Nazi wives and lovers tended to be mediocre women. They were not especially gifted or brilliant. They were content to be used as tools for their partners’ purposes—and to make the most of their proximity to power. That might surprise you. You might have expected Nazi-advertised attributes like “blonde,” “athletic,” “Nordic,” or “motherhood” to have had something to do with why certain women ended up in relationships with Adolf Hitler and his inner circle.

While it’s true that several top Nazis tended to be partial to blondes, they chose female partners for reasons of exploitation rather than personal admiration. Hitler, for example, scorned marriage and children, instead preying on naive teenage girls he could dominate; one such relationship was with his half-niece Geli Raubal. 

In most cases, the exploitation was mutual. While the Third Reich touted the ideal of “noble” and “simple” housewives, reality shows the women who stood at the prow of the Third Reich were anything but. They were willing to court monstrosity for money and privilege. Some became sadistic: like Brigitte Frank, who wore furs stolen from displaced Jewish women, or Unity Mitford, who toured a Jewish family’s apartment she wanted to confiscate while the owners wept in front of her. 

Nazi propaganda made people forget that attributes like blondeness, athleticism and motherhood are ordinary. In a world where mediocrity became an ideal, women who otherwise stood no chance of success were able to transform themselves into goddesses, thriving in an atmosphere of cruelty, materialism and superficial glamor.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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In the first years of the 20th century, despite the humiliating constraints of social segregation, thousands of African Americans made a living in show business. In Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Manhattan’s Harlem, there were top-tier vaudeville houses that headlined Black acts for Black audiences, and the Theaters Owners Booking Association signed up Black acts for almost 100 smaller venues around the country that catered to Black audiences. There were night spots like the Cotton Club in Harlem that for White audiences mounted lavish all-Black musical revues and Harlem theaters for full-scale Black musicals.

But the pinnacle was Broadway. As early as 1900, there were all-Black musicals there, but the concept really took off after the Eubie Blake–Nobel Sissle musical Shuffle Along opened in 1921 and ran an astonishing 504 performances. Producers sensed that the high stepping and raucous humor associated with Black performers were a money maker, and over the next decade 22 more all-Black shows opened on Broadway. These shows slotted the Black performers into stereotypical roles of shuffling gait and slurred speech, but they also opened the door for dozens of performers to have lifelong careers that eventually allowed them more dignity.

The money woes of the Great Depression of the 1930s made it tough to find backers for any Broadway shows, and the Shuffle Along type minstrelsy all-Black show virtually disappeared. But by then, two important corners had been turned: top-billed performers such as Paul Robson and Ethel Waters had moved out of the racial show business ghetto to earn star billing in otherwise White shows, and the classic American operas Porgy and Bess and Four Saints in Three Acts had opened on Broadway, giving African Americans roles as complex three-dimensional human beings.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Factory bells governed the day in early 19th-century Lowell, Mass. They summoned the mostly young women workers to the cotton mills at 4:30 a.m., signaled meal breaks, sent them home to company boardinghouses after their 12- to-14-hour shifts, and sounded curfew at 10 p.m.

The keepers of the boardinghouses were both caretakers and disciplinarians. They cooked meals and enforced moral codes. They made sure the “mill girls,” America’s first factory laborers, went to sleep on time and to church on Sunday.

This was life in a company town—the first planned company town in the United States. It wasn’t devised that way from the start, however. When the company founders traveled northwest of Boston in late 1821, it was simply to assess a potential factory site on the Merrimack River. Mainly, could the falls there reliably power textile machinery?

The answer was yes, and they bought the land. In 1823, the first machinery started processing raw cotton into cloth. Three years later, the land was incorporated as Lowell, named after the company’s late co-founder Francis Cabot Lowell.

The workers were mostly single women ages 15 to 30 from financially strapped families in the outlying areas. They needed places to live, so the company built the boardinghouses. A town with shops, churches, and other destinations eventually rose up.

With production growing fast, recruiters visited farms and villages to find help. The families there needed the money but were skeptical about sending their single daughters to live away from home. The promise of cash pay caught their attention. The living situation in Lowell sealed the deal, as many families concluded their girls would be protected, nurtured, and provided for.

By 1850, red brick boardinghouses and five- and six-story factory buildings lined the river for nearly a mile, the work force surpassed 10,000, and Lowell was the top textiles manufacturing location in the country. The mills continued operating another 70 years after that. They slipped into full decline only after World War I and the disappearance of military contracts.

Red Brick and Mortar

The Lowell National Historical Park spotlights preserved 19th-century mills and boardinghouses, as well as the network of canals that allowed boats to pass around the Pawtucket Falls for incoming deliveries of supplies and outgoing shipments of finished textiles.

The 88 water-powered looms at the park’s Boott Cotton Mill still run as they did back in the day, giving visitors an up-close look at the operation that gave the town its reason to be.

The 1840s boardinghouse exhibit in the Morgan Cultural Center, with kitchen and communal dining room downstairs and bedrooms upstairs, tells the story of the day-to-day life of the workers in company housing.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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In her day, Elizabeth Oakes Smith was a national figure. Born in Maine in 1806, she and her family moved to New York City in the late 1830s, where she joined literary circles and emerged as a prominent feminist essayist, lecturer, and poet. By the 1850s, she was living with her family on Long Island. The forces of the Civil War, however, led to her downfall. In 1861, her favorite son, Appleton Oaksmith, was arrested for outfitting old whaling ships for the slave trade. After spending several weeks imprisoned at Fort Lafayette in New York and Fort Warren in Boston, Oaksmith was transferred over to civil authorities and convicted in the federal court in Boston in the summer of 1862. Before he could be sentenced, though, he escaped from jail and exiled himself in Havana, Cuba, where he became a Confederate blockade-runner.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith spent the war years seeking a presidential pardon for her son. She wrote to Abraham Lincoln and met with Secretary of State William H. Seward, but nothing ever came of her efforts. As the war continued, she became increasingly embittered toward the Union and believed that Appleton was the victim of a malevolent administration in Washington, D.C. Although she had shown sympathy for African Americans and abolitionism before the war, her Democratic politics became increasingly evident in her diary by the midpoint of the war. She grew to especially hate Seward.

In the summer of 1863, Oakes Smith experienced one of the greatest terrors of her life—the New York City Draft Riots. For several days in mid-July, working-class men, women, and children—mostly Irish Democrats—lashed out against Lincoln’s conscription and emancipation policies. At least 105 people died during the five days of rioting, many of whom were African Americans who were viciously targeted by the mob. During this ordeal, Oakes Smith saw a dense crowd standing around a lamppost, upon which hung the body of Colonel Henry O’Brien, the Irish commander of the 11th New York Volunteers, who had ordered his troops to fire above the crowd the previous day in order to disperse them.

Sadly, O’Brien’s men had killed a mother and her 2-year-old child in the process. Now the rioters would exact their revenge. She also encountered Jeremiah G. Hamilton, a 56-year-old African American millionaire on Wall Street. Her diary, which is held with her papers at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, is one of the most remarkable accounts of this period. The following excerpts trace her reaction to the Gettysburg Campaign and then the horrific events that transpired in New York City shortly afterward.

June 17
The whole country is in a ferment because of the movement of General Lee north—Harrisburg is threatened—the Govenor [sic] of New York has been called upon for troops by the Govenor of Pennsylvania. The people have responded generously to the State call, but desired guarantees of the Govenor that they shall go only on short service—to defend the north—not fight the South—they will not trust the authorities at Washington.

June 18th
The excitement still continues. The people call for Gen. McLellon [McClellan] to head the army of the Potomac. We are now reaping the bitter fruits of the imbecility, and treachery of this Administration. I sometimes wonder how the historian will deal with this period. The Abolitionists have anticipated time by publishing their own version of events, called a History of the Rebellion by [John S.C.] Abbott, which suppresses facts and misrepresents them.

I am startled and distressed at events, and find how little I have understood the world—how far off the ideal seems now—that once was so near: but to one thing I still cling, the intrinsic worthiness of our humanity—the wholesomeness, and upwardness of its attributes—and then comes the question whence comes all this distortion?….

June 19
….Noon. The papers have come—and the panic is subsiding—it seems that Lee is on the retreat. I do not think all this demonstration is for nothing—I believe he designs to attack Washington, and dictate a peace from the Capital….

June 24th
A day of heavy work—found myself worn in body and spirit—cross and miserable.

The country is in a state of ferment, and yet it is suppressed—no faith in our rulers—I see the Govenor of New Jersey has directed the Malitia which was collected for the defense of Pennsylvania, to be disbanded, judging that there will be no occasion for their service. They refused to serve under the Administration….

Lee’s army within 18 miles of Pittsburg. 10 o’clock P.M. Going to bed—dissatisfied with myself—oppressed with a terrible sense of weariness and despondency. I am indeed cast from my moorings, drifting—drifting—whither?

June 25
The Confederates in large force in Pennsylvania—the papers contain some terrible records of savage cruelty and atrocious crime perpetrated by the Black soldiers. The negro in our cities and villages also has started upon a career of crime unparrallelled in our history. We are threatened with a war of races, in which the poor Negro must and will be the great sufferer….

June 27 
[Discussion of Lee’s invasion and Confederate privateers omitted.]

I believe this treacherous Administration designs to allow the Confederates to take Washington—having no capacity to manage our national affairs—finding themselves hopelessly involved, they design to let matters take very much their own way, and then under plea of necessity, acknowledge the Southern Confederacy:—then will come the contest for northern supremacy, when the wily Seward hopes to ride into the Presidency of the North….

June 30th 
….The Confederates are within four miles of Harrisburg. Gen. Meade has been called to the command of the army of the Potomac—Gen. Hooker relieved probably because of his interference. This is bad, people say, in the face of the enemy—but the Administration will not care to give battle—they wish for a general disruption in public affairs. They have inaugurated the reign of falsehood.

July 1st 
….The Confederates are within ten miles of Washington—they do not seem inclined to battle—with a grim wit they say they have come North to hold Peace meetings. So disgusted have the people become with the present Administration that they seem rather disposed to receive, than repel the invaders. Many say openly that the prospect of restoring the Constitution would be better under Jefferson Davis, than under Abraham Lincoln. Immense Peace Meetings prevail through the country, and resistance to the enrollment is the common sentiment….

July 3d
Great anxiety about the expected battle—I am by no means sure that our arms are successful against Vicksburg. The repulse of our troops at Port Hudson was a shocking, and bloody disaster….

July 6th
A terrible battle has been fought at Gettysburg. The Union army is said to be triumphant, with a loss of twenty thousand men—Good God! what horrible carnage—I am sick at the record—my whole soul revolts at this sanguinary conflict. Such a victory is as ruinous as defeat. There must be a compromise—for neither party will yield, and each seems an equal to the other in point of courage and persistency….

July 20th
The past week has been one replete with anxiety and not without incident. On Monday 13th inst. I took the early train for the City, where the most appalling scenes awaited me. Our fool-hardy, despotic rulers in spite of the warning of observant men, and the indication of the masses, that revolt would come, have persisted in enforcing the Conscription Act. On Saturday the action of Draft created no disturbance, although much jeering and derision followed. The City was greatly excited through Sunday—On Monday I went to the City, and what I now describe, I saw myself. I had occasion to visit the offices of several lawyers upon business—as I passed along the streets large bodies of people thronged the corners—a great crowd was about the Tribune Office, and the white faces of the workmen within, with their little paper caps upon their heads now and then appeared at the windows—but retreated at a sort of growl from the crowd which beset them.

I was obliged to call upon places in this vicinity, and was not unwilling to learn by my own observation the exact spirit of the crowd. I saw a respectable working-woman threading her way through the living mass, as I was doing myself, and found it convenient to use her and her basket as an entering wedge. Sometimes it would cross my mind, that if paving stones should take wing my position would be a dangerous one—but I had little anxiety for myself—indeed! let me confess it: own to the truth.

I was intoxicated—drunk with excitement. I said of myself—“Oh thou drunk, but not with wine.” I had seen the people submit to so many arbitrary measures—seen them go like sheep to the slaughter in this stupidly managed war—seen them die without a word for measures repugnant to them—seen the encroachments upon our liberties made daily by this corrupt Administration, and yet the people were silent—bitter—cursing deep, not loud, and I began to lose all hope—I wished I could do…something to rouse them—but nothing seemed able to do this—the people tamely cowered under oppression—the radical Editors lied and deceived them as did the rulers at Washington, and I despaired for American freedom. I knew the draft was repugnant to the genius of the country—I knew that the…burden of the war fell upon our working men, and the clause of exempting those who were able to pay the $300 threw all the burden upon the poor men, still it seemed as if the people would submit—

But now there was a recoil—five thousand men were up in arms—there was a perfect howl of rage and indignation from the masses. I said to my pioneer of the basket—“what is the matter? what are the people about?”

She gave me a fierce look—“They wont be carried off to the war—that’s what is the matter.”

“Well, would you have your husband carried off in this way?”

“If they do, they ve got to fight me first,” was the prompt reply. She went on with a hard sneering laugh—“Eh! you ladies can pay the $300 and keep your men to home.”

I said no more—passing into Broadway the shops were nearly all closed—the stages had been stopped or converted into conveyances for the insurgents—I walked up to the University building where I found Dr. Elliott, and Edward, on my way I passed several police men, haggard, dusty—exhausted—I said to myself—the mischief works—these insolent ruffians, who have lately fairly trod upon the people—knocking them down, firing upon them in mere wantonness, will now find a check—I grew ruthless in my indignation—for their insolence and cruelty had become a public cry.

About three o clock P.M. Capt Ellott invited us to a dinner at Delmonico in 5th Avenue: scarcely were we seated when the waiters rushed in barring the doors and closing the windows, and there came that great sound as of the sea—the tumult of the people. The rioters had burned down the colored orphan asylum and several other buildings—they paused and for a brief space it was doubtful whether they would not force the building. Soon there was a cry—“there goes a nigger,” and the cruel, remorseless multitude, three thousand strong were in pursuit of the unhappy fugitive. He was without doubt torn in pieces. As we made our way up to 36th street, all was dire confusion—mad uproar—police men, Military, citizens and rioters, in one vast conclave. I was shocked and ashamed to hear these well to do and luxurious people—the denizens of that vicinity urge the fire of the military—there was no expression of pity—no sympathy for the poor laborer, who in his mad vengeance sought a sort of justice—a wild revenge one most true.

Early on tuesday morning I was obliged to go to Wall Street. Before noon the outbreak had assumed such proportions that all business was suspended—stages and cars could not run, and the frequent discharges of the military told that hot work was in progress. I tried to make my way up town—I could not get across the City to take the train for home—nearly exhausted I was struggling onward when a carriage stopped in front of me, and J.G. Hamilton Esqr asked me to ride home with him—I did so and remained long enough to rest, and obtained information that struck me to the heart, and which I inwardly resolved to impart to the people.

While resting in the Hamilton parlors, which opened upon 29th st. down which masses of people were constantly passing with the debris of the insurgents, I observed a demonstration which was quite touching. I ought to say that Mr Hamilton is I think an eastern Indian—his complexion is darker than that of a mulatto, but his features are Caucassian [sic]—and he is a highly cultivated man—his children also are dark, but with fine black eyes, and long hair in ringlets—not at all [illegible word]. Two of these stepped out upon the balcony as they probably have always been in a habit of doing to watch the passers by in the street. Mr H. sprang from his chair—took them in and closed the window—He understood the hazard growing out of their dark complexions. I shall never forget the expression of anguish upon his face.

Soon after I took my leave, and my Host advised me to get at once into Lexington Avenue as a safer retreat from the crowd. I followed his advice—but made a circuit which brought me into the midst of the insurgents. Oh! my soul—what a sight presented itself! Masses of infuriated women, tossing their arms wildly—weeping women and children, and pale desperate men—pools of blood—broken furniture burning ruins. In a low calm voice I began to talk with the people—I told them what I had just heard that five thousand men would reach the City in the five o’clock train, and they had orders to march at once to this Avenue [2nd] and rake the whole length of it with grape shot—no warning given—the first round would be this iron hail. I went from group to group and told this and urged them to go to their houses. A poor, lank boy of thirteen kept close to me—at length I said to him, “My poor boy—go home—keep out of these dreadful scenes.”

The child burst into a perfect paroxysm of tears and sobbed out—“I have’nt got any home”—a woman explained that his Mother had been for some time dead—the father had been killed in the army—and the child lived upon the kindness of others. Observing a pale desperate looking man leaning against a wall I assayed a word with him—“Madam, (he said in good accent) it may be easy to tell us what to do—but I will not obey this draft. I may as well be shot here as anywhere. Look here—(pointing to blood upon the walk)—the soldiers fired upon us—not a word—no warning—and I took a child up—shot through the head—covered with blood—I looked at him—it was my own child—I will have revenge.”

At length a great burly fellow eyed me with a savage frown—and muttered between his teeth—“I know what you are—you are one of them aristocrats from the fifth Avenue—you’re a Spy”—looking round upon his followers—“she’s a Spy—sent here from the Black Republicans!” I saw I was in some danger—but I did not flinch—I do not think I turned pale—I repelled the charge in a calm, firm voice, and went on—he following and muttering—but I did not fear—a superhuman strength seemed mine. I knew better than to leave them—so I kept on talking in [a] low calm manner, advising them as seemed best. I had now reached 33d street, the disorder rather increasing. A short distance from me was a dense mass surrounding a lamp post, upon which the infuriated multitude had suspended the body of Col O Brine, an Irish officer, who had commanded his troops to fire into the crowd. It was a sickening sight—for four hours they tortured the unhappy man—prolonging his sufferings with a fiendish fury. I expressed compassion for him—but they justified their conduct on the ground that he was a traitor to his countrymen—

The deep shadows began to overspre[a]d the neighborhood—and waving my hand I turned up fourth street, quite a group following me and thanking me for what I had done.

The people everywhere repelled the imputation that their object was plunder. It was only opposition to the Draft, they said, and disgust at that clause in the act by which the rich man could exempt himself by paying $300 while the poor man was compelled to go.

It is not generally known what gave the first impetus to the Riot against the draft. I was told several times by the people with whom I talked, the Rioters—and they all told the same story.

It seems that somewhere in the vicinity was a widow woman—Irish, who had six sons. Of course the six were enrolled for the Draft, and by a singular fatality—the whole six were drafted—the young men were aghast—a crowd followed them to the Mother’s door; when the announcement was made to the Mother—she uttered a wild cry—“a yell,” the people called it, and rushed shrieking into the street, tearing her hair and tossing her arms above her head. The effect was electrical—and the fierce passions of the people broke out at once, sweeping all before them.

