Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

Analysis
Life is a difficult struggle, composed of mundane burdens that must be carried for years and sudden shocks that sorely try human courage. Throughout his life, John Seaman had to labor both industriously and reliably, year in and year out, to support his family. Cleora did her best to raise her eight children, but she was powerless to help the five who died. Deeply involved in their church, they derived much comfort from deep religious faith. Religion is many things and serves many functions, but fundamentally it compensates people for the terrible limitations of life on earth, where pleasure is fleeting and pain endures until dissolved by death.⁶⁴

From the exchange theory perspective, humans seek what they perceive to be rewards and avoid what they perceive to be costs. For humans as for other animals, seeking and avoiding are energized by emotions, along the dimension occupied by words such as desire and fear. By the very etymology of the word, an emotion is something that causes motion or motivates. Birds and mammals appear to experience the same range of emotions felt by humans, but probably with more limited cognitions. Emotions could be described as the visceral aspect of cognitions, or cognitions as the intellectual aspect of emotions. Exchange theory discusses these facts in connection with the evaluation of explanations.

Explanations are statements about how and why rewards may be obtained and costs are incurred. They are like instructions or recipes for achieving particular goals; they are cognitions intended to satisfy emotions by guiding human action. Because good explanations help people achieve things they desire, explanations are themselves a kind of reward. Unfortunately, many explanations are valueless, and it is difficult to evaluate explanations about how to achieve very valuable and difficult rewards. Evaluation is the determination of the value of any reward, including explanations.

In the absence of a desired reward, explanations often will be accepted which posit attainment of the reward in the distant future or in some non-verifiable context. We call cognitions like this compensators. Compensators are postulations of reward according to explanations that are not readily susceptible to unambiguous evaluation. Religious faith has an advantage over other kinds of compensators, because it is extremely difficult to test such beliefs empirically. Religions are systems of general compensators based on supernatural assumptions. Compensators are a matter of faith, the hope that religion can provide a highly desired reward that is not otherwise available.

The idea that religion is a response to unsatisfied emotions is not new. The first-century satirical writer, Petronius, wrote: "Fear first brought gods into the world."⁶⁵ William James contended: "The ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history; but none the less does religious history show the part which joy has evermore tended to play. Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes secondary, being the gladness of deliverance from the fear."⁶⁶ Either way, religion seems rooted in emotion, and the primary dimension is our feeling about costs and rewards.

Sacred discourse frequently concerns feelings, from guilt to bliss, terror to awe, and longing to ecstasy. The Bible is eloquent in its depiction of human emotion, across the entire spectrum: Job 4:14: "Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake." Job 38:7: "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." John 16:21: "A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world." 2 Corinthians 4:8: "We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair." Luke 13:28: "There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out." And who could forget the comforting words of John 3:16, which testify that even the Lord has emotions: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

However, sane people do not turn to religion for all of life's rewards, and they employ a variety of practical means to ward off costs. Not living in the Garden of Eden, John Seaman had to labor to buy food and shelter for his family. Despite her religious faith, Cleora sought medical cures for her own complaints and experimented with a host of health fads to strengthen her children. People prefer an actual reward to the compensator that merely substitutes for it. Thus even those who believe devoutly in the existence of Heaven will seek to stay alive on earth as long as they can. It was easy to see that religious faith was not a perfect cure for illness, and medical science had achieved notable progress in some areas such as surgery and vaccination against smallpox. Although the members of the Seaman family were highly religious by any standard, witnessing the deaths of loved ones demoralized them, and religious faith help only to a moderate degree to comfort them in their sorrow.

Religion permeated all aspects of the Seaman family's lives, but it did not dominate them. They were self-reliant people in a society and an historical era that rewarded self-reliance. In this, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber might say that they were Protestants.⁶⁷ We should recognize that people of any religious tradition can be self-reliant, but perhaps these pioneer sociologists of religion were right that this tendency is often stronger among the independent denominations of Protestants, and that was certainly the brand of religion practiced by the Seaman family.

