"Commissioned by God: Mother Bickerdyke during the Civil War

Military Medicine, Oct 2003 by Sartin, Jeffrey S

She treated casualties at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge near Chattanooga in late November to early December. The year 1864 saw her at work throughout Georgia, especially at Kennesaw Mountain and Atlanta. Between rounds of fighting, she and her other Sanitary Commission colleagues-Eliza Porter and Mary Livermore among them-made innumerable trips to Chicago, Milwaukee, and other large cities of the upper Midwest to solicit money and supplies. Bickerdyke also put her efforts toward another crusade, which would become more prominent after the war-care and compensation for disabled veterans.

By the time Atlanta was taken and set aflame in September 1864, there was, according to Commander Sherman, no more need for the frontline services of Sanitary Commission nurses. The war had entered its cruelest phase: Sherman was on his grim march to the sea and did not want his army of mobility to be encumbered with wounded and sick soldiers. Bickerdyke helped evacuate thousands of ill veterans from field hospitals in Atlanta to general hospitals in the north in preparation for this final phase of the war. Her curtain call came when the Army of the Tennessee paraded through Washington as victors on May 24, 1865. Disdaining a chair on the reviewing stand with Dorothea Dix and other dignitaries, she chose to work at an aid tent administering tea and food to fatigued and faint soldiers.3 As an encore, she continued to work for soldiers for many months after the official capitulation of the South.

After the War

After the war, Mother Bickerdyke lived in Illinois for 2 years, then moved to Salina, Kansas where she ran a boardinghouse for several years, which was supported and frequented by many former Union generals, including Sherman, Grant, Meade, and Sheridan (Fig. 3). She became reacquainted with her two sons, raised in proxy during the war by family friends, and continued to push for benefits for disabled veterans. The failure of the boardinghouse in 1869 was a bitter blow, but she threw herself into new crusades on behalf of orphaned children, alcoholics, and female victims of abuse, which took her to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, among other places.

She is remembered for one remarkable event after the war that has since acquired the patina of legend. In 1874, a grasshopper swarm descended on western Kansas, involving Barton County, where her two sons were then homesteading. The famine was devastating; according to local history, "the hoppers would swoop down on a field of corn and when they rose there would be nothing left to denote that there had been anything on the spot except the bare prairie."8 Mother Bickerdyke first went to Galesburg, Illinois, where she collected five rail cars of supplies and sent them west. This was hardly enough for the three counties that were hardest hit, so in the winter of 1874-1875 she traveled to Chicago, Milwaukee, and several other towns and made hundreds of speeches and wrote hundreds of letters. Her efforts resulted in the acquisition of 200 rail cars of food, grain, and clothing, which were shipped to western Kansas and distributed.3 A grateful Kansas state legislature commissioned a portrait of her for the state capitol building, and local residents still remember her as "the savior of Barton County."