'll read the letter clemency. We need all the men. We can have to fight and so I did it's so then. Well every Camp I went to that was my path. I would find the ones that were accused of desertion and slated to be drawn before a drumhead court and unjustly accused and convicted and shot her hand. And I would write my letter of clemency, and then rumor had it that Lincoln would see my handwriting on the letters and he'd see my signature. He's the all that's that. Husband lady. It got around. I say 200 men. Maybe more. No wish I could have saved more. I wish I could have seen more of my boys in blue, you know. In these camps it would see the refugees coming up from the south as the plantations. We turned over or there'd be a battle in a fort like a fort Pulaski. When Susie King Taylor, a sister nurse of ours, Went to went to the island of Saint Simon and then went on to become the first black nurse in the Civil War, she went on to become the first black teacher of a free school. In the Civil War, she met Clara Barton, my sister nurse. Clara, Barton was criticized for doing that because she was a lady of color, but I agreed to Clara Barton, there are sister nurses, and the color of their blood is the same. Because we do shed blood. We do bleed, we get hurt. But we heal and we go on.

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And then the last time that my heart broke, it was for Joy because we had won the war and our Father, Abraham had kept the union together. That we would somehow overcome. These problems, we would somehow with our imperfect Union, become a better place. We would somehow band together as the nurses and take care of our men, our boys in blue. I was at the Grand Review in Washington, d.c. when it was. Suddenly I heard the soldiers and they were cheering. And it was someone and they were saying, hooray for mother husband hooray for mother husband me. Thank you. I don't know if he has to memorize, like, we have plenty of time for questions. Yeah. If you'd like to ask some questions. Yes. Joshua. I actually outlive Joshua he lived in Philadelphia and he was, he practiced law. As always, he totally agreed with my efforts and felt it was a duty that we all had to serve in some way. And that was his way. And my guess is that he was busy in Philadelphia working with the Union forces, amassing supplies, and, and helping helping out the nurses. Because we had a tremendous Network. You know it's yeah they're executing. It was shot. Oh yeah. You know, there's there's a counts of 15 year old boy, who fell asleep at his field post and he was just picked up by the commander and put up against a tree and then shot because it was too much of a risk that the Confederates would get through the wine and then destroy the entire Camp. Killing hundreds of soldiers. So I mean it was a very serious offense, but there were many who just deserted because they were exhausted from the Carnage of battle and went just went home. They were hungry. They were tattered, they were famished dehydrated and Brandy Station. There's a book called The Mutiny of Brandy Station. Those men there. They mutinied against their officers because they were forced to March without water or salt or hardtack for more than 100 miles. And they were just dropping dead in the road from from heat the other wearing wool uniforms and the Heat of the summer. In fact, if you were to look at Civil War battles, in fact, this one at Fort Stevens heat and dehydration plays a major factor disease, plays, a major factor, the nurses were there to sort of take care of men to get them. Well, To to heal these wounds. Now often a man would be finding himself knowing or boy would know that. He'd be he'd be dying and so he would ask the nurse to come. And then she would sit and write out a note, a letter to the loved ones. Alright? And so Louisa May Alcott writes that she didn't have anything to write on. So she used the bottoms of a Tico, the bottom of a tea kettle, to write these notes in pencil or in pen and ink on papers. And then they would be dutifully sent to their families. Now that the badge on my hat is a third core badge, this is a replica from my own research on, Mary Morris husband. And she also sewed Hospital flag with yellow Calico, perhaps and a red flannel bottle on it, to sit, to, to signal that her tent per tent, was a medical tent. We could get medicine. And okay, so when you say Smoketown hospital or camp or Camp, Letterman. These were massive tent communities. Massive large tents holding 10 beds at a time. Cots, wooden carts with canvas that you folded in that you loaded. Ambulances were often like to wheel things pulled by a mule or a horse, or by people.

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So the level of skill of the nurses to was from the very basic, like I just come from home and I know how to take care of my little ones, keeping them from having fever to the more advanced nurses, who were trained in the Florence Nightingale technique, like the Woolsey sisters. Now we do that georgeanna Woolsey with the u.s. Sanitary Commission brought a French valet Chef or cook who cooked for her so are either. Many levels of activity with the nurses. But they were amazing and I just stole my daughter's life to a nurse and so I feel for them, I really do. Yes. Is it time? All right, thank you so much.