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Authors: Justin Martin

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As the USSC's general secretary, Olmsted opted to oversee this endeavor himself. On April 27, 1862—exactly eleven days after the medical bill was signed into law—he set out aboard the
Daniel Webster
, a small steamer. Accompanying him were some medical personnel he'd drummed up, including four surgeons and twenty male nurses. There were also three carpenters and four female volunteers: Katharine Prescott Wormeley, Christine Kean Griffin, Laura Trotter, and a woman who appears in records only by her last name—Mrs. Blatchford. It was a stunning Sunday afternoon, and the four women sat above deck singing hymns and sewing a red-and-white USSC hospital flag. These were society ladies, drawn from the aid groups that funneled into the USSC. Katharine Wormeley, for instance, was a resident of Newport, Rhode Island, and a French scholar, who became well known after the war for her translations of authors such as Balzac.
During the voyage, Olmsted oversaw a complete retrofit of the
Webster
. He ordered an apothecary's shop built along with bunks to accommodate 250 patients. The entire boat was scrubbed, and various bulkheads were knocked out to open up the circulation of fresh air. It was still a few years before the breakthrough findings of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister and the existence of microbes remained unknown, but there was a convention that cleanliness—for whatever reason, perhaps its proximity to godliness—could arrest the spread of disease.
The
Webster
arrived on the peninsula while the siege of Yorktown was under way. The ship traveled up Cheeseman's Creek, a tributary of the York River, and weighed anchor. The creek was crowded with military transports and battle ships. On either bank, Olmsted could see the forest, full of tents and thrumming with the activity of thousands of soldiers. As night fell, campfires illuminated this vast temporary city. Soldiers sang and played bugles, and occasionally the sound of big guns roared in the distance.
Soon, the USSC had its first patients of the peninsula campaign, a group of Union soldiers desperately ill with typhoid fever. By necessity,
the overstretched surgeons of the Medical Bureau focused on the battlefield wounded; those who succumbed to illness were given low priority. The sick soldiers had been left unattended in abandoned Confederate barracks that were really nothing more than crude huts. They had been alternately pelted by rain and baked by the sun. Olmsted described the squalid quarters as “a death-place for scores of our men who are piled in there, covered in vermin, dying with their uniforms on and collars up—dying of fever.”
The soldiers were placed on stretchers and carried onto the
Webster
. First order was giving them stimulants, the Civil War medicinal description of whiskey and other liquors. Doctors had noticed you could revive someone with a stiff drink, so alcohol was viewed as a stimulant rather than a depressant. The soldiers were also given beef tea with muriatic acid, the oldfangled name for hydrochloric acid. It was considered a tonic when small doses were mixed into a hot drink. The volunteer women used damp sponges to dab the foreheads of those suffering from high fevers. That was about all the medical help then available to typhoidfever victims. Soon the
Webster
was filled with 182 soldiers, and it set sail for New York, where the sick were transferred to hospitals to convalesce.
To replace the
Webster
, the quartermaster department (the army outfit in charge of transporting soldiers) issued Olmsted a new boat, the
Ocean Queen
. This was a 2,800-ton side-wheel steamship that had once belonged to Cornelius Vanderbilt. Olmsted assembled a fresh crew of USSC workers and ordered them to retrofit it for floating-hospital duty. Then he went ashore to bury a dead soldier.
When Olmsted returned, he saw two small boats pulled up alongside the
Ocean Queen
. Both were packed with soldiers who had fallen ill with typhoid fever. Olmsted protested that the
Ocean Queen
wasn't yet outfitted for patients; there wasn't a single doctor among his new crew. Too late: Sick soldiers began staggering onto the
Ocean Queen,
and soon there were 900 onboard. Olmsted went onshore and after considerable searching located a single doctor willing to help out with this deluge of the infirm.
Meanwhile, the female volunteers discovered a barrel of Indian meal tucked away in some forgotten corner of the
Ocean Queen
. When Olmsted
returned after nightfall, they were ladling it out of buckets to the soldiers. Here's his description of the scene: “Poor, pale, emaciated, shivering wretches were lying anywhere, on the cabin floors, crying with sobbing, trembling voices, ‘God bless you, Miss! God bless you!' ... I never saw such misery or such gratitude.”
Olmsted made the rounds cautiously, favoring his shattered left leg, careful not to step on the soldiers crowded everywhere on the decks of the
Ocean Queen
. The men lay head-to-head, taking up every available bit of space. Casting his lantern light across the ailing masses, he was pained to see how many of the soldiers had died. Olmsted limped back to his bunk and collapsed into exhausted sleep.
 
