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Sometime around the beginning of 1863, Louisa Volker became a member of the Military Telegraph Corps of the Union army. She probably volunteered for the position as Military Telegrapher, and was accepted due to the shortage of telegraph operators in the area. The only surviving written account of her work as a Military Telegrapher appears in Plum's book, The Military Telegraph During the Civil War in the United States, where Plum discusses the situation in southeastern Missouri in the summer of 1863.
About seven months previous, Miss Louisa E. Volker, a most estimable young lady, had relieved C. T. Barrett, operator at Mineral Point, and became at once not only the first lady operator in the corps, west of the Mississippi, but the only operatrix who had ever telegraphed on that side of the river. Entering upon duties which, heretofore, had devolved exclusively upon young men, she realized that peculiar feeling of responsibility which arises from an important but experimental trust, and hence, with all the zeal of a leader, she undertook the fulfillment of this new role of feminine usefulness in war. . .
On a former occasion, the station six miles north of the Point was attacked by cavalry, surprising Captain Lippencott's company, which being driven off, collected at Mineral Point. Miss Volker had previously ascertained the presence of the enemy and telegraphed to Pilot Knob the situation, and started the repairer north to mend the line if possible, which was actually accomplished during the night, she sitting by the instrument all night in expectation of an attack on Mineral Point.
Under normal civilian conditions in the big cities of the east, women operators were generally not expected to work nights, as it was not considered proper for unescorted women to be out at night; some telegraph companies even used this as a justification for preferentially hiring men. However, women operators in the West, and especially railroad operators, were frequently required to work nights, as they had to be present whenever trains passed the station.
In November 1863, while she was serving as a Military Telegrapher, Louisa Volker transferred ownership of a block of land and several lots in Mineral Point to Augustus Rauschenbach of St. Louis, who was the husband of her sister Sarah, and trustee for her mother, Emily. She may have transferred ownership of the land to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Confederates, in the event that she was captured. Her telegraphic skills made her a strategic target; Confederate raiders often kidnapped the local telegrapher when they invaded a town, and forced him or her to listen for intelligence, or even send false reports to confuse the enemy. However, her desire to protect the family's property led her to remain in Mineral Point, together with an unidentified sister, during Confederate General Sterling Price's raid into southern Missouri in September 1864.
On September 19, 1864, Price crossed over from Arkansas into Missouri at the head of a force of about 12,000 men. His plan was to capture St. Louis and Jefferson City, and install a secessionist government; he erroneously believed that the majority of the state's inhabitants were Confederate sympathizers, and would come to his support.
One of Price's primary targets was the town of Pilot Knob, which is located approximately eighty-five miles south of St. Louis. In addition to being the southern terminus of the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad, Pilot Knob had Union supply depots and iron works that were considered vital to the defense of the region. Pilot Knob was defended by a Federal garrison of about 1500 men who were stationed at nearby Fort Davidson.
Union forces under the command of Major General A. J. Smith were encamped in the area of Mineral Point. Smith's primary task was to defend the railroad link against attack by Confederates, who sporadically attacked the trains. Louisa Volker found herself in a position of great strategic importance as the only telegraph operator in the vicinity. Plum's account continues:
At Mineral Point, sixty-one miles from St. Louis and twenty-five north of the Knob, a good part of General Smith's command was concentrated to meet a portion of Price's troops expected there. Smith called in his out-posts, planted his guns and awaited attack. A train laden with soldiers and refugees, including the Irondale operator, was delayed in consequence of injury done the road near the Point. The attack on the train which followed was repulsed, the track repaired, and the train saved. By this time the woods were filled with Confederates, and picket firing began. Miss Louisa Volker, operating at the Point, having been at her instrument continuously for two days and nights, was relieved by the Irondale operator.
Price had originally intended to attack St. Louis. Sensing this, Union General W. S. Rosecrans, who commanded the Department of Missouri from headquarters in St. Louis, ordered General Smith to move in the direction of St. Louis to reinforce his position. Hearing of this, Price then made Fort Davidson, near Pilot Knob, his main target; he also began to destroy the rail and telegraph links to St. Louis, to prevent their being used to send any more reinforcements. Price sent units under General Joseph Shelby to accomplish this; by the morning of September 27, Shelby had succeeded in destroying the railroad tracks just south of Mineral Point, and in cutting the telegraph wires, thus isolating the Federal garrison at Fort Davidson. Confederate Colonel B. Frank Gordon was then ordered to attack Mineral Point. General Smith had been ordered to fall back toward St. Louis, leaving Mineral Point defenseless against attack. Plum gave this account of the invasion of Mineral Point.