I returned home on wednesday morning. In the cars I found Mr Hamilton—looking haggard and internally excited, but outwardly calm, and determined. I said at once go home with me. He remained nearly a week….Oh how anxiously we waited returns from the great City.

The Radicals have done their utmost to exasperate all classes—in order to have martial law proclaimed in the City. God save us from such calamity—the streets of New York would run blood—and the prisons be filled with men and women suffered to be obnoxious to the powers that be.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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Jonathan W. White is professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. In August 2023 he published a biography of Appleton Oaksmith titled Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade with Rowman and Littlefield.

With her book The Hello Girls and a follow-up documentary film, historian, commentator and author Elizabeth Cobbs set out to recognize the women who served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps’ Female Telephone Operators Unit during World War I. Members of the unit, many of whom worked Stateside as switchboard operators, maintained communications on the Western Front under spartan and sometimes hazardous conditions. Despite having served in uniform, however, the Hello Girls were denied veteran status. Though Congress remedied that in 1977, many of them had died by then. Recently lawmakers introduced legislation to formally honor the unit with the Congressional Gold Medal, presented for distinguished achievements that have had a major impact on American his-tory and culture. Past recipients include notable American warriors and military units. Cobbs recently spoke with Military History about her book and why the Hello Girls are deserving of recognition.

Who were the ‘Hello Girls’?

They were a group of 223 young women—some in their teens, most in their 20s and a few “old women” in their 30s—who volunteered at the request of the U.S. Army to go to France and run the telephone system. This was a daring thing. Most soldiers hadn’t even gone yet. These women were in logistics. The Army needed telephone operators over there before the majority of doughboys. They had to facilitate what was happening at the front, to get supplies, to get troops shipped here and there. Some served as long as two years. These women fielded 26 million calls for the Army in France. A handful traveled with General [John J.] Pershing during the big battles of Meuse-Argonne and Saint-Mihiel. Others served at the headquarters of the American First Army, which was close to the front but not in the war zone. They came from all over—from Washington state, down to Louisiana, up to Maine, even Canada. There were some French-Canadian women who volunteered and served with the U.S. Army.

Many served close to or on the front lines. Were any killed or wounded?

None were killed in action, but some did suffer permanent injuries, mostly from tuberculosis, which was common in northern France. Two died from the influenza pandemic, one on Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1918.

The conditions of World War I were pretty difficult, especially related to the weather these women had to endure in fairly exposed accommodations. Some were under bombardment. Some were in buildings where artillery concussions blew out windows. Once, they were told to evacuate but wouldn’t leave until the soldiers had. These women worked around the clock, especially the supervisors. Chief Operator Grace Banker, who led the first unit, recorded in her diary at the start of an offensive, “I slept two hours today.” They were handling incredibly complex logistical problems near the front lines. They got no breaks; they worked seven days a week, 12-hour shifts for several months during the worst part of the American war effort. It was extremely stressful. Some were close enough to the front lines that their switchboards shook during bombardments.

Of course, these women crossed the ocean to get to Europe in the first place. This was a time when troopships were being sunk. All of these women knew about this, and they were constantly told to use their lifejackets as pillows and wear all of their clothes to bed in case they were torpedoed. It was scary.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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What kind of training did they receive?

They went through a very strict recruitment and training. They had to be bilingual in French and English, and many washed out because of that. In fact, 7,600 women applied for the first 100 positions. Many were cut for language reasons, others because they weren’t fast enough on the phone. Once selected, they were vetted extremely carefully, sometimes three and four times, by Army intelligence. These women were literally handling national secrets in the wires they connected. One woman was even pulled off a ship at the last minute, though she turned out to not be the German spy they feared she was.

Once selected, they were trained by AT&T [American Telephone and Telegraph] on the phone system. After that they were sent to New York City, where they were drilled and learned to salute on the rooftop of AT&T headquarters. Once they went to France, the women who were sent toward the front were trained in the use of gas masks and pistols. They wore uniforms and had dog tags; otherwise, they risked being executed as spies if captured. They were told again and again that their uniforms and dog tags were their protection as soldiers of the U.S. Army.

Many were bilingual. How important was that skill?

The first group of 100 female volunteers were all required to be absolutely fluent in French and English. They had these super strict tests, where they had to simultaneously translate and operate a telephone exchange, record everything correctly and communicate accurately under pressure. It’s hard for us to appreciate today how nerve-racking that could be. They were getting hundreds of calls an hour, all of them critically important, truly a matter of life and death. These women felt a great deal of responsibility. They were connecting all kinds of calls, such as between commanders and combat units in the field. There were times when they were even talking with French combat troops. The Army set up its own PBX [private branch exchange] telephone system for communications to and from the front. However, the women often had to connect with French lines and French toll operators. Back then, a toll call would be passed from operator to operator to operator. This was a problem for the American doughboys, who generally did not parlez-vous. Pershing realized he couldn’t get a call to go anywhere, so that’s when they realized they needed people who could do the job and communicate with the Allies at the same time.

Why were women selected as operators?

The Army found it took men 60 seconds on average to connect calls that women connected in 10 seconds. In wartime that was the difference between life and death—for an individual and sometimes for whole battalions. Women were adept at using this technology and had the ability to do it much faster and more reliably than men. They were tested on being able to place calls in two languages, write and convey messages, make life-and-death connections in an instant, all while maintaining their composure and decorum.

Banker received the Distinguished Service Medal. What did she do to earn such recognition?

Chief operator for the Signal Corps, Banker was a remarkable person who was devoted to the American cause during World War I. She led the first female contingent under very challenging and difficult circumstances. At one point she developed a severe allergic rash. A doctor told her she needed to have it taken care of, but she said she didn’t have time. There’s a photo of her in which she looked absolutely terrible. Grace served under the extraordinarily demanding conditions of the Battles of Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne and was recognized for courageous service. In World War I the U.S. Army awarded only 18 Distinguished Service Medals to Signal Corps officers, of whom 16,000 were eligible. All the honorees were listed by rank. She was listed as “Miss,” because she was a [single] woman.

Why did the War Department deny the ‘Hello Girls’ veteran status?

Their commanding officers begged and pleaded with the War Department to recognize these women who had served alongside them, some in very dire circumstances. Around 11,000 women served with the Navy and Marines during World War I, and every one of them got military benefits, including hospitalization for disabilities. They all served at home in the United States. Only the Army sent women across the ocean into harm’s way, and then denied them veteran status. It was so upsetting and maddening for these women. They were told it would lessen the importance of the meaning of “veteran” if they were to grant women this honor. The Army decided early in the war these women would be contract employees. However, they neither told the vast majority of women, nor gave them any to sign. In fact, women took the same soldier’s oath everybody else did. They wore uniforms but were unaware there was a distinction. Many of the women were flabbergasted when they arrived home and found out they weren’t veterans.

Congress finally recognized them as veterans in 1977. How did that come about?

Their recognition came on the same legislation as the WASPs [Women Airforce Service Pilots], introduced by Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater had also been a service pilot in World War II and couldn’t believe that women he’d served with, many who wore the same uniform as him, were not being given veteran benefits. At that time the women of World War I came forward and said, “What about us?” The legislation then covered both groups.

Why award the Hello Girls the Congressional Gold Medal after so many decades?

Because it’s a story that was lost. I’ve met so many women in the Army who’ve said they had no idea this is where their story began. Women today represent 15 percent of the armed forces. It’s a very brave act for any woman to join an organization in which she is going to be in the distinct minority and going against gender expectations. It’s important to say we value female veterans as much as we value male veterans. The Congressional Gold Medal would help all Americans better appreciate the women in our armed services. It would help us recognize that what the Hello Girls did was not only physically courageous, but morally courageous—challenging every social convention at the time in order to help our country. It took a very special person to do that. They performed a heroic service.

This interview appeared in the Autumn 2023 issue of Military History magazine.

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New England novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is perhaps best known as the author of young adult fiction, including Little Women (1868), and Little Men (1871). However, Alcott put her writing talents to use in describing her Civil War experiences as a volunteer nurse in an autobiographical account called Hospital Sketches (1863). 

The result was not what one might expect from a nurse’s narrative. Alcott’s account is unique because of its irreverence and her extremely dry sense of humor. Giving herself the literary nom de plume of “Tribulation Periwinkle,” she describes the ironies of being an Abolitionist wanting to get in on the “excitement” of the war but finding herself in over her head. Alcott contracted typhoid fever during her Civil War service, for which she was treated with mercury; scholars have speculated that the health problems she suffered later on throughout her life were related to her exposure to mercury. 

Here Alcott describes her interactions with wounded soldiers from the December 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia, Robert E. Lee’s one-sided Confederate victory over Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s Army of the Potomac in which the 12,000 Union casualties were over twice those of Lee’s rebels.It gives us a perspective of what was on Union soldiers’ minds after the battle; rather than being preoccupied with the overall military situation or their cause, they were focused on matters at hand and their lives at home. 

Alcott manages to give a general sense of each soldier’s personality in describing her brief interactions with them. It is interesting to think that each of these soldiers, otherwise lost to history, achieved some form of immortality in the following narrative. 

Eager To Help

…Having a taste for “ghastliness,” I had rather longed for the wounded to arrive, for rheumatism wasn’t heroic, neither was liver complaint, or measles; even fever had lost its charms since “bathing burning brows” had been used up in romances, real and ideal; but when I peeped into the dusky street lined with what I at first had innocently called market carts, now unloading their sad freight at our door, I recalled sundry reminiscences I had heard from nurses of longer standing, my ardor experienced a sudden chill, and I indulged in a most unpatriotic wish that I was safe at home again… 

Having been run over by three excited surgeons, bumped against by migratory coal-hods, water-pails, and small boys, nearly scalded by an avalanche of newly-filled teapots, and hopelessly entangled in a knot of colored sisters coming to wash, I progressed by slow stages upstairs and down, till the main hall was reached, and I paused to take breath and a survey. There they were! “our brave boys,” as the papers justly call them, for cowards could hardly have been so riddled with shot and shell, so torn and shattered, nor have borne suffering for which we have no name, with an uncomplaining fortitude, which made one glad to cherish each as a brother. In they came, some on stretchers, some in men’s arms, some feebly staggering along propped on rude crutches, and one lay stark and still with covered face, as a comrade gave his name to be recorded before they carried him away to the dead house…

ORders To Bathe Men

The sight of several stretchers, each with its legless, armless, or desperately wounded occupant, entering my ward, admonished me that I was there to work, not to wonder or weep; so I corked up my feelings, and returned to the path of duty, which was rather “a hard road to travel” just then…Round the great stove was gathered the dreariest group I ever saw—ragged, gaunt and pale, mud to the knees, with bloody bandages untouched since put on days before; many bundled up in blankets, coats being lost or useless; and all wearing that disheartened look which proclaimed defeat, more plainly than any telegram of the Burnside blunder. I pitied them so much, I dared not speak to them, though, remembering all they had been through since the rout at Fredericksburg, I yearned to serve the dreariest of them all. 

Presently, Miss Blank tore me from my refuge behind piles of one-sleeved shirts, odd socks, bandages and lint; put basin, sponge, towels, and a block of brown soap into my hands, with these appalling directions: “Come, my dear, begin to wash as fast as you can. Tell them to take off socks, coats and shirts, scrub them well, put on clean shirts, and the attendants will finish them off, and lay them in bed.”

If she had requested me to shave them all, or dance a hornpipe on the stove funnel, I should have been less staggered; but to scrub some dozen lords of creation at a moment’s notice, was really—really—However, there was no time for nonsense, and, having resolved when I came to do everything I was bid, I drowned my scruples in my wash-bowl, clutched my soap manfully, and, assuming a businesslike air, made a dab at the first dirty specimen I saw, bent on performing my task vi et armis [by force] if necessary. 

The “Scrubees”

I chanced to light on a withered old Irishman, wounded in the head, which caused that portion of his frame to be tastefully laid out like a garden, the bandages being the walks, his hair the shrubbery. He was so overpowered by the honor of having a lady wash him, as he expressed it, that he did nothing but roll up his eyes, and bless me…so we laughed together, and when I knelt down to take off his shoes, he “flopped” also and wouldn’t hear of my touching “them dirty craters. May your bed above be aisy [may you be blessed in heaven] darlin,’ for the day’s work ye ar doon!—Whoosh! there ye are, and bedad, it’s hard tellin’ which is the dirtiest, the fut [foot] or the shoe.” It was; and if he hadn’t been to the fore, I should have gone on pulling, under the impression that the “fut” was a boot, for trousers, socks, shoes and legs were a mass of mud… 

Some of them took the performance like sleepy children, leaning their tired heads against me as I worked, others looked grimly scandalized, and several of the roughest colored [blushed] like bashful girls…Another, with a gunshot wound through the cheek, asked for a looking-glass [mirror], and when I brought one, regarded his swollen face with a dolorous expression, as he muttered, “I vow to gosh, that’s too bad! I warn’t a bad looking chap before, and now I’m done for; won’t there be a thunderin’ scar? And what on earth will Josephine Skinner say?” 

He looked up at me with his one eye so appealingly, that I controlled my risibles and assured him that if Josephine was a girl of sense, she would admire the honorable scar, as a lasting proof that he had faced the enemy, for all women thought a wound the best decoration a brave soldier could wear. I hope Miss Skinner verified the good opinion I so rashly expressed of her, but I shall never know. 

The next scrubbee was a nice-looking lad, with a curly brown mane, and a budding trace of gingerbread over the lip, which he called his beard, and defended stoutly, when the barber jocosely suggested its immolation…

“I say, Mrs.!” called a voice behind me; and, turning, I saw a rough Michigander, with an arm blown off at the shoulder, and two or three bullets still in him—as he afterwards mentioned, as carelessly as if gentlemen were in the habit of carrying such trifles about with them.

“Don’t You Wash Him!”

I went to him, and, while administering a dose of soap and water, he whispered, irefully: “That red-headed devil, over yonder, is a reb [Confederate], damn him! … Don’t you wash him, nor feed him, but jest let him holler till he’s tired. It’s a blasted shame to fetch them fellers in here, alongside of us; and so I’ll tell the chap that bosses this concern; cuss me if I don’t.”

I regret to say that I did not deliver a moral sermon upon the duty of forgiving our enemies, and the sin of profanity, then and there; but, being a red-hot Abolitionist, stared fixedly at the tall rebel, who was a copperhead, in every sense of the word, and privately resolved to put soap in his eyes, rub his nose the wrong way, and excoriate his cuticle generally, if I had the washing of him. 

My amiable intentions, however, were frustrated; for, when I approached, with as Christian an expression as my principles would allow, and asked the question, “Shall I try to make you more comfortable, sir?” all I got for my pains was a gruff, “No; I’ll do it myself.” 

“Here’s your Southern chivalry, with a witness,” thought I, dumping the basin down before him, thereby quenching a strong desire to give him a summary baptism, in return for his ungraciousness; for my angry passions rose, at this rebuff, in a way that would have scandalized good Dr. Watts. He was a disappointment in all respects, (the rebel, not the blessed Doctor), for he was neither fiendish, romantic, pathetic, or anything interesting; but a long, fat man, with a head like a burning bush, and a perfectly expressionless face: so I could hate him without the slightest drawback, and ignored his existence from that day forth. One redeeming trait he certainly did possess, as the floor speedily testified; for his ablutions were so vigorously performed, that his bed soon stood like an isolated island, in a sea of soap-suds, and he resembled a dripping merman, suffering from the loss of a fin. If cleanliness is a near neighbor to godliness, then was the big rebel the godliest man in my ward that day. 

Having done up our human wash, and laid it out to dry, the second syllable of our version of the word warfare was enacted with much success. Great trays of bread, meat, soup and coffee appeared…Very welcome seemed the generous meal, after a week of suffering, exposure, and short commons; soon the brown faces began to smile, as food, warmth, and rest, did their pleasant work; and the grateful “Thankee’s” were followed by more graphic accounts of the battle and retreat, than any paid reporter could have given us. Curious contrasts of the tragic and comic met one everywhere; and some touching as well as ludicrous episodes, might have been recorded that day.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Elizabeth Caroline Butler

(1837–1911)

Born in Autaugaville, Ala., on October 7, 1837, Elizabeth Butler had, as a young girl, traveled west with her parents, extended family, and neighbors. At 18, she married Allan T. Daniel in Lauderdale County, Miss., and the following year gave birth to a daughter, Nancy. While pregnant with her second child—a son they would name Henry—Elizabeth traveled with her husband to the community of Eutaw in Limestone County, Texas, where he began working as a farmer and rancher. In early 1860, she would be blessed with twin boys, George and William.

Having to take care of four small children and managing the day-to-day struggles on the frontier was demanding enough, but Elizabeth was about to experience even more discord with the untimely death of her husband that April. The death of a spouse on the frontier was a common occurrence, of course, and Elizabeth did what many such widows did and remarried, this time to dry goods merchant and postal worker Isaac Ellison, nine years her senior.

To defend the Lone Star State’s interests during the war, Texans enlisted in droves at their county seats. Younger, unmarried men were usually the first to go, but Isaac was eventually among those called to duty. In his absence, Elizabeth strove to keep the dry goods store and post office running, while continuing to juggle being a full-time parent.

She had no respite in managing these commitments, and it didn’t help that money was difficult to come by. At this time, each Texas county issued its own paper currency. As the war progressed, Eutaw alternated within the jurisdiction of three counties: Limestone, Falls, and Robertson. County money soon became more worthless than regular Texas and Confederate script, leading to economic collapse.

As it did for communities and states across the country, four years of war decimated Texas’ male population. Having fought predominantly in Colonel James B. Likens’ Bloody 35th Texas Cavalry, Isaac would be one Lone Star boy fortunate enough to return home. —William Joseph Bozic

Charles Carleton Coffin

(1823–1896)

While writing for The Boston Journal during the Civil War, Charles Carleton Coffin was told by his editor to always “keep the Journal at the front.” In that, Coffin succeeded. Based in Washington, D.C., he first made a name for himself traveling into the field with what became the Army of the Potomac. His coverage of the Union army’s retreat at the First Battle of Bull Run, in fact, remains his most extensively quoted piece.

At Fredericksburg in December 1862, a Union soldier expressed amazement at seeing “Carleton” beneath a tree under fire, still writing away. The following spring and summer, Coffin followed the Union army to Gettysburg and ended up traveling 100 miles on horseback and 800 more by train to get accounts to the Journal’s readers.

