Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

When she was working in one of the tents, a soldier rushed to the door and told her that an Ohio boy had nearly bled to death. As she wrote her family the next day, “I went in and there was one of ‘my boys’ nearly gone, he had lost a great deal of blood from his arm. I went to him and as he saw me, he called ‘Oh Sister,’ and seized my hand with his whole hand and for a few minutes he just clenched my fingers, he was in such agony. I spent a long time with him, bathing his head and face and giving him stimulus.” Three days later the boy died. “It was a strange burial; two or three soldiers, two Sanitary men and myself. The Episcopal service was read, then prayer was offered. It was a solemn and affecting sight.”⁸⁵

Lucy knew the deep affection the wounded soldiers felt for her. “This morning one of ‘my boys’ who is going to be carried to Washington asked me for my address, and told me if I would come out into the country where his folks live, he would show how country people could treat me, and the tears ran down his face as he talked. He and a comrade lay side by side badly wounded in the thigh and leg. The most unselfish persons I ever met are these soldiers. One wouldn’t take a delicacy for fear another needs it more than he does, and so it is all through the tents.”

Most of Lucy’s boys were taken immediately up to Washington on the steamer Connecticut.⁸⁶ Even thirty-nine years later, J. A. Sager would remember gratefully how Lucy placed two cots side by side for him and his buddy, then gave them a bottle of wine to keep up their strength on the voyage north. Sager also recalled Lucy running after a burial detail carrying the body of another Ohio boy, to clip off a lock of hair for his wife.⁸⁷

Lucy sat with Franky for several hours. She wrote a letter to his mother, and he gave her two rings to send her. He had carved one of the rings from a nutshell, and his pathetic possessions included skeins of green and yellow sewing silk he had picked up at Fairfax Court House. “The terrible pain he had suffered was nearly gone; he was very weak and hiccoughed badly, and I sat with him on the grass and fanned him and hummed ‘There is a Light in the Window Brother.’ I told him he could not get any better — that he was almost home. I told him of Jesus, and that if he would ask him to be with him when he went through the dark valley, he would lead him safely through, for he had promised to. I asked him if he was afraid to die. He said, ‘Oh, no, Jesus will be with me,’ and the tears ran down his face while I spoke of Jesus, of home and Heaven.”⁸⁸

When Lucy asked if he wanted some one to pray with him, Franky replied, “Oh yes.”

“Shall I send for that man that was here on Sunday and sang ‘Homeward Bound?’”

“Homeward bound, homeward bound,” Franky repeated, “Oh yes.”

Lucy sent a nurse to get Mr. Prugh, but another man came first, and they sang and prayed. Franky asked Lucy if she could sing, so she gave him “Jesus Loves Me” and “Rock of Ages.” She asked Franky if he could sing, and he replied “Guess not.”

“I began, ‘I Have a Father in the Promised Land.’ He tried to join me in a broken sort of a way till we came to the last verse, when his voice sounded out much louder, ‘I hope to meet you in the promised land.’

“Mr. Prugh came in and Franky wished it sung again. So we all sang it again. He tried to join in the last verse. We were all very much affected. Franky said ‘tell the man I thank you.’ I bade him good night.” The next day Franky was taken to Washington, where he soon died.

Last Days at the Front
The army camp moved a second time, to City Point where the Appomattox and James rivers joined. The Sanitary Commission arrived on the eighteenth, three days after General Grant began the relocation, but many delays left the Ohio volunteers without beds, blankets, or proper food. The Sanitary workers spent their first day at City Point establishing a feeding station and getting three large barges into position, connected with a gangway. They were a strange sight, because their upper decks were covered by hundreds of crutches.⁸⁹

Fellow nurse Anna Holstein wrote in her diary: “In the morning our rations were very scanty — we had but the remains of what we brought with us from White House. Before a stove could be had, or caldrons in readiness, those who were slightly wounded came straggling in; soon the number increased; and then trains came in sight and were unloaded upon the ground. Battle-smoked and scarred, dusty, weary, and hungry the poor fellows came — looking longingly at anything to eat; from early morning until late at night the scene was the same as at White House — thronged with wounded. It was impossible with the few conveniences at hand to prepare food for all that number.”⁹⁰