Chapter 2:

War Between the States

As they had with her brother Henry, Lucy’s parents searched for a way to lift her spirits. Recognizing Lucy’s intellectual gifts, her mother suggested she explore new horizons at a college away from Cleveland. Lucy agreed, so long as the school was in Massachusetts. Soon they had collected a pile of catalogues from schools and devoted several evenings to debating them. Lucy’s father sat with his feet near the fire, as Cleora passed him one brochure after another for inspection.

Linda Guilford, one of Lucy’s teachers at the Cleveland Female Seminary, strongly recommended the Ipswich Female Seminary just north of Boston. Ipswich had been founded in 1828 by Zilpah Polly Grant and Mary Lyon with a curriculum that stressed English and included sciences, mathematics, theology and philosophy.⁶⁸ Lyon left to found Mount Holyoke College, and Grant closed the school in 1839, but Professor John Cowles of Oberlin College and his wife Eunice reopened it. Ipswich enjoyed a sterling reputation as a teachers college and finishing school that combined evangelical Christianity with high intellectual standards. John Seaman examined the Ipswich brochure, and came across a line that pleased him greatly: “It is the aim of this school to make companionable, healthy, and self-reliant women.” He set down the catalogue, turned to Lucy, and said, “Daughter, you may go to that school.”⁶⁹ Lucy boarded the train for Boston without chaperone, and a night’s lay-over in Albany was followed by a night alone in a Boston hotel where she barricaded the door with tables and chairs against imaginary burglars and ravishers.

Reverend Cowles, she discovered, was blind but had mastered great erudition and taught from memory. Eunice Cowles “was also highly cultured, and her brilliancy put warmth and life and sympathy into the place. I remember the rose-trimmed cap she used to wear over her abundant hair.”⁷⁰

Among the most challenging books assigned was Alexander’s Evidences of Christianity, a collection of essays edited by a Princeton theology professor: Watson’s “Apology for Christianity” and “Apology for the Bible,” Jenyne’s “View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion,” Leslie’s “Short and Easy Method with Deists,” and Paley’s “View of the Evidences of Christianity.” The pages were small, three and a half inches by six, but the print was tiny and the book was nearly as thick as it was wide. The publishers proclaimed, “At a time like the present, when adventurous speculation is at its height, there is no friend of Christianity who may not profit by a recurrence to such a manual; in which he will find spread before his mind the great proofs of religion, for the enlargement of his knowledge, the resolution of his doubts, and the abundant corroboration of his faith.”⁷¹

In time, the mental discipline of such studies, the resolute Christian faith promulgated by the school, and the intense bonds that linked students and teachers drew Lucy out of her depression. “I was homesick and lonely at first,” she later recalled, “and sorrow still tinged my outlook on life.” Many of her free hours were spent in melancholy reverie, and one result was a tender six-stanza poem in which she imagined her dead loved ones waiting for her in the afterlife: “Loving arms are round me twining, heavenly music fills the air — Brother, friend and sister singing, sad but sweet to have you there.” When a Boston newspaper published these verses, her friends in Cleveland hailed her as a poetess, but she was never again able to express serious thoughts in poetry.

One midnight, a mouse entered a trap in the girls’ dormitory. The “snap” awakened the girls, and Lucy invited all of them into her room, where she staged a funeral for the late rodent. They muffled their giggles and conversed in whispers so the institute’s staff would not be awakened from its slumbers. With mock solemnity they laid out the deceased in state on a stand in the middle of Lucy’s room. Four girls stood at the four corners as guard of honor, brooms on their shoulders to simulate muskets. Lucy stood in an attitude of reverence and dignity, holding her copy of Worcester’s Dictionary open to the entry on mouse, she read the definition in lieu of scripture.⁷²

