Abigail Hopper Gibbons, Nurse -- 1801-1893 Print Email Born in New York to an abolitionist Quaker family, Abigail H. Gibbons grew up in a home that often harbored slaves on their way to freedom. Gibbons was also a medical nurse who brought the social convictions she learned at home to her medical and administrative duties.
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Annie Etheridge Hooks, Nurse/Soldier -- 1839-1913 Print Email When the war broke out, Annie, living in Detroit, joined the 2nd Michigan Infantry, ironically the same one Sara Emma Edmunds enlisted with as Franklin Thompson. It is not known if the two women ever met. The 2nd, the original Flint Grey militia, embarked for Washington, D.C., in May of 1861, and was in the battle of Blackburn's Ford, VA, July 18th. Annie is reported to have ridden her horse in the charge, afterwards taking care of the wounded on the field, but this too is in doubt, as it appears she did not possess a horse until the battle of Second Bull Run, when General Phil Kearny gave her one. But she was there, and on the front lines, helping nurse the wounded and giving water to the dying.
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Antonia Ford, Confederate Spy -- 1838-1871 Print Email Union Secret Service chief Lafayette C. Baker described Confederate spy Antonia Ford as a “decidedly good-looking woman with pleasing, insinuating manners.” From her home near Fairfax Court House, have way between Washington D.C., and Manassas VA, the Southern vixen not only acted as a courier for noted spy Rose Greenhow, but was able to gather valuable information on her own from lovestruck Union officers quartered in her father’s home.
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Clarissa Harlowe Barton, Humanitarian -- 1821-1912 Print Email Barton was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, in 1821, and educated at home, chiefly by her two brothers and two sisters. She was a teacher at first and the founder of various free schools in New Jersey. In 1854 she became a clerk in the Patent Office, Washington, D.C., but resigned at the start of the American Civil War (1861-1865) to work as a volunteer, distributing supplies to wounded soldiers. After the war she supervised a systematic search for missing soldiers.
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Cornelia Hancock, Nurse -- 1839-1926 Print Email Cornelia Hancock, a Quaker from New Jersey, answered the call for nurses at Gettysburg. At age 23 she was quickly immersed in the horrors of war, which she relayed to her relatives in descriptive, heartfelt letters. After only days of helping the wounded at Gettysburg, Hancock wrote her sister, “I feel assured I shall never feel horrified at anything that may happen to me hereafter.”
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Dorothea Dix, Nurse -- 1802-1887 Print Email A noted social reformer, Dix became the Union's Superintendent of Female Nurses during the Civil War. The soft spoken yet autocratic crusader had spent more than 20 years working for improved treatment of mentally ill patients and for better prison conditions. A week after the attack on Fort Sumter, Dix, at age 59, volunteered her services to the Union and received the appointment in June 1861 placing her in charge of all women nurses working in army hospitals. Serving in that position without pay through the entire war, Dix quickly molded her vaguely defined duties.
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Elizabeth Blackwell, Doctor -- 1821-1910 Print Email British-American physician and first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. Born near Bristol, England, Blackwell and her family moved to New York City when she was 11 years old, after a fire destroyed her father's business. The family moved to Jersey City, New Jersey (1835) and then to Cincinnati, Ohio (1838), where her father died not long after. To support the family, Blackwell and her mother and sisters opened a private school. Later, Blackwell accepted a teaching assignment in Kentucky, but bored with teaching and desiring to avoid marriage, she subsequently decided to pursue a career in medicine.
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Elizabeth Van Lew, Union Spy -- 1818-1900 Print Email The first Union flag to wave over Richmond in four years was raised in 1865 by this famous and effective Union spy. Born into a prominent Richmond family, Elizabeth Van Lew returned from her schooling in Philadelphia as an adamant abolitionist determined to fight slavery in the bastion of the South. "Slave power," she wrote in her diary, "is arrogant, is jealous and intrusive, is cruel, is despotic." Outspoken and rebellious, she appeared to her neighbors to be more than a little eccentric and soon became known as "Crazy Bet."
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Ella Palmer, Nurse -- 1829-1909 Print Email Ella Palmer responded to a call to citizens to help the many Confederate soldiers who were suffering, lying on the floor and shivering without blankets in a makeshift hospital in Chattanooga TN. Accompanied by her five-year-old daughter, Palmer donated her worldly goods to the hospital and then took charge as it’s matron. Palmer quickly organized two kitchens and a linen room, and ministered to the sick and dying at all hours. Though the hospital corps had consisted of men only, the surgeons welcomed the widow’s help.
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Emeline Pigott, Confederate Spy -- 1836-1916 Print Email Emeline Pigott was born and raise in Harlowe Township of Carteret Country NC. When she was 25, she moved with her parents to a farm at Crab Point on the North Carolina coast, just across the creek from where the soldiers of the 26th North Carolina were stationed to defend the coast. The sensitive and compassionate woman took it upon herself to help the troops in many ways. She tended to the sick and wounded soldiers, even bringing some home to nurse. Working throughout three counties, Pigott collected mail along with food, clothing, medicine, and other needed items, and left the goods in designated hollow trees and logs for the Confederates to collect.
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