She Outranks Me

Mother Bickerdyke’s Civil War        by Rich Hanson

     Students of the Civil War can point to many instances of individuals whose services in the Rebellion wrested them from obscurity to greatness.  One immediately thinks of a soldier whose fondness for drink forced him to leave the military.  A failure as a farmer, desperation and a lack of prospects forced him to return to Galena to work in his father’s tannery.  The war gave him an outlet to demonstrate his innate military genius, and he became the most successful commander in the Union army and went on to become the 18^th President of the United States.  Of course we’re talking about Ulysses S. Grant.  It transformed an eccentric military professor at the Virginia Military Institute, an instructor whom his students disparagingly referred to as “Tom Fool,” into the feared Rebel commander “Stonewall” Jackson, and a slave dealer named Nathan Bedford Forrest into a cavalry commander who became known as “The Wizard of the Saddle.”  It also transformed a widowed Galesburg laundress, domestic servant, midwife and botanic nurse into a no-nonsense battlefield nurse who could browbeat the military bureaucracy into submission to her will, and whose untiring efforts on behalf of her boys earned her their undying loyalty and the sobriquet of “Mother” Bickerdyke, the “Cyclone in Calico.”

     Some people go to church and get called to serve the Lord. Sometimes one gets called to some other form of service.  On May 26^th, 1861, Mary Ann Bickerdyke attended a special service being held at the Brick Congregational Church in Galesburg.  The Reverend Dr. Edward Beecher was slated to preach.  The war was the major topic of conversation in this activist congregation, and as part of the service, Reverend Beecher read a letter from his friend, Dr. Benjamin Woodward.  Woodward had accompanied some 500 Knox County men who had enlisted and had been sent to Cairo, Illinois.  Dr. Woodward wrote of the total unpreparedness of the military to deal with the housing, supply and medical needs of large numbers of troops, and urged the folks at home to send medical and sanitation supplies to distribute to the troops, as well as money to purchase essential needs.  He also urged the congregation to send a representative from Knox County along with the shipment of supplies to ensure that they were distributed where they were most needed.  A friend of Mary Ann Bickerdyke suggested that this was a job that she could fill well.  The resolute nurse must have agreed that there was a need for her and that she was competent to fill it, as a week later she had wound down her medical practice, found neighbors who would take care of her two young sons while she was gone (this would elicit some negative gossip at first from some of her judgmental peers) and was on her way to Cairo with an impressive amount of supplies that had been assembled by the good folks of Knox County.

     When she arrived at Cairo she was aghast at the conditions that she encountered.  The “hospital” consisted of a meager three tents set apart from the rest of the camp.  The patients she viewed were laying in mud and dirty straw, coated in dirt and their own blood, urine and pus.  There had been no one assigned to supply the hospital with adequate water, and even if it had been many of the men were too weak to bathe. 

     The Galesburg nurse immediately set to work to address the hospital squalor.  She commandeered some barrels and had them cut in half, then scrubbed to make them usable as bathtubs.  She then had water boiled, and used some of the poultry that had been sent with her from Galesburg to trade fried chicken dinners for labor as she recruited idle soldiers to help bathe the patients.  She distributed what clean clothes she had brought with her, and made certain that the hospital tents dirt floors were swept and covered with clean straw.  Although the original intent had been for her to return home after she had made certain that the supplies from Knox County had been properly distributed, Mary Ann saw that there was much more work that desperately needed to be done, so she resolved to stay with the troops as long as she could be of service to them.

     She went into the village of Cairo and found a room to rent.  Then she sat down and began to write to her friends in Illinois.  She described the horrific hospital conditions and petitioned her friends and church congregation to send her soap, clothing, chamber pots, cooking utensils, bedpans and washboards.  Soon she was going from camp to camp in the vicinity of Cairo, prodding, cajoling and sometimes browbeating military hospital personnel into improving conditions for their patients.

