Making of Civil War Memory

‘Recorded in Heaven’: Letters from the ‘Closet Archivium’ and the Making of Civil War Memory
-David McAllister, Archivist

“The Sisters lately with me gave universal satisfaction,” Henry Hollingsworth Smith, MD, wrote to Mother St. John Fournier in June of 1862, referring to the Sisters of Saint Joseph who served as nurses during the Civil War. Smith, the Surgeon-General of Pennsylvania, had charge of the health and welfare of Pennsylvania’s volunteer soldiers. In the first year of the war, medical care remained largely a patchwork of state agencies, volunteer surgeons, and charitable organizations. Pennsylvania’s surgeons cared primarily for Pennsylvania’s soldiers with only limited coordination from the federal government. That system changed in June 1862, when the United States Army assumed direct responsibility for military hospitals and medical personnel. Although their service was ending, Smith wanted Mother St. John to know why. The Sisters, he wrote, “did great good and were very kind and useful.” Then he added a prediction that would prove remarkably optimistic: “It will all be acknowledged soon, but Government is slow.”

Government was slower than Smith imagined. More than six decades passed before the service of the Sisters of Saint Joseph was publicly commemorated with the Civil War monument to religious Sisters dedicated in Washington in 1924. Yet even that recognition did not settle the question. In the years that followed, the Sisters still struggled to convince federal officials that their Civil War service was sufficiently documented to merit government grave markers for the nurses buried at Mount Saint Joseph.

This article follows the trail of correspondence that links Smith’s confident prediction in 1862 with the later campaign for monuments, memorials, and federal recognition. It is not simply a story of wartime service, but of how private letters preserved in an archive became the evidence through which later generations sought to secure a place for the Sisters of Saint Joseph in the national memory of the Civil War.

Any record of the Sisters of Saint Joseph ministering during the war would be scant without the correspondence of Henry Smith. His letters provide first-hand accounts of why the Sisters were called and what they did. Without Smith’s correspondence, the Civil War service of the Philadelphia Sisters would survive only in fragmentary recollections and scattered notes. His letters, preserved in the convent archives for more than sixty years, became the principal evidence upon which later generations defended the Sisters’ place in the history and memory of the Civil War.

Captains of Camp Curtin: January–April 1862
Henry H. Smith stood fretting as he assessed the thousands of volunteer soldiers encamped at the old county fairgrounds just a mile outside Harrisburg. The men, recruits from across the state, marched and trained in the frigid cold of January, waiting to head south and join the Army of the Potomac. The war, not even a year old, was momentarily quiescent, a lull in the fighting as the two armies awaited a thaw in the weather and the resumption of hostilities. Camp Curtin was “a scene of confusion,” and the camp’s two hospitals, of which Smith had charge, were filled with sick soldiers ravaged by measles and typhoid.

By January 1862, Dr. Smith knew he needed help to impose order and cleanliness in the camp hospitals to preserve the health of the soldiers. So, he reached out for help. The camp needed more nurses, he was sure, but not just any nurses. “Whilst beset by applicants,” Dr. Smith’s secretary—his wife—wrote, “every female nurse has been refused. . . The living is rough[,] the pay poor and Dr. Smith knows that nothing but the sentiments of religion could render any nurses contented.” He was “unwilling to trust any but his old friends the Sisters of Saint Joseph.”

He reached out to Mother St. John, whom he knew intimately from his time on staff at Saint Joseph Hospital. She responded with alacrity, sending Mother Monica Pue, Sister Camillus Phelan, and Sister Philomena Maher to the camp the next day. Soon, seven more Sisters followed: Sisters Mary John Kieran, Patrick Ward, Constantia McMenamin, Bruno McMahon, Ignatius Ryan, Xavier Walker, and Felix Haverty.

Without hesitation the Sisters took charge. Almost immediately Dr. Smith could see the difference. “Already each hospital shows the blessings attendant on their presence,” Smith wrote, only a week after they arrived. “Everything is now neat, orderly and comfortable.” Several Sisters stood out as exemplars. “Sister Philomen[a] is Captain of the Ward in the Camp Hospital and has a drummer boy to attend on her. The Sister in the kitchen [Sister Bruno McMahon] is also in authority [and] has a sentry at her kitchen door to make every one wipe their feet and a woman to do the rough work. Sister Camelia [sic – Camillus] is the Major and commands the Surgeons[,] keeping them in good humor and order by sewing on their buttons and other kind acts.”

