Phenominal Women

[dawna]

Mrs. Rose O'Neal Greenhow, Confederate spy, during her imprisonment in the Old Capitol, her daughter standing beside her.



Belle Boyd

"Library of Congress"

[Wild_Rose]

I could never come to terms with them placing an eight year old child in prison simply because they had imprisoned her mother and didn't know what to do with the child. Very strange.

Rose

[dawna]

Washington, Nov. 17th, 1861,
398 Sixteenth Street.
To the Hon. Wm. H. Seward,
Secretary of State:

Sir - For nearly three months I have been confined, a close prisoner, shut out from air and exercise, and denied all communication with family and friends.

"Patience is said to be a great virture," and I have practised it to my utmost capacity of endurance.

I am told, sir, that upon your ipse dixit, the fate of citizens depends, and that the sign manual of the ministers of Louis the Fourteenth and Fifteenth was not more potential in their day, than that of the Secretary of State in 1861.

I therefore most respectfully submit, that on Friday, August 23d, without warrant or other show of authority, I was arrested by the Detective Police, and my house taken in charge by them; that all my private letters, and my papers of a life time, were read and examined by them; that every law of decency was violated in the search of my house and person, and the surveilance over me.

We read in history, that the poor Maria Antoinette had a paper torn from her bosom by lawless hands, and that even a change of linen had to be effected in sight of her brutal captors. It is my sad experience to record even more revolting outrages than that, for during the first days of my imprisonment, whatever necessity forced me to seek my chamber, a detective stood sentinel at the open door. And thus for a period of seven days, I, with my little child, was placed absolutely at the mercy of men without character or responsibility; that during the first evening, a portion of these men became brutally drunk, and boasted in my hearing of the "nice times" they expected to have with the female prisoners; and that rude violence was used towards a colored servant girl during that evening, the extent of which I have not been able to learn. For any show of decorum afterwards was practiced toward me, I was indebted to the detective called Capt. Dennis.

In the careful analysis of my papers I deny the existence of a line I had not a perfect right to have written, or to have received. Freedom of speech and of opinion is the birthright of Americans, guaranteed to us by our Charter of Liberty, the Constitution of the United States. I have exercised my perogative, and have openly avowed my sentiments. During the political struggle, I opposed your Republican party with every instinct of self-preservation. I believed your success a virtual nullification of the Constitution, and that it would entail upon us the direful consequences which have ensued. These sentiments have doubtless been found recorded among my papers, and I hold them as rather a proud record of my sagacity.

I must be permitted to quote from a letter of yours, in regard to Russell of the London Times, which you conclude with these admirable words: "Individual errors of opinion may be tolerated, as long as good sense is left to combat them." By way of illustrating theory and practice, here am I, a prisoner in sight of the Executive Mansion, in sight of the Capitol where the proud statesmen of our land have sung their paeans to the blessings of our free institutions. Comment is idle. Freedom of thought, every right pertaining to the citizen has been suspended by what, I suppose, the President calls a "military necessity."

A blow has been struck, by this total disregard of all civil rights, against the present system of Government, far greater in its effects than the severance of the Southern States. Our people have been taught to contemn the supremacy of the law, to which all have hitherto bowed, and to look to the military power for protection against its decrees. A military spirit has been developed, which will only be subordinate to a Military Dictatorship. Read history, and you will find, that the causes which bring about a revolution rarely predominate at its close, and no people have ever returned to the point from which they started. Even should the Southern State be subdued and forced back into the Union (which I regard as impossible, with a full knowledge of their resources,) a different form of Government will be found needful to meet the new developments of national character. There is no class of society, no branch of industry, which this change has not reached, and the dull, plodding, methodical habits of the poor can never be resumed.

You have held me, sir, to man's accountability, and I thereore claim the right to speak on subjects usually considered beyound a woman's ken, and which you may class as "errors of opinion." I offer no excuse for this long digression, as a three months' imprisonment , without formula of law, gives me authority for occupying even the precious moments of a Secretary of State.