Lucy nodded to another girl who began the eulogy, speaking of the great kindness Mr. Mouse had shown his bereaved wife, noting that he was probably in search of food for her at the time of his tragic accident. Indeed, she was undoubtedly an invalid, even now awaiting his return in vain. The assembly pretended to weep, and Lucy was inconsolable. Acting a glorious faint, she was carried to her bed, where restoratives were successfully administered. Lucy then spoke the final words of the burial service, “dust to dust, ashes to ashes, waiting until the next mouse nibbles in our trap.” She opened her window, gently pinched the mouse in her hair-crimpers, and hurled it into the night.⁷³

Another escapade took Lucy and a girl friend five miles into the country, on foot, to meet a wagon bringing apples. But the farmer failed to appear, and the disappointed girls vowed to take the next team home, whatever it was. Along came a wagon, and her vow forced Lucy to ride all the way on the backs of dead hogs. This adventure prompted the girls to compose poems on the subject of “Apples versus Hogs.”

One April Fool’s Day, Lucy’s pals selected her to play a practical joke on a sentimental friend whose beloved Charlie was away in California. Lucy borrowed some men’s clothing, with a hat pulled down to hide her face, and arrived at the door in the darkness of evening. Other girls excitedly told Charlie’s lover that he had returned unexpectedly and begged to meet her in the parlor. Darkness and the hat, assisted by the blindness of passion, allowed the girl to believe that Lucy really was Charlie, and with loving words she rushed toward her. “Tenderly I put my arms around her and she submitted to the embrace until, unfortunately my hat fell off and then came a shout of ‘April Fool’ from behind the door. I was never quite forgiven by the chagrined girl for this escapade.”⁷⁴

At heart, however, Lucy was a very serious young lady. Every Sunday, the students were required to pay close attention to Reverend Cowles’s sermon and summarize it in a pink notebook that would be graded on Monday morning. After some weeks, Lucy was judged to have written the best essays, so she was sent to Newburyport for a day to visit a former teacher and receive praise from her literary circle.

Especially impressive to Lucy was the day when “Fidelia Fiske, that pioneer missionary in Persia, gathered a few of the girls about her, had them sit on the floor, Persian fashion, and gave them a story of ‘If you love me, lean hard.’ One of that group gave her life to China and another to Turkey.”⁷⁵ Fiske was a graduate of Mount Holyoke and teacher at the college who had been swept up in an 1843 revival and answered the call to join a girls’ mission school in Urumiah, Persia, where she worked for sixteen years before returning to Massachusetts and recruiting many young women to missionary work.

The conflict between North and South continued, but at first Richmond seemed almost as distant as Persia. “As the news was read to us, day by day,” Lucy thought, “we began to realize how personal it was to each one. Near and dear friends, as well as those who belonged to us by blood, were drawn into the warfare. We girls tried to do what little things we could, knitting many pairs of mittens, fashioning them with one finger and a thumb.”⁷⁶ Lucy and her classmates wore red, white and blue sashes in tribute to the Union, as they marched to the graduation ceremonies in the church at the top of the hill. Childhood behind them, the ladies marched back down and scattered to their separate fates.

With the Army in Virginia
In May 1864, Lucy and her mother visited Washington and accompanied friends to a dinner where the head of the Ohio Soldiers’ Aid Society spoke about the terrible slaughter of the war. The Battle of the Wilderness had begun on the fifth of the month, and for the next year the armies of Grant and Lee would be in almost constant contact, with men killed and wounded every day. The first hours were especially horrible, one of the strangest battles ever fought, in the tangled woods that deserved the name Wilderness. The dense underbrush and the smoke from countless fires confused the struggling soldiers who ambushed and counter-ambushed each other as the screams of dying wounded filled the air.⁷⁷

