On July 15th 1863, Emily Bliss Souder stepped off the locomotive at Gettysburg, PA to assist surgeons, physicians, and other volunteer nurses with the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg. The battle, which ravaged the small town and farmlands over the course of five days, was one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. Souder was one of hundreds of female volunteers who assisted in nursing the dying and wounded soldiers and civilians. Souder’s patriotic service is captured in a series of poems and letters written during her two-week visit as a nurse.

“A soldier-boy lay in his tent,
As evening’s shadows fell,
The seal of death was on his brow,
We saw and knew it well.
We paused to cut one raven lock,
And pluck one oaken leaf;
A stranger’s hand could do no more
To soothe a mother’s grief.

The wives have left their little ones
In quiet homes afar,
To watch beside the couch of pain,
Where heroes dream of war.”

- Emily Bliss Souder, “The Pilgrimage to Gettysburg: The Battleground of Freedom”[1]

“Dear Eliza,” the letter begins, “you have doubtless heard through some member of the family, that instead of going to Cape May with the children, I had, in company with three other ladies, made a journey to Gettysburg, to do what we could for our suffering soldiers.” As Emily Bliss Souder wrote to her cousin on July 27, 1863 she had been in the town of Gettysburg, PA, freshly rocked from one of the bloodiest, and most definitive, battles of the American Civil War, for about two weeks tending to the injured and dying.

Her experiences detailing a grueling and demanding endeavor are preserved in Leaves from the Battlefield of Gettysburg: a Series of Letters from a Field Hospital and National Poems, published in 1864. The collection is not only a beautiful capsule of a talented woman’s reflections on the Battle of Gettysburg, but also lends invaluable insight into the state of nursing in America.

[Image: nurses after Gettysburg, 1863] This photograph shows a makeshift hospital at the Battle of Gettysburg, showing the wounded and doctors alike standing outside of tents. The tents were filled with patients and supplies. To the right of the image stand several women, likely volunteer nurses or residents who were assisting with the recovery efforts. [2]

Nursing looked radically different at the time that Souder answered the call for female volunteers in the week after the battle had ended than it does today. Female nurses were a core component of American combat during the Revolutionary War and the American Civil War, with volunteer nuns and civilian women alike assisting in surgeries, tending wounds, and keeping makeshift hospitals stocked and clean.[3] Off the battlefield, civilian women were instrumental in creating bandages, knitting socks, and preparing gauze for field site use.[4] While there was yet no formal medical training school for women at this time, civilian volunteers who had experience taking care of their children or neighbors could respond to calls in the paper asking for assistance after great battles.

Nursing not only met physical and medical needs of soldiers, but carried an emotional comfort for many. Souder writes in Leaves from the Battlefield of Gettysburg that so many of the young men wounded and dying called for their mothers, their wives, or their girlfriends. It was these emotional responses that challenged the surgeons and physicians as well, a stark reminder of the sacrifice of this war. With nurses writing home for dying men, singing songs in the evening, and keeping the wounded company, women like Souder provided emotional support as well as medical care.[5] Souder grew to care for many of the men she cared for, recalling them in her letters home. One poignant example stands out wherein she extends a gesture of care for the mother of a dying soldier.

“It is just past eleven o’clock at night, and I have just finished a letter to the mother of a young man, of the New York 64th Volunteers, who died yesterday,” she wrote to an unknown recipient by the light of a small flame. “I cut a beautiful lock of black hair, which I enclosed with three oak leaves plucked from a branch which grew directly over his tent.”

The kind act of commemoration and remembrance for the fallen soldier’s mother was later immortalized in Souder’s poem “The Pilgrimage to Gettysburg”, which not only carries the impact of the definitive battle but, in many ways, details the very emotional component of nursing that characterized the American Civil War. As a mother herself, we can imagine Souder felt a responsibility to care for these men and convey their comfort to their mothers who were waiting for news far away.

[Image: Civil War Envelope - “We Will Take Care of the Soldiers Who Fought Our Battles.”] This envelope, sent during the Civil War from Kentucky to Illinois, reflects the very emotional nature of volunteer nursing during this conflict. Images of nurses were synonymous with patriotic sacrifice, on both sides, and characterized efforts.[6]

“We constantly witness heartbreaking scenes, but the Lord has endured us with strength to bear them,” Souder wrote. “I have learned to know whether the person carried on the stretcher is dead or living, by noticing whether he is carried with his head or his feet toward the shoulders of his bearers,” she wrote empathically to her brother on July 29th. In a later poem, “The Pilgrimage to Gettysburg” she writes:

“They are coming – they are coming –
A band of saddened men,
To look for graves on hillside,
In valley and in glen.
We see them ‘neath the oak tree
And near the bending corn;
We see them in the fading light,
And In the early morn.

Oh! Mournful are the stories
That we gather day by day,
Of those who fought and those who fell
In that long, bloody fray.”

Souder was one of many nurses who answered the call to assist the wounded and dying in the American Civil War. Moved by patriotism and compassion, Souder’s poetry and letters convey the trials and emotional moments of nursing during the American Civil War. The impact of her experience can be seen in her pilgrimages to the battlefield in the months and years after her nursing experience and on her headstone at the Woodlands Cemetery, where it reads “Volunteer US Army Nurse, Gettysburg, 1863”.

Learn more about Emily Bliss Souder and other nurses buried in the Woodlands in an upcoming tour.

Written by:
Margaret Sanford
MA Public History, Temple University

Resources:

Emily Bliss Souder, “The Pilgrimage to Gettysburg: the Battleground of Freedom”, Leaves from the Battlefield of Gettysburg: a Series of Letters from a Field Hospital and National Poems, (Philadelphia, PA: Caxton Press of C. Sherman, Son & Co., 1863).
U.S. Christian Commission at Gettysburg General Hospital, Library of Congress, Albumen Print, August 1863. https://www.loc.gov/item/2012650193/
“Civil War Nursing – Care of the Wounded”, American Nursing History, https://www.americannursinghistory.org/civil-war-care-of-the-wounded.
“United States Sanitary Commission”, Army War College, https://ahec.armywarcollege.edu/exhibits/CivilWarImagery/Sanitary_Commissionl.cfm.
Paige Gibbons Backus, “Female Nurses During the Civil War: Angels of the Battlefield”, American Battlefield Trust, October 20, 2020. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/female-nurses-during-civil-war
[Civil War Envelope showing woman nursing soldier with message “Lovely Woman. We will take care of the brave soldiers who fought our battles”, Library of Congress, woodcut envelope 8x13 cm. Postmarked unknown. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2019635129/