My Name Is Mary Sutter (17 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Sanitary Commission Report

The Union Hotel Hospital, July 10th, 1861

The Union Hotel Hospital, Georgetown, was occupied as its name implies, until recently hired for its present use. It is considered capable of accommodating 225 patients, and at present contains 189. It is well situated, but the building is old, out of repair, and cut up into a number of small rooms, with windows too small and few in number to afford good ventilation. Its halls and passages are narrow, tortuous, and abrupt, and in many instances with carpets still unremoved from their floors, and walls covered with paper. There are no provisions for bathing, the water-closets and sinks are insufficient and defective, and there is no dead-house. The wards are many of them over-crowded, and destitute of arrangements for artificial ventilation.

“Just think what they would have said if they had visited before you arrived, Mary.”

Stipp was leaning up against the wall in the second-floor hallway, watching Mary run a ragged mop over the uneven floorboards, which was the only flooring in the entire place that took mopping, but even if Mary were to remove each rug and beat it until it approached cleanliness, she would never accomplish anything even approaching clean. It seemed that no cleaning had been attempted in the eighty years or so since George Washington had eaten at the hotel, when the humble building was still only a tavern on the turnpike north. Neither had anyone cleaned the single water closet in an age. (The Sanitary Commission had gotten it wrong; there was only one, and its fabrication of more seemed somehow gracious, as if they could fill the need by wishing them into being.) Its box seeped through the floorboards to the cellar, where a shimmering lake of sewage pooled in the corner before bubbling into the unseen swamp that lurked beneath the city. Not even the linens were clean. The laundresses, hired by Stipp to work once a month, frequently did not show, and the sheets soured for weeks at a time under the patients’ backs. The cook knew how to prepare only two meals, oatmeal and boiled beef, but since there was no beef to boil, oatmeal was the mainstay of the 189 inhabitants of the least sanitary building in a hundred-mile radius of the nation’s capital.

“What the commission should have said is that this place is an apocalypse.” Mary wiped away the streams of perspiration cascading down her forehead. Her back ached; her palms were blistered from the mop handle, last sanded, she was certain, on George Washington’s final visit. She sank against the wall and sighed.

“I warned you that what I needed was a charwoman.”

“This is not sport, Dr. Stipp. Men cannot get well in such a place.”

“In all the world, there is not medicine enough to heal what ails the Union army, mopping or no.”

Stipp was at his wit’s end. He had no patience for dysentery, the disease that had seized most of his patients even though he had attacked the tenacious ailment with a cocktail of drugs that the steward, Mr. Mack, had cleverly pilfered from the medical supply at the quartermasters’ in Foggy Bottom. But not a single doctor in the army knew what to do. In light of the ever-present and rampant diarrhea, Stipp had had to improvise. He had at first suspected malarial fever as the cause, and had pushed the normal quinine dose to its limits, and for good measure added mercury and Epsom salts. But then he had changed his mind and thought the cause might be typhoid, and so now he was using Dover’s powder and the occasional opiate. When pain presented, he administered blisters by cupping, and ordered good slugs of whiskey. Several times, however, calomel had proved useful, as had castor oil. And if the sufferer was immune to all of the above, he gave ipecac, to induce vomiting. But it was a nasty business, every bit of it, and nothing he did was working. The Sanitary Commission had been generous in its assessment; the conditions in the hotel had reached unbearable long ago. Only Mary and her efforts were keeping death by enteric asphyxiation at bay.

As if to prove him right, Mary splashed the mop back into the bucket.

“You cannot drown disease, Miss Sutter.”

“I can wash away its residue.”

“You are the most stubborn young lady I have ever met. You were certainly not a charwoman in your former life.”

“I want to be a surgeon.”

Stipp sighed, regretting ever having invited this headstrong young woman to stay, though it hadn’t been bad to have her about. She had made remarkable progress on the hygiene situation. And the men had perked up in her presence, though Mary was no beauty and certainly gave no indication of any of the usual weaknesses of her sex. But it was demoralizing to have her see that day after day, week after week, none of his patients improved, and that he had no idea what he should do for them, and that this seemingly most simple of medical problems was in fact the most baffling one he had ever faced. And Mary turned up everywhere, looking over his shoulder at the bedside, inquiring whether or not such and such a dose of quinine had worked yet, whether or not the Dover’s powder was at all effective, had he thought of tapioca and rice as a palliative, did he wonder whether there was some collective problem afoot in the land, would the intestinal lining of the patients tolerate the repeated onslaught, did he think they would survive?