When the Sisters left the camp in early April, they received approbation and commendation from Dr. Smith and Governor Andrew Curtin. Amidst the “confusion of a constantly changing camp, the Sisters of St. Joseph sacrificing all personal comfort, ministered faithfully and truly, to the comfort and welfare of the sick. Neatness and order and sufficient ministration immediately followed their arrival in camp. . . . The State Authorities,” Governor Curtin wrote, express “their high appreciation of the self-sacrificing spirit which they exhibited among the sick soldiers.”

To the Battlefield in Virginia, April–June 1862
No sooner had the Sisters returned from Harrisburg than Dr. Smith wrote again asking for their help—this time on the battlefields of Virginia. “If three hardy Sisters will volunteer for duty with me[,] I will perhaps be able to take them [to Fortress Monroe]. . . Sister Mary Patrick [Ward] or strong Sisters will be especially useful in cooking for the wounded on the boat which I shall take at the Fortress.” Smith left on April 18th and called on the Sisters to join him by letter the same day. A day later, accompanied by Smith’s quartermaster, Mother Monica Pue and Sisters Mary Patrick Ward and Philomena Maher took a steamboat down to Fortress Monroe. “You are going to, perhaps, the very seat of war to care for the sick and wounded soldiers,” Mother St. John wrote to them. “I may say, happy is your lot, I wish I were able to go and share with you the fatigue and privations.”

Three Sisters proved too few, and less than a week later Dr. Smith was again asking for more. “I have just received a request from Dr. Smith, near Yorktown,” his wife wrote, “that you will allow six more of the Sisters of your Society, to come to him. He promises them good accommodations on a fine Steamer, and Plenty of Occupation.” Five Sisters left for Fortress Monroe on April 28th: Sisters Camillus Phelan, Bruno McMahon, Felix Haverty, Laurentia O’Donnell, and Anselm Jennings. “I at once got them on duty in the Hospital here,” Dr. Smith wrote back to Mother St. John.

The hospitals, in this case, were working paddlewheel steamers. As troops pushed toward the Confederate capital of Richmond by land, the doctors and nurses followed along the river aboard two vessels under Smith’s command, the Whilldin and the Commodore.

As the battles intensified in early May, Dr. Smith’s correspondence unsurprisingly slowed, and the careful voice chronicling the Sisters’ duties disappeared right at the climactic moment. Ironically, just as the Sisters entered the war’s most dangerous work, the documentary record grows quiet. Later recollections preserve flashes of the Sisters’ work, but not the day-to-day detail that survives for Camp Curtin. The difference is instructive: administrative letters are plentiful while the hospitals functioned routinely; once the campaign accelerated into active combat, correspondence yielded to necessity. The archive itself reflects the chaos of war.

On May 6, at the battle of Yorktown, the Whilldin and Commodore steamed down the James River to gather the wounded. “On arriving they went in small boats to the landing, wither the wounded were being carried from the field. It took all night and part of the next day to place the entire number on board the vessels.” Sister Camillus, one of the party gathering the injured, “carried all the canteens of whiskey and other supplies strapped to her back . . . as there was no place to put them.”

The Sisters returned to Union cities in stages as the ships filled with wounded and made their way north—the Commodore to Baltimore, the Whilldin to Philadelphia—and then went out again. Dr. Smith assured Mother St. John that a second trip would be a “pleasanter” one, perhaps ending at Richmond. There was no end at Richmond for the soldiers; the war continued. But for the Sisters, when they returned with the wounded in early June, their service was over. The U.S. Army had taken over the administration of all the hospitals, and Dr. Smith no longer had control over surgeons or nurses.

A Decade’s Labor, and a Quiet Withdrawal
The Sisters’ Civil War service, so carefully documented in Dr. Henry Smith’s wartime correspondence, receded almost immediately after the war. The women who had nursed soldiers at Camp Curtin and aboard the Whilldin and Commodore returned quietly to the ordinary work of the Congregation. Sister Xavier Walker resumed teaching and later served as superior in Baltimore. Sister Ignatius Ryan went on to establish St. John Convent in Newark. Sister Bruno McMahon returned to the infirmary at Mount Saint Joseph, while Sister Laurentia O’Donnell spent decades as superior at St. Philip’s. Like thousands of other veterans of the conflict, they seldom spoke publicly of what they had done. Their service became one chapter among many in long religious lives devoted to parishes, schools, and orphanages.

