Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Kate Cumming, A Report on "Kate", the Journal of a Confederate Nurse (part 3)

Kate Cumming:  Confederate Nurse 
(A report by Dana Casey Jones to the Prattville Dragoons SCV Camp 1524 2/14/2019)

Nursing duties were very broad, and their sufferings were personally sacrificial, and included such as:

--Writing letters for the soldiers, reading letters to the soldiers, reading scriptures and praying over them, reading them their last rights and comforting the dying, often simply holding their hand as they passed.
--Cooking, feeding the sick, making home brewed medicines and poultices, pulverizing charcoal which they used to control bleeding, administering medicines and whiskey, cleaning, washing clothing and bedsheets and bandages, gathering firewood and keeping the stove burning.
--Foraging and begging or bartering for food, milk, water and any other needed supplies; knitting of socks and sewing homespun from raw cotton, and many hours were spent making bandages, cutting them and rolling them.  They also begged for simple necessities such as forks, spoons, knives, and cotton to make mattresses for the soldiers.
--their hardships were:  lack of sleep, sleeping on the floors or boxes, heat exhaustion or extreme cold, hunger, insect infestation, their own illnesses, sheer exhaustion, constant packing and rebuilding as the hospitals migrated, mental and emotional stress, loss of their own loved ones and friends
--costs of simple items- $50.00 for a pair of boots, $2.00 for a pair of socks and $5 for stockings.  Rare luxuries she listed was coffee, sugar, tea, milk, meat

I cannot do justice to her original creative writings, so I thought it best to read some excerpts from the book so you can imagine what it was like to have actually lived through those tragic years.  I want to start with what she penned in her introduction as it sheds light on her motives for wanting her journal published:

“The southerner may learn a lesson from the superhuman endurance of the glorious dead and mutilated living who so nobly did their duty in their country's hour of peril. And the northerner, I trust, when he has brought in review before him, the wrongs of every kind inflicted on us, will cry, Enough!  They have suffered enough!  Let their wounds now be healed instead of opening them afresh.  I have another motive in view.   At the present moment, there are men on trial for ill-treating northern prisoners. This is to me the grossest injustice we have yet suffered.  I would stake my life on the truth of everything which I have related, as an eye-witness, in the following pages.  I have used the simplest language, as truth needs no embellishment.  May I not hope that what I have related in regard to the manner in which I saw prisoners treated, will soften the hearts of the northerners toward the men now undergoing their trial, and make them look a little more to themselves? We begged, time and again, for an exchange, but none was granted. WE starved THEIR prisoners!? But WHO laid waste our corn and wheat fields? And did not we ALL starve?  Have the southern men who were in northern prisons no tales to tell?— of being frozen in their beds, and seeing their comrades freeze to death for want of proper clothing?  Is there no (Henry) Wirz for us to bring to trial? But I must stop; the old feeling comes back; these things are hard to bear. People of the North-- the southerners, have their faults, (but) cruelty is not one of them. If your prisoners suffered, it was from force of circumstances, and not with design.”

She spoke of Lincoln as an evil despot ruler throughout her book.  In 1864 she stated, “ Lincoln has again refused to exchange prisoners. I do think this is the cruelest act of which he is guilty, not only to us, but his own men.  He is fully aware that we can scarcely get enough of the necessaries of life to feed our own men, and how can he expect us to feed his?  Human lives are nothing to him; all the prisoners we have may die of starvation, and I do not expect they would cost him a thought, as all he has to do is to issue a call for so many more thousands to be offered up on his altars of sacrifice.  How long will the people of the North submit to this Moloch?  He knows that every one of our men is of value to us, for we have no the dregs of the earth to draw from; but our every man is a patriot, battling for all that is dear to him.”

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