New Jersey's Ladies

Clara Barton

Clara Barton entered the work force first as a teacher - starting at fifteen years of age by establishing a school for the children of the workers at her father's sawmill. This small success encouraged her and she took another teaching position in New Jersey. As luck would have it, Clara eventually resigned that position and turned her attention to the American Civil War.

Clara became known as the "Angel of the Battlefield, caring for the wounded on both sides - an unheard of thing for that time period. After becoming familiar with the work of the International Red Cross in Europe, she organized a similar group in the United States in 1881 - the American Red Cross - and served as its first president.

Cornelia Hancock, 1839-1926
Cornelia Hancock, a Quaker from New Jersey, answered the call for nurses at Gettysburg. At age 23 she was quickly immersed in the horrors of war, which she relayed to her relatives in descriptive, heartfelt letters. After only days of helping the wounded at Gettysburg, Hancock wrote her sister, I feel assured I shall never feel horrified at anything that may happen to me hereafter.
It took nearly five days for some three hundred surgeons to preform the amputations that occurred here, during which time the rebels lay in dying condition without their wounds being dresses or scarcely any food... The Air is rent with petitions to deliver them from their suffering, the compassionate nurse wrote of the wounded and dying. While helping at Gettysburg, Hancock described her own conditions: I am as ... dirty as a pig and as well as I ever was in my life - have a nice bunk and tent about twelve feet square. I have a bed that is made of four crotch sticks and some sticks laid across and pine boughs laid on that with blankets on top. It is equal to any mattress ever made.
Hancocks skills as an organizer as well as her ability to raise supplies made her a very valuable nurse/ In mid - 1864 large numbers of wounded called her south to Virginia. Hancock grew totally disgusted by the carnage wreaked by General Grants tactics, writing, The idea of making a business of maiming men is not worthy of a civilization.
The pitiful conditions at the Contraband Hospital in Washington D.C., spurred Hancock to try to help the plight of freed slaves after the war. She opened the Laing School for Negroes in South Carolina, where she taught for 10 years before moving to Philadelphia. There, Hancock helped found the Childrens Aid Society and Bureau of Information; she dies in 1962.

New Jersey's Civil War Nurses

Prior to the Civil war, army nursing duties were done by the ambulatory male patients. These men were untrained and of little practical use. When the war created a desperate need for more nurses, Dorthea Dix was appointed to supervise women nurses for the Union. Her responsibilities included screening volunteers and establishing the rules for hospital duty. She had strict requirements for her volunteers.....

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N.J. Sanitary Commission

In June of 1861, Elizabeth Blackwell began organizing the relief efforts that would become so important in keeping the Union armies supplied with the goods necessary to care for the wounded during the Civil War. This effort led to the founding of the United States Sanitary Commission. It was primarily a women's volunteer organization that worked to collect lint, roll bandages, sew, knit, gather food and other supplies and raise money to purchase the things needed by the troops. Thousands of women participated in fund raising efforts for the sake of the cause.

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Mother Mary Xavier Mehegan

Founder of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth

The history of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, who are sometimes referred to as the "New Jersey Sisters of Charity" or the "Convent Station Sisters of Charity," is especially interwoven with the founding and development of the Catholic Church in New Jersey, just as Mother Seton's story is interwoven with the early history of our nation and of the Catholic Church in the United States. Under the authority of the first American bishop, John Carroll, Bishop of Baltimore, Mother Seton founded the American Sisters of Charity in 1809, in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Fifty years later, Sister Mary Xavier Mehegan was assigned by the New York Sisters of Charity to take charge of the new community that the first Bishop of Newark, James Roosevelt Bayley, nephew of Mother Seton, wished to establish
For fifty-six years, from 1859 until her death June 24, 1915, Mother Xavier headed the Sisters of Charity. Parish schools, academies, hospitals, a day nursery, orphanages, a home for the incurably ill, and a residence for working women were established.