During the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, Coffin had his nephew hurry his account to the presses in Washington. Ride as fast as you can, he urged; just don’t kill the horse. “If he is behind, his occupation is gone,” Coffin told his fellow war reporters (“specials,” as they were called). The “account must be the first, or among the first, or it is nothing.” If a reporter were to miss the mail or the train, he observed, “he might as well put his pencil in his pocket and go home.”

Coffin was one of more than 300 Northern correspondents to cover the war, earning about $25 a week. He shared with his colleagues a common set of vexations, such as the horse-stealing that frequently bedeviled field correspondents. On several occasions, Coffin’s servant greeted him in the morning, “Breakfast is ready, Mr. Coffin. Your horse is gone again.”

It is no surprise that Coffin’s name has a prominent place among Northern reporters inscribed on the War Correspondents Memorial Arch at Maryland’s Gathland State Park near Burkittsville. —Stephen Davis

Peter Bauduy Garesché

(1822–1868)

The authors of the 2007 book Never for Want of Powder make a compelling case that the Augusta (Ga.) Powder Works and its creator, Colonel George W. Rains, were instrumental to the Confederate Army’s survival as the war endured. Rains, however, had a counterpart in the Confederate Navy who shouldn’t be overlooked: Peter Bauduy Garesché.

Garesché’s father and uncle were French emigres who owned and operated a gunpowder mill in Wilmington, Del. The family were business partners of and relatives by marriage to the DuPonts of Wilmington’s famed DuPont Powder Mill family. Peter worked with his father in the mills as a youngster but eventually embarked on a career as a lawyer in St. Louis.

The Civil War divided the Garesché family. Peter’s cousin and close friend Julius Garesché, a fellow classmate at Georgetown University and a West Point graduate, remained loyal to the Union. Although Peter was a Southern sympathizer, he was not a secessionist, according to family sources. But when ordered to take a loyalty oath, he went south.

It helped also that he had strong Confederate contacts—General Joseph E. Johnston was his brother-in-law—and when the Confederate Navy was looking for someone to run its newly created powder works in Columbia, S.C., Garesché was chosen. It was a prescient decision.

Garesché was applauded for conducting the Columbia Naval Powder Works with “singular skill and commensurate results,” and for supplying the Southern Navy with gunpowder “of excellent quality.” Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who had known Peter while both were in St. Louis, purportedly told a friend: “I would, if I caught him, keep him close and not exchange him for 10,000 men. The powder he manufactures for the South is so superior to ours.”

After the war, Garesché resumed his law practice in St. Louis. He died in 1868. —Bruce Allardice

Mother Mary Hyacinth

(1816–1897)

In 1855, 39-year-old Madeline LeConniat, better known as Mother Mary Hyacinth, traveled to central Louisiana from her native France to open a convent and school along with nine other Daughters of the Cross. Louisiana would prove a harsh climate for her, often leaving her under the weather. The mosquitoes, she wrote, “[besiege] me continually because my blood which still smells European attracts them.” A lack of conversational English also hindered her local relations.

The Civil War increased already hard times with inflated pricing. Food and other supplies were in short supply, causing tense conditions for the nuns, students, and refugees alike. Troops from both sides constantly passed through the area, putting demands on their meager supplies.

The worst came during the Battle of Mansura on May 16, 1864, a contest featuring an artillery duel in which stray shots damaged the convent’s structures. In addition, soldiers looted the rations of the nuns and their wards. Relentlessly, Mother Hyacinth secured donations from the area’s residents to keep matters operating smoothly. She fervently kept the school running and still offered shelter to displaced individuals and families.

After the war, Mother Hyacinth continued to serve the convent and the neighborhood until 1867 when the motherhood discontinued its support of the Louisiana mission. Two years later, Mother Hyacinth was reelected mother superior and called back to Louisiana. She continued her community work without the support of the French motherhouse.

In 1882, at age 65, Mother Hyacinth returned to France to run the American novitiate until her death in 1897 at age 81. The Daughters of the Cross continued to operate schools throughout Louisiana into the next century, capitalizing on the sterling examples set by Mother Mary Hyacinth. —Edward Windsor

Martin Jackson

(Unknown)

As the Battle of Pleasant Hill, La., raged on April 9, 1864, Colonel Augustus Buchel of the 1st Texas Cavalry dismounted his troops and ordered them to attack the Federal infantry. Remaining on horseback, however, Buchel was an easy target and soon fell mortally wounded with seven injuries.

Two days later, Buchel died in the arms of a 17-year-old slave named Martin Jackson, a self-described “black Texan,” who lamented: “I had pitched up a kind of first-aid station. I remember standing there and thinking the South didn’t have a chance. All of a sudden I heard someone call. It was a soldier, who was half carrying Col. Buchel in. I [couldn’t] do nothing for the Colonel. He was too far gone. I just held him comfortable and that was the position he was in when he stopped breathing. He was a friend of mine.”

Martin and his father had followed their owner, Alva Fitzpatrick, to war to serve as cooks. Martin was also a stretcher-bearer, which he referred to as “an official lugger-in of men that got wounded.” Although Martin conceded, “I knew the Yanks were going to win from the beginning. I wanted them to win and lick us Southerners,” he also “hoped they was going to do it without wiping out my company.”

He remained fiercely loyal to the men of the 1st Texas throughout the war, continuing to cook for the men and tend the wounded. After the war, he was freed, became a cowboy, married, and eventually had 15 children. He even served as a cook in World War I, proudly claiming he never donned a uniform in either conflict. Martin’s one regret during the war—he started the deadly 75-year habit of smoking tobacco. —Fran Cohen

Cyrus Hall McCormick 

(1809–1884)

Cyrus Hall McCormick, one of the United States’ great early industrialists, founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago in 1847. Although he was merely one of several entrepreneurs to invent a mechanical reaper, his company’s Chicago home, as well as his family’s business acumen, quickly made his version the nation’s most successful and widely used harvester, critically helping open the Midwest and Great Plains to family farmers in the decade leading up to the Civil War.

Born February 15, 1809, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, McCormick was the eldest of eight children raised by Robert McCormick Jr. and Mary Ann Hall. Robert McCormick had attempted to design and build a mechanical reaper of his own during Cyrus’ youth, but it proved not to be a sturdy, reliable model. Building upon his father’s failures, as well as an unpatented successful version by Scottish inventor Patrick Bell, Cyrus succeeded in constructing a reliable reaper in 1831. He continued working on improving this model and finally received his first patent in 1834.

Two years after Cyrus established the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company with one of his brothers, Leander, another brother—William—joined them in Chicago. William’s business insight and Cyrus’ skilled salesmanship helped the company flourish.

Cyrus, however, suffered a stroke in 1880 and spent the last four years of his life as an invalid before passing away in Chicago on May 13, 1884. In 1902, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company was absorbed into the International Harvester Company. —Terry Beckenbaugh

John Other Day

(1819-1869)

“When I gave up the war path and commenced working the earth for a living, I discarded all my former habits,” John Other Day once wrote. “It was very hard for me to learn the white man’s ways, but I was determined to get my living by cultivating the land and raising stock.”

Born Ampatutokacha (i.e., Good Sounding Voice) in 1819, Other Day had been a fierce warrior in his youth, but his conversion to Christianity led him to join an association of “farmer Indians” in 1856. The following year, Other Day assisted in the rescue of a young female captive, and in 1859 he was nominated to a treaty delegation sent to Washington, D.C. While on that trip, he met an English woman working at his hotel whom he later wed.

On August 18, 1862, Dakota Indians, upset with living conditions on their federal reservation in Minnesota, killed several settlers and traders during an armed attack on the Lower Sioux Agency, igniting the 39-day Dakota War of 1862. Other Day hurriedly gathered up 62 settlers (men, women, and children alike) and secured them in an Agency building overnight, personally standing guard at the door. Early the next morning, he guided the group on an arduous, three-day trek across the Minnesota River and through a prairie to safety in St. Paul, where he was welcomed as a hero. Wanting to further assist his new community, Other Day volunteered as a civilian scout for the U.S. troops assembled to combat the hostile Indians, often fighting side by side with his newfound comrades.

The U.S. government awarded Other Day $2,500 for his heroism. He bought a farm in Henderson, Minn., but later sold it and moved to the Dakota Territory. He would die of tuberculosis on October 19, 1869, at the Fort Wadsworth hospital in what became the state of South Dakota 20 years later. —Richard H. Holloway

Phoebe Levy Pember

(1823–1913)

In April 1861, there was no reason to expect Phoebe Levy Pember would leave the mark on the Civil War that she did. Born into a prominent Jewish family in Charleston, S.C., she had spent the antebellum years in relative comfort, the well-off wife of a gentile, Thomas Noyes Pember, whom she married in 1856. As the nation formally began its split, however, her husband contracted tuberculosis, and she was widowed three months into the war. With no children and few career options, she relented to residing with her parents in Marietta, Ga. There she struggled, directionless and frequently at odds with her father.

That changed in November 1862 when Pember received an offer from the wife of Confederate Secretary of War George Randolph to move to Richmond to become “matron” of the capital city’s Chimborazo Hospital. Despite no previous nursing experience, Pember proved a providential choice for the position. According to the “Jewish Women’s Archive,” she “oversaw nursing operations as well as housekeeping and food and maintained a friendly but firm authority, loved for her feminine charms and her dedication to her patients.” That did not prevent her from pulling a gun on a hospital worker trying to pilfer whiskey from the hospital’s supplies.

Pember remained as Chimborazo’s first appointed female administrator until Richmond fell in April 1865. In 1879, she penned the book A Southern Woman’s Story: Life in Confederate Richmond, and in 1995 the U.S. Postal Service honored her with a stamp, featuring a painting of Pember feeding one of her patients chicken soup.

As historian James Robertson Jr. remembered: “Mrs. Pember was an aristocrat who developed a deep affection for the common soldiers and the class from which they came. She lived to be 89, but nothing in her life matched the three years of devoted service she gave to the human debris of war. Her only memorial were the looks of thankfulness that came from suffering soldiers who stretched out a hand for help—and found Phoebe Pember.” —Gregg Phillipson

Emma Sansom Johnson

(1847–1900)

The Yankees were several miles ahead, with Nathan Bedford Forrest in earnest pursuit. A deep stream blocked the way, however. Where could he cross—and who would show the way?

It was late April 1863, and a 2,000-man mounted column under Colonel Abel Streight had ridden to northwest Alabama to wreck as many Confederate railroads as possible. On the morning of May 2, the Federals burned the bridge across Black Creek, north of Gadsden, Ala., believing it would stall Forrest long enough for them to get away.

The “Wizard of the Saddle” wasn’t stymied, though. A local girl, 16-year-old Emma Sansom, knew of a nearby ford. Forrest eagerly hoisted her onto his saddle as she pointed the way. After crossing the creek, the Confederates chased Streight and his troopers so determinedly that he surrendered his command the next day.

Forrest was quick to credit the lass with his success, writing her a note of thanks from his “Hed Quarters in Sadle.” Emma quickly became a local heroine. She married the next year, and after the war moved to Texas, where she died in 1900.

Seven years later, Gadsden residents unveiled a statue to her that, despite recent discussions of taking it down, remains standing—with Emma’s right arm held aloft, her index finger pointing of course to that famed Black Creek ford. —John Gordon

Fritz Tegener

(1813–unknown)

A Prussian immigrant, Fritz Tegener lived in the Texas Hill Country town of Comfort, a community started by recent German immigrants embroiled in the political unrest of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe. Few German Texans owned slaves, and the people of Comfort were openly opposed to secession when the Civil War began, unwilling to participate in another such conflict.

Before the war, Tegener had been politically active in Comfort, serving as a jurist and county treasurer. That would continue during the Civil War. To protect the community from both Indian raids and the Confederacy, Tegener and other residents formed what was called the Union Loyal League.

After the Conscription Act of 1862 passed, Confederate soldiers began harassing the German Texans to join the Army, spurring more than 60 to organize a group that would travel south to Mexico to avoid conscription and appointing Tegener their leader. The ensemble departed in the summer of 1862, pursued by 94 Confederates as it traversed the rugged terrain of southwest Texas.

On August 10, 1862, the Confederates caught the Germans on the banks of the Nueces River and a battle ensued, known as the Massacre on the Nueces, in which 19 Unionists were killed and nine, too injured to escape, left behind and captured. Confederates executed their prisoners and left all 28 bodies unburied.

Though wounded, Tegener escaped and led the remaining Germans to Mexico, only to be ambushed by another Confederate group while crossing the Rio Grande. Eight more died.

Tegener spent the rest of the war in Mexico, but returned home afterward. Later, women of Comfort collected the sun-bleached bones from the battlefield and buried them under the only German language monument dedicated to the Union in the South named Treǔe der Union (Loyalty to the Union). Tegener risked his life to defend his political beliefs and find refuge for young German men of the Texas Hill Country. —Charles Grear

Alice Thompson

(1846–1869)

The ferocity of conflict often leads one to accomplish the unexpected. During the Battle of Thompson’s Station, Tenn., on March 5, 1863, teenager Alice Thompson—a progeny of the settlement’s namesake—made a split-second decision that helped change the course of an eventual Confederate victory.

Life had begun as usual that late-winter day, but Alice soon found herself caught in the midst of a desperate fray. Serving as Confederate physicians, Alice’s father as well as her beau remained near the front. She meanwhile fled her home, seeking protection for the rest of her family and finding refuge in the cellar of a neighbor, Confederate Lieutenant Thomas Banks. From the basement windows, she was able to catch glimpses of the conflict.

As the fighting intensified, Alice confronted a decisive moment. Having watched repeated Union advances and Confederate counterattacks, she became distressed watching a Southern flag-bearer fall to the ground. Forsaking her safety, Alice scrambled from the hiding place and made her way to the fallen soldier, grabbing the regimental colors—those of the 3rd Arkansas Cavalry—he had been carrying. Proudly holding the colors high, she drew the attention of Confederate troops, who were inspired by the recklessly courageous undertaking and rallied to push the Yankees back. Even with shells exploding around her, Alice reportedly never flinched as the Confederates advanced. Retreating Union troops were among those who admired her incredible bravery.

Finally, others concerned for Alice’s well-being pulled her back to the cellar. Her heroics did not end there, however. With Banks’ house serving as a hospital, she helped tend the wounded.

Alice Thompson died in 1869, only 23, but her gallantry at Thompson’s Station secured her place in Civil War history and memory. —Heidi Weber

Julia Wilbur

(1815–1895)

Julia Wilbur’s life easily could have slipped into historical anonymity. After years of a rather conventional rural life of teaching school and tending to the needs and wants of various members of a large and extended family, the spirited and socially aware Wilbur found herself caught up in the evangelical spirit burning through western New York. Residing in the environs of Rochester brought her into contact with prominent abolitionists and social reformers who, in the decades prior to the Civil War, advocated various forms of social and political change. Becoming a member of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society (RLASS) in 1852 probably rescued Wilbur from the life of an unassuming spinster and transformed her, at age 47, into an energetic social activist just as the nation was slipping into secession and war.

Determined to do more than darn socks and send food packages to the local boys in the Union Army, Wilbur traveled to Washington, D.C., as a representative of the RLASS. At first, she was armed with nothing more than a few general letters of introduction and a heart full of grit and compassion. After arriving on October 28, 1862, she was sent to Alexandria, Va., to do what she could to provide aid and comfort to the thousands of contrabands streaming into the Union-held city.

Nothing had prepared her for the sights, sounds, and, yes, smells she encountered. An entry in her diary described conditions she found upon her arrival: “Went to old School House. 150 C’s [contrabands] there. A large house for sick nearby. We went there, people in filth & rags—a dead child lay wrapped in piece of ticking—in another room, a dead child behind the door. Oh what sights! What Misery! No doctor—no medicines—only rations & Shelter.”

Along with her better-known friend—former slave and abolitionist Harriet Jacobs—Wilbur often encountered stubborn military bureaucracies, unfriendly local citizens, and various disorganized benevolent associations during her unrelenting fight against hunger, disease, and death. For the remainder of the war, Wilbur set about to change the dreadful conditions she found there.

Wilbur lived in Washington after the war and worked as a clerk in the Patent Office from 1869 to 1895, a harbinger of the thousands of women who would follow her into government employment. She remained active in social causes such as voting rights for women. She died on June 6, 1895, and is buried in the family plot in Avon, N.Y. —Gordon Berg

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Contributors:

Dr. Bruce Allardice, author of the “Loose Lips” feature article in ACW’s Spring 2023 issue, teaches history at Illinois’ South Suburban College. He has co-authored several books and articles on the Civil War and on the history of baseball.

Dr. Terry Beckenbaugh is an associate professor of history in the Department of Joint Warfare at U.S. Air Force Command and Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Ala. He is working on a book on the
1862 White River Campaign in Arkansas.

Gordon Berg, who writes from Gaithersburg, Md., is a longtime contributor to America’s Civil War, Civil War Times, and other HistoryNet publications.

William Joseph Bozic Jr., a retired Texas high school social studies teacher, works for the National Park Service in San Antonio. He is married with four children.

Fran Cohen, a freelance author specializing in history , writes from Little Rock, Ark.

Stephen Davis, who specializes in Southern Civil War history, writes from Cumming, Ga.

John Gordon is a freelance author based in Wetumpka, Ala.

Dr. Charles Grear, professor of history at Central Texas College, writes extensively on Texas and the Civil War. He is the author of Why Texans Fought in the Civil War.

Richard H. Holloway, a member of ACW’s editorial advisory board, is a historian who hails from Louisiana.

Gregg Phillipson is a former member of the Texas Holocaust Commission, well known for loaning his large collection of Jewish war memorabilia to museums across Texas. A resident of Austin, he also frequently delivers presentations about Jewish military history.

Dr. Heidi Weber is an associate professor in the SUNY–Orange Department of Global Studies, with specialties in U.S. history, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Edward Windsor, a retired historian and newspaperman, writes from Corinth, Miss.

By life’s end Sarah Creath McSherry Hibbins Stinnett Howard could claim five surnames, one from her birth and one each from her four husbands. Along the way she had suffered more hardship on the Texas frontier than most pioneers, man or woman. Described in her youth as “a beautiful blonde…graceful in manner and pure of heart,” she had watched as two of her husbands, her only brother and one of her children were killed in front of her and had lost a third husband in mysterious circumstances. She herself had been captured by Comanches and escaped, making a perilous and painful journey before stumbling bruised and bleeding into a camp of Texas Rangers.

But she had survived.

Originally from the vicinity of Brownsville, Ill., where she was born Sarah Creath around 1810, Sarah married John McSherry while still a teenager. In 1828 the newlyweds moved south, settling in DeWitt’s Colony, along the Guadalupe River in south Texas, then a Mexican province. In 1829 a son was born to them. Then tragedy struck.