     Needless to say, besides the gratitude of the average soldier, her presence and stubborn concern for the needs of her “boys” caused her to butt heads with some of the more intractable members of the military bureaucracy.  When a surgeon went to complain to General Benjamin Prentiss to lodge complaints against her, she followed him shortly afterwards to give the General her side of the case.  She must have been persuasive.  When she left the General’s tent she had his written permission to remain and to do whatever she deemed needed to be done.

     By the end of October, 1861, the army had taken over an unfinished hotel in Cairo to use as a hospital facility.  Mary Ann ramrodded the construction crew into completing the building and getting it ready for use as a hospital as quickly as possible.  The military surgeon-in-charge of the new facility found her to be meddlesome and overbearing and ordered her to leave HIS hospital.  This time, she brought her arguments to Ulysses Grant, who was the District Commander.  Grant appointed her matron of the facility and put her in charge of the laundry and of distributing supplies.  She was told though, that she was to stay out of the kitchen since the Chief Surgeon had contracted with a local hotel employee to address this important service. 

     Mary Ann soon discovered that supplies that had been sent to her from the home front to distribute to the troops were disappearing, especially the most desirable delicacies such as dried or brandied fruit or bottles of whiskey earmarked for “medicinal” purposes.  She soon formed a pretty good idea of whom the thieves were and decided to set a trap to prove it.

     She boiled a pan of dried peaches in order to bring some moisture back into them, then made a show of putting them on a windowsill to cool, making certain that she advised the hotel worker who had the hospital contract and some of his staff to keep an eye on them to make certain that no one gets into them.  She then absented herself to address some paperwork; no doubt more appeals to the good folks back home.

     Soon the individuals whom she’d asked to keep an eye on the delicacies made their way surreptitiously to the peaches to partake of them.  Soon they discovered that the purloined peaches didn’t sit too well in their digestive system.  The wily nurse had stirred some tartar emetic into the boiling peach broth, and no doubt enjoyed watching the thieves retch as they purged themselves of their sin.

    Adding to the discomfort of the guilty, she suggested that the next time they pilfer from foodstuffs earmarked for her “boys,” they might discover that it might be seasoned with ‘rat poison.”  Despite this warning and her pointed object lesson, the thefts continued.  Eventually she got fed up and took her complaints directly to General Grant.  After an investigation the Chief-Surgeon was reprimanded and some of his subordinates were transferred from their cushy hospital jobs to combat units.  The surgeon’s hotel worker buddy who had been given charge of the kitchen was booted from there into the guardhouse.

     By this time the boys in blue had begun to refer to Mary Ann as “Mother” Bickerdyke in appreciation of the care and concern that she lavished upon them, a protectiveness that reminded them of the mother that they’d left behind and who fretted for their safety back home.  A military man was heard to tell a civilian friend that Mother Bickerdyke meant more to the army than the Madonna to Catholics, and an officer who had had occasion to deal with her, and was dumbfounded by what she accomplished, wrote….”she talks bad grammar, jaws at us all, and is not afraid of anybody…but Lord, how she works!”

     The next problem that “Mother” Bickerdyke tackled was that of dirty laundry.  She’d noticed that the military would dispense of bloodstained uniforms, bandages and linen by simply burning them.  This seemed to her to be terribly wasteful when the items were in such need.  She enlisted the help of some of the “contraband,” blacks released from bondage who gratefully followed their army of liberators, and began to have the clothes washed.  This was a laborious task when done by hand and washboard, so she again wrote to the home folks in Knox County, asking to have mangles, tubs, kettles and irons sent to her. Lucy Frances Chase was one of the home folks who was indefatigable in helping to round up supplies to send to the front.  She was a member of the First Church, in Galesburg.  Later in the war she would even canvass the county for cows to send south to provide fresh milk for the sick and wounded soldiers.  Thanks to the generous contributions and help from home front angels such as Lucy Chase, Mother Bickerdyke soon had laundry services set up at the hospitals and camps that she visited and even set up a “rolling” laundry service that travelled with the troops as they moved.  It was said that she was such an adept baker as well that her bread was eagerly sought after by the troops, and she strived constantly to oblige them even to the point where some of her contraband assistants boasted that she could bake loaves of bread while the army was on the move.