Near Lucy’s tent was one belonging to the Christian Commission, an organization of volunteer religious workers informally attached to the Chaplains Corps of the army. Unexpectedly a can of peaches rolled under the edge of the tent, and Lucy discovered it was a gift from a drummer boy named Johnny who had been temporarily detailed to the Commission. Later he peeped into the tent to offer any help the ladies needed, and when he found they lacked a pillow for their weary heads, he dragged in a log that was smooth and dry. In a few days, the drummer boy returned to the battle front, and Lucy tore a piece from her blue checked apron for him to carry into danger as a memento and source of comfort.

The first night at City Point, an officer asked Lucy and Mrs. Greenwood to accept as guest in their tent Clara Barton, the woman who later founded the American Red Cross. Barton had been tending bleeding men since the first days of the war, and after grim experiences in the South Carolina campaign she had returned to the Virginia battlefields only weeks before.⁹¹ Without beds or blankets, the best Lucy could offer was one end of the log and one end of her warm shawl.

After Clara Barton’s departure, Lucy stood at the door of her tent looking at the nearby army camp when suddenly she realized that two men she saw in earnest conversation were President Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, general of the Army of the Potomac. A single soldier stood at a respectful distance, motionless as a statue, guarding the two men on whom the hopes of the Union rested. The President seemed tired, prayerful, humorless. It was a grim time in the conflict, and nearly a year of bloody struggle would stain the earth of Virginia before the South would capitulate.⁹²

It may have been at City Point that Lucy met a lean young man connected with the Christian Commission, William Folwell Bainbridge, perhaps when he came to her tent to borrow a few bottles of Jamaica ginger.⁹³ He had graduated from Rochester University two years earlier, having worked his way through college, and was on summer break from Rochester Theological Seminary. Both of them were Baptists doing volunteer work among the wounded soldiers, so Lucy and William found they had much in common. William’s seminary was open to students from all Protestant denominations, but the Baptist influence was strong, and candidates for admission were required to present certificates of membership in an evangelical church. The seminary supplied its senior students as temporary clergy throughout the region, and its graduates were much sought-after by churches in need of well-educated but fundamentalist ministers. The teachings stressed the divine authority of the Bible, but the training was highly intellectual. Students were instructed in the most convincing arguments for the existence of God and the best refutations for skeptical assaults on their tradition. Official doctrines included original sin, the second coming of Christ, and judgment after death of the righteous and the wicked.⁹⁴

When William entered Rochester Theological, there were just three faculty for 57 students, but they taught a complete curriculum that lasted three years. Sacred Philology required instruction and daily recitations in the languages of the Holy Scriptures: Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin. Biblical Criticism and Exegesis stressed analysis in the original tongues of the texts, while Homiletics prepared students to compose and deliver sermons in English or German. Ecclesiastical History traced the growth and transformation of the Christian church, with special attention to the struggle between state-established churches and non-conforming resistance movements and to “the corruptions and reformations of the Christian life and worship in medieval and modern times.” His father, Samuel McMath Bainbridge, was a Baptist clergyman, and William followed in his father’s footsteps, even to joining the same Delta Upsilon fraternity as his elder.⁹⁵

Although the Sanitary Commission cooperated with the Christian Commission, they were rivals. Lucy herself belonged to an evangelical denomination, but the organization that encompassed Ohio Relief was dominated by the more liberal denominations, and it believed that mercy and good works were the best fulfillment of their religious duties. In contrast, William’s group was founded by evangelicals who primarily sought to win the soldiers’ souls for Christ, with practical assistance to the men being only one means for accomplishing this, another being the distribution of over eight million religious tracts.⁹⁶

The men of the Christian Commission called themselves delegates, rather than clergy, but many were in fact ministers on leave from their pastorates, and all functioned as clergy. They gave sermons, held prayer meetings, wrote letters home on behalf of sick and wounded solders, and offered spiritual advice. This baptism by fire was excellent training for William, preparing him for his pastoral calling. Resolutely Protestant, the Christian Commission refused to distribute prayer books or devotional objects to Catholic soldiers, and some leaders of the Sanitary Commission considered it fierce and vindictive.⁹⁷