Olmsted proved to be a talented administrator. As much as he was a writer or park maker, this was starting to be an important part of how he defined himself. He drew up rules on the chain of command, time of meals, and how to process patients. He divided work into two watches—“sea fashion”—based on his long-ago voyage to China. Upon receiving a new ship, he'd divide it into wards, segregating those with communicable diseases from those with other ailments. For many of his patients, the problem was simple exhaustion. These soldiers needed a few days free from combat duty, he figured, and it was imperative not to expose them to disease while they recuperated.
Many of the troops were shockingly young, some just thirteen. So there was also the problem of soldiers who faked illness but were merely homesick. Upon learning that one of his ships had a large number of patients angling to return to New York City and its environs, Olmsted diverted the ship to Boston instead. He figured this would send a message:
Don't rely on hospital transports to desert the army.
Whenever the ships returned from various ports, Olmsted always tried to arrange for them to carry fresh USSC supplies along with female volunteers—and more surgeons, always more surgeons.
For the first part of the peninsula campaign, the USSC dealt mostly with disease victims. It aided relatively few soldiers who had been wounded in battle. All that changed with the battle of Williamsburg. The Medical Bureau surgeons were totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume
of injuries. For days after the battle, wounded soldiers lay where they had fallen, suffering and starving.
Those who survived were often carried to the USSC's hospital transports anchored along the York River and its tributaries. Once aboard, surgeons would begin by rubbing a little powdered opium into a soldier's wounds. Syringes for injecting morphine didn't become available until later in the war. Once the pain had deadened, it was possible to extract the bullet. For amputations, necessary on almost any wound to an extremity, chloroform was available as a general anesthetic—if one was lucky. Next, a dresser would pack lint around a soldier's wound and apply bandages. Aftercare fell to the female volunteers; it consisted of washing the wounds with soapy water and putting on fresh lint and bandages.
This was so much more than the good ladies of Hartford and Cleveland had signed on for. And it was thrilling! The female volunteers had expected to be charged with domestic duties aboard the hospital transports—cooking, cleaning, laundry—similar to what they did in their own households. Instead, they were helping soldiers in dire need, cleaning wounds and doling out medicine.
Olmsted was a stickler about proper registration of any soldier who came onboard a hospital transport. He wanted to know a soldier's company and regiment, for when he returned to combat, and next of kin, in case he died. For the female volunteers, one of the most poignant duties involved recording a soldier's last words or, as Olmsted described it, “catching for mother or wife the priceless, last faint whispers of the dying.”
The volunteers sent letters to loved ones with details about how the soldier died, the cause, and his final wishes. One bereaved wife wrote back, deeply pained that she hadn't gotten to see her husband's corpse. “Give him back to me dead
if
he is dead,” she begged, “
for I must see him
.” The soldier had been buried under an elm tree in an unmarked grave. In an effort to provide some comfort, one of the volunteers drew a sketch of his final resting place and sent it to the widow.
Some of the women who worked on the hospital transports kept diaries or wrote letters that have survived. From these, it's clear that service aboard the ships was harrowing but also strangely rewarding. It's also
clear that the female volunteers held Olmsted in special reverence. They called him “Chief” and were deeply appreciative of the trust and responsibility he granted them. Katharine Wormeley's diary includes a vivid observation about Olmsted's appearance and countenance:
He is small, and lame . . . but though the lameness is decided, it is scarcely observable, for he gives you a sense that he triumphs over it by doing as if it did not exist. His face is generally very placid, with all the expressive delicacy of a woman's, and would be beautiful were it not for an expression which I cannot fathom,—something which is, perhaps, a little too severe about it.... He has great variety of expression: sometimes stern, thoughtful, and haggard; at other times observing and slightly satirical (I believe he sees out of the back of his head occasionally); and then again, and not seldom, his face wears an inspired look, full of goodness and power. I think he is a man of the most resolute self-will,—generally a very wise will, I should think; born an autocrat, however, and, as such, very satisfactory to be under. His reticence is one of his strong points: he directs everything in the fewest possible words; there is a deep, calm thoughtfulness about him which is always attractive and sometimes—provoking.
Every moment on the peninsula seemed to bring a fresh challenge for the USSC. One Sunday in late May, Olmsted received an order from the quartermaster department to convert the
Spaulding
, a boat he'd been using, from a floating hospital back into a boat for transporting soldiers. He was given a new boat, the
Elm City
. Olmsted launched into what by now had become a familiar drill: Remove patients, medical supplies, and bedding from the old boat; scrub down the new boat. He and a crew of thirty surgeons, nurses, and volunteers worked all day. That evening, the quartermaster department issued a new order. Keep the
Spaulding
, Olmsted was told. The
Elm City
was the boat the army wanted. Oh, and please load it with sufficient coal for an eighteen-hour journey.
Now, an entire day's work—on a Sunday no less—by Olmsted and his crew had to be reversed. It was also necessary to locate twenty tons of coal and load it onto the
Elm City
. Olmsted made the rounds of other
hospital ships currently in his possession, scrounging coal. Meanwhile, two soldiers died during the shuttling back and forth. By four in the morning, the task was complete. The
Spaulding
was back to being a hospital ship. The
Elm City
was ready to transport troops.
Such work was wearying. Such work could make one insane. “Will you please engage a pleasant room for me in Brown's Bloomingdale Hotel,” joked Olmsted. This was a reference to David Brown, a doctor at Bloomingdale's Asylum, where he and Vaux had recently done a landscaping job.
 