At noon of the twenty-eighth, General Smith was telegraphed to fall back, and by three, P.M., the last train started. Every male citizen, fearing conscription, left also. Miss Volker and sister remained to protect their father's home from destruction. After hiding all evidences of her employment, and placing a pistol in her pocket, with a fixed purpose of defending herself and sister against violence, she overlooked the little village from her window, and discovered Confederate cavalrymen, ragged and dirty, with "lean and hungry" looks, suddenly possess the place and begin their ravenous search for food, not to mention their hunt for plunder.
This rabble was composed of men, barefooted, but spurred; others clothed in gaudy-colored curtain damask; all manner of hats and caps; some in Federal uniform, and strapped to their saddles was all kinds of plunder--calico, domestic, shoes, boots, tin pans, bed quilts, etc. Volker's house was soon filled by men who stole blankets and clothing, and helped themselves to the edibles at the same time. Miss Volker now discovered the depot, tank and engine-house in flames. Mineral Point and Coles bridges were also destroyed. By five o'clock, the enemy had all passed north, and the silence that prevailed in that deserted village was more trying than the presence of the dreaded enemy... Night approached, and darkness and imagination multiplied terrors in Volker's house, at least. The two young ladies, armed with pistol and their father's shot-gun, stood in the center of a room, still as death, listening intently. Morning brought report that St. Louis was captured. Not long after, an unfounded rumor that Indians had deluged Potosi in blood, stampeded the women and children from the Point.
The rumors were totally unfounded. Fort Davidson's defenders, under the command of Union Brigadier General Thomas Ewing Jr., successfully repulsed the first attack by the Confederates; they then slipped out of the fort and rode toward Rolla, Missouri, after blowing up the powder magazine. Price, unaware that the defenders had left, mounted a second attack at dusk on September 27, and, to his embarassment, found the fort empty when his troops entered it. Price then turned westward, and finally returned to Arkansas in December, having failed to achieve any of his strategic objectives.
Plum's account of Louisa Volker's work as a Military Telegrapher ended rather dramatically at this point; he gave no further information on Louisa Volker's life after the war. However, a search of archives in Washington County, Jefferson City, and St. Louis, Missouri, yielded information on her later activities.
During the war, Louisa Volker made the acquaintance of Thomas Hanlon Macklind, a lawyer and civil engineer in Potosi, Missouri. He had been born in Ireland and came to the United States with his parents, who settled in Pittsburgh. He was educated at the Franklin Institute as a civil engineer, and moved to Missouri in 1856, where he participated in the construction of the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad. While at Potosi, he studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1860. In 1861, he and several other pro-Union men of Potosi organized a volunteer unit, the Twelfth Missouri Cavalry of the Missouri State Militia, for defense against local Confederate sympathizers. The unit participated in several battles in southeast Missouri, and Macklind was promoted from Second Lieutenant to Captain.
In May 1865, Captain Macklind and Louisa Volker were married in St. Louis. They moved to St. Louis, where Macklind became an engineer with the Street Department. Macklind continued to be connected with the Street Department until his death in 1904. They had two sons -- William R, who was born in 1869, and Thomas V., who was born in 1880.
Louisa Macklind evidently gave up telegraphy after her marriage. However, she took an interest in a field that was just beginning to be open to women in the 1870's - stenography. Prior to the Civil War, most clerical work was performed by men; only with the employment of women by the Treasury Department during the Civil War did women begin to enter the field of general office work. It is likely that her background in telegraphy led to her interest in stenography; good penmanship, a high degree of literacy, and excellent spelling skills were basic requirements for telegraphers as well as stenographers.
Louisa Macklind died on May 21, 1905, at the age of 68. Her obituary appeared in the May 22 St. Louis Post Dispatch under the heading, "First Woman War Telegrapher Dead". Cause of death was listed as senile debility, aggravated by ulcers. She was buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery, in the same plot with her husband and parents.
