SOLDIERS of the CROSS, the Authoritative Text The Heroism of Catholic Chaplains and Sisters in the American Civil War
D AV I D P O W E R C O N Y N G H A M Edited by David J. Endres and William B. Kurtz
,
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Published Š 2019 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
°This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Editors’ Introduction
SOLDI ERS OF TH E CRO S S
Introduction
T HE FED ERA L C H A PLAINS Chapter I. Rev. J. F. Trecy: Chaplain th U. S. Cavalry
Chapter II. Rev. J. F. Trecy, Continued
Chapter III. Rev. J. F. Trecy, Continued
Chapter IV. Rev. Joseph C. Carrier, C.S.C.: Chaplain th Missouri Cavalry
Chapter V. Rev. Joseph C. Carrier, C.S.C., Continued
Chapter VI. Rev. Joseph C. Carrier, C.S.C., Continued
Chapter VII. Rev. Joseph C. Carrier, C.S.C., Continued
Chapter VIII. Rev. R. C. Christy: Chaplain th Pennsylvania Volunteers
Chapter IX. Rev. Thomas Scully: Chaplain th Massachusetts Veteran Volunteers
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Chapter X. Rev. Thomas Scully, Continued
Chapter XI. Rev. Peter Tissot, S.J.: Chaplain th New York Volunteers
Chapter XII. Rev. Thomas Willet, S.J.: Chaplain th New York Volunteers
Chapter XIII. Rev. C. L. Egan, O.P.: Chaplain th Massachusetts Volunteers
Chapter XIV. Rev. Paul E. Gillen, C.S.C.: Chaplain th New York Volunteers
Chapter XV. Rev. Innocent A. Bergrath
Chapter XVI. Rev. Peter P. Cooney, C.S.C.: Chaplain th Indiana Volunteers
Chapter XVII. Rev. Thomas Brady: Chaplain th Michigan Volunteers
Chapter XVIII. Rev. William Corby, C.S.C.: Chaplain th New York Volunteers
T H E CONF ED ERATE C H APLAIN S Chapter XIX. Rev. Henry Gache, S.J.: Chaplain th Louisiana Volunteers
Chapter XX. Rev. