Civil War
With the outbreak of the American Civil War, Gibbons knew that nurses would be needed to care for the wounded. The United States Sanitary Commission was established in 1861, shortly after the Civil War began, to recruit nurses and to provide adequate medical care to the Union wounded. It would undertake numerous fundraising efforts to raise money for these purposes. When the Commission set up a training base at David's Island Hospital in New York, Gibbons was among the trainees.
She traveled to Washington D.C., to help at the Washington Office Hospital, where she aided wounded officers and distributed supplies. She also helped to establish two field hospitals in Virginia. At Point Lookout, Maryland, the federal government took over a hotel and 100 guest cottages, converting them into a hospital complex with accommodations for 1500 soldiers. It was named Hammond General Hospital. Gibbons vied with Dorothea Dix, the Union Superintendent of Nurses, for control of the hospital. She finally gained an appointment as its head matron. In 1863 she left the facility after the hospital was adapted for use as the Point Lookout Confederate Prison.
In New York City, social tensions increased with the imposition of the draft. Many Irish immigrant working men did not support the war or abolition of slavery; they resented being drafted when wealthier men could pay for substitutes to take their places. With the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, they feared more job competition by blacks and the loss of work or being driven to lower wages. During the New York Draft Riots, ethnic Irish led mob attacks against individual blacks, their residences and businesses, as well as the Colored Orphan Asylum in the largest civil insurrection in United States history. They also attacked residences of known white abolitionists. On Tuesday, July 14, 1863, the Gibbons' Manhattan home at 19 Lamartine Place (now 339 West 29th Street) was attacked by rioters due to the family's connection to Horace Greeley, a nationally noted abolitionist, as well as their political support for the Radical Republican regime in Washington.
Read more about this topic: Abigail Hopper Gibbons
Famous quotes by civil war:
“Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)