The only female Military Telegrapher other than Louisa Volker to receive a certificate of Honorable Service under the Congressional Act of January 26, 1897, was Mary E. Smith Buell, of Norwich, New York. Nothing is known of her service during the Civil War; she is listed in Plum's roster of Military Telegraphers in The Military Telegraph During the Civil War in the United States as "Mary E. Smith." She lived in Norwich, New York, and was admitted to the Society of the United States Military Telegraph Corps in 1909, shortly before her death at the age of seventy-eight on May 24.
In my mind, the single most important woman of the Civil War era without a doubt was Harriet Beecher Stowe, "the little little woman who wrote the book that made this great war."
In addition to writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, she produced the single most riveting description of Abe Lincoln, one that captures the essence of the man in a handful of words:
"Lincoln is a strong man, but his strength is of a peculiar kind; it is not aggressive so much as passive, and among passive things, it is like the strength not so much of a stone buttress as of a wire cable. It is strength swaying to every influence, yielding on this side and on that to popular needs, yet tenaciously and inflexibly bound to carry its great end; and probably by no other strength could our national ship have been drawn safely thus far during the tossings and tempests which beset her way."
Beautifully-crafted and concise prose conveying stunning insight.
She was an artist of the highest order whose words caused the country to shake.
An ambulance wagon was often used in caring for, and transporting injured soldiers (Source: Library of Congress)
Mary A. Ellis, Missouri
Ellis assisted her husband in raising the 1st Missouri Volunteer Cavalry that encamped at St. Louis in August 1861. As the colonel’s wife she accompanied him in her carriage with two servants and her own tent. She nursed at the Battle of Pea Ridge, and helped with surgical operations.
"In camps, on the march, or in the hospital, there was not part of the work of a nurse that I did not do, even to assisting in surgical operations, particularly at the Battle of Pea Ridge, where I stood at the surgeon’s table, not one or two, but many hours, with hot blood steaming into my face, until nature rebelled against such horrible sights and I fainted but as soon as possible I returned. Our regiment was in the cavalry charge at Sugar Creek and many of our men were killed and wounded. I was there with my carriage on the field, and bringing in the first wounded to the house that was made to do duty for a hospital, and continued to care for the needy until April, 1862.
Once in October 1861, one of our officers was left with the rebels and was very sick. It was at the close of a hard day’s march, and his captain came to me to know what could be done. I went on horseback alone, with the determination to find him, and care for him, if possible, and had the pleasure of being the means of saving his life."
The same month, "it was my privilege to carry an important dispatch from General Hunter to General Price. The guerrillas and bushwhackers were so plentiful that the cars on the Northern Missouri Railroad could not run. The telegraph lines were all cut off, and any Union soldier or stranger unlucky enough to be caught beyond the camp was shot immediately. I received the dispatch from General Hunter at 9 a.m., and placed it in the hands of General Price, at Jefferson City, at 5 p.m., the same day, having ridden forty miles."
At the request of the chief of the detective force, she acted as a detective. At last she was taken sick. It was two months before she could stand and was unable to return to service. During her time in camp she received no pay, but spent thousands of dollars on the regiment and for the sick. Her only son returned from the war maimed and died an early death ". . . oh! I want to go to him,---and as I am quite old, it must be soon. I am a physician, but my work is done; I am not able to leave my room."
"Anyone who limits her vision to memories of yesterday is already dead." ~Lily Langtry~
Tents of the General Hospital at City Point, VA (Library of Congress)
Lois H. Dennett Dunbar, Michigan City, Indiana
Dunbar and Harriet Colfax, later a famous lighthouse keeper at Michigan City, both enrolled at St. Louis in November 1861. After the battle of Fort Donelson, 300 men came under their care. At the request of Gov. Morton of Indiana, she transferred to Hospital No. 2 in Evansville, where she eventually "commanded" five others. Colfax served on transports on the Mississippi. Dunbar made trips too. "Twice I went down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers after the sick, and at Sartartia, on the Yazoo, was under fire from the rebels, but our gunboats soon disabled them. We had a small battle, and took a church, which we fitted up for a hospital. We took some on the boat, gathering up three hundred on the return."
She was taught surgery under Dr. Jameson who had served in the Crimea and she studied from his manual. She assisted in many amputations. After the war, she married one of the first patients she saved after five doctors had given up on him. She resigned the service in September 1864.