On an otherwise pleasant day that year, around noon, John left the cabin to fetch water from a nearby spring. Moments later Sarah heard yelling and opened the cabin door to the sight of Indians killing and scalping her husband. She quickly slammed and barred the door, locking herself and the baby inside, then grabbed John’s rifle, determined to defend herself and the baby as best she could. While she waited in the still cabin, the Indians slipped away as quietly as they had come.

Around twilight a man named John McCrabb happened by. Seeing what had happened and hearing Sarah’s story, he placed her and the baby on his horse and led them through the darkness to the home of the McSherrys’ nearest neighbors, Andrew Lockhart and family, some 10 miles upriver. Mother and child remained with the Lockharts several months until Sarah remarried, to a well-off Guadalupe Valley man named John Hibbins (also given as Hibbons or Hibben). In 1835, after having given birth to a second child, Sarah returned to Illinois with her two children to visit relatives. In early 1836 they returned to Texas by way of New Orleans, accompanied by Sarah’s only brother, George Creath. In February the four met up with John Hibbins at Columbia, Texas (present-day West Columbia) on the Brazos River, setting out from there by ox cart bound west for the Guadalupe Valley. They never made it. Fifteen miles from home, they were attacked by a band of 13 Comanches who killed Sarah’s husband and brother, took her and the children prisoner, and rode north. 

“They traveled slowly up through the timbered country,” John Henry Brown wrote in his 1880 book Indian Wars and Pioneers of Texas, “securely tying Mrs. Hibbins at night and lying encircled around her.”The next day one warrior, weary of listening to the cries of Sarah’s infant, killed it by smashing its head against a tree as Sarah helplessly watched. Days later the party crossed the Colorado River deep in Comancheria and relaxed the security in which they held their captives.

Sarah faced a crossroads. Though she realized there was a chance to escape, she knew she could not make it away safely with her young son, so she made the heartrending decision to leave him. Wrapping him in a buffalo robe, she quietly slipped out of the Indian camp and into the darkness. 

“Daylight found her but a short distance from camp, not over a mile or two,” Brown wrote, “and she secreted herself in a thicket from which she soon saw and heard the Indians in pursuit. The savages compelled the little boy to call aloud, ‘Mama! Mama!’ But she knew that her only hope for herself and child was in escape and remained silent.”

When Sarah was certain the Comanches had given up their search, she pressed on through the heavy brush and down the Colorado, eventually stumbling across a riverside cabin in which 18 Texas Rangers had just settled down to their evening meal. Though she’d walked only 10 miles, it had taken her 24 hours. “She was so torn with thorns and briars, so nearly without raiment and so bruised about the face that her condition was pitiable,” Brown wrote. 

The Rangers, under the command of Captain John J. Tumlinson Jr., quickly saddled up and went after the Comanches. The next morning, after a brief but hard fight, they rescued Sarah’s child.

Sarah and son next went to live among the families Harrell and Hornsby, near the site of present-day Austin, and fled with them as the Mexican army that had taken the Alamo in March moved north. They eventually found refuge with former Dewitt’s Colony neighbor Claiborne Stinnett, and in the spring of 1837 Sarah and Claiborne married. In 1838 Stinnett was elected sheriff of Gonzales County. That fall the sheriff disappeared while returning north to Gonzales from Linnville, on Lavaca Bay. He was thought to have been killed, either by Indians or, as Brown believed, by two runaway slaves. Regardless, Sarah was again a widow. 

By then, though still shy of 30 years old, she had been widowed three times and seen her brother, one child and two husbands killed before her eyes. On May 29, 1839, she married her fourth and final husband, Phillip Howard. In June 1840 the couple left the Guadalupe Valley and moved west to the San Juan Capistrano Mission south of San Antonio. On arrival they were subjected to an Indian raid, Sarah’s son barely escaping capture a second time. The Howards later moved farther down the San Antonio River to southern Goliad County. There they experienced more Indian raids and again fled, this time to the vicinity of present-day Hallettsville, in Lavaca County. Finally finding peace there, Sarah gave birth to three daughters, and her husband was named a county judge. In their later years the Howards moved once more, settling in Bosque County, where Sarah died on March 28, 1870, of natural causes. She had been with Phillip for more than half of her 60 years—her reward after long years of hardship.

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More than a decade before sharpshooter Annie Oakley joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, dancer Giuseppina Morlacchi garnered headlines performing with Cody in the traveling Western stage drama Scouts of the Prairie. Dime novelist and entrepreneur Ned Buntline, who hastily wrote the three-act Western script in December 1872, had the Italian-born prima ballerina play an Indian princess named Dove Eye. The male stars of Buntline’s theatrical company were Cody and John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro, notable Army scouts who played themselves onstage. Landing Morlacchi was quite a coup for Buntline. Since making her U.S. debut in New York City in 1867, she had become the most sought-after dancer in the country, introduced the can-can to American audiences and earned the nickname “The Peerless.”

Photo collector Tony Sapienza said that when graceful Giuseppina performed the “grand gallop can-can” on Jan. 6, 1868, in Boston, where this photograph was taken, her interpretation of the high-stepping dance left the audience breathless. In Scouts of the Prairie she not only remembered her lines better than her co-stars, but also found romance with one of them. On Aug. 31, 1873, she married Omohundro at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Rochester, N.Y. Morlacchi continued to perform with her dance troupe and star with her husband in Western dramas. But tragedy was to strike the young couple when 33-year-old Texas Jack died of pneumonia in Leadville, Colo., on June 28, 1880. With that Morlacchi stopped touring. A scant six years later, on July 23, 1886, she died of cancer at age 49 in Billerica, Mass.

(For more on both Omohundro and Morlacchi, see Matthew Kerns’ Wild West feature article.)

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On June 17, 1775, a vicious battle rocked Bunker Hill in Charlestown, Mass. That first major engagement of the Revolution saw British Commander in Chief William Howe lead around 2,000 Regulars in what Howe expected to be a quick victory over 1,200 colonists commanded by Colonel William Prescott. Howe guessed wrong. The fierce, bloody fighting raged through the night. From a hillside miles away, Abigail Adams, 30, and son John Quincy, 7, watched with excitement and anxiety.

The Adams family lived in Braintree, a small coastal town 12 miles south of Boston. Abigail’s husband, John, a lawyer and key figure in the insurrection, had been gone since April, when he left on a meandering journey, eventually arriving in Philadelphia to attend the Second Continental Congress that convened May 10. John’s departure began a long separation that left Abigail Adams and their four children in one of the most dangerous places on earth—a city under siege—for nearly two years. She would have to run the family farm, keep her children safe, and husband the family’s finances. Abigail’s letters to John during this time, some of the most reliable accounts of significant early events in the Revolution, influenced decisions being made in Philadelphia that shaped the nation.

John Adams and Abigail Smith met in 1759. He was 25, living with his parents in Braintree; she was 15, also at living at home in Weymouth, just to the south. Writing was the easiest way to communicate, and when they began courting in 1764, the two established themselves as exuberant letter writers. Honest, poetic, tragic, joyful, and deeply thoughtful letters flew back and forth between the young romantics. He nicknamed her “Portia,” for the independent-minded heroine of The Merchant of Venice, and that was how she signed some letters. The couple married on October 25, 1764, when John was 29 and Abigail 19. They welcomed their first child, Abigail—nicknamed “Nabby”—the following year. By the time John left for Philadelphia in April 1775, John Quincy, Thomas, and Charles had arrived.

Like her husband, Abigail firmly believed in the American experiment and staunchly opposed slavery. She relished the Boston Tea Party. After Lexington and Concord in April 1775, she wrote to John and many friends and acquaintances, expressing joy and anxiety. In a letter to rebellious Plymouth playwright Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail described her emotions following the fighting. “What a scene has opened upon us since I had the favor of your last!” she wrote May 2. “Such a scene as we never before experienced, and could scarcely form an idea of. If we look back we are amazed at what is past, if we look forward we must shudder at the view.”

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Rebel Bostonians, having stepped collectively into the unknown, feared for their future. Abigail found a tonic for unease in her excitement at seeing the patriotism she had long advocated taking root and spreading. “Our only comfort lies in the justice of our cause,” she wrote. She urged Mercy not to leave Plymouth for relative safety inland, adding, with the characteristic vehemence that often outdid her husband’s: “Britain Britain how is thy glory vanished—how are thy annals stained with the Blood of thy children.”

As Abigail was writing to Mercy, John, now in Hartford, Conn., was writing to Abigail. He knew that in wartime even agrarian Braintree was bound to suffer. “Our hearts are bleeding for the poor People of Boston,” he wrote May 2. “What will, or can be done for them I can’t conceive. God preserve them.”

In that letter, John told Abigail he had purchased books on military strategy and said that if his brothers were interested, he’d be able to train them to be officers. “Pray [sic] write to me, and get all my friends to write and let me be informed of every thing that occurs,” he wrote.

Abigail took his request seriously. In a lengthy May 24 letter, she recounted an incident in Weymouth the previous Sunday morning. She awoke at 6:00 and learned the Weymouth bell had been ringing, that cannoneers there had fired three shots to sound an alarm, and that drums had been beating. Abigail hurried the three miles to her hometown and found everyone, even physician Cotton Tufts, “in confusion.” She described a wild scene, the result of four British boats anchoring within sight of Weymouth Harbor.

According to Abigail, a rumor had spread that 300 Redcoats had landed and were about to march through town. Residents began scrambling to fight or run. Abigail’s family fled. “My father’s family flying, the Dr. in great distress, as you may well imagine,” she wrote, “for my aunt had her bed thrown into a cart, into which she got herself, and ordered the boy to drive her off to Bridgewater which he did.”

Abigail was describing the “Grape Island Incident.” According to her letter, 2,000 local men gathered to fight, but the British never sent troops ashore. Instead, on Grape Island, a minor land mass in Boston Harbor, they stocked a barn with hay. The Weymouth men procured a small boat, intending to torch barn and contents. “We expect soon to be in continual alarms, till something decisive takes place,” Abigail wrote.

Though not decisive, Bunker Hill was a British victory, earned at great human cost and a boost to patriot morale because neophyte freedom fighters had stood their ground and were not overrun. The battle personally touched Abigail and John. Their good friend and physician Joseph Warren (no relation to Mercy) had died in action. “God is a refuge for us.—Charlestown is laid in ashes,” Abigail wrote to John on June 18. “The Battle began upon our intrenchments upon Bunkers [sic] Hill, a Saturday morning about 3 o’clock and has not ceased yet and tis now 3 o’clock Sabbeth [sic] afternoon.”

In a passage of the same letter written June 20, Abigail lamented her inability to gather quality intelligence for John about the battle. “I have been so much agitated that I have not been able to write since Sabbeth day,” she wrote. “When I say that ten thousand reports are passing vague and uncertain as the wind I believe I speak the Truth. I am not able to give you any authentic account of last Saturday, but you will not be destitute of intelligence.”

In reality, Abigail had a knack for threshing fact from fiction—over the years she heard many rumors of John’s death by all manners, including poisoning, but never believed any. Regarding Bunker Hill, she was able to assemble and recount a reasonably detailed narrative of events there, and she assured John that news of Warren’s death was true.

On the same day as the battle, George Washington was named commander in chief of the Continental Army. He rushed to Boston, intent on forcing the British to evacuate. Abigail first met him July 15, 1775, less than a month after Bunker Hill, with the city still under massive financial and military stress. The next day, she wrote that the appointments of Washington and General Charles Lee to positions of command had given locals “universal satisfaction,” but she also pointed out that the people would support leaders only as long as they were delivering “favorable events.” Washington displayed “dignity with ease, and complacency, the gentleman and soldier look agreeably blended in him,” Abigail wrote. “Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.” By the time that note would have reached John, he was going through a grave embarrassment—one threatening both his budding political career and worldwide geopolitics.

In the summer of 1775, many members of Congress believed war with Britain was still avoidable. On July 8, Congress signed the “Olive Branch Petition.” Written by John Dickinson, a Pennsylvania delegate, the document was a final reach for peace. That outcome was a long shot, but the British intercepted an inflammatory July 24 letter from John Adams to Colonel James Warren, Mercy’s husband. In that communique, Adams suggested to Warren that by now the colonists should have “completely modeled a constitution,” “raised a naval power and opened all our ports wide,” and “have arrested every friend to government on the continent and held them as hostages for the poor victims in Boston.”

Circulation by the enemy of these statements sank all hopes of diplomacy. After that episode, Abigail resumed signing letters “Portia.”

Through eight months of siege, Abigail’s updates became steadier and her commentary sharper. “Tis only in my night visions that I know anything about you,” she wrote October 21, needling John for his laggard epistolary ways but also reporting a wide range of goings-on around Boston. A wood shortage meant bakers would only be able to work for a fortnight. Biscuits had shrunk in size by half. The British were constructing a fort near the docks, and the Continental Army was short on provisions.

In that letter, Abigail also commented on Dr. Benjamin Church, a supposed patriot who had been caught passing coded information about the forces surrounding Boston to the British. Locked up by Washington’s men, Church had been dumped as the Continental Army’s “Director General” of medicine and was awaiting arraignment. “It is a matter of great speculation what will be [Church’s] punishment,” Abigail wrote. “The people are much enraged against him. If he is set at liberty, even after he has received a severe punishment I do not think he will be safe.”

Abigail was in mourning. Her mother, Elizabeth Quincy Smith, had died in Weymouth October 1. In his grief, Abigail’s father, Parson William Smith, had lost “as much flesh as if he had been sick,” she wrote, adding that her sister Betsy looked “broke and worn with grief.” She regretted John’s chronic absences, estimating that in 12 years of marriage, they had only actually been together six.

Washington’s troops quietly ringed Boston in a martial noose, placing cannons on high ground that forced the British to depart by sea at the end of March 1776. The warships and transports that carried the enemy away, Abigail wrote on March 17, amounted to the “largest fleet ever seen in America;” she likened the bristle of masts and billows of sails to a forest. Washington allowed Howe’s men to leave unmolested on the proviso that the Redcoats not burn the city. The foe was as good as his word, though some Britons looted like pirates on holiday. Dirty tactics notwithstanding, though, their exit thrilled locals, Loyalists excepted.

 Abigail told John she felt the burden of the British presence merely to be changing location but admitted to being happy that Boston had not been totally destroyed. The city’s escape exhilarated John, a fiend for independence. On March 29, he wrote to Abigail about his joy at learning Boston was free, even as he moped that he knew few details and so awaited her accounts with “great impatience.” He wanted Boston Harbor made impregnable. Abigail had neither the ability nor the desire to command troops, but John often discussed strategic ideas with her and greatly valued her opinion of them.

Most of the time.

The most famous look into Abigail’s politics arose from Patriot celebrations of the British retreat. Abigail only reminded John that he “Remember the Ladies” after she had unleashed a condemnation of Virginia. “I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creatures of theirs,” she wrote March 31, 1776. “Of this I am certain that it is not founded upon that generous and Christian principle of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us.”

The letter gained fame because in it Abigail forcefully characterizes women’s second-class status in the colonies. Law and custom barred women from owning property and assigned any wages they earned legally to their husbands. “All men would be tyrants if they could,” and if a Declaration of Independence was coming, it would be shrewd not to put all of the power in the hands of one sex, Abigail argued.

She dusted her broadside with drollery. “The ladies,” she said, were prepared “to mount a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.” The letter also conveyed notes of optimism, originating as it did in one finally assured she could plant seeds on her farm or go for a walk without hearing cannonades.

But that optimism evaporated. John dismissed his wife’s adjuration to “Remember the Ladies.” In an April 14 note, he pooh-poohed Abigail’s thoughts as “saucy”—implying that she was straying from her designated societal role and venturing into arenas she should eschew. John’s shrugging response irked his wife. She wrote to Mercy Otis Warren asking if they should compose another appeal to Congress. Frustrated with John’s lackadaisical mien, she and the family faced a stout new challenge just as the absent man of the house was taking on unprecedented responsibilities in Philadelphia.

Smallpox had been blistering indigenes and colonizers in disfiguring, deadly waves around North America since the Europeans first arrived. In 1775-76, British occupiers and Continental Army soldiers besieging them loosed a particularly severe outbreak. Abigail first mentioned the pox in her March 17, 1776, letter to John celebrating the city’s survival. As the British were withdrawing, the port was still battling the latest epidemic. Only the previously infected were even being allowed into town, a category that would have included John Adams, who in 1764 had undergone a controversial procedure—inoculation.

To inoculate against the pox, a doctor opened a small wound and into that cut or scrape inserted matter intentionally tainted with exudate from a person with smallpox. The idea was to trigger a mild case of pox from which the recipient emerged in a few weeks enjoying lifelong immunity, as occurred with survivors of full-on cases like George Washington. By summer 1776, inoculation had become en vogue. The “Spirit of Inoculation,” as Abigail labeled it, finally achieved such critical mass that city authorities legalized the procedure.

Writing on Sunday, July 7, Abigail invited John Thaxter, who was her cousin and John’s law clerk, to “come have the small pox with my family” that Thursday, July 12. As a clinical setting Abigail’s cousin Isaac Smith Sr. provided his sprawling Boston home. Abigail, Thaxter, the Adams children, and nearly 20 others, including Abigail’s sister Betsy Smith Cranch and her family, as well as strangers like Becky Peck, crammed the mansion to await inoculation by Dr. Thomas Bulfinch. The doctor was charging 18 shillings per week for what he estimated would be three weeks of sequestration while inoculation did its work. During that time those inoculated could expect to experience smallpox symptoms to a greater or lesser degree.

The next day, Abigail wrote her first letter to John since June 17. The children had undergone inoculation “manfully,” she reported. She wished John could have joined them, she wrote, but the opportunity had arisen on short notice, and most residences around Boston were at and beyond capacity. The group had been lucky to book a house.

That year’s hot summer would have had the city resonating around the clock with coughing and the house redolent of rotting flesh—two noxious and prominent smallpox symptoms. Abigail wrote that the children “puke every morning,” complaining to John that a maid she had hired was useless, the girl’s lone qualification being immunity conveyed by a case of the pox.