       “Mother” continued to have problems with officious military men.  Shoulder straps and stars meant nothing to her if she believed that she was right.  During the siege of Vicksburg she heard of a young man, a soldier who she believed upon hearing the particulars, was being unjustly court-martialed.  Indignant at what she viewed as a miscarriage of justice, she marched into the courtroom and pulled up a chair next to the accused man. 

      The Presiding Officer of the Court demanded to know what she was doing there.

     “I am here to sit with my son,” was her stubborn reply.

     “Your son?” questioned the incredulous officer.

     “Well, he is Some mother’s son, and I am here to make certain that he gets justice.”

     After a few moments of stunned silence, during which the presiding officer mulled over his response, he finally arrogantly informed her that military justice would be properly dispensed and that the court-martial proceedings did not require any assistance from her.

     “Yes,” she bellowed back at him, refusing to be intimidated.  “I should expect justice from such a drunken lot of officers.”  She turned and leveled her gaze at General Frederick Steele, who was passively observing the proceedings, and then fiercely demanded, “General Steele, I ask that this boy be transferred to General Grant’s command.”

     Not wishing to quarrel with so formidable opponent, as well as someone so respected by the troops, General Steele granted her request and no doubt was relieved when she marched triumphantly out of the court with the former prisoner.

     Another occasion that served to demonstrate the power and authority that she could wield occurred while a Union brigade was being hurried forward to help fortify Corinth against Rebel General Van Dorn’s attempt to recapture the important railroad terminus.  The brigade commander’s troops had been marching since noon, and he petitioned higher command to let them stop and rest for a few moments.  The request was denied.  The troops were passing the hospital when a strong voice bellowed at them to “halt.”  Instinctively the men obeyed, whereupon “Mother” Bickerdyke and her staff distributed much needed and reviving soup and coffee.  Mother herself had given the order to “halt” in order to take care of her tired “boys.”

     Shortly after the court-martial incident “Mother” ran up against an officious surgeon in Memphis whose racial prejudice led him to order the contrabands who Mother Bickerdyke had enlisted to assist her from the hospital grounds.  Indignant at the stupidity of such an order, she saddled a mule and rode to the headquarters of General Stephen A. Hurlbut.  Reaching his command tent after midnight, she stormed in, rousted him out of bed and convinced him to write an order that allowed her to “retain the use of such contraband service at the hospital as she wished and for as long as she pleased.”  No doubt part of her ability to persuade him stemmed from an incident when the inebriated General fell from his horse in Corinth, Mississippi and suffered a black eye, some head lacerations and bruised bones.  Although she easily diagnosed the General as suffering from the effects of an obvious bout with the bottle and the resulting hangover, she discreetly recorded his symptoms as resulting from a stubborn head cold.  The General owed her one.

     The next morning the surgeon arrived at the hospital to find the contraband working there just as they had been doing in the past.  Furious that his order was being ignored, he stormed up to Mother Bickerdyke as she was helping to prepare breakfast.

     “Mrs. Bickerdyke.  Did you receive the order that I left for you to read yesterday morning?”

     “I did, Sir,” she placidly replied, continuing to stir the pot of soup that was in front of her.

     “I expected it to be obeyed.”

     “Oh.”  

     “And why has it not been?”

     “Because General Hurlbut has given me an order that keeps them here,” she said triumphantly, flourishing the order in front of the surgeon.

     Frustrated, the medical man lost his temper and roared, “I’ll not have you in Memphis.  I’ll send you home before the week is out!”

     Unintimitdated, Mother Bickerdyke locked eyes with him and sternly set him straight.  “I shan’t go.  I came here to stay and I mean to stay until this thing is played out.  You’ll just have to make up your mind to get along with me the best you can.”  She paused, and then punctuated her resolve with a threat.

      “And doctor,  you’d hadn’t better get in a row with me, because whenever anybody does, one of us goes to the wall and it ain’t going to be me.”

