A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [199]
The vast need for surgeons and medical personnel had opened the doors to any foreign doctor with a degree and a proficiency in the English language. Though not in the same numbers as foreign soldiers, they came by their tens and hundreds to Washington. Until two months before, twenty-five-year-old Charles Mayo had been the house surgeon at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. There were loud protests from the staff and patients when the popular and well-respected doctor announced his intention to go to America to gain more medical experience.45 After seeing Mayo’s qualifications, the new surgeon general, Dr. William Hammond, who was valiantly trying to overhaul the entire system, offered him charge of 125 beds at the Armory Square Hospital in Washington. This was not what Mayo had in mind, and he politely declined the offer, preferring to take the assistant surgeon examination instead. But to his chagrin, his marks were so high that the president of the examining board put in a special request for Mayo to be stationed in the capital.
In the aftermath of Fredericksburg, Mayo worked all day and long into the night, hurrying
from place to place to the assistance of maimed and exhausted men, pursued all the while by messengers with notice of fresh arrivals … scarcely a hotel or boarding-house in the city but contained someone that required the doctor’s help. It became impossible to keep a detailed visiting list, or to remember the names of one’s patients. “Lieutenant A and five others, Colonel B and six others; Captain C and four others,” are specimens of the kind of record that had to suffice for the contents of a particular house or hotel.46
Occasionally, he remembered men by their stories; for example, a wounded officer in the Irish Brigade who was saved by the butt of his revolver, which took the full force of a minié ball. But for the most part, he was too busy to become friendly with his patients. Mayo noticed that many of them arrived dying from tetanus—the result of incompetent butchery at the field hospitals, he concluded. There was nothing he could do for these wretched men except try to ease their pain. One particular case stayed in his memory: a healthy young major with a botched amputation who lingered for several days, eventually dying in the arms of a kind and decent hotel keeper who could not bear the thought of her guest dying alone.
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Washington was in an uproar over Fredericksburg, and General Burnside was accused of criminal stupidity. “What astonishes me is that such a battle should ever have been fought,” the new attaché Edward Malet wrote to his father. “I do really think that all those men who fell were murdered.”47 Lincoln’s reputation as a war leader suffered a serious blow. The president wrung his hands as he listened to accounts of the battle, repeatedly asking, “What has God put me in this place for?”48 To many people, not just in the capital but also throughout the country, the answer was obvious: it was time for Lincoln to make way for a successor. The treasurer of the Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, wrote in his diary on December 18 that “Old Abe’s grotesque genial Western” jokes simply nauseated him now; “if these things go on we shall have pressure on him to resign.”49 Three days later, Strong recorded with surprise that it was Seward and not Lincoln who had resigned. “Edward Everett and Charles Sumner are named as candidates for the succession. I do not think Seward a loss to government,” he wrote. “He is an adroit, shifty, clever politician, he believes in majorities, and it would seem, in nothing else.”50
A campaign to oust Seward had been gaining momentum for several months. The previous September, Lincoln had fended off an anti-Seward delegation from New York that claimed to represent