Owing to a leisurely postal system Abigail’s graphic letter about those events was not the means by which John learned his family had been inoculated. Letters reporting the coup from Isaac Smith Sr. and young Boston attorney Jonathan Mason reached Philadelphia first, stunning John. In a letter to Abigail dated July 16, beset by worry that colleagues would think him a cad for ignoring his loved ones in their hour of need, he poured out his heart. His feelings were “not possible for me to describe, nor for you to conceive my feelings upon this occasion.” He remained steadfast in his commitment to press on with the Congress. “I can do no more than wish and pray for your health, and that of the children,” he wrote. “Never—never in my whole Life, had I so many cares upon my Mind at once […] I am very anxious about supplying you with money. Spare for nothing, if you can get friends to lend it to you. I will repay with gratitude as well as interest, any sum that you may borrow.”

Abigail’s letter of July 13-14 arrived July 23. By then, the effects of inoculation had begun to take hold. Abigail experienced only one “eruption”—a pustule signaling infection. Nabby and John Quincy had gotten sick, but without eruptions. Thomas and Charles showed no symptoms, so she had them re-inoculated. Around this time, she got her first intimate look at the real disease. On July 29, she wrote, fellow inoculant and temporary housemate Becky Peck had symptoms of smallpox “to such a degree as to be blind with one eye, swelled prodigiously, I believe she has ten thousand [pustules]. She is really an object to look at.”

Lags between letters consigned John to anticipating past events. He wrote that Abigail’s accounts had convinced him that Charles had not yet taken the smallpox virus. By the time that news reached Abigail, she had had Charles inoculated a third time, and Nabby a second. Hundreds of pea-sized pustules covered almost all of Nabby’s body. In one letter, John referred to her as his “speckled beauty.” Abigail’s ordeal ground on until September 4, 1776, when she and Charles returned to Braintree. A treatment advertised as lasting three weeks had stretched into seven.

During her siege by inoculation, Abigail occasionally slipped away briefly. She left the family lodgings on July 18 to attend the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. She stood in a large crowd below the balcony of the Massachusetts State House on Boston’s King Street to listen to the words her husband and his committee had helped draft. Writing to John she described a scene of great joy punctuated by church bells and celebratory gunfire. She, however, attended the fete in a state of disappointment.

In her July 14 letter, Abigail had reacted sourly to a rendering of the finished declaration that John, copying it himself, had sent. “I cannot but feel sorry that some of the most manly sentiments in the Declaration are expunged from the printed copy,” she wrote. “Perhaps wise reasons induced it.” She likely meant an earlier draft Thomas Jefferson had written and shown to John. That version denounced slavery, a sentiment expunged from the version made public. It is reasonable to hypothesize that, reading the version in her husband’s handwriting, Abigail thought that John had composed the entire document and that he himself had eliminated the statement on slavery.

During the inoculation interlude, Abigail was on tenterhooks anticipating John’s return; he had asked her to direct a man with two horses to fetch him in Philadelphia. However, on June 12, John was named president of a new Committee on War and Ordinance, recasting him as a one-man defense department in charge of organizing a military, allocating that force’s finances, supplying Washington’s men, and more. Just as Abigail was preparing to return home to Braintree from the Smith house, John intuited that New York City was to be the war’s next battleground. He would have to stay in Philadelphia to nurse the infant country he had just helped found. Often in correspondence he fretted about his health.

In Braintree Abigail struggled. Farm workers were scarce. Most men had enlisted in the Army, taken up privateering, or, as Loyalists, had fled with fellow Tories. Tea, which soothed her headaches, was at least as scarce as farmhands; John did send a tin that the courier delivered to Elizabeth Adams, his second cousin Samuel’s wife.

In November 1776 John escaped the revolution’s gravitational pull and joined his family for their first significant reunion since April 1775. The children had survived. He and Abigail had gained the independence they had sought together for years. Abigail had been the keystone, communicating crucial information to the Congress, guiding the household through smallpox, and uplifting John through good times and bad. Always appreciative of his spouse’s integral part in his public life, he wrote of his feelings for her to a friend the day after he had signed the Declaration. “In times as turbulent as these, commend me to the ladies for historiographers,” John Adams wrote July 5, 1776. “The gentlemen are too much engaged in action. The ladies are cooler spectators….There is a lady at the foot of Penn’s Hill, who obliges me, from time to time with clearer and fuller intelligence, than I can get from a whole committee of gentlemen.”

Jon Mael is a high school teacher and author from Sharon, Mass. He has been fascinated by Abigail Adams for decades. Follow him on Twitter @jmael2010.

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In a discussion of life on the Western frontier relatively few women pop to mind. Even the well-known phrase “Go West, young man,” popularized by newspaper editor Horace Greeley, omits women from the story of westward expansion. Certainly, women were there, often toiling away anonymously to raise families and crops in harsh environs. Yet few remain household names. Exceptions include hard-drinking, tough-talking Calamity Jane and, to a lesser extent, hard-drinking, quick-shooting Stagecoach Mary. One genuinely ladylike Western pioneer who has largely escaped notice is Yetta Kohn, who for decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s was a dynamic force on the plains of New Mexico (which became a state in 1912). A successful businesswoman, rancher and devoted mother, Kohn’s story has all the fabric of what constitutes an American legend.

A Jewish immigrant from Bavaria (born Yetta Louise Goldsmith on March 9, 1843), she found success both as a young wife and mother and as a widow, and she did so without a formal education or parental guidance. Yetta’s very American story began in 1853, when the 10-year-old disembarked in New York from the steamer William Tell in the company of older family members, possibly siblings. They eventually made their way west, as Yetta’s name appears beneath theirs in the 1860 census as a 17-year-old resident of Leavenworth, Kansas Territory (admitted to the Union months later as the 34th state).

That year she married fellow countryman and Jewish immigrant Samuel Kohn, and the couple journeyed west in a covered wagon to start a new life together in gold rush–era Denver’s Cherry Creek neighborhood. There she gave birth to sons Howard and George, who as adults would become instrumental in Yetta’s later success. By 1865 the family of four had returned to Leavenworth, likely due to a flood that had devastated Cherry Creek in May 1864. Over the next several years Samuel entered the wool-and-hide business, and Yetta delivered three more children. Two died in infancy, while daughter Belle survived. 

In 1869, soon after Belle’s birth, the growing family returned west, following the Santa Fe Trail to Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, some 40 miles east of Santa Fe. There Samuel opened a wool-and-hide store on the town plaza, supplying the garments necessary for life on the frontier. In the 1870 federal census Yetta, a seamstress, is the only woman in town who listed an occupation other than homemaker. A year later she gave birth to son Charles. 

On Sept. 29, 1878, Samuel died at age 40. The cause was unrecorded. He left Yetta with four children, ages 7, 9, 15 and 17. Together with eldest son Howard, Yetta kept the wool-and-hide store viable through 1882. She then moved the clan to a homestead in the since vanished community of La Cinta, 60 miles to the east-southeast. Applying the lessons she’d learned running the family business in Las Vegas, Yetta soon opened a grocery store, became the postmistress and began purchasing more land on which to graze cattle. By 1887 she had formed a partnership with two local investors and her three grown children (Howard, George and Belle) and was running 4,000 head of cattle on open range in San Miguel County. She also helped establish a social club and once helmed a flatboat across the Canadian River to get club members to an outing.

Inevitably, the maturing Kohn children scattered. In 1885 Belle and Charles left for school in Kansas and New Jersey, respectively, soon followed by college-bound Howard and George. In 1888 the family sold their stock to rancher Wilson Waddingham. Through the turn of the century Yetta continued to buy and sell land in Las Vegas and Kansas while bouncing between Las Vegas and addresses in Wichita and New York.

In 1900 Yetta and George rendezvoused back in Las Vegas, where Charles soon joined them to start a general store. By 1902 Howard had united with his mother and brothers in time to make a final move south to the rail stop of Rountree, New Mexico Territory (20 miles west of Tucumcari), where they purchased a mercantile business from town namesake Henry Rountree and acquired more land through the homestead acts.

That year a lingering drought ended, the town was reborn as Montoya, and Yetta and her three sons not only kept the mercantile store running, but also opened a land company, a bank and a ranch. The businesses owned by mother and sons were known as Kohn Bros., while the ranching component was called Yetta Kohn & Co. By 1904 the family was again intact, as Belle, husband and son joined her mother and brothers in Montoya and started their own ranching operation. For a dozen years good business decisions and astute land purchases allowed the family to flourish.

Then double tragedy struck. On Jan. 30, 1916, just four days after his marriage to 24-year-old Hannah Bonem, Charles died at age 44 in Kansas City, the first stop on the couple’s honeymoon, from an infection in an abscessed tooth. Three days later, a grief-stricken George collapsed and died of heart failure. He was 53. A front-page profile in the Feb. 3, 1916, Tucumcari News and Tucumcari Times paid tribute to the brothers and, by inference, to how well Etta had done as a widow and single mother:

“The esteem in which these brothers were held is best attested by the deep sympathy universally expressed by the community. Every business house was closed by common consent…and remained closed while the bodies awaited the last sorrowful rites.…

“No more beautiful tribute could be paid to the life and memory of these brothers than was manifested in the sorrow of the native people with whom their business had largely been transpired and who came in numbers…to unite their sorrows in one common grief.

“Upright, congenial and generous, Charley and George Kohn endeared themselves to all worthy persons with whom they were acquainted.”

Scarcely a year later, on April 24, 1917, Yetta—or “Mother Kohn,” as she was affectionately known in Montoya—died at age 74. Family oral history records that her passing had been “hurried along” by the circumstances of her sons’ deaths. The April 27 Santa Fe New Mexican was especially generous in its praise of the late matriarch:

“She had an especial faculty for comforting the unsuccessful without injuring their pride, and hundreds of needy will miss her ever-ready response to their appeals. 

“The home life was her greatest pleasure and ideal, and legions have been made happy through an [sic] hospitality which has become proverbial. A real type of womanhood has departed, but her good influence will live always.”

After the deaths of Charles, George and Yetta, Howard Kohn took over the family businesses and followed his mother’s habit of purchasing land around Montoya. In 1923 he married his bookkeeper, Clara McGowan, and they named their only child, daughter Yetta, in honor of her grandmother. When Howard died in 1933 from the effects of smoke inhalation after battling a blaze at the Kohn ranch, Clara took over operations. Like her mother-in-law, she proved a sharp yet ladylike businesswoman. In 1946 Clara’s ranching enterprise, by then known as the T4 Cattle Co., purchased 117,000 acres in the Mesa Rica section of the historic Bell Ranch, which abutted the Kohn property. After the sale T4 land totaled 180,000 contiguous acres. Succeeding generations continued to acquire land, and today the 220,000-acre T4 is one of the largest private ranches in the country.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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The Summer 2023 issue of Aviation History magazine will feature some classic photography by Alfred Palmer, who shot scores of images while working for the Office of War Information during World War II. There wasn’t enough room in the print magazine to include all the images we wanted to feature, so here’s another selection, just in time for Women’s History Month.

During the war, 6.5 million American women entered the workforce, filling jobs that opened up when men joined the military. Women workers were necessary at a time when American was ramping up to become the arsenal of democracy, cranking out munitions, ships, tanks, landing craft—and airplanes. As FDR said in a speech on Columbus Day in 1942, “In some communities employers dislike to hire women. In others they are reluctant to hire Negroes. We can no longer afford to indulge such prejudice.”

“The men were all being drafted,” said a Chicago woman named Lois Wolfe. “They were taking them right and left, and even those that had been exempt in the beginning were being called, and they desperately need people to fill their jobs. That what we girls did, we filled men’s jobs.” Wolf went to work making parts for the Consolidated B-24 Liberator at a plant in Melrose, Illinois.

Some women started working out of patriotism. Others did it for economic reasons. Some did it out of a combination of both. “Suddenly, the standard idea of seeing women as fragile creatures, ill-suited for work outside the home, much less for hard labor, seemed like a peacetime luxury,” wrote Emily Yellin in her 2004 book Our Mother’s War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II. “Like never before America asked women to take up the slack—to join in producing the vital machinery of war.” The aircraft industry was among the biggest employers of women, who made up around 40 percent of its workforce. Douglas Aircraft alone employed around 22,000 women.

The enduring symbol of women in the workforce is Rosie the Riveter, a character that emerged in a song by the singing group the Four Vagabonds and later made indelible as the subject of a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell and in a government-issue “We Can Do It!” poster. One worker who became even more famous than the fictional Rosie was the very real Norma Jean Dougherty, who packed parachutes at a factory in Burbank, California. After the war she dyed her hair, changed her name, and became the film icon Marilyn Monroe.

When men began returning from the war, women began leaving work. Some left voluntarily; others were forced out. But something had changed. In her book, Yellin quotes a woman named Katherine O’Grady, who said, “After the war, things changed, because women found out they could go out and they could survive. They could really do it on their own.”

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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She was an oddity, an enigma to Life magazine war correspondent Jack Belden. Covering the news from the French city of Chartres in August 1944 with soldiers from Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army, this woman stood out from the pulsating crowd, jeering at those having their heads shorn for consorting with the Germans.

In his September 4, 1944, article titled “The Girl Partisan of Chartres,” the veteran correspondent described Nicole Minet (her nom de guerre) in adulatory terms:

Her blonde hair fell over a sun-browned face in a careless disarray and this, with her full lips and a rather sultry expression gave to her obviously young face the appearance of a charming hoyden. She was clad in a light-brown jacket and a cheap flowered skirt in many hues which ended just above her knees. Her legs were bare and brown. About her arm went a ribband bearing the legend FTPF [Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français]. In the waistband of her skirt was stuck a small revolver.

The “charming hoyden” consented to an interview with Belden but was quickly whisked away by fellow partisans.

Thankfully for Belden, and for history, the two bumped into one another the following day.

The 18-year-old, later identified as Simone Segouin, was captured in film by famed wartime photographer Robert Capa during the Liberation of Paris on August 29th, 1944. The image of Segouin holding an MP-40 submachine gun all the while in shorts, a checkered shirt and a beret — led her to become the face of the French Resistance during the Second World War.

And while the female resistance fighter’s bravery and partisan actions is legendary in itself, the iconic photograph came to symbolize the hodge-podge nature of the French Partisans and how a simple French country girl could wreak havoc on the Goliath that was Nazi Germany.

According to The Washington Post, Segouin was born to a farming family in the village of Thivars, near Chartres, on Oct. 3, 1925. Her father had fought in the French army against the Germans during World War I. After the German occupation of France began in May and June of 1940, her father sided with the anti-Nazi resistance, and partisans used his farm as a hideout.

The then 17-year-old was discovered in March 1944 by Lieut. Roland, a former engineer in the merchant marines before the war. Roland soon became chief of a group of 40 men operating near Eure-et-Loir and recognized the need for a girl or woman to do liaison work for, as Belden writes, “they can often get places where a man might be suspect.”

“I studied her for a while to see what were her feelings,” Roland relayed to Belden. “When I discovered she had French feelings I told her little by little about the work I was doing. I asked her if she would be scared to do such work. She said, ‘No. It would please me to kill Boche [a derogatory French word for German soldiers].’”

According to The Washington Post, Segouin and Boursier worked together for months, blowing up bridges and derailing trains carrying German troops or munitions. The teenager exchanged messages with other resistance members on a German bicycle she had stolen and repainted. The bike, which she called her “reconnaissance vehicle,” was filled with baguettes and allowed for blonde-haired innocent-looking Seqouin to move about German-occupied territory without suspicion.

While working in such close proximity to one another, and although he was 20 years her senior, Segouin and Boursier became lovers. Although never marrying the two would have six children together before splitting in the mid 1950s.

For her wartime actions, she was promoted to lieutenant in 1946 and, along with other resistance fighters, was awarded the prestigious Croix de Guerre.

“Nothing pleased Nicole so much as the killing of the Germans,” Belden wrote. “I could find no traces of what is conventionally called toughness in Nicole. After routine farm life, she finds her present job thrilling and exhilarating. Now that the war is passing beyond her own home district she does not think of going back to the farm. She wants to go with the Partisans and help free the rest of France.”

She went on to do just that.

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There are hundreds of published primary sources of soldiers, civilians, and politicians, but the massive diary kept by South Carolinian Mary Chesnut (1823-1886), published as Mary Chesnut’s Civil War in 1981, remains a classic must-read of its genre. Mary, the wife of South Carolina politician and officer James Chesnut, knew and interacted with the Confederacy’s elite.

Mary Chesnut’s Civil War

by Mary Chesnut, Yale University Press, January 1, 1981

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Whether expressing disgust at the contradictions of slavery (“our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children….”), describing a general’s appearance (Maj. Gen. Edward Johnson “had an odd habit of falling into a state of incessant winking as soon as he was the least startled…”), or bemoaning command decisions (“Jeff Davis did hate to put Joe Johnston at the head” of what was left of the Army of Tennessee, “For a day of Albert Sidney Johnston, out West! And Stonewall, could he come back to use here!!!”), her opinions provide a page-turning chronicle of the rebellion’s rise and fall.

You can own the Columbia, S.C., home the Chesnuts lived in for periods during the war, and where she wrote a part of her diary. The six-bedroom house was built in the 1850s, and survived the February 1865 fires that swept the South Carolina capital after William T. Sherman’s men occupied the town. 

Offered at $950,000 and located on Hampton Street in the historic district, the house has operated as a bed & breakfast and is still zoned for such use. Or it can serve as a private residence. Buy it and walk to the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, or swing by the old capitol building and see where the scars remain from Union shellfire. Upon returning, you might want to sit down and record your own thoughts of the war that so intrigues us.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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I’ve always believed that “with time, all truth is revealed.” Fifty years have provided a time to remember, reflect, and reconsider my USO experiences touring Vietnam and Thailand for 21 days in August 1972. As Miss America 1972, I traveled the length and breadth of the United States, accumulating about 250,000 miles. When pageant officials invited me to headline a Miss America USO Tour to Southeast Asia, I enthusiastically accepted. Not only was this an opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream, but was also a significant way to conclude my year’s reign.

My WWII Navy veteran father instilled in me the ideals of service and sacrifice. He once told me, “War forever changes you. Always honor and respect those who have served our country in the military!” I took dad’s words to heart. During my college years at Ohio University, I joined Angel Flight, a women’s support group for the Air Force, and rose to the rank of [ROTC] Cadet Lt. Colonel.

Burned in Effigy

After being named Miss America, I approached pageant officials to adopt a platform for my year of service. I was motivated to support our military and suggested I lead a campaign among local and state Miss America participants to wear a pewter wristband inscribed with the name of a POW/MIA. I hoped media coverage would focus on supporting U.S. troops to counter the pervasive antiwar protests.

I discovered that my Miss America mission was as unpopular as the war. My appearances met with controversy, including: being burned in effigy, having objects thrown at me during parades, protests outside my hotel room, and death threats. I quickly learned that when you take a stand on an issue, you had better be prepared to defend it!