Another encounter at City Point was far less pleasant, and it precipitated Lucy’s departure from the battle. On a warm evening, she was writing a letter by candle-light on the packing case that served as her desk, the curtain that was the tent’s door pushed back for ventilation. A civilian entered to chat with Mrs. Greenwood, and she introduced the man to Lucy. There were many letters to write to families of wounded men, so Lucy went back to her work and did not think anything of the matter.

Late that night, when Mrs. Greenwood was away on some errand, there was a tap on Lucy’s tent pole, and she awoke startled, demanding to know who was there and what he wanted. It was the man she had met earlier, and he boldly demanded her sexual favors. Perhaps he mistook Sister Ohio for a common camp follower, or he believed that any woman at the battlefront was fair game. Lucy seized a hatchet she had earlier used to open a box and clanged it down on a pile of nails, exclaiming: “The first man who crosses this threshold will be a dead man!” The man ran like a startled deer.

For the first time in her long ordeal tending the wounded, Lucy sought the aid of Father Prugh and his staff of loyal young men. The next day, her attacker fled to Washington. Shortly afterward, Mrs. Greenwood needed to attend to business back in Cincinnati, and several of the young men who had volunteered to Ohio Relief had come to the ends of furloughs they had been granted by their employers. Thus, it seemed a good time for Lucy’s stint to come to an end as well: “Those weeks under a summer sun in Virginia were very trying; feverish and worn, I was obliged to go to Washington, and then home. It was a service for which, receiving not a cent, yet for worlds I would not have missed — one of the most precious experiences of my life.”⁹⁸

Courtship
Lucy resumed her normal life in Cleveland. A young woman of twenty-two, her education was behind her, the war had proven her maturity, and it was time to begin an adult life. A few months after returning, Lucy received an unexpected visitor. He was one of the men she had served in Virginia, the soldier wounded in both arms who had first called her Sister Ohio. Dressed in the uniform of a major, but with the left sleeve empty, he had regained his health. Recalling the bread and milk she had fed him in that tent in Virginia, he said, “You see, I found out your name and who you were, and I have come to thank you and to have some bread and milk with you. But you won’t have to feed me.” Later he proposed marriage to her, but she gently declined the offer.

Back in Virginia, Grant’s vast army finally defeated Lee’s men, and Ohio proclaimed April 14, 1865, a day of public thanksgiving. One hundred guns fired a salute at the public square, the sound of volleys rolling up Seneca Street to Lucy’s house. Rockets, parades, speeches, church services, and bonfires completed the celebration but could not take Cleveland’s mind away from the terrible cost. The city and surrounding county had sent ten thousand men to the war; seventeen hundred were killed and two thousand maimed.

The next day, the telegraph wire brought the news that Lincoln had been assassinated. His body was sent back to Illinois for burial, but the funeral train would stop at Cleveland and other cities on its way. “In the center of the public square very hastily a pavilion was erected, where the body would lie in state. Flags drooped at half-mast; bands rehearsed the saddest of sad music; a committee of young women, decorated with sashes of black, with busy fingers made up huge rosettes and trimmings of black and of white cambric with which to make more pleasing the pavilion where the dead hero should rest.”⁹⁹

At dawn on April 28, an artillery salute called the people of Cleveland to the Euclid Street railway station. Ohio’s governor vied with various committees and guard units for the crowd’s attention until the canon roared and the dirge began. Six white horses pulled the plumed hearse, and the throng marched solemnly to the Public Square near Lucy’s house. As soon as the casket was placed upon the catafalque, heavy rain began to fall. The Episcopal bishop of Ohio read the burial service, and with one hundred thousand other people, Lucy filed past. “With drawn faces and many a sob, the people came, one after another, to look upon that quiet form, wondering, wondering who could guide the ship of state now that our captain had fallen.”¹⁰⁰

Each mourner would take away a personal memory. Chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, Salmon P. Chase lifted up a child so she could see Lincoln better, saying “Little girl, there lies a great and good man. Never forget him.”¹⁰¹ At the close of the day, despite the rain and lashing wind, thousands marched back to the railway station, and at midnight the train resumed its melancholy journey.

