Forum Host- Joined
- Aug 6, 2016
She was a New York seamstress turned Civil War nurse and she documented her time in service to her country in a book titled "In Hospital and Camp: A Woman's Record of Thrilling Incidents among the Wounded in the Late War". What begins in a story of her patriotism will end in the harsh reality of war and life especially when documenting her time at Gettysburg. {Italics texts from source #1 unless otherwise noted)
"The same patriotism which took the young and brave from workshop and plow, from counting rooms, and college hall… lent also to our hearts its thrilling measure, and sent us out to do and dare for those whose strong arms were to retrieve the honor of our insulted flag."
Sophronia E. Bucklin was born March 5, 1838 in Cayuga County, New York. She was approximately thirty-three years old when the Civil War started, two years younger than the age of thirty-five required to enlist as a nurse.
Miss Bucklin was so inspired to serve. She never took a leave during her time of service. She was a woman that believed "If any woman has done this, I can" {2}. Meeting with the board of managers for the Soldier's Aid Society was her first step. After they voted their approval for her to continue on with her nursing training she had one more obstacle to face: the approval of Miss Doretha Dix the Superintendent of Women Nurses in the Military Hospitals of the Union.
July 4, 1863 - Forty Union nurses working for the U.S. Sanitary Commission were the first to arrive on the 4th of July including Sophronia E. Bucklin. Her first impressions:
"On Saturday we entered the battle town. Everywhere were evidences of mortal combat, everywhere wounded men were lying in the streets on heaps of blood-stained straw, everywhere there was hurry and confusion, while soldiers were groaning and suffering… They lay like trees uprooted by a tornado.
Stripped of cattle and sheep – stores and houses robbed, still the people of Gettysburg stood nobly by their defenders. The women brought forth their contributions of bandages and lint, and poured out with unsparing hand their hidden delicacies, such as wines and jellies, like oil upon the sea of suffering humanity."
Complicating the job was the hot sun or the pouring rain making for horrendous conditions. For the first two weeks at Gettysburg, Bucklin was mostly working in the fields.
"It was the field on which the first guns were fired in that memorable battle." {4}
"Tears filled my eyes when I looked on that great field, so checkered with the ditches that had drained it dry. So many of them I had seen depart to the silent land."
On July 20, 1863 she was moved to Camp Letterman named the medical after Jonathan Letterman. Sophronia described the day they moved the critically injured into the new medical units:
"A line of stretchers, a mile and a half in length, each bearing a hero, who had fought nigh to death, told us where lay our work, and we commenced it at once. I washed agonized faces, combed out matted hair, bandaged slight wounds, and administered drinks of raspberry vinegar and lemon syrup." {2}
It would soon become known as a first class field hospital known for it efficiency and well-managed care facility. Consisting of more than four hundred tents all dedicated to the care of the wounded there was a cook house, tents providing surgeons to work separately as well as tents to hold those soldiers who did not make it as well as an embalming tent. In the fall they even provided a Sibley stove to provide heat and comfort while patients recuperated.
She also grew as a nurse to tend to any soldier whether they be wearing blue or gray. Earlier in her experiences as a nurse she observed this regarding the Rebel wounded:
"More than half the wounded men in the hospital were rebel soldiers, grim, gaunt, ragged men – long-haired, hollow-eyed and sallow-cheeked… It was universally shown here, as elsewhere, that these bore their sufferings with far less fortitude than our brave soldiers who had been taught, in sober quiet homes in the North, that while consciousness remained, their manliness should suppress every groan, and that tears were for woman and babes."
After Gettysburg she writes:
"With the same care from attendants, and the same surgical skill, many more of the rebels died than of our own men – whether from the nature of their wounds, which seemed generally more frightful, or because they lacked courage to bear up under them, or whether the wild irregular lives which they had been leading had rendered the system less able to resist pain, will always remain a mystery with me… Notwithstanding their hostility to us Northerners, I had much respect for them". {4}
Miss Bucklin stayed at Gettysburg until the last tent was taken down on November 20, 1863 just one day after President Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg Address. She recorded:
"[as] the hospital tents were removed – each bare and dust-trampled space marking where corpses had lain after death-agony was passed, and where the wounded had groaned in pain. Tears filled my eyes when I looked on that great field, so checkered with the ditches that had drained it dry. So many of them I had seen depart to the silent land."
She served as an army nurse until the end of the war always fighting for respect from some of the male doctors. In 1864 while at Camp Stoneman she had a surgeon dismissed when she complained that he was sexually harassing the women at the hospital. She returned home and returned to her job as a seamstress. She never married and died in Ithaca, New York in 1902. There was no doubt her time at Gettysburg was her most memorable experience throughout the war, as she later wrote that she would never forget those soldiers who died:
"Every grave has its history, and thousands were there." {3}
Sources
1. https://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2015/02/sophronia-bucklin.html
2. "In Hospital and Camp in the American Civil War", by Sophronia E. Bucklin
3. http://civilwarrx.blogspot.com/2013/07/sophronia-bucklin-nurses-wounded-at.html
4. https://emergingcivilwar.com/2013/07/08/sophronia-e-bucklin-sanitary-commission-nurse-at-gettysburg/
Photo
Miss Bucklin - Public Domain
https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.33752/
Bringing the