As I was searching for educational items to include in my exhibits, I endeavored to spotlight, as equally as possible, the various women religious who served as Civil War nurses. At first, I had planned to feature three communities of Catholic nuns: the Daughters of Charity, the Sisters of Charity, and the Sisters of Mercy based on the types of materials that I found. For example, I had located photographs from the National Archives of a Sister of Mercy and a Sister of Charity. Even though the two women had been called Sisters of Mercy and both had misspellings in their names, I wanted to use their portraits in my project to demonstrate the common misconception that all of the sister-nurses in the 1860s were members of the same order. Another reason that it’s important for me to incorporate photographs of the Catholic sisters is for the purpose of annotating the Nuns of the Battlefield monument with the different communities represented in my final project. Because the nuns are standing side by side in the sculpture, viewers can see that they are wearing unique religious habits. Furthermore, I also intended to annotate one of the portraits from Mathew Brady’s Civil War-Era Personalities collection to point out the distinctive parts of a Sister of Mercy habit.
To identify the religious sisters in the photographs I came across, I cross-referenced their names, orders, convent location, and place of birth on a list from the Catholic University of America archives. This compilation of 580 Catholic nuns was filed with the War Department in Washington, D.C. following a petition by the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians to honor the soldier-sisters who were nurses during the Civil War. If I was not able to confirm that a sister-nurse was on the Nuns of the Battlefield list, then I did not add that item to my exhibit inventory. Since there has also been some confusion in distinguishing between the Sisters of Charity and the Daughters of Charity, as both names have been employed in an interchangeable manner, I hope to clear up the mystery with a photograph of Sister Mary Gonzaga Grace, the superioress of the Daughters of Charity who staffed Satterlee Hospital in Philadelphia. Unlike the Sisters of Charity who wore black bonnets, the Daughters of Charity donned an iconic white headpiece known as a cornette.
After discovering that many nuns nursed wounded soldiers on Mississippi River hospital ships such as the U.S.S. Red Rover, I decided to highlight the Sisters of the Holy Cross as well and chose a photograph of Mother Angela Gillespie, founder of the Holy Cross Nursing Sisters. Additionally, in realizing that the majority of my items were associated with the Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern regions of the United States, I tried to find a few artifacts from the Southeast. One of these items was the gravestone of Mercy Mother Mary de Sales Brown in Vicksburg, MS, who primarily cared for injured Confederate servicemen.