Union losses were running at ten thousand a week, and the man from the Ohio Soldiers’ Aid Society depicted the wretched conditions at Fredericksburg: “Along the river and in the city streets and on the floors of the houses our men are sick, wounded and suffering, helpless and dying.” He explained that he was assembling a relief party of Ohio volunteers that would include a distinguished Methodist clergyman named Prugh from Xenia and a widow from Cincinnati, Mrs. Greenwood. Knowing of Cleora’s extensive medical experience, he begged her to join the expedition. “Take your daughter with you — she can help.”⁷⁸

Having just received a telegram telling of illness and calling her home, Cleora was unable to accept. “But you may send my daughter, and I will go as far as Aquia Creek with her to see whether or not she can be of any use.” R. H. Stevens of Oberlin, Ohio, wrote home that the Ohio relief workers “have the good fortune to secure the services of Mrs. Seaman and daughter of Cleveland, and Mrs. Greenwood of Cincinnati, whose cheering words and countenances beaming with sympathy and love, will carry hope and joy into the heart of many a poor sufferer.”⁷⁹

Ohio Relief was one of many local organizations operating under the aegis of the United States Sanitary Commission, a private group that Abraham Lincoln scornfully called the army’s “fifth wheel.” Throughout the war, it struggled against an indifferent administration to establish its legitimacy and collect donations to bring adequate care to sick and wounded northern soldiers. The truth was that the army’s own medical corps was thoroughly inadequate. Wounded men were often left lying on the battlefield in agony for as much as two or three days, and when finally carried back on stretchers or in wagons they received poor care. One reason was the combination of incompetence and corruption that marked most Union efforts almost until the very end of the war. Another was the reluctance of Lincoln and other northern politicians to acknowledge the high level of sacrifice that would be required to defeat the Confederacy. Into this shameful gap came the Sanitary Commission, which established relief kitchens and stationed attendants to give what help they could.⁸⁰

The group boarded a transport boat at Washington and went down the Potomac a short distance into Virginia to meet a train bringing wounded up from Fredericksburg. Surveying the small town of wharves and tents that comprised Aquia Creek, Dr. Lewis Henry Steiner called it “vile, stinking, and miserable.”⁸¹ For her own part, Lucy knew that none of the conventional courtesies appreciated by ladies could be expected under such extreme circumstances, and she understood that it was her duty to help the men, no matter how horrifying their condition, and to avoid becoming a burden. She later described the appalling sight that greeted them:

“Oh, what a procession that was from train to transport — men hobbling, limping, staggering — each man able to help lending a hand to those utterly helpless. There were few stretchers; blankets, and even sheets, were improvised for carrying the men who could not walk. Wounded, sick, and faint, they reeled from the railway to the friendly boat, where they gladly lay down on the hard boards. A narrow pathway was left between the feet of the two rows of men packed closely together on the floor of the transport. The few doctors were indeed busy and very quickly used my mother’s practical knowledge of medicine and nursing.”⁸²

The men craved water. Lucy took a pail, filled it, and went among them, moistening their lips and cleaning their bandages. No one realized at the time that the rags spread infection from wound to wound, and the men took immense comfort when Lucy washed their hands and faces. A doctor hurried past and told her to make some milk punch. “We must keep these fellows alive till we get them to Washington.” Through the darkness of night, the boat worked its way upstream. Often, as Lucy knelt besides a man, bringing a spoonful of punch to his lips, he would beg God to bless her.

When the transport reached Washington, the living were carried to hospitals and the dead were delivered to Arlington cemetery. The boat was quickly prepared to fetch another group of wounded, and the leader of the party begged Lucy to return with them, promising Cleora that Father Prugh would watch over her daughter. With just a few moments to spare Lucy said farewell to her mother and turned again toward the war. The party of Ohio volunteers established their first base at Port Royal on the Rappahannock.

Lucy received no uniform, and she had to make do with an ordinary gingham dress and blue checked apron. Her mother lent her a great shawl that could double as a blanket in emergency. The state of Ohio provided a good umbrella, suitable to ward off either sun or rain, and a red silk badge with gold lettering: “OHIO Relief Committee, Office of Ohio State Agency: 344 Penn. Ave., Corner 7th Street.” The state also provided condensed milk, sugar, canned fruits, jellies, and other special foods for the men.

