Ellen Ryan Jolly, who played the leading role in the effort by the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians to have the Nuns of the Battlefield Monument dedicated in Washington, D.C., 100 years ago in 1924, wrote a book, “Nuns of the Battlefield,” that was published three years later by The Providence Visitor Press and included her extensive research documenting how hundreds of Catholic women religious served as nurses during the Civil War. Summarizing that effort, she called it “her labor of love, the assembling of data which would reveal to the world the story of the nearly-forgotten heroism of the brave and saintly women…”
Ellen Ryan Jolly’s “Nuns of the Battlefield” book offers vivid accounts of that wartime service by the nation’s women religious, including members of the following three religious orders that have a historic connection to what in 1939 became the new Archdiocese of Washington. In 1947, the archdiocese that initially just included the nation’s capital was expanded to include the five surrounding Maryland counties. The following information is drawn from Jolly’s book.
The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Kentucky, who formerly served at several Catholic schools in Southern Maryland including Father Andrew White, S.J. School in Leonardtown, were highlighted in the first chapter of “Nuns of the Battlefield.” During the Civil War, members of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth served in a hospital in what had been a Baptist church in Paducah, Kentucky. A young sister in that religious order, Sister Mary Lucy Dosh, was stricken by a fever after helping many wounded soldiers in that makeshift hospital’s fever ward, and she died three days after Christmas in 1861. Jolly’s book describes how soldiers escorted her body on the way to her final resting place:
“With muffled drums and noiseless tread, several files of soldiers, some in the Union Blue and an equal number in the somber Gray of the Confederacy, marched from the Baptist Church Hospital, in which Sister Lucy had died, to the Ohio River, where a gunboat, under a flag of truce, especially designated for the purpose, awaited the precious remains of their cherished friend and nurse, who had given up her young life in the service of her countrymen.”
Jolly wrote that after the brutal Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in 1862, Sisters of Charity “passed from one field to another, dispensing charity and mercy to men of the Blue or the Gray…”
The chapter ends with a list of the names of 31 Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Kentucky, who served as nurses during the Civil War.
Also highlighted in Jolly’s book were the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul in Emmitsburg, Maryland, whose order established the former Providence Hospital in Washington, D.C.; and continues to sponsor Elizabeth Seton High School in Bladensburg, Maryland, and St. Ann’s Center for Children, Youth and Families in Hyattsville, Maryland. The book listed 232 Daughters of Charity who served as nurses during the Civil War, and the author said an equal number of other members of that order whose names were not documented may have also served as nurses then.
In the aftermath of the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, 26 Daughters of Charity serving as wartime nurses sprang into action from Emmitsburg which is 10 miles away, including at St. Francis Xavier Church in Gettysburg, which was converted into a makeshift hospital, with the bodies of wounded soldiers carried onto pews and onto the floor, nave and gallery, while the vestibule served as a surgical room.
Jolly noted that the starched white cornette headpieces that the Daughters of Charity wore then were described by eyewitnesses as fluttering like angel wings as they tended to the wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg. In “Nuns of the Battlefield,” Jolly wrote that the Daughters of Charity helped “pick up the wounded and carry them to farm wagons which had been requisitioned as ambulances… To supply a shortage of bandages, these ‘Angels of Gettysburg’ removed many of their own garments, which were quickly torn into strips and applied to the bodies of bruised and broken and bleeding men.”
The Sisters of the Holy Cross of Notre Dame, Indiana, also played key roles as nurses during the Civil War. In Maryland, the Sisters of the Holy Cross today sponsor Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring and Holy Cross Hospital in Germantown, and The Academy of the Holy Cross in Kensington.
In her book, Jolly named 63 Sisters of the Holy Cross who served as nurses during the Civil War, including in a makeshift hospital at the Jesuits’ St. Aloysius Parish in the nation’s capital, which the author noted had become “a haven to the sick and wounded soldiers who were brought into Washington from the surrounding battlefields. Often in the dead of night, and without an instant’s warning, hundreds of helpless men, officers and private soldiers, drummer boys and buglers, were carried to St. Aloysius and to the devoted care of a corps of Holy Cross sister-nurses.”
