Tag Archives: women

‘Mary Lincoln Insanity Case’ Podcast

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I haven’t yet listened to this, but it’s an intriguing podcast offering.  Mary Lincoln’s last years were even more troubled than her earlier ones, the poor lady, and her only remaining (and least loved) son trying to get her institutionalized was the final blow life dealt her.

The star-studded April 16 Statehouse discussion of the Mary Lincoln insanity case can be heard now at “From Out of the Top Hat,” the blog of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

The discussion featured two separate panels, both moderated by author Scott Turow, so the ALPLM has split its podcast into two presentations as well.

Panel 1 discussed historical, cultural and legal aspects of the case. The podcast is an hour and six minutes long.

Panel 2, an hour and 10 minutes, covered medical and legal issues.

‘Mary Lincoln Insanity Case’ on podcast – Springfield, IL – The State Journal-Register.

Clara Barton’s Inner War

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Many of my favorite historical figures (Lincoln, Sherman, Meriwether Lewis among them) appear to have suffered from debilitating depression, which makes it all the more stunning that they went on to drag themselves up and change their worlds. Another of my favorite tough broads, Clara Barton, was listed amongst the black dog owners, too.

“I am depressed and feel dissatisfied with myself,” she wrote in fine, tiny script in diaries now stored on microfilm in the Library of Congress. With so little to do, she paradoxically couldn’t rest, and so “rose not refreshed, but cold and languid.” For neither the first nor last time, she considered suicide.

“All the world appears selfish and treacherous,” she wrote on April 14. “I can get no hold on a good noble sentiment any where. I have scanned over and over the whole moral horizon and it is all dark. The night clouds seem to have shut down — so stagnant, so dead, so selfish, so calculating. . . . Shall the world move on in all this weight of dead, morbid meanness?” A few days later, she fantasized again about killing herself.

But then, as Elizabeth Brown Pryor wrote in her 1987 biography, “Clara Barton: Professional Angel,” the self-made philanthropist’s “dejection was lifted finally by her only true remedy — a need for her services. The Union army’s spring campaign had started early.”

via Clara Barton’s inner war — Health — Bangor Daily News — BDN Maine.

Sara Lucy Bagby

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I’m currently reading a John Brown biography, and am deep in the heart of the Bleeding Kansas chapters.  It’s interesting to note that, for all the violence and emotion of the pro- and anti-slavery factions, there were many moderate Kansas who tried desperately to keep these radicals in check.

This story, of an escaped slave torn from her life as a free woman, illustrates the delicacy with which the moderates of Ohio treated the situation of enforcing the hated Fugitive Slave Act.  They did their best to repress the irrepressible conflict that was erupting all around them.

The news of Bagby’s arrest raced across the country. It was as if the South had stabbed the North in the heart; Bagby was snatched from a bastion of freedom by the evil slave oligarchy. Northerners now knew that slaveowners would indeed reach into any town in any state and grab any African-American they chose. No one was safe from slavery’s odious grasp.

In the days before Bagby’s trial, the street outside her jail nearly erupted into violence several times as free blacks gathered. Others pleaded for calm. The United States in early 1861 was in a tenuous position, with some states having seceded and others mulling the possibility. Many hoped that there was still a way to reunite the country. But a violent rescue of Bagby would further inflame the South and make disunion inevitable.

Sara Lucy Bagby: Last African-American Forced Back Into Slavery Under The Fugitive Slave Act & A Harbinger Of The Civil War | usariseup.

Frank Thompson

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A two-for-one posting: An interesting article that mentioned a memoir which I’ve added to the Library. A Canadian girl disguised herself as “Frank Thompson”, and joined the Union Army. Given this description from the article, the memoirs will be quite the Victorian potboiler:

How did Emma and 400 other male impersonators that served in the Union Army pass inspection? Since neither a physical examination nor proof of identity were required, it was easy to fool recruiters whose sole concern was putting warm bodies in uniform…

The beardless private was a model soldier, whose courage and devotion to duty earned an appointment as regimental mail carrier in March 1862. Next to food nothing mattered more to the foot soldier than letters from home. Emma took her responsibility seriously and did such a first-rate job that she was promoted to brigade postmaster.

But Emma did not want to spend the war playing post office. Itching for more action, she jumped at the chance to join the Secret Service.

Unsexed: or, The Female soldier. The thrilling adventures, experiences and escapes of a woman, as nurse, spy and scout, in hospitals, camps and battle-fields

http://smmercury.com/19299/bartee-haile-woman-pulls-off-civil-war-masquerade/

Clara Barton, Tough Broad

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Another Civil War personality who has changed in my estimation is Clara Barton. Unlike Vallandigham, Lincoln, Joe Johnston et al., though, she has pretty much entered my personal pantheon of saint-like tough broads – a rare combination.

She’s famous, of course, for starting the American Red Cross, but during the war, Barton was a one-woman UN: She went all Doctors Without Borders as a freelance nurse; ran a kind of UNHCR for missing soldiers in Washington; and, with Dorence Atwater, was a de jure two-person UN War Crimes administrator at Andersonville. Imagine what the world would be like with a few more Clara Bartons in it!

Once Barton reached places where the Union and Confederate armies clashed, she cooked gruel, soups and meals for hundreds of patients. Her own apple pie made a good dessert. She changed bed sheets and cleaned bedpans to combat the soldiers’ common curse of dysentery. She cleaned and bandaged wounds — countless amputations among them. She walked along wards and offered sips of water or whiskey. She listened to the lovesick confidences of a soldier whose real name was Mary, a teenage girl runaway from her Maryland family, searching for her sweetheart in a Wisconsin regiment. A soldier wounded at Antietam begged her to cut an unbearable bullet out of his cheek. All Barton had was a penknife — but she did it, with another soldier holding his comrade’s head.

In other words, Barton did a lot of everything that desperately needed to be done.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/compassion-under-fire/

Clara Barton

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The more I learn about Clara Barton, the more in awe of her I become. She went from being a clerk at the outbreak of the war, to being a one-woman clearinghouse of information for families desperate to know what had become of their sons, brothers, fathers and husbands. What a little force of nature!

It was her work in finding the whereabouts of missing soldiers that led her to the boarding house on Seventh Street, from which she operated the “Missing Soldiers Office – 3rd Story, Room 9” said the old metal sign which was also found, with “Miss. Clara Barton” printed at the bottom.

It was said that she collected boxes of letters from grieving families across the country, some sending pictures of their missing young men, with the hopes of finding where they were. Of course, the news was usually bad – most were buried in unmarked or poorly marked graves. Apparently as word of her endeavors spread, so did the inquiries and she is credited with handling over 55,000 pieces of mail during the time the small cramped office was open.