The cultural life of the city returned to normal. John Seaman was especially proud that winter that Cleveland could draw world-famous intellectuals and that his daughter understood their words. “During this lecture course,” she recalled years later, “I heard such eminent men as Ralph Waldo Emerson, John G. Holland, and Wendell Phillips, and feel, now, a certain distinction at having been permitted to listen to these great thinkers while others can only say they have read their works.”¹⁰²

Especially perplexing was Wendell Phillips, the strange but impressive Boston radical who had propagandized for the abolition of slavery for thirty years. Ironically, before the war he was a loud advocate of dissolution of the Union, wanting to free the North from the contamination of the South’s slavery, but not prescient enough to imagine that the South itself could be freed. During the war he criticized Lincoln sharply, demanding an immediate end to slavery, not recognizing the President’s need to keep the border states in the Union until victory would give him the power to proclaim total emancipation. After the war he argued that black men should have the right to vote, but while claiming to be a feminist he told women of both colors to wait their turn for suffrage.¹⁰³

Relations between the sexes, interwoven with the lethal power of medicine, were the dark theme of a drama played out a few doors from the Seaman home, in the offices of Dr. Hosea W. Libbey at 92 Seneca Street. At the very end of 1865, Mrs. Aletha Houghton received treatment from Dr. Libbey, and died a week later in the town of Lorain at the house of Mrs. Mason, her friend. Dr. Libbey was immediately arrested and charged with manslaughter for having caused her death by violence used in effecting an abortion. Newspaper editorials cheered his conviction, saying the evils of criminal abortion were increasing like the plague and must be condemned. Libbey’s protestations of innocence were called cowardice, and the community was shocked to see many women visitors flock to his jail cell. Just when the press was expressing satisfaction over his sentence of eight years in the penitentiary at hard labor, doubts arose. Eventually, Mrs. Mason admitted that she had first taken Mrs. Houghton to a physician in her home town of Wellington, who had botched an abortion attempt. Unsuccessful in undoing the wretched work done to Mrs. Houghton’s body by his colleague, Dr. Libbey had been falsely accused, and after nine months in prison was released by the governor’s pardon.¹⁰⁴

While Cleora quietly practiced her female-centered medicine practically for free, down the street, at 119 Seneca, Dr. Gibson continued to rake in the dollars from the men, treating seminal weakness with electropathy.¹⁰⁵ Despite her experiences on the battlefield, or perhaps because of them, Lucy did not follow her mother into medicine. She apparently had no thought of translating her extensive education into a career, but for the first time began opening her heart to a man, taking the first steps toward marriage. Never before had she “kept company,” and the man she chose was William Folwell Bainbridge, the minister’s son she met when both were serving with relief agencies in northern Virginia.

One evening she went with William to a minstrel show. “My pretty clothes were a satisfying addition to my dignity, but my red hair was a source of discontent. I was extremely sensitive about it. The conversation between the two black-faced comedians therefore struck a tragic note with me.

“‘Sambo,’ said one, ‘has you heard tell how they lights the streets in this city?’

“‘No, sah,’ replied the other. ‘How does they?’

“‘Why, they puts all the red-headed girls on the corners.’

“‘Well, I reckon that was a good idea.’

“‘Yes, so it was, but they had to ’bolish it.’

“‘How come they had to ‘bolish it?’

“‘’Cause they found the policemen got to huggin’ the lamp-posts.’”¹⁰⁶

This joke made Lucy blush in extreme embarrassment. “I felt that it was directed at me personally, and that I was the butt of every laugh in the house. I never did forget the humiliation of that evening.”