"I have had men die clutching my dress till it was almost impossible to loosen their hold. I have often taken young boys in my arms when they were so tired they could not rest in their beds, and held them as I would my own little boys. I never went to the ward with a sad face, but always had a smile and a cheery word for all. The doctor used to say he knew when I was ahead of him, for the patients had such pleasant countenances."
"I asked my father what there was to make doctoring more disgusting than nursing, which women were always doing, and which ladies had done publicly in the Crimea. He could not tell me." ~Elizabeth Garrett Anderson~
Lillie Devereux Blake (1833-1913) was a suffragist, a noted fiction writer, journalist, essayist, lecturer, and women's rights advocate. The daughter of planter George Pollock Devereux and Sarah Elizabeth Johnson, she was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. When her father died in 1837, her mother decided to leave his plantation in Roanoke, Virginia and return with her daughters to her relatives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Lillie attended Miss Apthorp's School for Girls in New Haven until age fifteen, after which she studied with a private tutor in the Yale undergraduate curriculum. She married Frank Umsted, a lawyer from Philadelphia, in 1855. The birth of their first daughter, Elizabeth, in 1857 coincided with the publication of her first story in Harper's Weekly.
The years 1858-59 were marked by the birth of her second daughter, Katherine, the publication of her first novel, Southwald, and the alleged suicide of her husband. She resisted remarriage. Instead, to support her family she wrote, using pseudonyms, for mass market magazines and was a Washington-based Civil War correspondent for one magazine and two papers. In 1866, she married Grinfill Blake, an employee at a manufacturing firm in New York. She continued to support herself by writing. Among her works are a collection of short stories, a collection of essays, hundreds of uncollected short stories and essays, and five novels.
"A true woman always loves a real soldier." ~Belle Boyd~
"Five College Archives and Manuscript Collections"
Antoinette Brown Blackwell (sister-in-law of Elizabeth Blackwell, 1st female doctor in the U.S. & organizer of The Women's Central Association of Relief during the Civil War)
Antoinette Louisa Brown was the first American woman ordained as minister. She was born May 20, 1825 in Henrietta, New York, U.S.A. and later attended Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. Oberlin was the first coeducational school to grant college degrees to women and to accept students of all races. Women, however, were expected to clean rooms, wash clothes and serve food for the male students. While studying at Oberlin College Brown met and became lifelong friends with Lucy Stone, a suffragist and an abolitionist.
In 1847 Brown finished the literary course taken by most women. She encountered serious objections from the faculty when she then decided to study theology. They did not think it an appropriate field of study for a woman. However, the school charter decreed that no student could be excluded on the basis of sex, so Brown prevailed and finished the theological course in 1850. The Oberlin College faculty, however, refused to award her a college degree and she did not receive a license to preach. The degree was eventually awarded to her twenty eight years later.
Brown traveled the lecture circuit for two years speaking in favor of abolition of slavery and temperance (prohibition of alcohol consumption) and preached whenever she had an opportunity. This was at a time when public speaking by women was considered taboo. She was often shouted down by male preachers. Finally, on September 15, 1853 Antoinette Brown was ordained a minister of the First Congregational Church in South Butler, New York. That same year she was also an official delegate to the World's Temperance Convention in New York but she was not allowed to speak. In 1854 Brown withdrew as minister of her congregation due to theological differences. She found she had difficulty supporting the idea of the original sin and predestination. She then became a Unitarian.
Brown took her ministry to the slums and prisons of New York City. Her observations of the poor and people with mental disorders led her to publish articles on these subjects in the New York Tribune owned by Horace Greeley. In 1855 she published Shadows of Our Social System
In 1856 she married Samuel Blackwell, brother of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, and a brother-in-law of Lucy Stone. The Blackwells had five daughters (two other children died in infancy) and Brown now focused on raising them. Though she stayed at home taking care of her family, Brown continued writing. In 1869 she published Studies in General Science linking scientific knowledge and women's equality. In 1871 she published a novel The Island Neighbors. In The Sexes Throughout Nature, published in 1875, she claimed that Darwin failed to understand the roles of the sexes. Altogether Brown published ten books in her lifetime.