I believe the Miss America title provided a platform to reinforce what is right and good about America and its people. The USO Tour was an opportunity to thank our troops for their service.

The Miss America Organization’s (MAO) director, George Cavalier, wrote and produced the show, “Something’s Coming On.” For the first time, MAO and USO decided to send two troupes: one to Vietnam and Thailand and another to Europe. We spent two weeks rehearsing and prerecording the show in New York City. We would perform live, but having the show’s music prerecorded meant we did not need live music.We could thus be transported by small aircraft or helicopters and reach remote areas where service members hadn’t seen American women in months.

Our 21-day adventure began Aug. 6, 1972. I was joined by six 1971 state representatives: Miss Louisiana, Avis Ann Cochran; Miss Maine, Allyn Warner; Miss New Mexico, Michele Cornali; Miss South Carolina, Pam Inabinet; Miss Utah, Janis Gentry; Miss Virginia, Linda Jean Moyer, along with our traveling companion, Mrs. Irene Bryant.

My mother flew in from Columbus, Ohio, to bid us farewell. Although visibly anxious about us traveling to a combat zone, she remained supportive and wished us well. As I departed, my mother handed me a travel diary and suggested I record each day’s activities. I recorded the locations visited, what we did, who we met, and my impressions.

Finding the Diary 50 Years Later

Fifty years later, my journey began again when the travel diary emerged among other 1972 memorabilia. On Aug. 6, 2022, I transcribed what I wrote in my diary detailing Day 1: “‘en route’ New York City to San Francisco International Airport to Travis AFB to Elmendorf AFB (Anchorage, AK) to Tokyo, Japan, to Saigon, Vietnam.”

Each day for 21 days, I sent the SE Asia Troupe ladies an email with that day’s diary transcription and pictures. Memories flooded back. They told me how that trip also impacted them for a lifetime—above all their visits to hospitals, mess halls, or lounges where we would “meet and greet” service members, sign autographs, take pictures, and listen to their stories and experiences.

One of the ladies recalled a difficult visit to the 95th Evac Hospital (China Beach), where we sat by the beds of wounded soldiers, many in critical condition. We held their hands, signed autographs, and tried to give them a glimmer of hope and a glimpse of home. One young soldier, a double amputee, told us he was to be married but didn’t know why his fiancée wanted to marry only half of a man!

Recalling that visit, my colleague remarked, “I was so young and had never really traveled much. I remember thinking the fellows looked like just kids out of high school. I’ll never forget the look in their glazed eyes. It was as if their souls had been amputated!”

Almost Shot Down by a SAM

Reconnecting was a big part of this 50-year journey; making contact with the six troupe ladies was the priority. I also wanted to find service members who had been part of our support team and others we met. This sleuthing was no easy task. Making those connections was essential to verify my diary entries and help identify pictures. Finding our security officer, Lt. Joe Shogan, was a significant step.

Joe revealed his assignment presented more risk than anticipated. He was concerned for our safety and questioned many locations on our itinerary. Joe’s instincts were realized Aug. 18 on a “Handshake Tour” near the Mekong Delta that included: Hau Nghia Province, Tan An (Long An Province), Ham Tam, Tay Ninh, Phu Cuong, and Xuan Loc, all of which had recently seen enemy action. No performances were scheduled in these very remote areas. There would simply be a “meet and greet” before we moved on.

At our first stop in the Province of Hau Nghia, we were shown damage from a recent mortar attack and how the shrapnel tore through a colonel’s quarters and hit him. No one was there when we arrived in Tan An due to “contact” from “a major road being cut-off by the Viet Cong (VC).” Our next stop, Ham Tan, looked like a tropical paradise. Ironically, we were told that the surrounding mountains and dense jungle were favorite hiding places for the VC!

According to this transcript from my diary:

“Off again, on our way to Xuan Loc. I was getting a bit sleepy, and the day seemed like it would never end. I closed my eyes to catch forty winks when suddenly our helicopter was diving down toward the water below! I was sitting in the gunner’s seat wearing headphones and heard something about a ‘Sammy?’ My first thought was that we had been hit and were going to crash. I offered a prayer to Jesus and a few ‘Hail Marys!’ It was strange, but for a brief moment, it crossed my mind, is this it? Will my legacy be the Miss America killed in Vietnam?…

As the chopper stabilized and everyone regained their composure, I asked what had happened and was informed that the V.C. had launched a heat-seeking missile at our helicopter. Fortunately, our gunner saw the plume of smoke and immediately warned the pilot, who engaged in a diversionary maneuver. Once again, I am convinced about divine protection!”

We learned the importance of listening and following instructions, briefs, and orientations, especially when wearing helmets and flak jackets.

While in the mountain area of Pleiku, there was a threat of incoming fire. I was washing my hair when suddenly my chaperone banged on the door and yelled for me to get out and get my gear on. In my zeal to follow orders, I climbed out of the shower dripping with water and suds, and hit the floor wearing my helmet and flak jacket, albeit nothing else!

An Eye-Opening Experience

Although we were based in Saigon, our tour took us near the DMZ to Phu Bai and Da Nang. In the Gulf of Tonkin we visited or entertained on the USS Midway, USS America, USS Hancock, and the destroyer Worden IV. In Vietnam, our tour took us to Gia Dinh, Corpus Christi Bay, Monkey Mountain, China Beach, Marble Mountains, Pleiku, Long Binh, Hau Nghia, Tan An, Ham Tan, Xuan Loc, Phu Cuong, Tay Ninh, Can Tho, Tan Son Nhut AB, and Saigon.

On Aug. 25, we boarded a MAC (Military Airlift Command) flight en route to the USA via Clark AFB in the Philippines, Hawaii, Travis AFB, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, where a limo met us to transport the troupe back to Atlantic City, N.J.

In two weeks, a new Miss America would be crowned, and we were to perform on the live broadcast for the pageant. According to my diary:

“Thoughts swirl in my head as I contemplate the full ramifications of what these last 21-days represent. I must confess that what I experienced and witnessed on this tour differed from what I had expected. So many factors to consider, process, and interpret. It will be interesting to see how history handles the truths of the Vietnam War and this time in our American history!”

Before I went to Vietnam, I was naïve in believing the rhetoric and political spin that attempted to justify why we were there and what we hoped to accomplish. Being in Vietnam and Thailand opened my eyes. I experienced it firsthand and had been one-on-one with our military men and women, many of whom didn’t want to be there but fulfilled their duty. I heard the opinions of officers and high-ranking officials who debated if the war was “winnable.”

I walked the streets of Saigon and learned many Vietnamese considered it the “American War” and not the “Vietnam War,” while others shared their hopes that U.S. troop involvement would result in their country becoming “united, prosperous, and anti-communist.” It was a confusing and challenging time that ended with tragic and disappointing results in 1975 as an abrupt pull-out from Saigon occurred.

My experiences validated my father’s words about war changing people. For me, that change resulted in appreciation for the resiliency of the human spirit and a humble awareness of mortality.

By retelling my story in this article and my forthcoming book, “The Last Miss America in Vietnam,” I hope to honor the brave men and women who served our country. Their commitment and sacrifices need to be dignified and remembered now and for future generations. God bless America!

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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Mississippi suffered greatly throughout the Civil War, but it was at Corinth where citizens and volunteers first endured the carnage of war amplified by a bloody clash deep in the Tennessee wilderness. Early on, gaining possession of Corinth—an important railroad junction in northeastern Mississippi—garnered immediate attention from both Union and Confederate commands. Tucked away in a swampy lowland and divided by jagged ravines and dried-up creek beds, Corinth presented an arduous physical challenge for the massive armies that converged on the town. So it was in the spring of 1862 that the Civil War found Corinth and brought along the reality of a long and bloody struggle.

Shiloh was Corinth’s prelude to war. As for the inexperienced civilian-soldiers, the reality of the combat experienced there was a shock. Most combatants who survived the fight left the battlefield wholly bewildered, unable to process what seemed like an entirely new way of war. Veteran’s recollections of Shiloh and Corinth—some of them written decades later—give us insight into the brutality of this devastating war.

Confederate Captain Francis A. Shoup, Mississippi Private Augustus Mecklin, Ohio Captain George Rogers, and Confederate nurse Kate Cumming experienced Shiloh and the action around Corinth through different lenses. Shiloh was Shoup’s first brush with intense combat. So traumatic was the fight that following the war the sight of budding trees immediately transported him back to the spring of 1862. The fight also scarred the young Mecklin. So much so that he did not and would not see the war through. Others like the ardent abolitionist Rogers and the passionate Cumming were inspired by their experiences and were determined to see the end—no matter the cost.

Before war touched those combatants, however, their fates were dictated by decisions of untried commanders unprepared to direct war on such a large scale. In February 1862, Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston waffled under such pressures. Johnston had to stop his retreating armies and devise a plan to counter the Union offensives from western and eastern Kentucky. On February 5, 1862, General P.G.T. Beauregard arrived in Bowling Green, Ky., to assist Johnston with conjuring a stopgap for the crumbling Confederate defensive line. But Johnston offered no practical solution for halting the Union thrust toward Tennessee. Beauregard quickly suggested a concentration of Confederate forces at Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River. Johnston agreed—somewhat—and sent 15,000 troops to defend the route to Nashville. Nevertheless, the force was insufficient, and Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River fell after a few weeks. For the “victor of Donelson,” Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, an unchecked advance down the Tennessee River into Alabama and Mississippi became a reality.

In a rush to establish a rallying point for his receding commands, Johnston suggested to Beauregard the northeastern Alabama town of Stevenson. Yet again, Johnston’s suggestion puzzled the Creole who countered by hinting at converging the forces at Corinth. Johnston concurred and in early March 1862, approximately 40,000 Confederate troops from all over the south assembled at Corinth for a counteroffensive against the Union advance down the Tennessee River.

Thus, Corinth became the staging point for a showdown between Grant and Johnston. The sleepy town transformed into a dusty military hub and quickly filled up with excited Confederates enthralled at the idea of striking back at the captors of Fort Donelson. The enemy that many Confederate soldiers imagined as inferior fighters were much like themselves, however. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee and Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio were “Westerners”—men from Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Farmers, tradespeople, rural schoolmasters, and pious preachers made up the majority of both contending armies at Shiloh. Confederates from Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas ran into a familiar foe at Shiloh, and though green, they too were determined to conquer.

‘The first leaf of spring’

Three years before his death in 1896, ex-Confederate Francis Asbury Shoup sat down for an interview with the Confederate Veteran. In the twilight of his life, Shoup reminisced over the Vicksburg and Atlanta campaigns with remarkable detail and, like many ex-Confederates, cast blame of shortcomings upon his superiors. But for Shoup, a former captain and chief of artillery for William Hardee’s Corps, he began his story on April 5, 1862. He recalled the 23-mile slog from Corinth, and riding about the battle lines of Hardee’s Corps in deep reflection.

The Confederates were only a few miles from the Union encampment at Pittsburg Landing, Tenn. Shoup and his men bided their time listening to merry Federal camp tunes and taking in the tranquil scenery in a rare reprise from the rain. “[We] had plenty of time to look at the dogwood blooms, of which the woods were full.” The old soldier recalled: “I never see them now that I do not think of Shiloh.” Further to the rear, Private Augustus Hervey Mecklin, Co. I, 15th Mississippi Infantry, did not have the ear of a general or of any officer for that matter. A few days after the Battle of Shiloh, Mecklin wrote an intense letter to sort out what he saw. But on April 5, he lay only a couple thousand yards behind Hardee’s lines. Prophetically, he thought of his comrades’ impending demise and the scores of grieving mothers back home. Perhaps Mecklin looked to the sky for guidance. He noted: “The trees were budding into the first leaf of spring.”

As dusk set in on April 5, Captain Shoup trailed Hardee to a council of war called by Johnston. Shoup was not present at the conference with Johnston’s corps commanders but waited on the outskirts of the meeting. Afterward, Hardee informed Shoup of the situation. According to Shoup, Hardee was discouraged about the assault the next day. In addition, most of Johnston’s corps commanders reciprocated the feeling. Shoup affirmed during his interview with Confederate Veteran that Hardee confided to him afterward: “After listening for sometime Gen. Johnston cut them short by saying, ‘Gentlemen, return to your commands; the attack will be made at dawn. If the men have no rations they must take them from the enemy.’ ”

Shoup believed until his dying day that “we [the Confederates] came that near turning tail, even at the last moment.” But unfortunately for Shoup, Mecklin, and tens of thousands of others, no retreat was sounded. As historian Timothy B. Smith puts it best: Johnston cast the “iron dice of battle.” There was no going back.

The morning of April 6 was “very warm,” Mecklin recalled. “The sky was clear and but for the horrible monster death who now pile high carnival, this might have been such a Sabboth [sic] morn as would have called pleasant recollections of Sabboth bells & religious enjoyment.” As he and the 15th Mississippi waited for their chance for a glimpse of ‘the elephant,’ Captain Shoup, attached to the first Confederate assaulting force, rode manically through rough underbrush and low-hanging branches in search of anyone to give him orders.

While dodging monstrous splinters, Shoup recollected catching sight of the foe: “It seems that the enemy was just sending out some scouts, at any rate our skirmishers were engaged very early.” Glancing about, Shoup quickly realized “it was all haphazard—line against line—patching up weak places with troops from anywhere they could be got.” He lamented “for several hours the [f]iring was constant.”

From about 7 a.m. to 11 a.m., the battle progressed methodically. At first contact just before 6 a.m., Johnston’s raw regiments had orchestrated a disorganized lunge at a momentarily startled Union force. But under the direction of Brig. Gens. William T. Sherman, Stephen Hurlbut, and W.H.L. Wallace, the Federals worked an effective delaying defense as Grant constructed a formidable defensive line near Pittsburg Landing. Meanwhile, inexperienced troops on both sides maneuvered awkwardly through dense foliage.

The carnage was severe. Artillery on both sides tore limbs from man and tree. At 9:30 a.m., the Union right began to crumble and fell back to the Tilghman Branch around Jones Field. There Sherman and McClernand scrambled to steady their raw troops in face of a rapidly regenerating Confederate advance. It was there where Augustus Mecklin and the 15th Mississippi deployed to one of the battle’s epicenters: Brig. Gen. Benjamin Prentiss’ camp along the Hamburg-Purdy Road.

Mecklin recalled his callow unit’s advance: “Just at this juncture while making a rapid march at double quick one of our Liets [lieutenants] was shot through the hand accidentally by his own pistol & just at the same moment almost, our adjutant, the Lieut’s Bro., was stabbed accidentally in the thigh. With a bayonet.”

The 15th Mississippi continued forward, advancing uncertainly toward disorganized but stabilizing Federal lines. As the Mississippians bypassed booming batteries, Mecklin recorded their gruesome effect: “Here & there we saw the bodies of dead men—friends & foes lying together. Some torn to mince meat by cannon balls. Some still writhing in the agonies of death. We halted for a short time near where a poor fellow was lying leaning against a tree severely wounded.”

In awe of the terrific noise, he added, “The cannon appeared to be carrying on this contest wholly among themselves.” While taking shelter at a tree line, Mecklin longed to escape the exposed position: “Some of the balls reached us & while we were halted one struck a tree nearly a foot through & splitting it a sunder tore a poor fellow who was behind it into a thousand pieces.”

The Mississippians, however, pressed on. In the advance, Mecklin looked about and recalled the image of the idyllic atmosphere torn by hot iron and lead: “The trees were spotted with bullet holes. Many branches & tree tops not budding into the tender leaf of spring bowed their heads, torn partly from the forest stem by the balls of both sides.”

When the Mississippians reached volleying distance, Mecklin’s fears became reality: He caught a glimpse of the elephant. “For the first time in my life, I heard the whistle of bullets,” he recalled. “We took shelter behind the tents & some wagons & a pile of corn & returned the fire of the enemy with spirit.” With exasperated prose, Mecklin continued: “The bullets whistle around my ear. I was near the front & firing. lay down to load soon men were falling on all sides.” Around him, comrades fell: “Two in Co. E just in front of me fell dead shot through the brain. On my left in our own Co., W. Wilson, W. Thompson & Ben. Stewart. Bro. Geo. & James Boskins were wounded.”

Mechanically, Mecklin went to work, doing his best to block out the destruction. He fired so rapidly, in fact, that his rifle gummed up: “…my gun got so foul that I could not get my ball down. Taking a short stick that lay near, I drove the ball down. Again the tube became filled up & not being able to get it off, I called to one of Co. E. to throw me the gun of a wounded man by him. I fired this until the tube became filled. Throwing it down I went to the rear & picking up my ho’ gun held on until the battle was over.”

At the epicenter of the fighting, Mecklin and Shoup were not aware the Confederate high command was in some disarray. Johnston had died from a mortal wound; his replacement, Beauregard was battling illness and spent, mistakenly confident the battle had already been decided—that the Federals were not in position for an effective response. The 15th Mississippi had been fighting for 12 straight hours, and as night fell, Mecklin expressed his relief: “Long had I looked for the kind hand of darkness to lay its peaceing hand upon this savage conflict.”

Mecklin would survive the next day’s fighting in what became a remarkable Federal victory. He also survived his army’s miserable retreat to Corinth and the subsequent 31-day siege of the city. But Shiloh tarnished his soul. He resigned from the Confederate Army later that year and returned to ministry, never fully coming to grips with the whirlwind he and his comrades had encountered in the Tennessee wilderness.

A clash in Jones Field

At 5 a.m. April 7th, 1862, Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace’s wayward 3rd Division lined up on the right as part of Grant’s planned counterattack. Wallace become lost trying to reach the battlefield the day before and arrived too late to figure in the fighting. George Rogers, the 25-year-old captain of the 20th Ohio’s Company A, rode ahead of his men as the attack lurched forward. A veteran of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s 1861 campaigning in western Virginia he was not quite prepared for what lay ahead. Meandering to the left, the 20th came upon Colonel Preston Pond’s Louisianans in Braxton Bragg’s Second Corps secluded along with Captain William Ketchum’s Alabama Battery in Jones Field. Muskets began to rattle and, while urging his men on, Rogers glanced at the enemy lines. He saw an excited Confederate officer, flag in hand, desperately rallying his wavering lines. Rogers suspected it was Beauregard himself, but it was most likely Pond.

A few days later, Rodgers wrote of his contact with Pond’s “Creole” brigade: “Our brigade came by a beautiful and rapid movement upon a heavy battery of the enemy’s, supported by a brigade of Creoles commanded by Beauregard in person, who—with flag in hand at the head of the brigade—was endeavoring to rally his forces for a final effort to retrieve his lost fortunes.”

