The engravings of blacks were the first that caught my eye. They were among a group of eight from a book published in the late 19th century by a woman named Mary A. Livermore, a narrative of her four years as a nurse in the Union Army where she worked in hospitals and on the front lines tending to wounded soldiers.
Livermore was also an abolitionist, teacher and advocate for women’s rights. She was born in 1820 in Boston, and as a young woman worked as a governess in rural Virginia. There, she witnessed the abomination and cruelty of slavery, including an incident where the plantation owner mercilessly beat a slave girl after he knocked hot coffee from her tray and it spilled on him.
The book was titled “My Story of the War,” and the engravings were copyrighted in 1887. They were created by J.J. Cade of New York from drawings by F.O. Darley and W.P. Sheppard, and apparently first published in 1888 by A.D. Worthington & Co. of Hartford, CT. I was not expecting much empathy in how the slaves were drawn, but I was curious about the circumstances surrounding the events.
Each of the engravings carried a title, along with a passage from the book.
“Fleeing from the Land of Bondage – On the Mississippi River in 1863.”
“Mothers carried their babies on one arm, and led little woolly headed toddlers by the other. Old men and women, gray, nearly blind, some of them bent almost double, bore on their heads and backs the small ‘plunder’ they had ‘toted’ from their homes. They were all going north, like the Israelites, ‘from the land of bondage to a land they knew not.'”
Slaves were brought aboard the steamship Maria Denning, along with wounded Union soldiers that Livermore and the other women attended, according to Livermore’s account. The ship was headed north to St. Louis along the Mississippi. Along the way, they spotted a group of blacks waving frantically for the ship to stop so they could board. The captain did not stop there, but at another dock where blacks, soldiers and mules came on board. Livermore also encountered a black enlisted man who asked her to deliver a young boy to his mother, who had escaped slavery to Chicago.
“Prayer Meeting in a Contraband Camp – Washington 1862.”
“Oh, I’m gwine home to glory – won’t yer go along wid me. Whar de blessed angels beckon, an’ de Lor’ my Saviour be!”
The Union army opened camps for blacks escaping slavery, and Livermore attended a prayer meeting in 1862 at a Washington camp, where blacks were praying and rejoicing over their deliverance. “All knew that the President had issued a Proclamation of Emancipation, and they expected to be free before the end of the war. When they sang their celebrated song, until then always sung stealthily and in secrecy, beginning, ‘Go tell Moses, go down into Egypt, An’ tell King Pharaoh, let my people go,’ the leader improvised verses at the close stilted to their circumstances, and the congregation changed the chorus, shouting with excitement, and gesticulating in a way that would have been terrific had they been less jubilant, ‘He will let my people go!'”
At another prayer meeting in 1865, she found the same enthusiasm. She met an old woman who had been a housekeeper-slave on the plantation where Livermore had been a governess. The woman was the mother of the slave girl who had been brutally beaten. Livermore reminded the woman that she had declared that slavery would end and her people would be avenged. The woman had not forgotten and was not surprised that it was finally happening.
Livermore found conditions deplorable for Union soldiers in the hospitals and on the battlefields. More soldiers died of disease and unsanitary conditions than from the fighting. Some, Livermore wrote, were just as afraid of going to the hospitals as staying in the camps, where they felt care was much better.
Before volunteering with the army, Livermore had lived in Chicago with her husband and children, writing extensively against slavery and for the causes she espoused. She and her husband edited a newspaper, and she helped found two charities.
Volunteering to work for the Union army through the U.S. Sanitation Commission, she assisted at military hospitals in the Midwest. Through her guidance, and with the aid of other volunteers, she provided soldiers with food, medicine, surgical supplies and other items, some of it on the battle front.
She was one of the organizers of the first Sanitary Fair in Chicago in 1863, and asked President Lincoln to donate the original manuscript of the Emancipation Proclamation to sell to raise money for the ailing war effort. He dispatched the original draft, and the document sold for $3,000 (it later burned in the Chicago fire of 1871). The fair raised almost $100,000, and sparked fundraising fairs in other cities.
A year later, 48 copies of the document were printed and signed by Lincoln specifically to raise money for the Great Sanitary Fair in Philadelphia. They were offered for $10 each, but not all were sold.
Livermore’s work was said to have saved the lives of thousands of soldiers, but she is not as well-know as American Red Cross founder Clara Barton.
After the war, Livermore put her sights on women’s rights, helping to form suffrage organizations and becoming a major voice in the movement as a lecturer and writer. Her book of Civil War memories is considered a good history of how women were involved in relief efforts during the war.
Over the next few years, the book seemed to have been published several times, including 1890 and 1896. She died in 1905.