The archive reflects that silence. “The truth is,” Sister Assisium McEvoy later admitted, “we made no note of the Sisters’ work [in the war], never expecting to be called in for it, and being averse to publicity.” The irony is striking. The very women who had willingly entered military hospitals sought no public remembrance afterward. Had Dr. Smith’s letters not survived in the convent archives, the Philadelphia Sisters’ Civil War service would have remained little more than scattered recollections and fading community tradition. “They made history,” a 1924 article lamented, “but that they wrote not its record, is to those who follow them, now an unavailing regret.”

It took an outsider to ask for proof.

In 1914, Ellen Ryan Jolly—a Rhode Island schoolteacher, civic activist, and member of the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians—began writing to religious communities throughout the country in search of documentation for the women who had served as Civil War nurses. Her campaign would eventually produce the Nuns of the Battlefield Monument in Washington, but before it could produce a monument, it first required an archive. At Mount Saint Joseph, Jolly’s inquiries prompted the Sisters to reopen correspondence that had lain undisturbed in the “closet archivium,” as they called their small repository of records, for more than sixty years. Smith’s letters were read again, names recovered, dates assembled.

Ellen Jolly was not the first to chronicle the work of religious sisters in the Civil War, but she was the most assiduous. George Barton had devoted a brief chapter to the Philadelphia Sisters in Angels of the Battlefield (1897), apparently based on interviews with members of the community. Yet Barton’s work remained largely within Catholic circles, and it was Barton’s version of events, secondhand and slightly removed, that had stood as the closest thing to a public record of the Sisters’ service for nearly two decades. Jolly sought something different—not simply remembrance, but national recognition.

The work of writing the Sisters’ own record was not finished until December 1924, when the Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia published “A Brief Account of the Services, During the Civil War, of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Philadelphia,” signed only “S.S.J.”—almost certainly the work of Sister Assisium McEvoy, who had spent the intervening years assembling it. It was the first time the Congregation had told its own story in its own words. Barton had told it for them once; now, prompted by Jolly’s insistence that the story required proof, the Sisters finally wrote it themselves.

Jolly understood that the monument was about more than remembering Civil War nurses. It was a public argument about who counted as American. “The Catholics of this country have been stigmatized by their enemies as wanting in patriotism,” a reporter paraphrased her, “and yet it is a fact the Catholic nuns have been foremost in the world of succoring the wounded.” A monument dedicated, in the words of Cardinal Gibbons, to Catholic sisters’ “patriotic zeal” would counteract the nativist spirit of the country. Jolly regarded the War Department’s refusal as evidence of the anti-Catholic prejudice she believed shaped federal decision-making. She called the Secretary of War part of “an anti-Catholic Administration.” And when the House of Representatives failed to pass the resolution, she called out the bigotry of the Congressional process.

The bigger problem for Jolly and any recognition of the Sisters was that the War Department required proof of service. What had been memory within the convent now had to satisfy the evidentiary standards of the federal government. Because “the nuns were not enlisted, no statue could be erected,” even though Jolly “furnished the records in the case, including the pension papers of six Sisters.” After years of planning for a monument at Arlington, the War Department in December 1918 granted a site near the Cathedral in Washington instead. It also authorized “the national chairman of the monument committee [Jolly] to apply for official government markers to be placed on the graves of all Sister war nurses buried within the United States.” The War Department wrote to Jolly: “We suggest that you obtain application blanks for those whose graves you wish marked from the Office of the Quartermaster General of the Army. These applications must be filled out and returned to the Quartermaster’s Department, who will ship the markers to any part of the United States.”

For the Sisters of Saint Joseph in Philadelphia, the true reckoning with their history in the Civil War came with a letter from Ellen Jolly in May 1919. “By the morning’s mail,” she wrote Rev. Mother Mary James Rogers, “I had the honor to receive from Quartermaster Gen. Wood of the War Department . . . a long delayed and long expected quantity of application blanks, which I am hastening to forward to you. Will you kindly fill out the blanks of the Civil War Nurses, as far as possible, in accordance with printed instructions.” The Sisters did not fill out the applications, so almost a year later, Jolly sent another note. “Now that the cruel war is over,” she wrote, referring to the recent armistice with Germany, the War Department “is anxious to place official government markers upon the graves of the Sister-war-nurses . . . as soon as possible. I am, therefore, sending blanks which you will please fill in with all data up to date.”

