How Cordelia Harvey Found Triumph in The Midst of Tragedy

The night of April 19, 1862 was cool and dark along the Tennessee River at a small settlement known as Pittsburg Landing. The landing is situated on a swift stretch of the Tennessee River about fifteen miles from the Mississippi state line and was the site of a terrible battle two weeks earlier that had claimed several thousand killed and wounded. Wisconsin Governor, Louis Harvey, along with several doctors and nurses, arrived at the landing to inspect the conditions of the hospitals that cared for his Wisconsin soldiers. As he stepped from one steamboat to another, he lost his footing and fell into the swift black water. Witnesses dove in the dangerous river and swam under the steam ship but could not locate the governor. It would be ten days before his body was found down river. Cordelia Harvey refused to let her late husband’s death be in vain. She vowed to turn her personal tragedy into an unrelentless fight to make sure that soldiers from Wisconsin received the care and attention they needed, no matter where they were located. Governor Edward Salomon, the man who succeeded her husband as governor upon his death, appointed Harvey a “State Sanitary Agent” for Wisconsin soldiers. Little did he know how far and how serious Cordelia Harvey would take her job. Harvey visited soldiers in the field over the next several months, traveling wherever Wisconsin soldiers were located. She organized shipments of supplies, organized staffs, and convinced army officials that many soldiers would heal faster and survive the war if removed from the harsh heat and humidity of Southern hospitals. She eventually convinced General Ulysses S. Grant and President Abraham Lincoln to let her return to Wisconsin and build the first hospital designed for wounded soldiers in the U.S. Her humanitarian work earned her the nickname, Wisconsin’s Florence Nightingale. Cordelia Harvey is an example of someone who turned tragedy into triumph through helping others. This sample essay explores a range of topics, including triumph and tragedy, offering insightful analysis and thought-provoking perspectives.

The Civil War remains the most costly war in American history. Two percent of the United State’s population (620,000) died during the conflict and another one and half percent (476,000) were wounded. America was simply not prepared to fight such a deadly war. Soldiers were often left on their own while waiting for treatment from a doctor. One out of ten soldiers died every hour because of those conditions. Thousands of men suffered from diseases such as, pneumonia, typhoid fever, camp fever, and etc. Some soldiers knew they were going to die and begged for leave, but was not granted. There was not much anyone could do, especially when soldiers had to move camp multiple times. Nurses, doctors, practitioners, anyone who was healthy enough to help the wounded, tried their best, but often caught fever, and became ill themselves. Veteran soldiers had long faces, hollow cheeks, and sunken in eyes, their immune systems were weak from malnutrition.

Cordelia Harvey Was a Women of Action and Courage 

Cordelia Adelaide Perrine was born in upstate New York, in 1824. Later that year, her family moved to Kenosha, Wisconsin. Harvey grew up on a small farm and grew up to be a school teacher before she married. She met and married Louis Harvey of Clinton, Wisconsin in 1847. The young couple worked a country store where her husband used his customers as means to talk politics. In 1859 Louis ran and was elected a state representative and then was appointed as the state’s secretary of state. In 1862, at the urging of his political friends, Louis was elected governor of Wisconsin, Cordelia Harvey became the Wisconsin’s First Lady. During his term, both Cordelia and Louis began to get involved in the welfare of the soldiers from Wisconsin. The couple were highly regarded by the troops who believed that the governor and his wife truly cared about their well being. Governor Harvey stated in one of his reports, 'It would have moved a heart of stone to witness the interviews between the Governor and our wounded heroes. There was something more than formality about these visits, and the men knew it by sure instinct.' During the Governor’s brief visit in Savannah, Tennessee, he wrote to Cordelia. He told her that this trip had been the best one yet, and that he couldn’t wait to tell her all about it, unfortunately, he did not make it home. Cordelia was in Madison, tending to the soldiers families when she received the news of her husband’s death. Cordelia Harvey was not a women to sit around and wallow, she did not mourn long before she was ready to pick up where her husband had left off. She was appointed “State Sanitary Agent,” and immediately began to travel to the camps where Wisconsin soldiers were located.

Her first order of business was to visit the First Wisconsin Cavalry in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The First Wisconsin had been in Cape for several months by the time Cordelia Harvey arrived there in September of 1862. Most of the men had not taken to hot and humid weather of Southeast Missouri. At any given time, a third of the regiment was sick with various ailments such as typhoid fever, diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria. Many of their ailments were the result of bad drinking water. Much of the region in which the First Wisconsin had to patrol was located in a large densely forested swamp. Clean water mainly came from wells and springs, some of which were contaminated by Southern sympathizing guerillas.

