Harriet Dame did not hesitate. When the Civil War “first broke out,” she recalled, decades later, “or was talked of, even, I began to look about me to see what a woman could do, should there ever be real fighting,”
In the spring of 1861, when enlistment emptied her Concord boardinghouse, the 46-year-old former dressmaker began to cook and sew for the men of the First New Hampshire Regiment, encamped across the Merrimack. When sickness spread among the soldiers, she made an infirmary of her unoccupied rooms. And as the first battles in Virginia demonstrated that this civil war would be bloody, costly and long, Harriet Dame made plans to leave her home and livelihood behind, to go wherever she could make a difference in the great struggle of her time.
Our time is skeptical of heroes. From Vietnam to Iraq, our wars have been distant, murderous follies. We thank veterans for their service, but we don’t want to know what we asked them to do. It’s hard for us to imagine ourselves confronting an irrepressible conflict with unselfish idealism.
No Place For A Woman, a deeply moving new book from historian and longtime Concord Monitor editor Mike Pride, tells the story of Harriet Dame’s Civil War. From Bull Run to Gettysburg to Cold Harbor and the siege of Petersburg, Dame offered five years of service and sacrifice. Along with contemporaries including Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton, she pioneered women’s roles in modern medicine and helped reinvent treatments, systems and hospitals to meet a crisis of immeasurable suffering.
Profoundly modest and uncontainably strong-willed, Dame began her war by seeing to the health and comfort of soldiers who had been her boarders, neighbors and friends. Pride’s appreciation for New Hampshire’s capital city guides us back to the Concord of 160 years ago, a lively center busy not only with politics and governance but famous for its manufactures: wagons and coaches, boots and shoes, parlor organs and theatrical wigs. Dame’s boarders included railroad workers, clerks, shopkeepers and seminarians, and no doubt a politician or two.
A stronghold of the still-young Republican party, Concord was politically important enough to rate a visit from presidential hopeful Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. The pages describing Concord’s reaction to Fort Sumter are haunted by former president Franklin Pierce, the only man New Hampshire has ever sent to the White House, a president of whom not much can be said other than that he did as little as any man — and perhaps still less than very few others — to prevent civil war. Even in April 1861, his speeches championed the inertia that had only emboldened Southern fire-eaters. But by then, as Concord newspaperman Henry McFarland wrote, the North was at last shaking off its “strange public stupor” and preparing to meet the slave states’ challenge.
Harriet Dame seems never to have suffered from inertia. Born in 1815 in North Barnstead, she apparently worked hard all her life. She was a seamstress skillful and productive enough to prosper in the competitive field of dressmaking in Boston. When she rejoined her family, now settled in Concord, she ran a profitable boardinghouse while caring for her father.
“[N]arrow in the shoulders and slight in stature,” Pride writes, Dame “did not look like a woman who could withstand years of war,” but her “dark eyes could pierce.” Living the relatively quiet life of a spinster, she might not have been someone neighbors expected to defy the conventions of her time, which were no more accepting of women in medicine than of women casting votes. But the letters, journals, newspapers and memoirs that conjure Dame’s war service don’t seem to record surprise from anyone who knew her well. Friends and family seem to have known that once Harriet made up her mind to do right, there was no stopping her.
No Place For A Woman tells us that governors, generals, doctors and even some women in nursing tried to tell Dame what she couldn’t and shouldn’t do to feed hungry soldiers and ease the suffering of wounded and dying men. Some didn’t think a woman should be anywhere near the war. Some didn’t want her living among soldiers, where she would presumably be both in moral danger and a temptation to sin. Some didn’t want her in field hospitals, assisting at surgery, dealing with the horrors of mutilation and disease. Some didn’t want her on the battlefield, treating the wounded as soon as the shooting stopped.
Dame defied them all.
“She grasped from the start,” Pride writes, “that her place during battle was as close to the battlefield as she could get without entering it during the fighting. Dame had decided at the beginning of the war that women were needed in the field because they could do necessary work that men would not.”
New Hampshire fought a hard war. The Fifth New Hampshire suffered the highest casualty rate of any infantry regiment in the Union armies, and more than 6,000 New Hampshire men died to defeat slavery. (Yes, Confederate apologists and white supremacists still insist that Southerners fought to defend “state’s rights” and not for slavery, and that Northerners didn’t fight against slavery but for the Union. And they’re still wrong, because the only “right” any Southern state was willing to go to war for was the “right” to enslave human beings. And the only threat to the Union was Southern states’ insistence on expanding slavery – or making war.)
Many thousands of Granite State soldiers were wounded, and countless men who survived credited Harriet Dame with saving their lives. Her unhesitating devotion to community, humanity and principle were remembered until the last New Hampshire veterans passed away, almost a hundred years ago. Old soldiers’ gratitude inspired belated state and federal recognition of Dame’s achievement, prompting newspaper stories and reminiscences that are rich sources for No Place For A Woman. Dame “left for the front,” Pride writes, “as a matron in the Second New Hampshire before a single major battle had been fought. By the time she quit the army eight months after the war ended, the Second was just one of many regiments whose soldiers considered her a saint.”
William Craig is the author of Yankee Come Home: On the Road from Guantanamo to San Juan Hill. He teaches creative writing at Dartmouth College.