William had graduated from Rochester Theological Seminary and became the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Erie, Pennsylvania, in July 1865.¹⁰⁷ Erie lies about a hundred miles from Cleveland, and William could easily travel by train to visit Lucy. The Cleveland and Erie Railroad sent five trains a day in each direction, and the express took three hours and five minutes, compared with four hours for the local.¹⁰⁸

William’s father, Samuel McMath Bainbridge, had not lived to see his son ordained, nor to celebrate the Union victory, dying on the first day of 1865.¹⁰⁹ Samuel had been born in Romulus, New York, in 1816, a generation after members of his family had helped found the first Baptist church in that town.¹¹⁰ His father was John Bainbridge, who had worked as a printer in Philadelphia for a few years, but came to Romulus to farm in 1793. In 1799, John married Mary McMath. As a sign of how close-knit the community was, his brother, Mahlon, married Mary’s sister, Elizabeth. Romulus was a tiny hamlet, and the one road led nowhere. Many of the houses were crude log shacks, but Samuel's home, on the east side of the road near the church, was a substantial dwelling.¹¹¹

As a printer’s son, Samuel had early been introduced to the world of letters. His uncles Peter and Absolom both combined the careers of physician and minister, while uncle Abner graduated from a medical college. In 1836 Samuel entered Hamilton Theological Seminary, and was ordained the pastor of a church in Stockbridge, New York, in 1841. That same year, he married Romulus neighbor Mary Price Folwell. To add to the in-breeding, his first cousin, Joanna Bainbridge, married Mary’s brother, Thomas Jefferson Folwell. As proof of the high level of education in this apparently isolated community, one of Joanna's daughters married a Yale professor and her son, William Watts Folwell, became president of the University of Minnesota.¹¹² Mary’s father had graduated from Brown in Providence in the class of 1796.

William Folwell Bainbridge was born at Stockbridge in 1843, and two years later the family moved to Avon, near Rochester, where Samuel was pastor for four and a half years. He became involved in a battle over his alma mater, that came to be known as the great Removal Controversy.¹¹³ In part, this was a religious schism between traditional Baptists who wanted to keep the seminary at Hamilton, and more moderate Baptists and non-Baptists who wanted to transform it into a modern university and move it to Rochester. Samuel was drawn in by fellow alumnus Pharcellus Church, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Rochester, and he served for a time on a committee to organize state Baptists behind the removal. The pro-removal and anti-removal forces jockeyed back and forth, until each was reduced to such crude devices as deceiving the other side about what hour a crucial vote would be taken or scheduling a meeting on a few hours notice so distant parties could not arrive in time. Finally a judge ruled that the school would stay put. Great sums of money were raised on both sides, leading to the establishment of Rochester University and the successful transformation of Hamilton first into Madison University and then into the modern Colgate. In 1848, Pharcellus transferred to a church in Boston, and Samuel moved across the Genesee River to York, where he was pastor of the Second Baptist Church for three and a half years.¹¹⁴

The census taker who visited them on July 25, 1850, found four children in the household — William (age 7), Frances (5), Samuel S. (3) and George Dana (1) — plus a 20-year old Irish helper named Sarah Byrns.¹¹⁵ In 1853, Samuel became pastor of the First Baptist Church of Wheatland, but he remained only one year.¹¹⁶ Two more children were born, Clement in 1853 and Mary in 1855. The family seemed constantly to be moving around in the wilds of western New York state, living for a time at Penn Yan, directly across Seneca Lake from Romulus. The enumerator for the 1860 census found them at Painted Post, not far from Elmira, a family of eight plus an Irish domestic servant named Margaret Larkin. With fifteen hundred dollars personal property, Samuel was listed as a Baptist clergyman; his wife Mary possessed five hundred dollars, and William Folwell Bainbridge, aged seventeen, was a propertyless student.¹¹⁷ Samuel seemed a wanderer, but his college friends called him “able, faithful, fearless.”¹¹⁸ His children were “very beautiful and promising.”¹¹⁹ Every summer of his quarter-century pastorate, he was “prostrated by a terrible sickness” that led William to compare his father to a dauntless overseas missionary who would endure any suffering in service of the Lord.¹²⁰