As spring gave way to summer, the fighting along the peninsula grew more desperate and merciless. General McClellan and the Union army pushed to the outskirts of Richmond. There, they fought the battle of Fair Oaks, the largest conflict so far in the Civil War's eastern theater and second only to Shiloh in terms of casualties. Stationed at a distance, Olmsted was aware of Fair Oaks and gleaned from reports that it had been a bloodbath, but the battle was followed by an eerie calm for the USSC. It was a full day before the injured began to pour in.
And pour in they did. The wounded arrived by train, and there were so many that Olmsted set up a processing station between the rail depot and his hospital ships. Many arrived at night, so Olmsted used candles to mark a path to guide the soldiers. The processing station consisted of a long trench filled with burning wood, above which hung big iron kettles suspended on forked stakes. Olmsted instructed that the soldiers be given warm gruel and hot coffee, with as much condensed milk as they desired. Those who arrived feverish received brandy and other “stimulants.” The wounded were given lemonade with ice, a luxury. This lemonade treatment was based on the odd notion that someone who had taken a bullet could derive great benefit from a cool drink.
As the casualties stumbled by, or were carried past on stretchers, the female volunteers tried to determine their ailments and triaged them accordingly. Critical cases went straight to the ships. An overflow hospital, consisting of twenty tents, was set up for the others.
In the midst of all of this, Olmsted lost contact with Mary. He sent her eight unanswered letters. “I need not say that my anxiety has become
painful almost beyond endurance,” he wrote in his ninth missive. “It is useless to speculate on the cause of my not getting letters from you.” As it turned out, Mary had recently moved to a new address. Their home at Mount St. Vincent was being turned into Central Park Hospital, a facility for the Union wounded. These were chaotic times, and with all that was going on, it appears that the couple had failed to communicate on this simple matter.
 
For days after Fair Oaks, the trains kept rolling in, at all hours day and night. Sometimes there were several hundred soldiers packed into a single car. Typically, they hadn't had a drink or a single morsel of food since before the battle. The soldiers showed up, Olmsted observed, “without beds, without straw, at most with a wisp of hay under their heads. They arrived, dead and alive together, in the same close box, many with awful wounds festering.”

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