Death surrounded the nurses of Gettysburg, part 1

A Harper’s Weekly artist depicted Gettysburg in pastoral pre-battle days. By the time that volunteer nurses started arriving to care for wounded soldiers in July 1863, debris and dead horses and graves covered the battlefield. (Harper’s Weekly)

At 7:30 a.m., Tuesday, July 14, several Philadelphia nurses left Baltimore on a Northern Central Railroad train for Hanover Junction. Among the women was 49-year-old Emily Bliss Souder, née Thacher, born to Stephen and Harriet (Preble) Thacher at Kennebunk in York County in June 1814.

Her parent later moved to Lubec, where brother Joseph A. Thacher was born in 1825. Moving to Zumbrota, Minnesota in 1856, he served in that state’s legislature during the Civil War.

Running north to Pennsylvania from Baltimore, the Northern Central Railroad connected at Hanover Junction with the single-track line running west to Gettysburg. Medical personnel and supplies flowed west on that line; wounded men flowed east to hospitals in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. (Wikipedia)

By the 1830s Emily lived in Philadelphia with her husband, Edmund A. Souder. Five of their 11 children died by age 2; Emily brought to Gettysburg’s wounded a sensitivity developed at multiple gravesides.

Deposited at Hanover Junction at 11 a.m., July 14, “we waited” with “the sun beaming down … with withering power” until ordered into a railroad car around 3 p.m., Souder said. Immobile “till past seven,” the car “was crowded to suffocation” with the nurses, “six Sisters of Charity with a priest, just opposite us, going to nurse the sick,” and “people looking for their dead” or, hopefully wounded men.

Souder noticed that the Sisters of Charity, the first Catholics many wounded Protestants would ever meet, wore “their white bonnets, black stuff garments, and rosary and cross” hanging “from their girdles.”

Kennebunk-born Emily Bliss Souders passed through Hanover Junction, Pa. in July 1863 while en route to Gettysburg. Married and living in Philadelphia, she volunteered as a nurse and spent some time caring for wounded Yankees and Confederates. Now a York County park, the original train station stands within the wye where the railroad to Gettysburg swung to the west (left). A hotel during the 1860s, the three-story brick building on the left is now privately owned. (BFS)

Clanking through Hanover and Oxford in pouring rain, the train reached Gettysburg about 11 p.m. Unloading their luggage and boxed medical supplies, the Philadelphia nurses found accommodations at “a nice place” recommended by a woman passenger.

A Seminary Ridge Museum display displays a Sister of Charity feeding a wounded Union soldier at Gettysburg. The Sisters were the first Roman Catholic Church representatives that many wounded Protestant soldiers had ever met. (BFS)

Wednesday morning, an army ambulance transported Souder and her companions “to the hospital tents of the Second Corps,” located around four miles from Gettysburg, she reckoned. En route “we saw the rifle-pits, the dead horses … and many soldiers’ graves,” Souder said.

Not even “chloride of lime” spread on Gettysburg streets could eliminate the stench, “the horrible atmosphere” punctuating “the sense of smelling,” she sniffed. “Camphor and cologne or smelling salts are prime necessaries … certainly for the ladies.”

At II Corps’ hospital, Souder “found a great many Maine boys; many from Wisconsin and Minnesota; scarcely one who had not lost an arm or a leg.” Confederates and Union wounded lay “side by side,” and she discovered the great equalizer.

Death is very busy with these poor fellows on both sides,” Souder realized.

A Union soldier relaxes near the Lutheran Seminary building that served as a Confederate and a Union hospital after the battle of Gettysburg. The Adams County Historical Society now operates a museum inside the building. (Library of Congress)

The living suffered. “Our wounded behave like true heroes,” said Charles C. Hayes, the Washington, D.C. agent for the  said. “A large number have amputated limbs[,] but they murmur not.” Emily Souder, however, heard “sounds [that] beggar description.

The groans, the cries, the shrieks of anguish, are awful indeed to hear,” she said. “We heard them all day in the field” on July 16; that night she “buried my head in my pillow to shut out the sounds” swirling from a nearby church converted into a hospital.

Nurses changed bandages — there never seemed enough — and fed their patients. “Condensed milk is invaluable,” and the wounded enjoyed “the corn-starch, farina, and milk punch,” Souder noted. “A cup of chocolate is greatly relished.

Union soldiers killed on July 1, 1863 are gathered for burial no earlier than four days later. The terrain indicates these were not soldiers from the 16th Maine Infantry Regiment. (LOC)

The men are dying all around us and there is no time to say more than a friendly word” as nurses were “called from tent to tent” and asked to prepare food. Six to 10 patients occupied each tent, and nurses served large quantities of “stimulating food,” often brandy-fortified, “to keep the life in them,” Souder said.

Daily an ambulance delivered the nurses to the hospital by 7 a.m. and picked them up about 7 p.m. Death surrounded them; split half Union and half Confederate, “twelve poor souls” died on July 17, including Rowland Ormsby, a young 64th New York Infantry soldier.

Snipping from his head “a beautiful lock of black hair,” Souder “plucked” three leaves from an oak tree shading his tent and enclosed those items with the letter she wrote his mother.

Next week: Death surrounded the nurses of Gettysburg, part 2

Sources: Emily Bliss Thacher Souder, Find-A-Grave; Minnesota Legislative Reference Library; Mrs. Edmund A. Souder, Leaves from the Battle-field of Gettysburg: A Series of Letters From a Field Hospital and National Poems, Caxton Press, Philadlephia, Pennsylvania, 1864; Charles C. Hayes letter to Governor Abner Coburn, July 16, 1863, Maine State Archives


“Swartz delves into the personal stories of sacrifice and loss…” — Civil War News

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Brian Swartz can be reached at visionsofmaine@tds.net. He enjoys hearing from Civil War buffs interested in Maine’s involvement in the war.

Brian Swartz

About Brian Swartz

Welcome to "Maine at War," the blog about the roles played by Maine and her sons and daughters in the Civil War. I am a Civil War buff and a newspaper editor recently retired from the Bangor Daily News. Maine sent hero upon hero — soldiers, nurses, sailors, chaplains, physicians — south to preserve their country in the 1860s. “Maine at War” introduces these heroes and heroines, who, for the most part, upheld the state's honor during that terrible conflict. We tour the battlefields where they fought, and we learn about the Civil War by focusing on Maine’s involvement with it. Be prepared: As I discover to this very day, the facts taught in American classrooms don’t always jibe with Civil War reality. I can be reached at visionsofmaine@tds.net.