It wasn’t ego, he told himself. He was not really so small a man as that. It was that he was done with teaching. James Blevens had been the last of his students, and he had been sharp, that one. Cleverly taken with the body and its vagaries. But that was when he himself had been sharp; now the Texas sun had dulled his memory, and he was fighting to remember what used to come to him without any trouble at all. Sometimes, he felt himself not so much at his wit’s end, but witless. How much there was to know; how little he knew. Mary would be much better off anywhere else, even if she couldn’t see it. Still, she was remarkably resilient. It seemed nothing would bring her to her knees, not even the despicable state of this building. But as happy as he was to have finally obtained responsible help, he would not engage in dishonesty.

“You will not become a surgeon here. I cannot help you. I tell you this as a warning. I want you to understand. There is nothing for you here.”

“I will become a surgeon here,” Mary said, but she would not look at him, because she did not want to see the unwavering honesty in his eyes. “I am learning things.”

“This is no place to become educated. This is no place at all, in fact, or can’t you tell that?”

“I will learn what I can.”

“By mopping floors?”

“Yes, by mopping floors. And by washing sheets and by beating rugs and by any other means necessary.” She was shouting now, her voice carrying down the narrow hallway, penetrating the old timbers of the hotel that had seen murder, adultery, generosity, desperation, and grief, but never such ragged disappointment.

“You’re a fool,” he said.

He left her then and Mary finished mopping the hall, furiously slopping the water onto the floorboards and then whipping the mop back and forth, banging it into the walls. She felt like she was fighting the entire history of the country, all its residue, all its neglect, all its ignorance. In the dim light, it was impossible to tell whether or not she was making any progress, on the floor or in her education. What had she learned so far? How to unplug an ancient water closet, how to bathe in a building without bathing facilities, how to pitchfork boiling linens from a wash cauldron to a rinse one, but nothing about medicine. What was striving for if all you learned was that your stubbornness led you places you never wanted to be in order to do things you never thought you would do?

She flushed the water closet with the waste water, and set the mop in the corner to rinse once she went downstairs. She was soaked though with perspiration and dirty water; the hotel walls also hoarded heat. She unpinned her hair and ran her hands through her curls, twisting them back up again into their pins. What had she wanted; where had she come? The men called to her as she careened down the hallway, begging her for help to write a letter, for something to drink, for her smile, but she dashed past their open doors until she reached her room under the stairs, where she peeled off her dress and threw herself onto the hard, thin mattress in her camisole and pantaloons. Drab walls, peeling wallpaper, a wardrobe in which a rat had made a nest in her nightgown.

It will not be good, not any of it. You will have exhausted yourself for nothing.

Her mother’s letter was folded under her pillow and Mary pictured now, as she rarely allowed herself to do, home: the bounty of the dining table, the clean, scented sheets on her bed, the yellow orchid gracing the hallway table, the airy rooms, freshly laundered curtains billowing from tall windows open to a spring breeze.

A pot of tea, served on a tray, with a pitcher of milk fresh from the icebox and crystals of sugar in a silver bowl.

Who was Stipp anyway? He was not the keeper of the gate, just as neither Blevens nor Marsh was. But she couldn’t help but feel now that she had made a huge mistake, had gone backward, not forward, had made her life worse, not better. The sweat was beginning to evaporate now from her skin, cooling her, but there was still so much to do. There were sheets to boil and bedpans to clean, and then she had to try to find something to eat, because mealtime as the only woman among hundreds of men was a fight for survival.

She reached under the pillow and pulled Amelia’s letter from its envelope.
Please come home. Please find Christian.
The pages were already beginning to tear, though she had only read the letter half a dozen times. She supposed Jenny would want to hear of Thomas, too, though she wasn’t surprised that Amelia hadn’t mentioned it. Nothing was as she had imagined coming down on the train, when the resolve propelling her had seemed as right and true as love. It was terrifying to have miscalculated; she rarely did that, and feared that her stubbornness—yes, she would admit she was stubborn, Stipp was not wrong about that—might not be enough to sustain her.

Do one thing, Mary thought. Have control over one thing. Wasn’t this how she had conquered uncertainty in childbirth? Steadiness, patience, deliberation, then action. Gathering herself in the melting heat, she rose from the bed, smoothed the sheets and her petticoat, and stepped into her still damp dress. After tucking the letter back under her pillow, she collected her purse and a parasol she had purchased to ward off the southern sun (no havelock for her), marched out of the disease-ridden Union Hotel, hired a hack, and headed into Washington, retracing for the first time the route she had taken a month before. Dust flew up from the street traffic and shimmered in the waves of afternoon heat. Mary held a handkerchief to her mouth and the parasol over her head as she climbed the stairs to the run-down building the hack driver had pointed out when he had come to a rest outside the Department of the Army.