My object is to call your attention to the fact: that during this long imprisonment, I am yet ignorant of the causes of my arrest; that my house has been seized and converted into a prison by the Government; that the valuable furniture it contained has been abused and destroyed; that during some periods of my imprisonment I have sufferend greatly for want of proper and sufficient food. Also, I have to complain that, more recently, a woman of bad character, recognized as having been seen on the streets of Chicago as such, by several of the guard, calling herself Mrs. Onderdonk, was placed here in my house, in a room adjoining mine.

In making this exposition, I have no object of appeal to your sympathies, if the justice of my complaint, and a decent regard for the world's opinion, do not move you, I should but waste your time to claim your attention on any other score.

I may, however, recall to your mind, that but a little while since you were quite as much proscribed by public sentiment here, for the opinions and principles you held, as I am now for mine.

I could easily have escaped arrest, having had timely warning. I thought it impossible that your statesmanship might present such a proclamation of weakness to the world, as even the fragment of a once great Government turning its arms against the breasts of women and children. You have the power, sir, and may still further abuse it. You may prostrate the physical strength, by confinement in close rooms and insufficient food--you may subject me to harsher, ruder treatment than I have already received, but you cannot imprison the soul. Every cause worthy of success has had its martyrs. The words of the heroine Corday are applicable here: "C'est la crime qui fait la honte, et non pas l'echafaud." My sufferings will afford a significant lesson to the women of the South, that sex or condition is no bulwark against the surging billows of the "irrepressible conflict."

The "iron heel of power" may keep down, but it cannot crush out, the spirit of resistance in a people armed for the defence of their rights; and I tell you now, sir, that you are standing over a crater, whose smothered fires in a moment may burst forth.

It is your boast, that thirty-three bristling fortifications now surround Washington. The fortifications of Paris did not protect Louis Phillippe when his hour had come.

In conclusion, I respectfully ask your attention to this protest, and have the honor to be, &c., (Signed)

Rose O. N. Greenhow



Rose O'Neal Greenhow, diary entry (25th March, 1862):


General Dix said: "You are charged, madam, with holding communication with the enemy in the South."


"If this were an established fact, you could not be surprised at it. I am a Southern woman, and I thank God that no drop of Yankee blood ever polluted my veins; and as all that I had ever honored or respected have been driven by ruthless despotism to seek shelter there, it would seem the most natural thing in life that I should have done so."


"How is it, madam, that you have managed to communicate in spite of the vigilance exercised over you?"


"That is my secret, sir; and, if it be any satisfaction to you to know it, I shall, in the next forty-eight hours, make a report to my government at Richmond of this rather farcical trial for reason."


The Digital Scriptorium
Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
Duke University

[tarheel]

