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All images: NavSource Online; "Old Navy" Ship Photo Archive / Harpers Weekly
The Red Rover Hospital Ship was a shining example of the medical advances that came out of the horrors of the Civil War. Nothing could symbolize that contrast more than the woodblock etching above. The Rover stands out white & shining amid the black, death dealing Western Flotilla gunboats.
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Laid down as a luxury packet boat in 1859, the Red Rover began its wartime career as a barracks ship in New Orleans. Holed & left abandoned March 1862, she was salvaged by the U.S. gunboat Mound City in April. Her career as an army hospital ship began 10 June 1862. Assigned to the Western Flotilla above Vicksburg, the Red Rover was purchased by the Navy in September 1862. From that point the Red Rover served sick & wounded men of both sides until December 11, 1864. Decommissioned & sold November 1865.
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The Red Rover was unlike any ship that ever sailed before. During the Crimean War, British ships crammed with sick & wounded men had been hellish places to die. They were anchored in a warm, shallow bay. In an unspeakably grotesque scene, the dead who had been put over the side sewn into hammocks with iron shot at their feet bobbed to the surface. Standing vertically like a nightmarish army of ghouls, ranks of shrouded bodies were swept back & forth by the wind. Deaths by disease outnumbered battle casualties 10-1.
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This very small image is of the Medical Officers & Paymaster of the Red Rover 1864-65. They were led by a man with an unusual name, Fleet Surgeon Ninian Pinkney. Not pictured, the women who revolutionized the nursing profession.
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This image is a woodblock engraving from Harpers Weekly January-June 1863 page 300
Four Sisters of the Holy Cross joined the crew of the Rover.
"We were not prepared as nurses, but our hearts made our hands willing & our sympathy ready, & so with God's help, we did much toward alleviating the suffering."
The sisters did more than alleviate suffering, they were the first members of what would become the Naval Nursing Corps. Before the Civl War the nursing profession, as we understand it, did not exist. The lessons the sisters learned under extreme circumstances were the beginning of a revolution in medical care.
On December 26, 1862 Alice Kennedy, Sarah Kinno, Ellen Campbell, Betsy Young, Dennis Downs & Anne Bradford Stokes were mustered into the U.S. Navy as "First Class Boys", the grade given to 'loblolly boys' who assisted nautical doctors. They were the first women to officially join the U.S. armed forces. All of them were self-liberated. All of them had been midwives & were accustomed to blood.
Ann Bradford Stokes, a woman who had self-liberated from her owner in Murfreesboro TN joined the crew of the Red Rover on January 25, 1863. She was illiterate, but she was a quick study. She took the Sisters of the Holy Cross' lessons to heart. She was promoted from laundress to nurse & earned her first class boy rating as a nurse. She would be the first woman to receive a military pension based on her service on the Rover.
The self-liberated laundresses & nurses of the Red Rover wielded a miracle of Civil War medical care, lye soap. The Rover had excellent laundry facilities designed to provide crisp white sheets & table clothes daily for first class travelers. Put to the service of hospital patients, the simple use of lye soap to clean hands, clean shirts, clean sheets, clean towels & regular baths radically reduced in hospital infections. The doctors & nurses were intelligent observant people, they didn't know why rigorous cleanliness worked. It was obviously very effective & that was all that mattered. Liberally applied, lye soap was the wonder weapon of Civil War medicine.
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Not only did the Red Rover have an extraordinary crew, but her original design as a luxury packet boat was a blessing. In the image above she is pictured tied up with a purpose built ice barge. Ice was cut on lakes in New England, shipped to New Orleans on special built schooners & transferred to barges for distribution up river. Folks in Nashville enjoyed their juleps all through hot Middle Tennessee summers thanks to New England ice. The Red Rover was built to take advantage of the ice trade.
The packet boat had been built with an insulated ice storage room, there was a dumbwaiter to bring it up to the saloon & private cabins on the upper decks. Imagine lying in a hospital bed upriver from Vicksburg during July while having a kindly nurse bring you a cold compress or cool drink. An elevator (vertical rail road) lifted patients from the main deck up to the hospital decks. Kitchens intended to service the refined tastes of first class travelers were ideal for cranking out nutritious meals for the patients. The right thing for the wrong reason in the form of wire mesh over the windows kept out flying bugs. The mesh was there in the mistaken belief that sunlight somehow caused disease. All in all, the Red Rover was an ideal hospital ship.
Wounded & diseased men from North & South received the same care aboard the Red Rover. That was a condition of the financial support received from the Western Sanitary Commission. Cleanliness, kind attentive nursing & advances in medicine combined to give the Red Rover an almost perfect survival rate. It was a template for all the hospital ships, the American Red Cross & members of the nursing profession that followed.
Note:
The ice trade was serious business. At one point during the investment of Vicksburg, General Grant put 40 barges of ice under the command of Mary Livermore of the U.S. Sanitary Commission.
Clipper ships in the tea trade did not want to contaminate their holds with cargo on the way out to China. Rather than using stone for ballast, their holds were filled large blocks of ice were packed in straw. In China, the clean New England ice sold for a premium price.