The War Department wanted specifics about the Sisters and their service, but when the SSJs submitted the applications for the grave markers, they could not get the numbers and names correct. “A list you sent this office on Jan’y 31st there are entered only ten names, whereas, on [the] enclosed [list] there are fourteen.” Which was it, Jolly wanted to know. The War Department was already reluctant to verify Sisters’ service. Of the hundreds of names Jolly had submitted to the Quartermaster General from religious congregations across the country, only 89 could be “verified by the official records.” If Rev. Mother truly sought “the glory of the Church,” at a time “when our beloved Government has been more and more secularized by the jealousy of the narrow-minded,” Jolly argued, please send “any additional data.”

So Rev. Mother Mary James Rogers opened the archives to find and verify what information they had about the Civil War nurses. It was not for the praise of the Sisters themselves, for all but two had died, nor for the recognition of the Congregation, but for Ellen Jolly herself. “Not from my hope of success in obtaining recognition for our war nurses,” she wrote, “but only because of your friendly insistence and wonderful self-sacrifice have we attempted again to write the story, only too meagre, in details of those Sisters who ‘went to war.'”

The search itself became a kind of reckoning. After going through the records, Rev. Mother found that eleven of the fourteen Sisters who had served as nurses—eighty percent—were Irish immigrants. Only one was native-born. These were women who had risked disease in camp and shellfire on the battlefield for a country not their own by birth, and Rev. Mother did not miss the significance. “I do not deny we would be glad to have the honor you seek for rendered to the Sisters,” she wrote Jolly, “particularly now when our real Americanism is too often flouted by those braggarts of the pseudo article.” In another postscript, very much unlike her usual restraint, she took a direct swipe at the nativists of the day. “Shall we have the Ku Klux Klan for a chorus on Americanism?” she asked.

The labor bore fruit, at least in part. In April 1922, after the SSJs again submitted affidavits of Civil War service, the War Department sent two grave markers—one for Sister Ignatius Ryan, one for Sister Xavier Walker. Rev. Mother refused to use them. “As it would be very unfair to the memory of the other Sisters to use those two we put them aside,” she wrote. “I cannot see on what grounds stones were sent for them and not for the others, some of whom did much more work than they.” Two markers for fourteen women was not recognition; it was arbitrary, and Rev. Mother would not let the War Department’s incompleteness stand in for the Congregation’s history.

Two years passed before the larger campaign reached its most public moment — and the monument itself was not, in the end, an easy thing to build. The sculptor, Andrew O’Connor, submitted an initial design that provoked vigorous protest from the Irish societies sponsoring the memorial, who objected that his figures depicted the immigrant nuns as they might have looked stepping off the boat at Castle Garden—bedraggled, undignified. O’Connor, for his part, accused his critics of knowing nothing about art. Under protest, he prepared a second model. What was finally built stood twelve feet high on a granite base, its bronze panel ten feet high and five feet wide, depicting twelve figures in bas-relief representing twelve orders of Catholic Sisters, with a central scene of an “Angel of the Battlefield” tending a wounded soldier. It cost some $50,000 and was placed, at the government’s invitation, on a triangular plot opposite St. Matthew’s Cathedral, at the corner of Rhode Island and Connecticut Avenues.

On September 20, 1924, the Nuns of the Battlefield Monument was unveiled in Washington before a large crowd that included bishops, priests, religious women, military officials, and civic leaders. Four Sisters of Saint Joseph traveled from Philadelphia to witness the dedication.

Two days later, on September 22, back at Mount Saint Joseph, the Congregation held its own service—smaller, and unseen by Washington. In the cemetery where the Congregation’s war nurses were already buried, along the path the Sisters called the Via Memoriae, Reverend James Griffin offered a memorial service in honor of “the Soldiers of Christ who went in His Name to attend on the soldiers of war.” No bronze panel marked the spot. No crowd of bishops and generals attended. The Sisters’ own dead lay, as one Sister later put it, “where the rippling waters of the Wissahickon glide”—and it was there, rather than in the nation’s capital, that their community first marked what its own women had done.