Inside, the clerk—cousin, Mary thought to the one at the Surgeon General’s office—sighed and asked why she wanted to go to such a rough place as Fort Albany.

“To see my brother.”

“I am sorry, but there are no passes for civilians to visit soldiers at the forts.” In the heat, his wool uniform smelled like a wet dog.

“I have to see him. My mother begged me, and I’ve come all this way—”

“We are aware that many mothers are worried. That is why the Sanitary Commission is allowed across the Long Bridge for inspections, but under no circumstances are family members allowed.”

“But I have to see him.”

“Pardon me, but are you a Miss or a Mrs.?”

“A Miss. Miss Mary Sutter.”

“Write him a letter, Miss Sutter,” the clerk said, “and be done with it.”

“But—”

“Virginia is enemy territory. There are no passes to be had for sisters or mothers or anyone else. Unless you are a bawdy girl, and then that is an entirely different matter, one for the provost guard to attend to. We are not issuing passes. Go home.”

He walked away from her then and busied himself with something in the corner. Mary slipped outside. Her hack driver had gone. She stood for a moment, watching the traffic swell in the streets, then walked toward the Willard, where the bellman would hail her another cab.

A charwoman. Not yet a nurse; certainly not a surgeon. Not even a good sister or daughter. Perhaps it didn’t matter, she thought, as she dodged traffic on the avenue. The war could end tomorrow and they’d all be back in Albany anyway, just like before, except that Jenny and Thomas were expecting a baby, and Mary would certainly have her chance to be a good sister then.

On the way back to Georgetown, she wondered what ambition was worth, and whether her family would love her if she failed. She had grieved the loss of Thomas, had resolved on this other path, and it was further away now even than it had been in Albany. And now she wasn’t even able to comfort Amelia on the state of Christian’s well-being. She had never felt so defeated in her life.

At the Union Hotel, the walls throbbed with heat. She hid her purse, repinned her hair, and went upstairs to begin stripping sheets from the beds.

Chapter Fifteen

“We have received certain information that the Confederates are at Manassas,” John Hay said. “Are you aware of this?”

It was Monday, July the fifteenth, six a.m., two weeks before Lincoln’s seventy-five thousand men were to return home to their plows and wives, and not a thing between the warring states had been settled. Apart from incessant drilling and parades, the growing ring of forts beginning to encircle Washington, and the increasing public outcry for a resolution to the seemingly insoluble conflict, you could barely tell there was a war on. In the past three months there had been the occasional skirmish—small battles scattered here and there, most notably in western Virginia, where a general named George McClellan was successfully harassing the Confederates in the interest of protecting both the C&O Canal and the railroads—but for the most part, the willing civilians-turned-soldiers who had engulfed Washington City had fired no shots, engaged in no battles, and achieved only the dubious distinction of having fallen ill by the thousands. If the issue of secession was ever going to be settled, it had to be settled soon, before the idle seventy-five thousand returned home. On this point at least everyone agreed.

Everyone this morning included General Winfield Scott, seventy-four years old, a brevet lieutenant general who had commanded forces in both the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War and then served as military governor in Mexico City and had once even run for president. He was the commander general of all the Northern forces. General Irvin McDowell, forty-three, also brevetted, was in charge of the Army of Northeastern Virginia, the Northern contingent encamped on the Virginia side of the Potomac. They had ridden down Pennsylvania Avenue through the simmering dawn to the Mansion for this meeting. McDowell felt himself subordinate to everyone in the room, even the annoying Hay, and was holding himself in an exaggerated posture of diffidence that was making him vastly uncomfortable, not the least because he knew that both Scott and Lincoln had preferred Robert E. Lee for McDowell’s current position before Lee had decided to secede with his home state of Virginia. The president, who had slept that night in the Mansion rather than at the Soldiers’ Home where his wife, Mary, and their children were spending the summer away from the sweltering bog of the Potomac, was leaning over an incomplete map of Virginia spread across his desk that the two generals had brought with them.

Hay cleared his throat. “I asked, gentlemen, are you aware?”

Both Scott and McDowell sized up Hay, with his linen vest and oiled hair, and decided these dandifying vanities were further evidence of his youthful ignorance and that he was far too young to be advising the president, especially in military matters. Besides, how did the impertinent boy know where the Rebels were? Manassas was thirty miles away—in Virginia, no less.