She returned to the lecture circuit in the 1870s after her husband's business failed. She was a strong supporter of the women's suffrage and wrote magazine articles in support of this cause. Her articles were published in the Woman's Journal, edited by Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell. She also continued her religious activities. She still preached and even ordained two women preachers. Brown served as a pastor emeritus of All Souls Unitarian Church in Elizabeth, New Jersey from 1908 until her death. In 1920, when Brown was ninety five, she was able to vote for the first time, after the Nineteenth Ammendment gave women in the U.S.A. the right to vote. Antoinette Brown Blackwell died November 5, 1921 in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
"If woman's sole responsibility is of the domestic type, one class will be crushed by it, and the other throw it off as a badge of poverty. The poor man's motto, "Women's work is never done," leads inevitably to its antithesis -- ladies' work is never begun." ~Antoinette Brown Blackwell~
Smith's barn in Keedysville, Maryland, which was used as a hospital after the battle of Antietam (Library of Congress)
Estelle Johnson, Vermont
When her town’s regiment, the 4th Vermont, was formed her husband and brother-in-law enlisted. She and her sister wanted to accompany the regiment. The colonel said nurses had not been called, but wanted them to join. She was sworn in personally by the colonel and the governor of Vermont. In September they reached Federal Hill in Washington and joined other regiments. The 9th Wisconsin had seven ladies and at Camp Advance the 2nd Vermont had five women with the regiment. While at Camp Griffith, they were shelled. The captain wanted she and her sister to fall back, but, "I told him if he thought we would run at the first fire he was greatly mistaken."
They set up a hospital in a house where she and her whole family succumbed to typhoid fever. Her sister died. She went to Washington three times for supplies, at one point leaving with Amanda Farnham. They took a wagon to Germantown then proceeded on foot to a bakery. "When the German woman who had charge saw our uniforms, she invited us into her kitchen to have some dinner, and would not accept any pay." Her husband was discharged disabled and subsequently she left the service in 1862.
"So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children." ~Atticus~
Dawna,
I'm usually not much in relating articles about women, however, in this case, and being almost a resident of Front Royal, where my parents lived, I found this Lady to be just that.........quite a Lady. She resided in Front Royal for a time, and the house (cottage), that she lived in there, is now a historical museum, with many of the artifacts that belonged to her, still there. I paid more attention to her, as she resided in Front Royal. The picture of her, is also one of her later years, and not one of the usual photos you see of her. This is part of the Front Royal driving tour, one which I was very familiar with, having lived in this area, and in visiting my parents, later in my life.
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Stop 2 Belle Boyd
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It was 1:30 P.M. and the temperature was reaching eighty degrees when General Jackson and General Richard S. Ewell with their staffs stopped in this vicinity to prepare their men for battle.
With a company of the Sixth Virginia Cavalry, "Wise Troop," in advance, Colonel Bradley T. Johnson's First Maryland (CSA) deployed into line of battle, the Louisiana Brigade filed in behind them. This would include the colorful battalion of Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat, "Wheat's Tigers." The Sixth Louisiana was positioned in immediate support. The Seventh, Eighth, and the Ninth Louisiana regiments were ordered to the open fields to the west of Gooney Manor Road.
Belle Boyd ca.1890 wearing specially designed (Belle’s design) brooch of Southern Cross of Honor. Picture from the Book Belle Boy in Camp and Prison.
In front of the columns, one-half miles south of town, Jackson and Ewell surveyed the ground leading into Front Royal. It was from this ridge that Henry Kyd Douglas captured the attention of G. Campbell Brown, a member of Ewell's staff. Brown focused his gaze on "a woman running like mad down from the on our right...gesticulating wildly to us. "Douglas, at Ewell's behest, rode down the hill to meet "the romantic maiden" with a "tall, supple, graceful figure" who called his name. Momentarily startled at being recognized by the woman, Douglas' astonishment evaporated when he saw the " well-known Belle Boyd whom [he] had known from her earliest girlhood."
Winded and gasping Belle Boyd told her friend to advise Jackson that the Federal forces inside Front Royal were minimal: "Go back quick and tell him that the Yankee Force is very small, one regiment of Maryland infantry...Tell him I know, for I went through the camps and got it out of an officer." "Tell him charge right down and he will catch them all."...Four Valiant Years pg 147.
Henry Kyd Douglas
“Stonewall” Jackson’s Staff
Acquaintance of Belle Boyd It is Kyd Douglas who recognizes the young woman running across the fields as Belle Boyd. Kyd Douglas had made Belle’s acquaintance in Martinsburg, Virginia previously. “She was just the girl to dare to do this thing.” . . .Four Valiant Years, pg 147
Belle Boyd Sign
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