Women Nurses in the Civil War Navy
Although the United States military did not officially allow women to permanently serve until July 30, 1948, when President Harry S. Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, women still found their way aboard ships during wartime. During the Civil War, women’s primary role onboard military vessels was medical. The unprecedented carnage led to an administrative revolution in how the war’s sick and wounded were cared for. Women volunteered to serve as nurses—a position previously understood to be fulfilled by men. Serving on hospital ships, these women provided critical labor in providing care and comfort. Despite remaining restricted from combat service, by performing the important tasks of nursing sick, wounded, and dying men, these women both witnessed and experienced the physical and emotional toll associated with war.​​
When these women first volunteered as nurses onboard Civil War ships, they did so under a convoluted bureaucratic structure which could find them reporting to one of two agencies. One option was the United States Sanitary Commission led by Federick Law Olmstead—later famed as the landscape architect who designed New York City’s Central Park—who worked with the United States Army. Following the April 1862 battle of Shiloh, the Sanitary Commission maintained a fleet of hospital ships beginning with the Tycoon and the Monarch. These ships technically belonged to the United States Army, yet they were staffed with Navy Officers and crew. If that was not already confusing enough, the United States Navy maintained its own agency, the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, which was created in 1842 during a restructuring of the naval administration. Both the United States Navy and the Army operated hospital ships staffed by naval crews. Meanwhile, the Confederate Navy Medical Corps directed medical personnel onboard Confederate gunboats and land-based hospitals, but the Navy of the Confederacy did not include hospital ships. This can be attributed to the strategic differences between the two navies, as the United States Navy’s blockade system allowed for non-combatant ships to be attached to squadrons, while the Confederate Navy never enjoyed the luxury of having relatively stationary and non-fighting vessels.
The U.S. Navy’s first hospital ship was the USS Red Rover. This vessel was a former Confederate ship captured in Missouri by the USS Mound City in April 1862 and converted for medical purposes. The Red Rover’s medical staff included four nuns from the Sisters of the Holy Cross. These were the first women who volunteered as nurses onboard Civil War ships. The Red Rover also included formerly enslaved African American women among its nursing staff. Ann Bradford Stokes, Ellen Campbell, Alice Kennedy, Sarah Kinno and Young Fowler were collectively added to the ship’s log as contraband, a term used by the United States military identifying self-emancipated people who became affiliated with military units during the war. Individually, these Black women received the lowly rank of “boy.”​
Although administrators such as Olmstead envisioned hospital ships being safely removed from exposure to the scenes of war and thus ideal environments for volunteer nurses anticipating genteel and hygienic conditions, reality did not match this expectation. Instead, hospital ships were only one stop removed from field hospitals on the battlefields and were frequently overcrowded with men inflicted with grisly injuries. These women, who often lacked any formal training, were stretched to their physical and emotional limits. Reflecting the era’s expectations of women maintaining pleasant homes, these nurses were expected to not only perform medical care but also keep an atmosphere similar to domestic life. In this way, women nurses were tasked with performing double duty—serving both as medical caregiver as well as fulfilling a motherly role. Katherine Prescott Wormeley recalled the experience of being a nurse, saying, “Imagine a great river or sound steamer filled on every deck—every berth and every square inch of room covered with wounded men; even the stairs and gangways and guards filled with those who are less badly wounded; and then imagine fifty well men, on every kind of errand, rushing to and fro over them, every touch bringing agony to the poor fellows, while stretcher after stretcher came along, hoping to find an empty place; and then imagine what it was to keep calm ourselves, and make sure that every man on both boats was properly refreshed and fed.”
These women were committed to their work to the detriment of their own personal comfort. Another nurse reported, “Our little boat is so crowded that we will sleep on the upper deck, all under cover being occupied by the wounded; and the small outfit of china dinnerware being needed for the sick, we take our meat and potatoes on slices of bread for plates, and make the top of a stove our domestic board.” United States hospital ships cared for men from both sides of the conflict which exposed these women to a wide variety of men with a diverse set of beliefs about the war. One nurse poignantly recounted speaking with a dying Confederate, writing, “One near death—he had the most terrible wound I ever saw—said gently: “God forgive me honey, if it was wrong. I thought it was right, but I don’t like it, that’s the truth. I would have rather have died for the old flag.”
Women nurses had firsthand experiences with death, saw the horrors of war, and sacrificed their personal comfort to perform their duties. These women were very much participants in the Civil War.
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Logan Barrett
Director of History & Collections