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It was during this restorative summer that Mary formed what one newspaper termed a “daily habit of visiting the hospitals in the District.” The hospitals became her refuge, allowing her a few hours of reprieve from her private grief. “But for these humane employments,” a friend who often accompanied her to the hospital wards recalled her saying, “her heart would have broken when she lost her child.” It is clear in the recollections of Walt Whitman, who worked as a nurse in the hospital wards, that the harrowing experience made one’s “little cares and difficulties” disappear “into nothing.” After ministering each day to the hundreds of young men who had endured ghastly wounds, submitted to amputations without anesthesia, and often died without the comfort of family or friends, Whitman wrote, “nothing of ordinary misfortune seems as it used to.”

In the days after the Peninsula Campaign, the New York Daily Tribune reported, the numbers of sick and wounded pouring into the city were enough “to form an immense army.” Every morning, steamers arrived at the Sixth Street Wharf carrying hundreds of injured soldiers, many “horribly wounded.” As crowds gathered around, the soldiers disembarked, some carried on stretchers, others stumbling along on crudely made crutches. Ambulances stood by, ready to transport them to the dozen or more hastily outfitted hospitals that had sprung up in various parts of the capital.

In the effort to meet the soaring demand for hospital space, the federal government had embarked on a massive project of converting hotels, churches, clubs, school buildings, and private residences into military hospitals. The old Union Hotel, where congressmen and senators had boarded during earlier administrations, became the Union Hotel Hospital. A visitor noted that “the rooms in which the politicians of the old school used to sit and sup their wine” were now crowded with patients lying on cots. Louisa May Alcott, who worked there as a nurse, observed that “many of the doors still bore their old names; some not so inappropriate as might be imagined, for my ward was in truth a ball-room, if gunshot wounds could christen it.” The Braddock House, where it was said that “General George Washington held his Councils of War,” was also pressed into service, with some of the same old chairs and desks.

The second floor of the Patent Office, under the guidance of Interior Secretary Caleb Smith’s wife, Elizabeth, was likewise transformed into a hospital ward accommodating hundreds of patients. It presented “a curious scene,” Whitman noted, with rows of “sick, badly wounded and dying soldiers” lying between “high and ponderous glass cases, crowded with models in miniature of every kind of utensil, machine or invention.” In addition, “a great long double row” of cots ran “up and down through the middle of the hall,” with extra beds placed in the gallery. Especially “at night, when lit up,” the impromptu ward presented a bizarre spectacle with its “glass cases, the beds, the sick, the gallery above and the marble pavement under foot.”

In mid-June, the Methodist Episcopal Church on 20th Street offered its chapel for conversion to a hospital. Five days later, government carpenters and mechanics were hard at work covering pews with timbers to support a new floor upon which hundreds of beds would be placed. As in other church hospitals, the pulpit and assorted furnishings were safely stored under the floor, while the basement was turned into a laboratory and kitchen. Taken together, these makeshift government hospitals accommodated more than three thousand patients, still only a fraction of the beds that would be needed in the months and years ahead.

In preparation for her hospital visits, Mary filled her carriage with baskets of fruit, food, and fresh flowers. She cleaned out the strawberries in the White House garden and procured a donation from a wealthy merchant, impressed by “the quiet and unostentatious manner” of her ministrations, for $300 worth of lemons and oranges, so necessary to prevent scurvy. For