United States Sanitary Commission
The United States Sanitary Commission (USSC), created in June of 1861, was the largest private war relief charity of the Civil War. Organized to coordinate Union homefront donations, assist in military hospitals, and advise the government on recruitment and medical issues, the men who founded the Commission expected it would provide a national stage for their ideas about class, society, and nation-building. Headed by Henry Whitney Bellows, Unitarian minister of All Souls' Church in New York; landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted; and lawyer George Templeton Strong, the USSC approached the war less as a battle with the institution of slavery than as a contest for postwar political influence and social reform.
The idea of a centralized agency to coordinate home-front charity did not originate with Bellows or his colleagues. Rather, within days of the war's outbreak, a group of upper-class women in New York City, including Drs. Elizabeth Blackwell and Emily Blackwell, formed the Women's Central Relief Association (WCRA) to coordinate the volunteer efforts of homefront women and train female nurses. Seeing the possibilities inherent in a centralized war charity, Bellows stepped in to create a male-run organization, reducing the WCRA to a regional branch of the new Commission.
When the Civil War began, few Americans imagined a long or costly war; indeed, many believed Secretary of State William Seward's prediction that military conflict would be over in three months. Yet even a brief war required levels of material aid and support for recruitment that could overwhelm the meager War Department. Anxious to act on their politics and accustomed to handling the welfare needs of others, thousands of northern middle-class women responded to the war emergency by refocusing their charitable energies and creating soldiers' aid societies to produce uniforms, bandages, hospital clothing, and foodstuffs needed by departing regiments.
Commission leaders never anticipated that the greater part of their energies would be occupied with coaxing women to send their donations to the USSC. Having witnessed women's enthusiasm for early mobilization (and believing that charity was "instinctual" to women), they assumed easy compliance with their philanthropic structure. They failed to comprehend the extent to which the Sanitary Commission represented an incursion into the social prerogative middle-class women had acquired over philanthropy. Nor did they appreciate the realities of household labor and the sacrifices women made to meet demands for supplies. Worse still, by the middle of the war rumors of Sanitary Commission fraud and mishandling of supplies had spread throughout the North. Stories of widespread corruption, including the sale of goods women donated, led many on the homefront to conclude that the USSC was a mere money-making concern, igniting antebellum fears about concentrations of power. As women resisted USSC demands for their labor, they attempted to protect the meanings they attached to their patriotism and their benevolence. In cities and towns throughout the Union, they staged "Sanitary" fairs to raise money for soldiers' welfare, and sent their donations through alternate channels to hedge against misappropriation.
The Sanitary Commission continued its operations until the end of the war, bolstered by Union victories at the front and prodigious canvassing of the Northern homefront. After the war, it boasted of having distributed donations worth over $15 million. Generous with their praise for women's wartime labors, in personal correspondence USSC leaders expressed considerable frustration with the Commission experience. For their part, Northern women displayed ambivalence about the impact of their war work. Women leaders of Sanitary Commission branches were grateful for the opportunities they had for full-time involvement in the great conflict; a number went on to shape careers that utilized the organizational skills and personal contacts they had developed during the war.
For the vast majority of women, their labors in support of the Union left their lives little changed in terms of civil rights. Those who hoped that their participation would demonstrate their fitness for full citizenship were disappointed by their exclusion for suffrage rights in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Nonetheless, countless women took considerable pride in what they accomplished during the war and the real economic value they contributed to the Union.
Civil Liberties, Civil War.
Bibliography
Attie, Jeanie. Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Fredrickson, George M. The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965.
Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
Maxwell, William Quentin. Lincoln's Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission. New York: Longmans, Green, 1956.
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