Rogers and the 20th Ohio moved cautiously into Jones Field. The enemy forces would exchange volleys for the next three hours. Eventually, Wallace’s division picked up speed mid-morning and rushed over Pond’s disheveled brigade. The Ohioans pitched into the fleeing Confederates. As Rogers guided his lines, he was distracted by the strange actions of one shaken officer, “weeping like a child” at the sight of his mutilated mount. Mercifully, the officer unloaded six shots into the dying animal. “That scene,” Rogers lamented, “…remains the most vividly painted in my memory of all those I saw on that memorable day.”

By 4 p.m., the exhausted and severely bloodied Confederate army began its staggered retreat to Mississippi. Making the situation more dire was an intense rainstorm that turned the roads into a nearly impassible quagmire. Fortunately for the severely wounded, volunteer nurses scrambled from surrounding Confederate states to assist in any possible way. As the fighting raged on April 7, Alabamian Kate Cumming heard of the massive fight and boarded a train from Mobile, Ala., to Okolona, Miss., and from there to Corinth. Cumming observed trains loaded with grievously sick and wounded heading into the opposite direction and recorded on April 8: “It is raining in torrents. Nature Seems to have donned her most somber garb, and to be weeping in anguish for the loss of so many of her nobelist [sic] sons.”

Nursing the Wounded

Shiloh’s aftershock quickly expanded to towns and settlements in Tennessee and Mississippi. Corinth instantaneously felt the blow. Fortunately, Kate Cumming and many civilian volunteers were there to help. She had arrived on April 11, towing a heavy heart because her two brothers—one in Ketchum’s Alabama Battery, the other in the 21st Alabama Infantry—had possibly been killed during the battle. While in transit from Okolona, Cumming wrote in her diary: “There is a report that Captain Ketchum is killed, and all of his men are either killed or captured; the Twenty-First Alabama Regiment has been cut to pieces. I was never more wretched in my life! I can see nothing before me but my slaughtered brother, and the bleeding and mangled forms of his dying comrades.”

With uncertainty on her mind, Cumming kept busy nursing the sick and wounded. On April 12, she “sat up all night, bathing the men’s wounds, and giving them water. Everyone attending to them seemed completely worn out.” The afflicted soldiers seemed crammed into every crevasse: “The men are lying all over the house, on their blankets, just as they were brought from the battle-field. They are in the hall, on the gallery, and crowded into very small rooms.”

It was the scent of war, however, that disturbed her most: “The foul air from this mass of human beings at first made me giddy and sick, but soon I got over it.” Yet she remained and Corinth’s atmosphere of suffering only intensified with time. A week later, desensitized somewhat, Cumming wrote about a soldier knowing “he will die.”’

“A young man whom I have been attending is going to have his arm cut off!” she recorded on April 23. “Poor fellow! I am doing all I can to cheer him. He says he knows he will die, as all who have limbs amputated in this hospital have died.”

Her senses dulled by stress and the sight of human suffering, Kate Cumming concurred with the doomed boy: “It is but too true; such is the case.” 

For the thousands of victims of Shiloh who sought refuge behind the entrenchments of Corinth, a true challenge of survival approached in the form of climate. The month of May brought excessive heat and dryness, and severe illness incapacitated entire units. Potable water was almost nonexistent, and many soldiers lapped liquid out of stagnated puddles and swamps. The lumbering Union army finally reached the outskirts of Corinth during the last week of April, and Corinth’s desperate inhabitants again braced for the relentless horrors of war.

Shoup, Mecklin, Rogers, and Cumming all converged at Corinth, but the ghosts of Shiloh followed. Though they all survived the war, vivid memories of Shiloh haunted them the rest of their lives.

After working as a concrete mason for 15 years, Trace Brusco changed career paths and is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Alabama, where he studies military history. His current project focuses on Corinth, Miss., and how the Civil War impacted northeastern Mississippi.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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The legendary 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion — the only all-Black, all-female unit deployed during World War II — will soon have its day on the silver screen.

Actor, comedian and director Tyler Perry will produce the war movie “Six Triple Eight” for Netflix, according to a release from the streaming platform.

“The 6888th Battalion contributed to the war effort in a unique way: by sorting through a three-year backlog of undelivered mail and delivering the mail to American soldiers far from home,” the release notes. “In the face of discrimination and a vast, unfamiliar country divided by a global conflict, these 855 women brought hope to the front lines.”

Efforts by the battalion, which was helmed by Maj. Charity Adams — the first Black woman to commission with the U.S. Army — were essential for service members eager to hear from loved ones back home. The backlog of mail they sorted in Birmingham, England, was set to take six months to sort and pass along to the front lines. However, the 6888th Battalion was so efficient that they did it in three. The same thing happened when they were transferred to Rouen, France.

“When they completed their mission, the women of the 6888th had broken all records for redirecting mail, sorting an average of 5.85 million parcels per month,” the Arlington National Cemetery records indicate.

Despite facing racial discrimination, the personnel of the 6888th helped blaze a trail for the diversification of the U.S. military.

“They proved, like others had before them, that African American women wanted to serve their country nobly in a time of crisis, and they provided an enduring legacy for future generations of military women,” the Arlington archives note.

Perry reportedly based the movie’s script on a 2021 WWII History magazine article by Kevin M. Hymel, according to Netflix.

The streaming service, for which Perry has directed three prior projects, has not yet announced a release date.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

The complicated story of prolific World War II photographer Lee Miller — from surviving sexual abuse at the hands of her own father, her numerous romantic liaisons with European elite, to being one of the first to capture the horrors of Dachau — is set to be brought to the big screen.

Oscar-winner Kate Winslet will portray Miller in “Lee,” with Alexander Skarsgård as Roland Penrose, an English Surrealist painter, photographer, poet and Lee’s paramour.

According to Deadline, filming is currently ongoing and will be the directorial debut of cinematographer Ellen Kuras (“Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind”).

Others on the cast include Andy Samberg (“Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) will play the role of Life Magazine photographer David E. Scherman; Marion Cotillard as Solange D’Ayen, the fashion director of French Vogue and a personal friend of Miller’s; and Josh O’Connor (“The Crown,” “The Durrells”) as Tony, a young journalist.

The film itself is not a biopic but focuses on the decade and the war that irrevocably altered the adventurous life of Miller, who was beloved by her peers and GIs alike.

The film’s log line describes Miller as “a middle-aged woman [who] refused to be remembered as a model and male artists’ muse. … She defied the expectations and rules of the time and traveled to Europe to report from the frontline. There, in part as a reaction to her own well-hidden trauma, she used her Rolleiflex camera to give a voice to the voiceless. What Lee captured on film in Dachau and throughout Europe was shocking. Her photographs of the war, its victims and its consequences remain among the most historically important [of the conflict]. She changed war photography forever, but Lee paid an enormous personal price for what she witnessed and the stories she fought to tell.” 

Vogue reports that the film, due out sometime next summer, drew heavily from the biography “The Lives of Lee Miller” by Antony Penrose, Miller’s son with Penrose.

And while Antony himself wrote that Lee was a depressive alcoholic and a terrible mother, her contribution to the war, nevertheless, was profound.

Miller was the first and only wartime photographer to record the first Allied use of napalm at St. Malo, France, and acted a witness to the horrors of the Holocaust. Her photographs of the liberation of Dachau were widely spread by the Allies as evidence of Nazi crimes.

One of her photographs of Buchenwald famously captured a liberated 16-year-old Elie Wiesel.

At the time, Miller cabled back to Vogue what she had witnessed. In her report, she simply wrote “Believe it” — which became the subsequent title of her work featured in American Vogue.

“To me, she was a life force to be reckoned with, so much more than an object of attention from famous men with whom she is associated,” Winslet said of her character. “This photographer, writer, reporter, did everything she did with love, lust, and courage, and is an inspiration of what you can achieve, and what you can bear, if you dare to take life firmly by the hands and live it at full throttle.”

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Barbara Annette Robbins checked her luggage at the United Airlines desk, passed through the doors and walked toward the airplane waiting on the tarmac at Denver’s Stapleton airport in August 1964. In film footage captured by her father, the young woman in a simple pastel suit turns and waves before boarding the silver aircraft. He kept filming as the plane took off.

Three layovers later, Robbins touched down at Tan Son Nhut Air Base on the outskirts of Saigon and was eager to begin her job fighting communism. There would be no film of her happy return home. Less than a year later Robbins became the first American woman and first CIA officer to die in Vietnam and remains the youngest CIA employee killed on duty.

Bright and Unconventional

Robbins was born on July 26, 1943, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Buford and Ruth Robbins. At the time, her father was stationed in World War II’s Pacific theater loading ordnance onto Consolidated PBY-FA amphibious flying boat bombers. She grew up in Denver, with younger brother Warren, in a three-bedroom ranch house in the West Colfax neighborhood. Her father was a butcher at King Sooper’s grocery store, and her mother worked in the complaints department at a window factory.

At Thomas Jefferson High School in southeast Denver, Robbins demanded a lot from herself while also demanding she receive proper credit for her work. “I remember she got a B+ in one class and thought she deserved an A, and she went to her teacher and made her case,” Warren said. “Her grade was changed.”

Robbins was determined to do well in high school because she had college in her sights, unlike many of her peers. Less than 40 percent of women graduated from college in the 1960s.

Robbins was “a terribly bright little girl” and “unconventional,” recalls older cousin Dolores Schneider. Although the girl had a taste for Dairy Queen vanilla ice cream cones, “she didn’t always like to eat the ice cream, but she liked the cones.” Robbins was always a little independent, Schneider added. “She was like that as a girl, so naturally she grew up to be that way.”

Recruited By the CIA

After high school Robbins enrolled at Colorado State University in Fort Collins to study French and learn secretarial skills. While there, she was recruited by the CIA. The Robbins family wasn’t especially political, but it was patriotic. Fourth of July meant large extended family barbecues and parking alongside Interstate 25 to watch fireworks burst in the night sky over Denver’s newly built McNichols Arena.

This patriotism that had been imbued in Robbins inspired her to answer President John F. Kennedy’s call for Americans of all ages to ask themselves what they could do for their country.

A few semesters before completing her degree, Robbins told her family she was going to join the State Department and volunteered to serve in Vietnam. “I remember a conversation about how she wanted to fight communism,” Warren said. “That was her goal, and she was adamant about that.”

Addressing her father, Robbins even evoked the potential threat to the family’s home. “When they get to West Colfax, mister, you’ll wish you’d done something,” she said.

Robbins concealed the fact that the State Department job was just a cover for her work with the CIA. She left college in 1963, without a degree. Her parents “were nervous about her decision to volunteer,” Schneider said. “She wasn’t nervous at all.”

The family’s nervousness was understandable. In summer 1959, six Viet Cong guerrillas had attacked a compound that housed eight American advisers with Military Assistance Advisory Group-Vietnam, in Bien Hoa, a few miles northeast of Saigon.

MAAG-V was formed on Nov. 1, 1955, to oversee a U.S. military contingent that had been growing since President Harry S. Truman sent the first advisers to Vietnam in 1950 to support colonial ruler France, which had been trying since the end of World War II to quell a communist takeover of Vietnam.

The Saigon station had an opening. Robbins volunteered. If she was going to make a difference, she was going to do it where it most counted.

The Situation In Vietnam

In May 1954, communist-led Viet Minh independence fighters defeated French forces at Dien Bien Phu, a small village in northwestern Vietnam near the Laotian border, bringing nearly a century of French rule to an end.

In July 1954, the Geneva Accords sliced Vietnam in half at the 17th parallel. Communists led by Ho Chi Minh governed the North. The pro-Western government of the South was led by President Ngo Dinh Diem, buttressed by French and American support. Tensions between the two sides soon flared into violence.

The attack on the Bien Hoa MAAG-V compound occurred on July 8, 1959. Six of the American advisers were in the mess hall watching The Tattered Dress, a 1957 crime drama starring Jeff Chandler and Jeanne Crain. Just as someone flipped on the lights to change the reel, Viet Cong attackers thrust their weapons through the open windows and sprayed the room with automatic fire. The VC killed two South Vietnamese guards and two Americans—Maj. Dale R. Buis, 37, and Master Sgt. Chester M. Ovnand, 44, the first U.S. troops killed by enemy fire during the American war in Vietnam.

The simmering conflict in Vietnam had not yet resonated with most Americans or even found its way into U.S. military classrooms. The attention of the nation’s leading military educators and strategists seemed to lay elsewhere—namely on how best to repel the hordes of Soviet soldiers seemingly poised to troll through West Germany if the ongoing Cold War ever turned “hot.”

“There was zero attention paid to Vietnam,” said retired Col. Alan Phillips, a Silver Star recipient who graduated from West Point in 1959 and did tours in 1963 and 1967. “We had half a million troops stationed in Germany then, and there was nothing like counterinsurgency plans being developed or taught.”

Keeping The Secret

During Robbins’ time at Colorado State, the situation in Vietnam remained on the periphery. The peace movement did not fully reach the campus until 1968 when students occupied the agricultural building. The Rocky Mountain Collegian, the student newspaper, focused on various club activities, guest speakers and sporting events. After leaving the school, Robbins returned to her parents’ house and packed for Washington while listening to Pat Boone on the record player she had bought with her saved allowance.

While her parents believed she was working in a State Department building, Robbins spent 12 months as a trainee in the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, the forerunner of today’s National Clandestine Service.

In late spring 1964, after the last of Washington’s famed cherry blossoms had fluttered to the ground, an unexpected opportunity arrived. The Saigon station had an opening. Robbins immediately volunteered. If she was going to make a difference, she was going to do it where it most counted.

Before she left for Vietnam that summer, Robbins, her parents and brother piled into the car and drove to the Four Corners Monument in Monument Valley, Utah. A home movie shows the four skipping, dancing and smiling their way around the metal marker at the point where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico touch.

Last Goodbye

A week later the family returned to their home. Robbins stood in her bedroom considering her clothes. She laid out airy linen shifts and pastel suits, low-heeled pumps and a few pairs of gloves. She packed pencils, pens and lightweight stationary. She was ready for her trip to Vietnam.

On the drive to the airport with her parents and brother, bursts of quiet interrupted the chatter. Warren recalled it as “a nice day and just sort of exciting, too, to see Barbara off.” Buford parked, popped open the trunk and lifted out Robbins’ suitcases. She headed for the United Airlines desk.

After the arrival at Tan Son Nhut, Robbins, a leather purse in hand and sensible pumps on her feet, boarded a bus. Chicken wire covered the windows to protect against bomb blasts, and the seats reminded her of buses in elementary school. The bus took Robbins to the Astor Hotel in downtown Saigon. She stayed there for a week and then moved into a fully furnished apartment, complete with linens and maid service.

“There are many other Americans from the Embassy also living here so I feel very safe,” she wrote to her family. “Security-wise we do have to be careful–but you’d never feel that way right here in Saigon if it weren’t for the Vietnamese police all over the city.”

Over the next year Robbins sent 30 letters home. She never wrote about how she typed top-secret CIA reports during the day. Her letters described searching the black market for piasters (Vietnamese currency) and dollars, what women wore, training her new dog “Captain” and occasional weekends in Nha Trang, a coastal city about 200 miles north of Saigon with beaches and fine French dining.

Every now and then she nonchalantly mentioned Buddhist protests in the square near the Rex Hotel in Saigon, bombings at various cafes and fighting on the outskirts of the city.

“You probably see more of what’s happening on television than I’ll ever see here,” she wrote, adding that her family would read about curfews and Vietnamese students marching in protest as if the “country doesn’t have enough problems trying to win against the VC.”

Hoping to bolster South Vietnam’s prospects for victory, U.S. military personnel had jumped from 16,263 in 1963 to 23,310 in 1964, and by the end 1965 would reach 184,314.

The Christmas Bombing

Robbins took pains to contrast the war news presented in the States with reality on the ground, whether in the portrayal of Saigon politics or daily dangers American personnel faced.

“We in the embassy were in no danger whatsoever,” Robbins wrote after a bomb exploded Aug. 25, 1964, on the fifth floor of Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel. It didn’t kill anyone, but several were wounded. Reassuring her parents, she remarked that the hotel’s rooftop was still probably the safest place in the city for dinner. Robbins wrote about meeting military personnel who volunteered for service in Vietnam, the “very unusual group” of helicopter pilots “you’re always reading and hearing about,” and the close-knit American community that came together for dinners and dancing.

“Well, I was here during a coup—or at least an attempted one—it’s pretty busy in the embassy at a time like that,” she noted. Robbins mentioned a military parade on the anniversary of the successful Nov. 2, 1963, coup that overthrew and assassinated Diem. During “the night of our party it was a 2 a.m. curfew instead of 12 midnight and so we were all outside and could hear the gunfire at Bien Hoa.”

In December 1964 Robbins marked her nine months in-country with a renewed sense of purpose. She meant to attend Christmas Eve Mass, but two men in a four-door sedan changed those plans. She explained: “I didn’t go to Xmas service because the Brink’s BOQ [bachelor officers’ quarters housed in the Brinks Hotel] was just bombed at 6 p.m. and it was all but impossible to get to church from where I live. I heard the explosion and at first thought it was thunder, but when the radio went off the air I knew it was an explosion and a large one. Not a very pleasant way to start the holiday.”

Two Viet Cong had driven a car with 200 pounds of explosives to the hotel, parked it and detonated the explosives. Two Americans—one military, one civilian—were killed, and dozens of Americans and South Vietnamese were injured.

Killed In the Embassy

With the arrival of the new year, Robbins pushed through a brief bout of homesickness and immersed herself in her work. She considered extending her stay in Vietnam.

All the while the situation in Saigon grew increasingly fraught. In February 1965, as conditions deteriorated, dependents of American diplomats and military personnel were evacuated. Robbins’ letters became more serious.

She wrote: “Many demonstrations are backed and infiltrated by the VC. It’s sort of like in the U.S. with the communists in some of the clubs, societies, etc. who are influencing and persuading in a sort of behind-the-scenes act. You don’t know who they all are, and so that makes it twice as difficult to fight them. Even then the American advisors are out in the field fighting with the Army of the Vietnam North—they don’t know who the enemy is. During the day he may be a simple farmer with his rice paddies and when the night comes he is the enemy.”

On the morning of March 30, 1965, Robbins sat at her metal desk on the second floor of the U.S. Embassy on Pasteur Street. Gunfire erupted outside. According to accounts of the incident, a car that sagged from being overloaded was parked too close to the embassy.

