Mary
Ann Ball was born
in Know County, Ohio, on 19th July, 1817. A farmers daughter, she
married Robert Bickerdyke in 1847. Bickerdyke had three children before
her husband died in 1859.
On the outbreak of the American Civil War
Bickerdyke joined a field hospital at Fort Donelson and worked on
the first hospital boat that collected wounded soldiers from Cairo,
St. Louis and Louisville.
Bickerdyke later became chief of nursing under the command of General
Ulysses S. Grant. Bickerdyke served at
Vicksburg and at the request of General
William T. Sherman, accompanied the
Union Army throughout the Atlanta
Campaign.
After the war Bickerdyke worked with the Salvation
Army in San Francisco in a project
to help civil war veterans. Mary Ann Bickerdyke, who received a special
pension from Congress in 1886, retired to Bunker Hill, Kansas, where
she died on 8th November, 1901.
(1)
In her book, My
Story of the War, Mary
Livermore
described the work of Mary
Ann Bickerdyke
on the hospital boat
After
the battle of Donelson, Mother Bickerdyke went from Cairo in the first
hospital boat, and assisted in the removal of the wounded to Cairo,
St. Louis and Louisville, and in nursing those too badly wounded to
be moved. On the way to the battlefield, she systematized matters
perfectly. The beds were ready for the occupants, tea, coffee, soup
and gruel, milk punch, and ice water were prepared in large quantities,
under her supervision, and sometimes her own hand.
When the wounded were brought on board, mangled almost out of human
shape; the frozen ground from which they had been cut adhering to
them; chilled with the intense cold in which some had lain for twenty-four
hours; faint with loss of blood, physical agony, and lack of nourishment;
racked with a terrible five-mile ride over frozen roads, in ambulances,
in common Tennessee farm wagons, without springs; burning with fever;
raving in delirium, or in the faintness of death, Mother Bickerdyke's
boat was in readiness for them.
(2)
After the war a surgeon working with Mary
Ann Bickerdyke wrote about her achievements working on the Union
Army hospital ship.
I never saw anybody like
her. There was really nothing for us surgeons to do but dress wounds
and administer medicines. She drew out clean shirts or drawers from
some corner, whenever they were needed. Nourishment was ready for
every man as soon as he was brought on board. Everyone was sponged
from blood and frozen mire of the battlefield, as far as his condition
allowed. His blood-stiffened, and sometimes horribly filthy uniform,
was exchanged for soft and clean hospital garments. Incessant cries
of "Mother! Mother! Mother!" rang through the boat, in every
note of beseeching and anguish. And to every man she turned with a
heavenly tenderness, as if he were indeed her son.
(3)
Mary
Livermore,
My
Story of the War (1887)
At
last it was believed that all the wounded had been removed from the
field, and the relief parties discontinued their work. Looking from
his tent at midnight, "Blind Jack" Logan, then a colonel,
observed a faint light flitting hither and thither on the abandoned
battlefield, and, and after puzzling
over it for some time, decided it was someone robbing the dead. He
sent his orderly to bring the rascal in. It was Mother Bickerdyke,
with a lantern, groping among the dead. Stopping down, and turning
their cold faces toward her, she scrutinized them searchingly, uneasy
lest some might be left to die uncared for. She couldn't rest while
she thought any were overlooked who were yet living.
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