     The doctor backed down, but from that day forward he always referred to her with a mixture of frustration and respect as “The Brigadier in Command of Hospitals.”

     A few months later his “Brigadier” came to him with yet another concern.

     “Do you see this milk that we have?” she complained indignantly.  “Why it’s such poor stuff that if you poured it into the trough of any respectable pig, he’d turn up his nose and run off squealing in disgust.  Yet we’re paying these Memphis sesech 50 cents a quart for this vile stuff.”

     “What do you suggest,” the surgeon asked, certain that Mary Ann Bickerdyke already had a solution formulated.

     “If you’ll give me a 20 day furlough and transportation, I’ll go home and get all the milk and eggs that the Memphis hospitals can use.”

     The surgeon raised his eyebrows skeptically as he reminded her that a barrel of eggs would certainly spoil in the warm weather long before it got to Memphis from Illinois.

     “I’ll bring the milk and egg producers,” she responded, looking at him as though he was somewhat of a blockhead for not following the drift of her idea.  “Cows and hens and then we’ll have milk and eggs of our own.  The folks at home will round up all of the cows and the hens that we’ll need.”

      The surgeon was unconvinced.  “Foolish woman.  You’ll be laughed from one end of the country to the other if you embark on such a wild errand.”

     “Give me a furlough, and I’ll prove that I’m right,” his calico-clad brigadier responded.

     Of course, the Chief Surgeon gave in.  He knew better than to argue with her.  Mother Bickerdyke left for Illinois.  Immediately upon her arrival she set to work.  At Jacksonville she persuaded a wealthy patriotic farmer to give her a hundred cows. In Galesburg one of the individuals who rounded up cows for her was Lyman West, whose farm was one of the stations on the “underground railroad..  In his obituary he’s credited with having “succeeded admirably in his mission.”   Then she travelled to Springfield to make a deal with Governor Yates to ship them to Memphis in herds of 15 to 20.  Laughingly, the troops began to refer to her bovine milk contributors as “Mother Bickerdyke’s Cow Brigade.”   Making the rounds of Illinois communities, she urged donors to send fowl that they wished to contribute to the “Sanitary Commission Headquarters” in Chicago, where the “din of crowing, cackling and quarrelling son became unbearable.”  They were shipped to Memphis in coops of 24 each.  Mother Bickerdyke’s efforts led to close to a thousand chickens being shipped to Memphis.  General Hurlbut eventually issued orders assigning President’s Island in the Mississippi opposite Memphis as the place where Mother Bickerdyke could keep her livestock.

     After the fall of Vicksburg, she became a special attaché of the XV Corps and met one of the commanders who would become one of her staunch supporters and friends, General William Tecumseh Sherman.  Their relationship began in rather rocky fashion.  General Billy had issued an order that forbade any civilian or sanitary stores from being transported by railroad from Nashville to Chattanooga.  Aware that mule-drawn ambulances were being sent to Chattanooga, Mother filled hundreds of bags full of sanitary supplies and loaded them on the departing vehicles.  Then she defied Sherman’s orders and took the train to Chattanooga herself, arriving unannounced at the General’s headquarters.

    “How the devil did you get here?” demanded one of General Sherman’s staff officers.

     “Came down on the train, of course.  There’s no other way of getting down here.”  Then she demanded to see General Sherman personally.

     “Put your request in writing,” the staff officer replied brusquely.  “I don’t think he’ll see you though.”

     “I guess he will,” Mother said with a determination that was punctuated by action as she pushed her way past the surprised staff officer into Sherman’s office.

     Sherman glanced up at her, visibly annoyed.  “What do you want?”

     “We can’t stand this last order of yours no how,” Mother launched into him.  You’ll have to change it.  We can get along without more nurses and agents, but not without supplies.  The sick and the wounded soldiers need them.  You’ll have to give the permission to have them brought down.”

     “The general glowered at her, then said “I’m busy.  You’ll have to discuss this with me another time.”  Having assumed he’d dismissed her, he resumed his paperwork.