Lucy would forever remember kneeling beside the body of a man blackened by dirt, gunpowder, and sunburn. His bandages were hard with dried blood, and he did not move. On the chance that he was still alive, Lucy bathed his face and bandages, and in a moment his eyes opened. She improvised a tiny tent over his head and prepared to feed him punch, when a doctor rushed past offering only words of encouragement: “Bully for you, Miss Ohio.”

Later, another soldier called out to her, “Say, please, Ohio Relief, what’s your name?” Instead of answering, Lucy pointed at her badge. The man then called her Sister Ohio, and because both his arms were shot he begged her to feed him. Lucy gave him bread and milk, learned that was an Ohio boy, and tended him for several days until he was transported to a hospital in Washington. From this time, Lucy draw a sense of great honor from the title, Sister Ohio.

In addition to the wounded, Lucy tended men struck by dysentery and other diseases that thrived in the festering filth of the army. Outside one of the tents and lying under its ropes, a boy was doubled up, groaning with stomach cramps. He had been lurching around, unable to stay in one place, and the orderlies were too busy to deal with him. She gave him medicines for the dysentery, fed him, and made him more comfortable on the grass with a warm blanket. Shortly, he was in good enough condition to ship north.

The volunteers moved to White House Landing on the Pamunkey, a major medical base for the Union army when a hospital consisting of one hundred tents had been established there two years earlier. General Grant had set up his headquarters at White House immediately before Lucy arrived.

On Friday, Lucy and Mrs. Greenwood rose early, and took coffee, crackers and milk punch around to the wounded men who had been brought from the front in farm wagons. As she wrote her family later that day, “We found the men needy and very glad to see us.”⁸³ The two of them continued this work until the other nurses took over, and they were able to get their own breakfasts. Then they separated, each going through the tents, “bathing heads and faces with bay rum, giving food and stimulus as needed.”

“In one tent I found three from Ohio, one from New York and one from Michigan; all badly wounded. I fed them, bathed their heads and hands, and furnished them clean clothing from our supplies. I also wrote letters for them to their friends.” The Michigan boy was called Franky, just sixteen years old, from the town of Jackson. He had been shot in both arms and one leg, and the wounds had become gangrenous and infested with maggots. The doctor told Lucy to give the boy all the milk punch he wanted, for he could not live long.

“He said he was not afraid to die; he knew his mother had been praying for him a long time, and he thought Jesus would help him to die if he had to, but he would rather live.” Lucy cared for him all the day, and he seemed to grow stronger. “At noon I took them all some tea, soft bread, apple jelly, and oranges, for which they were grateful.” When she fed Franky, he spoke animatedly, “That tea is good, the best I have had in a long while.” At evening, she brought them supper, told them the news from the front, and said good night. With feeling, they replied, “God bless you!”

Saturday morning, the nurses heard that about twenty Ohio cavalry were at a hospital tent a mile away from their camp, so six of them went down, carrying baskets, pails, and bottles of supplies. Among the wounded was the chaplain of a Connecticut regiment. Lucy wrote home, “One case interested me very much; his intellectual and refined face covered with dirt, lying on an old blanket in his thin military clothes, in a raging fever. Not a person to give him a drink, and needing care very much.”⁸⁴ Rain added to the misery, and she feared that her Michigan boy would not last the day.

Sunday morning she devoted half an hour to Franky, through she could hardly spare a moment for this “poor, lonesome, wounded boy.” In the afternoon, with Mrs. Greenwood and another lady, she visited the tent of Ohio boys and sang “Homeward Bound.” Mr. Prugh read the twenty-third psalm, “The Lord is My Shepherd,” and after a few minutes chatting, they all prayed.