Mary Edwards Walker, one of the nation's 1.8 million women veterans, was the only one to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor, for her service during the Civil War. She, along with thousands of other women, were honored in the newly-dedicated Women in Military Service for America Memorial in October 1997.
Controversy surrounded Mary Edwards Walker throughout her life. She was born on November 26, 1832 in the Town of Oswego, New York, into an abolitionist family. Her birthplace on the Bunker Hill Road is marked with a historical marker. Her father, a country doctor, was a free thinking participant in many of the reform movements that thrived in upstate New York in the mid 1800s. He believed strongly in education and equality for his five daughters Mary, Aurora, Luna, Vesta, and Cynthia (there was one son, Alvah). He also believed they were hampered by the tight-fitting women's clothing of the day.
His daughter, Mary, became an early enthusiast for Women's Rights, and passionately espoused the issue of dress reform. The most famous proponent of dress reform was Amelia Bloomer, a native of Homer, New York, whose defended a colleague's right to wear "Turkish pantaloons" in her Ladies' Temperance Newspaper, the Lily. "Bloomers," as they became known, did achieve some popular acceptance towards the end of the 19th century as women took up the new sport of bicycling. Mary Edwards Walker discarded the unusual restrictive women's clothing of the day. Later in her life she donned full men's evening dress to lecture on Women's Rights.
In June 1855 Mary, the only woman in her class, joined the tiny number of women doctors in the nation when she graduated from the eclectic Syracuse Medical College, the nation's first medical school and one which accepted women and men on an equal basis. She gratuated at age 21 after three 13-week semesters of medical training which she paid $55 each for.
In 1856 she married another physician, Albert Miller, wearing trousers and a man's coat and kept her own name. Together they set up a medical practice in Rome, NY, but the public was not ready to accept a woman physician, and their practice floundered. They were divorced 13 years later.
When war broke out, she came to Washington and tried to join the Union Army. Denied a commission as a medical officer, she volunteered anyway, serving as an acting assistant surgeon -- the first female surgeon in the US Army. As an unpaid volunteer, she worked in the US Patent Office Hospital in Washington. Later, she worked as a field surgeon near the Union front lines for almost two years (including Fredericksburg and in Chattanooga after the Battle of Chickamauga).
In September 1863, Walker was finally appointed assistant surgeon in the Army of the Cumberland for which she made herself a slightly modified officer's uniform to wear, in response to the demands of traveling with the soldiers and working in field hospitals. She was then appointed assistant surgeon of the 52nd Ohio Infantry. During this assignment it is generally accepted that she also served as a spy. She continually crossed Confederate lines to treat civilians. She was taken prisoner in 1864 by Confederate troops and imprisoned in Richmond for four months until she was exchanged, with two dozen other Union doctors, for 17 Confederate surgeons.
She was released back to the 52nd Ohio as a contract surgeon, but spent the rest of the war practicing at a Louisville female prison and an orphan's asylum in Tennessee. She was paid $766.16 for her wartime service. Afterward, she got a monthly pension of $8.50, later raised to $20, but still less than some widows' pensions.
On November 11, 1865, President Johnson signed a bill to present Dr. Mary Edwards Walker with the Congressional Medal of Honor for Meritorious Service, in order to recognize her contributions to the war effort without awarding her an army commission. She was the only woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor, her country's highest military award.
In 1917 her Congressional Medal, along with the medals of 910 others was taken away when Congress revised the Medal of Honor standards to include only “actual combat with an enemy” She refused to give back her Medal of Honor, wearing it every day until her death in 1919. A relative told the New York Times: "Dr. Mary lost the medal simply because she was a hundred years ahead of her time and no one could stomach it." An Army board reinstated Walker's medal posthumously in 1977, citing her "distinguished gallantry, self-sacrifice, patriotism, dedication and unflinching loyalty to her country, despite the apparent discrimination because of her sex." After the war, Mary Edwards Walker became a writer and lecturer, touring here and abroad on women's rights, dress reform, health and temperance issues. Tobacco, she said, resulted in paralysis and insanity. Women's clothing, she said, was immodest and inconvenient. She was elected president of the National Dress Reform Association in 1866. Walker prided herself by being arrested numerous times for wearing full male dress, including wing collar, bow tie, and top hat. She was also something of an inventor, coming up with the idea of using a return postcard for registered mail. She wrote extensively, including a combination biography and commentary called Hit and a second book, Unmasked, or the Science of Immortality. She died in the Town of Oswego on February 21, 1919 and is buried in the Rural Cemetery on the Cemetery Road.

[tarheel]

