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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
“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.