Harvey wrote a letter to the executive officer of Cape Girardeau, Brigadier General John McNeil, that: “The First Wisconsin are here and not over one hundred and fifty men are able to do duty and they look like ghosts of their former selves. More than one hundred men are in the hospitals, closely packed in small badly ventilated rooms. They are sick and dying of almost every disease that ‘flesh is heir to.’ Their only nurses are the convalescent patients, who go pale and tottering through the rooms and do all they can, but soon get sick again.” Harvey knew that the only way to truly get these men well again was to get them out of the sweltering heat and into proper beds where they could be monitored and cared for. She wrote to her contacts in the Western Sanitary Commission in St. Louis to send as much supplies as they could, as soon as they could. Even as she wrote for assistance more troopers arrived from a recent raid into Arkansas, many of which could barely stay in their saddles due to illness. She wrote the Governor back in Wisconsin hoping that he would be able to get supplies and possibly more doctors sent to Cape Girardeau: “Yesterday I went to camp with the surgeon, and there on the grass and about one tent lay more than one hundred men waiting for him, it’s a poor and overwhelming sight. I wrote you first to send doctors and men, but I hope now to take a good number of the sick away from here. I am afraid that under the current conditions our boys will not be fit enough to even fight a war”.

Cordelia’s trip to Cape Girardeau was her first real experience of life in the field hospitals of an army on campaign, even she fell seriously ill and was forced to return to Wisconsin to recuperate. One Wisconsin soldier said that no one was immune to the terrible weather conditions and water found in the region, he wrote a local newspaper back home that: “I do not wonder why there is so much sickness among northern soldiers here, for there is no such thing as health, even among the natives. They all look thin, yellow and sickly as people can who are not confined to their beds. This disease is common to all, small children as well as grown persons. The constitution of a child is destroyed before arriving at maturity.”

Her Role and Actions as a Representative of the Wisconsin Aid Society

During her time in Wisconsin, Harvey proposed an idea to area physicians around Madison, Wisconsin. If soldiers had a place to they could be shipped to away from the terrible climate and conditions of the South during summer, their odds were better that they would recover. Her idea was met resistance, local physicians were afraid the soldiers would bring back diseases they contracted in the South, and even if it were possible, no general wants to see his troops leave the area of operations for any reason, they explained.

By 1863 Wisconsin had made Cordelia Harvey an official representative of the Wisconsin Aid Society, an organization founded on the principles that Harvey professed. Harvey's next stop after Cape Girardeau was Memphis, Tennessee. At Memphis she began the same work she had done at Cape Girardeau. Memphis was a large hub for army operations throughout the Western theater of the Civil War. This meant that she had more and higher up officers to do deal with when she ran into conflict from army officers.

General Ulysses S. Grant said that Harvey was often a thorn in his side but that he knew her intentions were true. At first Grant denied all of her requests to send soldiers home. Harvey argued with the general and his staff and refused to be denied to take care of the soldiers that she believed she was obligated to help. Like Brigadier General John McNeil in Cape Girardeau, Grant believed the furlough of troops home to get healthy from severe illness would lead to desertion, but this time she was able to provide proof from her experiences at Cape Girardeau that that simply was not the truth. Finally, Grant compromised with her, she promised to keep detailed records of every patient and notify Grant's staff whenever she was going to grant a furlough. She would keep in direct and timely contact with the generals staff and would personally be responsible that the records were accurate.

In the fall of 1863, Cordelia Harvey had a system in place through the Wisconsin Aid Society that was efficient enough it no longer needed her supervision. She decided to travel to Washington to speak with President Lincoln and the Secretary of the War Edwin Stanton to get support for her idea. Lincoln was very skeptical of this idea. She explained that if the soldiers were forced to stay near the front lines to get treatment from tents while sleeping on the ground, it would be a death sentence. It made five visits total to President Lincoln before he finally authorized her plan. She had prevailed, President Lincoln no doubt understood what Grant meant by her persistence being a thorn in his side. Lincoln only agreed to the plan if she personally supervised the hospital, she later commented that she was not sure if that meant the president had confidence in her ability or if it was to get her out of his side. Cordelia Harvey finally saw a way that she could help a large number of soldiers at a time with the creation of the first soldiers hospital, located in Madison. Upon completion she traveled south and began picking up patients for her new hospital. She was able to procure funds to ship the soldiers north from the Western Sanitary Commission. In all she transported over one hundred sick and wounded soldiers north to Madison, of that group only five would die, a number far beneath what it would have been if the soldiers were left in the field hospitals. In the summer of 1865 the hospital was closed. Cordelia Harvey then set out to convert it to a home for soldiers' orphans, which was opened in January, 1866, and she served as its superintendent until the state took it over in 1867. With an average population of about 250 children, a total of nearly 700 children lived there in the decade following the Civil War. While the Civil War was a time of great conflict and turmoil, people like Cordelia Harvey emerged from the ashes to represent something bigger than themselves. There were no veteran hospitals and certainly no homes dedicated to children who became orphans caused by the war. Cordelia Harvey took the tragedy of the death of her husband and used it as inspiration to do something that would make his and her life worthwhile. Harvey did what she could to triumph over the tragic circumstances of war and the horrors that soldiers experienced.

Conclusion

Serving others offered her peace of mind and a sense of duty to do what was right. In a world driven mainly by men, especially on the battlefield, Harvey jumped right in and made sure that her voice was not only heard but that it would not go away. She used this persistence to wear down those that stood in her way. She knew that eventually they would at least reach a compromise if only to get her to leave them alone. Even the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln saw and understood the devotion that she had to her cause of helping veterans and their families. Cordelia Harvey showed that even with an event as large as the Civil War, one person can make a difference.