African American Nurses in the Civil War

Nursing was not a woman's job before the Civil War, but by 1865, there were over 3,000 nurses serving the Union and Confederacy. In the North, most women nurses worked in military hospitals.

Image: Black nurses with the 13th Massachusetts Infantry
The 13th Mass fought in numerous battles, from the Shenandoah Valley to Bull Run to Antietam

So many women volunteered as Union nurses that the U.S. government hired Dorothea Dix to …Read More...

Female Soldiers and Nurses at Antietam

Fought on September 17, 1862, the Battle of Antietam was the first battle to occur on northern soil, and it is the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with a combined tally of dead, wounded and missing at 22,717. Also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, it took place near Sharpsburg, Maryland and Antietam Creek.

Image: Rochester House Marker
Where Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was treated for his wounds

The battle occurred after …

Union Military Hospital in Washington, DC


Image: Chapel and buildings at Armory Square
Completed U.S. Capitol in …

Romantic Legends of the Civil War

Arabella Griffith married Francis Barlow the day after he enlisted in the Union Army. Francis was a well-established New York lawyer, while Arabella was 10 years his senior and a member of New York high society. The following year she joined him in service to the Union Army.

Image: Arabella Griffith Barlow

Arabella Wharton Griffith was a young woman of twenty-two years when she moved from rural New Jersey to New York City to …Read More...

Civil War Women Prisoners of War

Many of the arguments against women fighting in combat is the fear that they will become prisoners of war. Documentation proves that some soldiers who were discovered to be women during the Civil War were briefly imprisoned. Madame Collier was a Union soldier from East Tennessee who was captured and imprisoned at Belle Isle, Virginia. She continued concealing her gender, but another prisoner learned her secret and reported it to Confederate authorities, who sent …Read More...

Civil War Nurse and Occasional Journalist

Harriet Ward Foote, the oldest child of George Augustus Foote, was born June 25, 1831 in Guilford, Connecticut, on a New England farm - one of those rocky hillsides of which the natives say a man must own two hundred acres at least, or he will starve to death. Harriet was a first cousin of the famous Beecher family, her father being the brother of Roxana Foote Beecher, Lyman Beecher's first wife.

Joseph Russell …