Laura Smith Haviland

Wesleyan Pioneer
by Lee Haines
Historian of The Wesleyan Church

www.wesleyan.org

Laura Smith Haviland, a tiny frontier woman who made the ideals of nineteenth-century Wesleyan Methodists come to life, was born to Quaker parents in Canada , on December 20, 1808 . When she was seven, the family moved to New York .
What education Laura received came from her mother and a neighboring lady, but the little girl became an insatiable reader. One dark night her father found her absorbed in a book describing the horrors of the slave trade. He relieved her distress by telling her that it had been outlawed.
With some playmates, Laura visited Methodist prayer meetings. She hungered for a warm religious experience, but was forbidden by her quiet Quaker parents from attending any more such services.
When Laura was seventeen, she married Charles Haviland. Charles was a committed Friend and it seemed that Laura was forever barred from the spiritual experience for which she still longed. She prayed privately and made the best of her situation.
In 1826, Laura’s parents moved to southeastern Michigan , near Adrian . Three years later, Charles and Laura followed with their two children. A log cabin 16 by 18 feet was built, and here Laura continued raising her family, giving birth to a total of eight children. Her devotion to human need quickly became apparent, as she became nurse to every ill neighbor.
Laura’s life was soon changed in keeping with her childhood thoughts. In the early 1830s, she helped organize the first anti-slavery society in Michigan . Then she and Charles established the first station on the "Underground Railroad" in Michigan , helping escaped slaves slip through to Canada and freedom. While the Friends opposed slavery, they thought the abolition movement much too "exciting." As a result, Charles and Laura withdrew from the Friends. In 1841, they joined in the organization of Wolf Creek , the first Wesleyan Methodist church in Lenawee County . Laura was now free to fight slavery and enjoy the warm spiritual experience she had so long desired.
By the time Laura had four children old enough to learn, she became their schoolteacher and also took on the responsibility of instructing the orphans of the county. Her concern for the children of the area led to her establishment of Raisin Institute in 1836; she insisted that it be open to all regardless of race, sex, or creed—a radical move for that day. The school eventually became an orphanage supported by the State of Michigan and was moved to Coldwater.
In 1845, Laura faced the darkest period of her life. Within a six weeks’ period, erysipelas took her husband, her mother, her sister, her father, and her baby. She herself almost died, and when she recovered she found herself a widow at the age of 36, with seven children to care for, and a debt of $700 to cope with. With characteristic courage and trust in God, she persisted over the skepticism of businessmen about a woman’s ability, and took charge of her husband’s business.
After Charles’s death, Laura intensified her involvement in the Underground Railroad. In 1846-47 she cleverly foiled the efforts of men from the South to return a family of escaped slaves to bondage. In their rage, the men placed a price of $3,000 on the head of this tiny woman, dead or alive. She defied the offer, making repeated trips to Cincinnati , Ohio , to help escaped slaves. She even slipped into Kentucky , to assist them and to encourage an imprisoned abolitionist. She personally escorted some escapees all the way to Canada , and spent considerable time near Windsor , teaching freedmen. Shortly before the Civil War, she took a daring trip to Little Rock , Arkansas , attempting to bring out the wife of one slave who had already reached Michigan . There she lived in a slave-owner’s home, seeing the atrocities of slavery firsthand, and once stared down three bloodhounds which were trained to kill.
When the Civil War began, Laura secured recommendations from the governor and a congressman, and traveled down the Mississippi , to minister to wounded soldiers and former slaves. She succeeded in having the head of one military hospital removed because of his cruelty and neglect, and successfully intervened in behalf of 3,000 Union soldiers imprisoned on islands in the Gulf of Mexico . Still later, she went to Kansas , to minister to the hordes of refugees there. Some of the white refugees did not care to work, and with these Laura had little patience. Following the War, she visited Washington , interceding with President Andrew Jackson for a convict, and carried on rescue work in Virginia .
Laura addressed the Wesleyan Methodist Michigan Annual Conference on her work at the 1865 session, and the 1867 session recognized her work among the freedmen as a conference appointment. Later she rejoined the Friends, but she always maintained close fellowship with the Wesleyans.
By 1879, multitudes of Negroes were fleeing from the South, where the Klan was making life intolerable, and pouring into Kansas . Laura hastened there to serve again. She helped found an educational institution for refugees, and in 1883, went to Washington to win financial support from Congress. She returned to minister in a mission in Hell’s Half Acre in Kansas City . Her labors led to the naming of Haviland , Kansas , in her honor.
In 1881, Laura wrote her autobiography in A Woman’s Life Work. In it she summarizes her philosophy thus:
Is it not the duty of every Christian to bring his or her religion into every line of life work, and act as conscientiously in politics as in church work? Sanctified common sense is loudly called for on the highway of holiness. In whatever condition or station in life we find ourselves, are we not our brother’s keeper in a more extensive view than we are prone to conceive?
Laura Smith Haviland lived a long and active life, dying in April 1898. Eleven years after her death, a life-sized statue of this tiny woman was erected in front of the city hall at Adrian —one of the very few erected to commemorate the life of a woman. Above a drinking fountain at her feet are the appropriate words, "I was thirsty and ye gave me drink."
~*~

Lee M. Haines, Laura Smith Haviland: A Woman's Life Work (Marion, IN: Wesleyan Publishing House, 1977).