Punishing Hay with a humorless smile, Scott instead directed his answer to Lincoln.

“Of course we are aware of the situation. Our scouts reported last night that the enemy recently moved a large force through the Shenandoah Valley. If they have indeed settled at Manassas—and of course,” Scott said, both bowing and smirking in Hay’s direction, “given the delays between reception of intelligence and any corresponding reaction, a
military
man never assumes that the information in his possession is either current or accurate—however, now might be our best chance to destroy the Rebel force and win the war. And then we can shame the Rebels back into submission.”

The four men could almost hear the clock ticking. Even the public had lost patience.
Forward to Richmond!
the newspapers were crying, splashing their impatience across dailies all over the North.

McDowell shifted. He didn’t agree with Scott. Despite intensive drilling, his troops were still unready to face an army, unready even to march the proposed thirty miles to Manassas. They were an undisciplined lot, who despite having wielded shovels more than muskets these past months, were out of shape for a hike of that length, not in the least because a good number of them were still unshod. To say nothing of the fact that he didn’t know how he would feed them once he got them there. Ammunition was scarce, the supply trains hadn’t been established, ambulances were unmanned. That the Rebels would have none of this in place either did not comfort him. An army needed to be prepared. Politics and the military should not be bedfellows; he had believed it at West Point, and he believed it now. Of course, that Lincoln wanted the war to end swiftly was not a crime. He did too. The trouble was, under these circumstances, he needed an advantage. His only hope of victory was surprise, and his unprepared troops, much as he disliked sending them in their inexperience, should have already been on the march. And yet here they were, conferring, when they should already be five miles down the road.

Lincoln seemed not to have heard Scott’s answer. He was still perusing the inadequate map, his palms flat down on its curling edges to hold them back. The president’s easy manner, so often interpreted as ignorance, seemed now almost disinterested to McDowell. The president’s enemies called him a monkey, an ape, with arms far too long, a head too large, a long gawky string of a man, who wanted war. But McDowell didn’t think so. He thought instead that the man was resigned to the tactic, was courageous in fact, in not backing away from it, even though he knew nothing.

Scott sighed and heaved himself into a chair. He was too old to wait while a new president, totally ignorant of the mechanics or stratagems of warfare, dawdled in indecision.

Lincoln finally looked up at McDowell and asked, “What of the train depot?”

Both McDowell and Scott exchanged glances. They had bet on the way over that Lincoln wouldn’t be able to tell a regiment from a company, to say nothing of understanding the battle plans that McDowell had prepared.

Straightening, though at six feet he was nearly as tall as Lincoln, McDowell said, “Our best chance of victory is to destroy the railroad leading from Manassas into the valley, just as you suggested, Mr. President. I’ll have to get a better look on the field, but I’m thinking of a five-pronged attack. One division to attack the Rebels holding the bridge over Bull Run. Another to run to the right over Sudley’s Ford, there.” He made a large circling gesture toward the map. “Possibly another on the Centreville Heights. Our troops, however, are untested in battle, and I should have left with them yesterday.”

John Hay said, “But can you win?”

Before McDowell could answer, General Scott said, “It’s a good enough plan.” But he was still thinking of his own plan, one that called for control of the Mississippi and a blockade of key Southern ports that would strangle the South without having to fire any ammunition. He was tired of war, tired of fighting, and too infirm to travel into the field, and he would feel a good deal more confident of the success of this plan if it were Lee standing now before the president instead of McDowell, but he would never upset the president’s confidence in the proposed action.

Hay asked again, “Will you win?”

Irvin McDowell, a general for as long as Hay had been alive, wished that he could speak plainly, but it was past time for that. He’d already lodged his objections, and no one, not even Scott, had listened. “Mr. President, I promise you that I will not tolerate defeat.”

No one else in the North would either, least of all Abraham Lincoln, who, after a moment’s more perusal of the maddeningly incomplete map, said, “God’s speed, then.”

“They don’t seem to like you much,” Lincoln said to Hay after the generals left, but he said it with a glimmer of amusement at his young secretary, whose company he trusted far more than he did the generals’. They were standing at the window overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, watching their carriage clatter out the gates.

“It was good you hired that spy,” Hay said, “or else I do believe those two would have denied the Rebels were anywhere near here. For generals, they don’t seem to like war very much.”

“They don’t, do they?”

“At least we’ll know in a few days who has won,” Hay said, “and then the matter of secession will be resolved.”

“You think so?” Lincoln said, and Hay turned to him to discern whether it was hope or doubt that had so altered the president’s voice, but Lincoln had turned away, and would say no more.