A policeman ordered the driver to leave, but the man refused. The officer fired at the vehicle. Suddenly a man on a scooter pulled up alongside the car and shot at the police officer.

Hearing the commotion outside their office, Robbins and other CIA secretaries scurried to the window. As Robbins got close, 300 pounds of explosives in the car exploded. In the blast, a piece of iron grating covering the windows broke free, sailed through the air like a javelin and impaled the 21-year-old CIA employee, killing her as she looked out the window.

Outside, firemen sprinted toward the building, ambulances screeched to a stop, and more shots rang through the air. A young American woman, blood streaming from her ear, stumbled around dazed. On the sidewalk, shattered glass sparkled in rivulets of blood. A man on a stretcher held a cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers.

It was the most brazen attack against American interests in South Vietnam to date. The bomb killed 21 people—Robbins, Petty Officer 2nd Class Manolito Castillo, a Filipino serving in the U.S. Navy, and 19 South Vietnamese. Additionally, 183 were wounded.

Viet Cong Arrested

The South Vietnamese police arrested one of the men involved in the bombing, Nguyen Van Hai, and took him to a local hospital. Hai admitted he was with the Viet Cong, and a military tribunal sentenced him to death. In retaliation, the North Vietnamese announced they would execute Gustav Hertz, a 46-year-old American aid mission officer they had taken hostage.

At the urging of the U.S. government, the South Vietnamese did not execute Hai. Nor was Hertz executed, although he died of malaria in 1967 while in captivity.

On May 25, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation appropriating $1 million to build a new embassy compound on a more secure site. Johnson would not yet support military leaders’ push for retaliatory raids on North Vietnam but vowed that “the Saigon bombing fires our will to fight on.”

Robbins’ parents turned on the evening news just as reports were being aired about a bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Buford phoned a contact at the State Department to learn more. An hour later, Warren came home and realized by the look on his parents’ faces that something serious had happened.

Around midnight Warren closed his bedroom door and tried to sleep. Two hours later, Buford called the family’s pastor and asked him to keep them company while they waited for news. At 4 a.m. there was a knock on the door. Opening it, Buford and Ruth saw a State Department official standing on the stoop. They crumpled. Their daughter was dead.

In Saigon, on Thursday, April 1, a South Vietnamese and an American honor guard stood at attention during a short ceremony at the American chapel at Tan Son Nhut. Acting U.S. Ambassador U. Alexis Johnson, whose face had been cut in the blast, stared at the caskets holding Robbins and Castillo. Assistant Prime Minister of South Vietnam Tran Van Do pinned the Vietnamese medal of gallantry on the flag-draped coffins.

After the plane bearing Robbins’ body touched down at Stapleton, her parents and brother drove to the funeral home. A State Department official escorting the 21-year-old’s remains met the family there and gently explained that one of the handles on the coffin broke in transit. He asked Ruth if she wanted to see her daughter. She shook her head. Buford and Warren also declined.

Traveling To Washington

After finalizing the funeral arrangements, the three drove home to discover local and national press camped across the street. For the next three days Buford and Ruth remained cloistered inside their home, leaving Warren, now 18, to run the occasional errand and bring in the mail. Among the many condolences were telegrams from Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Three days later on April 4, 1965, the funeral procession wended its way to Chapel Hill Cemetery on the outskirts of Denver. At the grave, Ruth, wearing sunglasses and a white hat, pressed her white-gloved hands to her mouth. Buford, in a black suit, bowed his head.

That Sunday, the University Hills Lutheran Church dedicated its service to Robbins. State Department co-workers, friends and family donated an illuminated cross that was affixed to the wall behind the altar.

Weeks later, Buford, Ruth and Warren traveled to Washington. The family had learned only recently that their daughter worked for the CIA, not the State Department. Since Robbins was stationed inside the U.S. Embassy, Rusk wanted to meet her family.

He presented the parents with an engraved plaque: “Barbara A. Robbins (Posthumous) Who gave her life for her country at the American Embassy, Saigon, Viet-Nam, On March 30, 1965.” Rusk and the family then moved to the dining room for a meal of lamb chops and apple pie with cheddar cheese on top. “It wasn’t a depressing thing,” Warren said. “It was nice for my parents.”

The CIA’s Memorial Wall

Thirty years later, on June 1, 1995, the Robbins family returned to the nation’s capital to attend a private service in honor of their daughter, who had a memorial star carved into the CIA’s Memorial Wall, which recognizes agency employees who died in service to their country. But Robbins’ name was not in the accompanying Book of Honor that lists fallen CIA officers.

Warren said a CIA official told the family that Robbins’ name was not listed for what the agency termed “cover considerations,” an indication that some related documents had not been declassified yet. Buford wished to see his daughter’s name inscribed, but he died in 1998. Robbins’ name wasn’t listed until 2011. By then, Warren’s mother had died. He was the only one alive for the ceremony, held in the agency’s hall on May 23, 2011.

CIA Director Leon Panetta said: “To this day, Barbara is the youngest officer memorialized on our Wall. She was the first American woman to die in Vietnam and the first woman in our Agency’s history to make the ultimate sacrifice. Nine women since then have fallen in service to our mission. Today we remember them all, with great love and admiration.”

In 1974, the CIA dedicated a Memorial Wall at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to honor fallen employees with a star carved into a marble wall. Originally proposed to recognize CIA officers killed in Vietnam and Laos, the concept was expanded to honor all who died in the line of duty. The initial stars represented 31 members killed since the agency’s founding in 1947. Today there are 139 stars.

Displayed with the wall is a “Book of Honor,” containing the names of those memorialized with a star. Some stars don’t have corresponding names in the book because they remain classified even in death to protect intelligence sources and methods.

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The Civil War has long been recognized as a conflict that ushered in many military and technological innovations—from trench warfare and repeating firearms to submarines and ironclad warships—that foreshadowed the evolution of warfare in the 20th century. What may be less well known, but no less important, is that the war also witnessed the service of the very first female chaplain in the U.S. military, Ellen Elvira Gibson Hobart. A rather obscure correspondence file that found its way into the letter files of the Volunteer Service Division in the Adjutant General’s Office at the War Department documents the little-known story of how “Ella” Gibson Hobart faithfully served the 1st Wisconsin Heavy Artillery during the Civil War but tried unsuccessfully to obtain War Department recognition for her efforts.

Ellen Gibson was born May 8, 1821, in Winchendon, Mass., to Isaac and Nancy (Kimball) Gibson. In 1827, Isaac moved the family back to his hometown of Rindge, N.H., where Ella became a successful teacher in the local public schools. She also taught children at Winchendon, Ashby, and Fitchbury, Mass. In 1852 Gibson embarked on a career as a writer and public lecturer on abolition, women’s rights, and other moral reform issues. According to later tributes, she achieved early attention as “one of the very first women in America who spoke from the public rostrum,” and did not shy away from challenging “the creeds of the church and antiquated political and religious dogmas.” After the Civil War began, Gibson engaged in organizing Ladies’ Aid societies in Wisconsin to support the needs of soldiers in the field, and was involved with the Northwest Sanitary Fair in Chicago.

On July 21, 1861, Gibson married John E. Hobart, in Geneva, Ill. (they later divorced on August 5, 1868). An ordained Methodist clergyman who entered the Spiritualist tradition in 1856-57, John Hobart soon became chaplain of the 8th Wisconsin Infantry. By then an ardent patriot and Abolitionist, Ella followed her husband to camp and assisted with the spiritual well-being of the troops as well as the physical comfort of the sick and wounded. She became ordained herself in the Spiritualist tradition by the Religio Philosophical Society of St. Charles, Illinois, on November 13, 1863. Her ordination license, or Certificate of Fellowship—a copy of which was included in her correspondence file at the AGO—recognized Hobart as a Regular Ordained Minister of the Gospel and authorized her “to solemnize marriages in accordance with law.” An accompanying statement from the board of the Religio Philosophical Society, dated May 2, 1864, confirmed Hobart’s status as an ordained member and recommended her for “the appointment to a Chaplaincy either in the Regular Army of the United States or for a post in Regimental Volunteer Service Chaplaincy.”

An opportunity for regimental service soon came along as Ella began to perform unofficial duties as chaplain of the 1st Wisconsin Heavy Artillery while batteries E through M were being organized at Camp Randall in Madison, Wis., in September 1864. The regiment then moved to the defenses outside Washington, D.C., and at Fort Lyon in Alexandria, Va., Hobart was elected chaplain by the regimental officers on November 22, 1864. Wisconsin’s adjutant general wrote to the War Department on December 17, 1864, requesting confirmation of Hobart’s election by securing her an official appointment to the regiment’s chaplaincy. Despite having a roundabout endorsement from President Abraham Lincoln, to whom Ella had previously applied for support and who expressed no objection to her commission (even though Lincoln claimed to have no legal authority to approve such an appointment), Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton flatly denied the request on the grounds that no precedent existed to muster a female into military service. In spite of the official rejection, Ella Hobart continued to minister “faithfully and to the satisfaction of the officers and enlisted men” of the 1st Wisconsin for the remainder of the war until July 12, 1865.

Official recognition for Hobart’s military service as a chaplain came slowly in the postwar years. On March 3, 1869, a joint resolution was finally introduced in Congress to grant Hobart full pay and related emoluments “for the time during which she faithfully performed the service of a chaplain…as if she had been regularly commissioned and mustered into service.”

To support her case for back pay, Hobart penned a lengthy narrative of her military service to Adjutant General Edward D. Townsend, in which she adamantly defended her work as a chaplain despite the inherent disadvantages she faced in her profession because of her gender:

Boston
Dec. 9th 1869.
Maj. Gen. E.D. Townsend
A.A. Gen. U.S.A.
Washington, D.C.

Sir—
Understanding that you demand further proofs to establish my Claim passed by Congress last session, permit me, Sir, to make a plain statement of facts as I know and understand them. Bear with me and I will be as brief as possible.

Last July, I received letters from three of the officers of the Regiment, saying, that they were ready to give again, their affidavits, when called upon. I then saw Col. Swift’s Agent in Boston, who told me, that the proofs already forwarded and then on file, upon which the Bill passed Congress, were sufficient, therefore, I made no farther effort to procure them. I regret, now, exceedingly that they were not then obtained, as their non-appearance seems to have given rise to the supposition that such proofs as to service actually rendered could not be procured.

But, Sir, permit me, torefer you to those on which the Bill passed as evidence, not only of such service, but of nearly two years unpaid toil, previous to my entering the Army as Chaplain.

Have patience, Sir, I beseech you, and give me a hearing. It was in consequence of this two years faithful service, in organizing Soldiers Aid Societies in Wisconsin, raising funds for the Sanitary Commission, and rendering service in other states, in various ways, both North and South that influenced Governor Lewis, General Fairchild—then State Secretary—and Hon. S. D. Hastings—State Treasurer, to recommend this Chaplaincy to the then enlisting Regiments in Camp Randall, Madison, Wisconsin.

Governor Lewis and General Fairchild desired to give me a paying position—the former, saying, that he would commission me provided I was elected by any Wisconsin Regiment, for enquire, then, why he did not do so: Have patience, Sir, and I will give you the facts as I understand them, and as reported to me by him and others.

The Regiment was not organized until after we reached Alexandria. I went down with one of the Batteries. Col. Meservey was already there, and when the election came off he forwarded the appointment to Governor Lewis, who instead of Commissioning me wrote to the Secretary of War enquiring if he would authorize the mustering provided he did commission me. Mr. Stanton replied in the negative. Every effort seems to have been made by the Wisconsin State authorities to induce him to reconsider his decision, but of no avail. Even the approbation of President Lincoln, obtained by myself failed to move him. The Officers of the Regiment were not behind in that endeavor, as their Petition will testify; they affirmed they would not elect any other Chaplain, and I signified my willingness to remain and act as Chaplain as long as they were satisfied, without any expense to them or the Regiment. Secretary Stanton, then advised me to put a Bill in Congress and obtain the place by a special Act, which I then did not feel disposed to do.

Now for the service. I did all and more than was required of me in the Hospital; and as to lecturing on preaching to the men—a portion of the Sundays I held two or three services in various barracks, speaking also week day evenings, and conducting funerals in the open air, as late in the season as December. We had no Chapel or place of meeting except the barracks, and the open air.

It does not seem modest for me, Sir, to Speak of these labors particularly, even could I without appearing egotistical and incurring your contempt. I would therefore, refer you to Colonel Meservey, and Surgeon Waterhouse of the Regiment, General Auger and Capt. Lee, for proofs; in one instance, as to service rendered under the most difficult, sad and soul harrowing circumstances in procuring a furlough for a soldier to escort him to Wisconsin a distracted mother and the dead body of her son, whom she expected on her arrival at our Headquarters to find alive and well, but whose lifeless son had been taken to the Dead House one hour previous. He was her son; She could not leave his body there! She was too distracted to return alone! O, Sir, though you may think lightly of it, a mother is a mother, and appreciates such service—and does not God; and will not my country, and render to a woman, who knew neither ease nor rest for nearly three long years, her pay to keep her from starving!

O, Sir, had I been a man, my ability and usefulness would never have been questioned! The reason I am so explicit is because I understood you question whether such service as is claimed ever was or could ever be rendered.

Now as to the time of service. Colonel Meservey and all his Officers in Camp at that time committed themselves to me on September 30th, 1864. I was not “a favorite” of the Colonel or any of his Officers. I had been speaking there and had in six weeks time given thirty nine lectures in Camp Randall, [illegible word]. I had never seen the Colonel until that day, but he had heard of my labors and the report with the papers, in my possession, influenced him to grant me this position. Neither was I acquainted with the other Officers of the Regiment.

Colonel Meservey left for Alexandria that day, but as I was informed, not till after he had seen Governor Lewis and obtained from him the ratification of his promise made to me, that he would commission me, provided I was elected Chaplain of any regiment.

From that time Sept. 30th 1864, I date my claim for pay, because, from that day I labored particularly for that Regiment or the Batteries composing it, then being filled up in Camp Randall and till I left for Alexandria Oct 17th, and reached there Oct. 22d and until the election Nov 22d, when the Regiment composing these several batteries, could legally elect me, I was doing all in my power for the comfort and happiness of the men the [sic] serve as after the election when I was legally acknowledged Chaplain-elect of the Regiment.

I claim that all this time I was “faithfully performing the services of Chaplain to said Regiment as if I had been regularly commissioned and mustered into the service,” and was bearing my own expenses independent of the Government or any individual, either in the Regiment or out.

Now, Sir, when does my term of service commence—not when I was commissioned, for I never was commissioned, not when I was mustered for I never was mustered; from when I was elected, or when a sufficient number of days after the election had expired to have had my commission arrive from Wisconsin and myself been legally mustered into the service as Chaplain? The mustering might then have taken place in about ten days after the election—Nov. 22d, which would have been December 1st or 2d.

Now, Sir, I claim as the Resolution provides, “shall be entitled to receive the full pay and emoluments of a Chaplain in the United States army for the time during which she faithfully performed the services of a Chaplain to said Regiment,” that that “time” commenced Sept 30th 1864 and continued till July 4th 1865 and also claim three months pay after the close of the war the same as other Chaplains, with all the emoluments of a Chaplain during this time. I am not indebted to the government except the use of a tent a few weeks, I had none of the privileges of an Officer of the rank of Chaplain, but performed the duties of that office, while to all intents and purposes I was only a citizen as far as the government was concerned.

I am not disposed, Sir, to be captious or exacting but humanity, benevolence and patriotism is paid very poorly, if I am entitled to nothing from government or my fellow creatures.

The encouragement to utility, morality, charity and love is meager indeed, when it becomes less in the eyes of this Republic than the value of a bridge or a piece of land. Where will you find your Florence Nightingale in another war if you refuse thus to acknowledge them in this.

O, Sir, I beseech you, stand not in the way of this Claim, for it is due me as you may know if you will take the pains to enquire of Governors Lewis, Fairchild and Salamon and many other gentlemen to whom you may be referred.

I have need of this pay as I am alone, alone in this world—all my loved ones are dead or dying and with my health ruined, like many a male Soldier of the Rebellion I enquire, shall I end my days in a pauper house, disabled, sad and misanthropic realizing that “Republics are indeed ungrateful?”

Sir, I have given you a synopsis of facts as far as my knowledge extends and if you desire farther particulars explanations or references, please, inform me. Do not suffer misrepresentation or prejudice to influence you in a matter which though to yourself of slight importance, nevertheless, involves the real or woe of one whose comfort and happiness are as dear to her, as are yours to you or even as are a President’s or titled Monarch’s to them.

Aware that you are but a servant and can only obey the law under which you are sworn, permit me, Sir, to add, in conclusion, that whatever the Resolution is proven to signify that I will accept as a Resolution though not as my Claim and right from Government, unless it includes all I demand.

Therefore, if it should be proven that the time of service included in the Resolution did not commence till much later than I claim, I shall still maintain that my labors with the Regiment began Sept 30th and also my expenses.

I have recently written to four of the Officers of the Regiment for Affidavits and will forward them as soon as received.

In hopes that justice will finally be rendered me, I await your action and reply.

Mrs. Ella G. Hobart
242 Harrison Avenue
Boston, Mass.

Hobart finally received payment for her services as a chaplain on March 7, 1876, in the amount of $1,210.56. Recognition for her military service, however, remained elusive. The 1869 joint resolution was amended twice in the House of Representatives, in 1880 (H.R. 8578) and 1892 (H.R. 3842), to recognize Hobart as chaplain of the 1st Wisconsin Heavy Artillery and to muster her into the Volunteer Service of the United States at the equivalent grade. Both measures apparently failed. Meanwhile, Hobart (who by then had reverted to using her maiden name of Gibson) continued her career as an author, penning articles for The Truth Seeker, The Boston Investigator, The Ironclad Age, and The Moralist (and serving as editor of the latter periodical in the early 1890s). She became a supporter of the Free Thought movement and a charter member of the National Liberal League. Ellen Hobart died on March 8, 1901, in Barre, Mass.

It was not until 100 years after Hobart’s death that a grateful nation finally recognized her military service when Congress posthumously granted Hobart the grade of captain in the Chaplain Corps of the U.S. Army via the National Defense Authorization Act of 2002. By then, however, Hobart had already been eclipsed for nearly 30 years as the first “official” female chaplain in the military by Lt. Dianna Pohlman Bell, who was commissioned as a U.S. Navy chaplain in 1973.

John P. Deeben holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in American History from Gettysburg College and Penn State University and is a reference archivist with Research Services at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. He has published articles in numerous genealogical journals and magazines, including Prologue, American Ancestors, and National Genealogical Society Quarterly. 

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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