     “No, General,” she said, resolutely standing her ground against him better than either Johnston or Hood would be able to.  “Don’t you dare send me away.  I won’t go until you fix this thing the way it ought to be fixed.”

     A smile began to crease the General’s weathered features.  Then he chuckled.

     “I can’t stand here fooling all day,” Mother Bickerdyke insisted, sensing a crack widening in Sherman’s stern demeanor.  “Now write me an order for two cars a day to be sent down from the Sanitary Commission at Nashville and I’ll be satisfied.”

     Sherman wrote up the order for her, signed it, and soon the desired sanitary stores were rolling into Chattanooga as the troop’s adopted “Mother” desired. 

    Sometime afterwards, an offended military bureaucrat came storming into the General’s office, complaining about a meddlesome old woman who was countermanding his orders.  By this time “Cump” Sherman had had enough dealings with “Mother” Bickerdyke to appreciate her intentions and her tireless work on behalf of his men.  Perhaps he just didn’t want to butt heads with her or had heard the story of the surgeon who asked her on whose authority she presumed to take some action that he’d objected to.  Her response at that time was “on the authority of Lord God Almighty.  Have you anything that outranks that?”

     So, General Sherman threw up his hands, smiled pityingly at the individual who came in to lodge the complaint, sighed, and then said, “She outranks me.  I can’t do a thing in the world.”

     Toward the end of the war, the troops wanted to show their appreciation to their battlefield “Mother.”  She was invited to stand in an honor position during a review.  Touched by the invitation, she donned her Shaker bonnet and mounted a crude wooden reviewing stand that her “boys” had made for her.  Then commenced the spectacle.  What paraded by was not a brigade of soldiers, rather a herd of cows.  All had been freshly curried, their horns shined and their hooves blackened.  Many of the bovines were adorned with little flags and serenaded with appropriate martial music as they were paraded past.  “Mother” was delighted with the tribute to her efforts, and even General Sherman was grinning broadly.

     At the end of the war Uncle Billy offered her the signal honor of sitting at the side of Mrs. Sherman during the Grand Review of the Armies in Washington DC.  She refused, choosing instead to remain with the troops she cared so much for.  Her “boys” had bought her a new sidesaddle and a beautiful velvet riding outfit.  She chose to use the saddle, but embarrassed by the fancy clothing, she set it aside.  She rode alongside General John A. “Black Jack” Logan at the head of the XV Corps on her old saddle horse, “Old Whitey,” dressed as simply as she always was, in a calico dress and adorned by a bonnet. She was invited to join the dignitaries on the reviewing stand.  She demurred, and instead went to check on two tents that she had ordered set up ahead of time.  One was a dispensary for lemonade and foot balm, since the thirsty, footsore soldiers were still her heart’s concern.  The other tent was a latrine.  Later that evening she contributed the dress that she’d worn in the parade and the bonnet to an auction, urging that any money raised from their sale go to “her boys.”  Her simple clothing netted $300.

     After the war Mary Ann Bickerdyke continued fighting for her soldiers.  She returned to Illinois in 1866 and worked for a year in the Home for the Friendless.  During this time she came in contact with many veterans and their families who were poverty-stricken and embittered at the lack of jobs available for them after the war.  She went out to Kansas to scope what opportunities there was for families willing to move out West for a fresh start, then returned to Chicago and arranged a deal with the President of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad to transport 50 veteran’s families to Salinas, Kansas.  Arriving in Salinas with the soldiers and their families, she collaborated with General Sherman, now commander of Fort Riley, to have the military lend horses and wagons to help her homesteaders get a good start.  She also asked for and received the General’s recommendation to railroad officials to build a hotel in Salinas and appoint her as its manager.  The hotel soon became known as “The Bickerdyke House.”  What was intended to be a business venture became more of a charitable institution, as the kindhearted widow could never bring herself to charge any of the veterans room and board.

     In 1869 an Apache uprising killed 40 settlers in the Salinas vicinity and left thousands homeless.  She traveled to Washington where she was given aid for the stricken families.  She also petitioned the Kansas legislature to appropriate money to help those uprooted by the uprising.  In her travels and relief work she used hotel profits which the owners believed should have been applied to the building’s mortgage, and they fired her.

