Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [702]
The genesis of the U.S. Sanitary Commission lay in the response of northern women to the outbreak of war. By 1861 thousands of ladies, exhorted by women’s magazines, had gathered at one another’s homes or in churches to make bandages for the troops. Upper-class ladies worked for the Seventh Regiment at George Templeton Strong’s, and Henry Ward Beecher’s church kept a dozen sewing machines going. In addition, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, seeing the need for nurses, began giving two-month training courses in her infirmary, and at Bellevue or New York Hospital, then sending volunteers on to Washington.
Soon, several elite women decided these efforts needed coordination. Dr. Blackwell joined with Mrs. William Cullen Bryant, Mrs. Peter Cooper, and “Ninety-Two of the Most Respected Ladies” in calling for an oversight organization. On April 26 four thousand women gathered at the Cooper Union to form the Women’s Central Association of Relief for the Sick and Wounded of the Army. The twenty-four-year-old Louisa Lee Schuyler, a member of the Rev. Henry Bellows’s fashionable All Souls Unitarian Church on Gramercy Park, became the key organizer.
They soon found that federal administrators paid women little heed, so they turned to Bellows, Strong, and some prominent male physicians for assistance in gaining official approval and establishing a working relationship with military authorities. These men prepared a report for Lincoln that adopted an expert, “scientific” approach. Analyzing data generated by the British and French Commissions of the Crimean War, they observed that during that conflict (1854-56) an estimated 22 percent of British war deaths (30 percent for the French) had stemmed from possibly preventable disease.
In June, Stanton and Lincoln authorized establishment of the Sanitary Commission as a semiofficial agency to take charge of the health and welfare needs of the army. The organizers established a committee of associates, composed mainly of Republican bankers and merchants, to help solicit funds. The initial stake came from life insurance companies; many communities had taken out policies for local volunteers, so the firms stood to benefit from decreases in soldier mortality.
Their next move was to establish the predominance of their male, professional, and highly centralized staff over the volunteer women already organized in benevolent associations in most of the cities and small towns of the north. By 1863 the Sanitary Commission had become the mediator between these women’s groups and the military, circulating information on hospital and army supply requirements to thousands of local Soldiers Aid societies. The commission also investigated troop, camp, and hospital conditions and established an elaborate battlefield relief system, introducing reform methods into the government bureaucracy.
The sanitary commissioners proved extremely effective. They also made a lot of enemies by their insistence that discipline and subordination should be imposed on unruly armies, as on unruly cities. They thought Lincoln’s pardoning of condemned deserters smacked of just the kind of fuzzy-minded and indiscriminate charity they had battled in New York. Female volunteers, in turn, resented the male commissioners’ domination of the one public arena, charity, in which women had established some authority and objected to the commission’s use of agents who were paid fifteen hundred to four thousand dollars annually when soldiers were getting $156. Nor did the commission members’ wealth, professionalism, Republicanism, or residence in New York City endear them to the mass of the volunteers.
Many switched their support to another Manhattan operation, the U.S. Christian Commission, founded November 16, 1861, by the YMCA. Its leadership was an interlocking directorate of the