For Jolly, the monument honored the Sisterhoods collectively. The government-issued grave markers would honor each woman individually. If the bronze monument proclaimed that Catholic Sisters had served, the white marble stones would identify those who had served by name, one grave at a time. The campaign therefore continued after the dedication in Washington, as the SSJs continued to fill out lists of Sisters who served and Jolly continued to pressure the War Department. In late 1926, Jolly enlisted the aid of Senator Peter Gerry (Dem, RI) to convince the Quartermaster General to release the grave markers for the Sisters in Philadelphia, and once again the SSJs filled out affidavits attesting to their service. Sister Assisium sent the paperwork to Jolly again on November 5, 1926. “I hope they are satisfactory, and that the business so long burdening you may soon be ended.” The Quartermaster Department’s reply only asked if “it is possible to secure any additional information” about the Sisters’ service. That answer returned once more to the archives at Mount Saint Joseph.

There the search reached its limits. The women who had answered Dr. Smith’s call in 1862 had almost all died. Only Sister Anselm Jennings remained, and, as Sister Assisium confessed with disarming honesty, “she does not remember.” There were no diaries of the campaign, no orderly registers of military service, no carefully maintained roster of assignments. “The truth is,” she admitted again, “we made no note of the Sisters’ work [in the war], never expecting to be called in for it, and being averse to publicity.” The surviving correspondence of Dr. Smith, Governor Curtin’s letter of commendation, community annals, and fading memories were assembled as best they could, but the record remained incomplete.

The War Department remained unconvinced. Questions persisted over the number of Philadelphia Sisters who had served and whether their service could be verified from official military records. The archival record that had been sufficient to reconstruct their history proved insufficient to satisfy the federal government’s standards of proof. After months of correspondence, Mother Mary James Rogers brought the matter to a close. “The Sisters whose names were sent you, served under Surgeon General Smith with the Pennsylvania Troops,” she wrote. “We sent all the proofs we had on hand including duplicate of Governor Curtin’s laudatory acknowledgement of their services.” Then, with characteristic restraint, she ended the effort. “Having been called on to ask for the markers, we did so. Now we withdraw the Request. The Sisters’ services are recorded in heaven; we seek no further recognition on earth.”

It is a remarkable ending because it is both resignation and vindication. The government declined to place white marble markers over the graves of the Philadelphia Sisters, yet the letters did not simply survive; when the search for evidence reopened the archive, they permanently altered the historical record. In gathering evidence for the applications, the Congregation reconstructed a history that had never before been written in full. Dr. Henry Smith’s letters, preserved for more than sixty years in the “closet archivium,” became more than old correspondence. They became the foundation upon which the story of the Sisters’ Civil War service could be recovered, written, and remembered.

Coda
Even Rogers’s withdrawal, however, did not end things. In 1932, five years after her letter to the War Department, Jolly wrote again asking for all the data about the war nurses. The request does not survive among the Sisters’ own correspondence; it surfaces instead in the Congregation’s Council Minutes, found decades later by an archivist working through a different set of records. The Council discussed whether pursuing the headstones a second time was worth “taking up the very troublesome work again.” They decided it was. “The opinion was,” the minutes read, “better send the Records lest there should be regret later.”

Neither Jolly nor the Sisters were successful in convincing the War Department in 1932—there are no Civil War grave markers in Mt. St. Joseph Cemetery—but there is no correspondence about the rejection. The anxiety in that one line, the fear of a future regret, born from a past one, is its own small echo of everything that came before. The Sisters who served in the Civil War did not think to leave their record of it. The Sisters who followed them, a generation on, had learned better. They kept the note, tucked in a bound volume, waiting to be found when it was needed.

A Note on Sources
This article draws on the correspondence of Dr. Henry Hollingsworth Smith with Mother St. John Fournier, preserved in the SSJ Archives at Mount Saint Joseph, along with community annals, Governor Andrew Curtin’s 1862 letter of commendation, and the correspondence between Ellen Ryan Jolly and Mothers Mary James Rogers and Assisium McEvoy concerning the Nuns of the Battlefield Monument and the later grave-marker campaign (1919–1927), also held in the SSJ Archives.