     Getting a measure of revenge on the railroad officials who had dismissed her, she went to Washington and used her influence to help defeat a railroad appropriations bill.  The bill’s defeat did not restore her job, so at the urging of friends who felt that she would be admirably suited for the job, she went to New York to work with indigent tenement dwellers and took a position with the Protestant Board of City Missions which she held for four years.  Her thoughts still dwelt in Kansas though, so when her sons asked her to move back to join them on their farm in Great Bend, she eagerly complied.  Her arrival coincided with that of a grasshopper plague that ruined hundreds of farmers, so she set to work again as an activist, returning first to Illinois and later out East to solicit aid for the stricken farmers.  Altogether she made ten trips east to procure aid for the Jayhawker State from 1874 through 1875.  Thanks to her efforts more than 250 boxcar loads of food and clothing were brought to Kansas and distributed among the needy.  The State Legislature passed a resolution of appreciation and ordered that a portrait of Mrs. Bickerdyke be hung in the State Capitol to honor her efforts.

     The two years of activity, however, culminated in her physical breakdown, and in 1876 her sons sent her to San Francisco to recuperate.  Once her health was restored she found the time to communicate with many of the veterans whom remembered her fondly, and she found that many of them were entitled to pensions, but ignorant as to the procedures that one had to follow to apply for one.  Mrs. Bickerdyke became a pension agent, and eventually an attorney at law in order to assist her boys, and relied and received invaluable help from now Senator John A Logan, who helped her procure necessary records from his offices in Washington DC.  She continued with this work even after General Logan got her a comfortable sinecure at the San Francisco mint.  She worked with various reform groups, made efforts and took a personal interest in reforming alcoholic veterans and was active in the Women’s Relief Corps, the auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic. 

     In the 1880’s she returned to Bunker Hill, Kansas to live with her son, Professor James Bickerdyke, Superintendent of Schools at Bunker Hill.  In 1886 Congress finally got around to honoring her wartime services by granting her a $300 a year pension, only half the amount asked for on her behalf by Senator Logan.  Among one of her last accomplishments was the Bickerdyke Home near Ellsworth, Kansas, founded for war nurses, veterans, their widows and orphans.  This establishment remained in operation until 1951.

     Mother Bickerdyke died peacefully in Bunker Hill in 1901 after a minor stroke.  Her body was brought back to Galesburg, and you can find her gravesite in Linwood Cemetery.  A more fitting and impressive monument to her though can be found on the grounds of the Knox County Courthouse, a bronze statue of her offering assistance to a wounded soldier.  The inscription on it says simply, “She Outranks Me.” Given her care for the sick and wounded, a more appropriate memorial to her cannot be imagined.  She has also had the honor of having both a hospital ship and a Navy destroyer named in her honor by the government that found these to be less expensive honors than the full pension Senator Logan had asked for her and that she so richly deserved.

Sources

     There’s an abundance of material written about Mary Ann Bickerdyke.  My dilemma was in culling the information down into a compact yet readable article.  I turned to Nina Baker’s “Cyclone in Calico” and “Mother Bickerdyke as I Knew Her,” by Florence Kellogg.  Shorter works with references to her that I found helpful were forwarded to me by the ever invaluable Phil Reyburn, the guiding light behind these creations, or found in some cases by my own searches on the internet.  They are as follows…Sylvia Dent’s Noble Women of the North, Jeffrey N. Nash’s A Politician Turned General: the Life of Stephen Hurlbut, Laurie Chambliss’s The Mother of the Union Army, Wikipedia’s entry on Mary Ann Bickerdyke, a Civil War Times article entitled “Mrs. Mary Ann (Mother) Bickerdyke, Frank Moore’s Women of the War, Mary Elizabeth Massey’s Women of the Civil War, and the “Galesburg Register Mail’s “ obituaries of Mrs. Lucy F. Chase and Lyman West.