[tarheel]

Because of her social work in Kansas, the City of Haviland was named in her honor. In addition, her contributions inspired a well-deserved but rare kind of a tribute in Michigan; the statue of Laura Smith Haviland which graces the lawn of the City Hall in Adrian, Michigan, is one of the few such monuments ever to have been erected in honor of a woman

[dawna]

Great story Tarheel - Laura Haviland was indeed a 'phenominal woman.' And to think that she was also a Canadian!

Dawna

[dawna]

Mrs. Fanny Ricketts

Upon hearing that her husband Capt. James B. Ricketts of the 1st U.S. Artillery had been seriously wounded and possibly dead at the First Battle of Manassas, Fanny refused to believe the news. She set out alone from their home in Washington D.C. determined to find her husband.
Fanny would find him wounded but alive in a house located on the battlefield known as Portici. She remained by his side, nursing him under miserable conditions for twelve long weeks, first at Portici and later in a Richmond prison.

An excerpt from the diary of Fanny Ricketts:

26 July, Fri.
. . .Oh nothing, no words - and they are limited in this little diary - can describe the horrors around me. Two men dead and covered with blood were carried down the stairs as I waited to let them pass. On a table in the open hall a man was undergoing amputation of the leg. At the foot of the stairs two bloody legs lay and through it all I went to my husband. Outside the next door was a severed arm, and my clothes brushed by blood, cloths, splint, etc. I found my dear husband lying on a hospital stretcher still covered with blood!

God alone knows the horrors of this place...Downstairs there are some forty men in the various stages of death or possible recovery. Blood runs on the floors, the smell is dreadful but no language can describe it.


27 July, Sat.
Dear J. passed a restless night, his knee is much inflamed. Oh God grant my darling husband be spared his leg...I was awake all night, the groans of the dying sounding in my ears. As I look from the window I see a severed leg under a tree. It has been there all day and I intend asking to have it removed.

"Civil War Women"

[bama_belle]

What a wonderful post!

I can't wait to get a chance to sit back and read all of this!

[dawna]

Abby House

Of all the cantankerous, cussing, belligerent women in North Carolina, easily one of the best known was Abby House, known (actually affectionately) as "Aunt Abby."

Born in Franklin County about 1797, she gained prominence during the War of 1812 when she learned that her beau was sick in Norfolk, Virginia. To care for him, she walked all the way from North Carolina to Norfolk, but arrived the day after he had died, so she walked home again. When the Civil War was imminent, she collected clothes, shoes, and food for the Confederate soldiers and delivered them personally. Having eight nephews, she encouraged all of them to serve in the Confederate army. She told them that should any of them become sick or wounded, "you can depend on your Aunt Abby to nuss and tend you." Throughout the war, she nursed back to health five of her nephews, and buried another. She also had a special affection for any soldier from Franklin County.

Never intimidated, and always bold, she would confront commanding officers and ask to care for any soldier from Franklin County who was sick or wounded. So determined was she, that following the Battle of Fredericksburg, she searched the battlefield for twelve days, trying to find one of her relatives. After the war, during Reconstruction, Abby lost her house and property, but was taken in by some Confederate veterans who gave her a cottage near Raleigh.

At Raleigh she would frequently attend political meetings where she would give the Democrats advice, whether they wanted it or not, and no one had the nerve to ask her to leave. In 1876 she attended the Democratic State Convention, uninvited, and nominated Zebulon B. Vance for governor. There was one delegate absent, and when the presiding officer made a motion that Abby take the absent delegates place, the motion was passed unanimously. Occupying this seat, she then cast her vote for Vance, and became the first woman to cast an official vote for a political office.

Abby House died in 1881 and on her gravestone was written, "Angel of Mercy to Confederate Soldiers."

"Women in History" (by J.T. Marck)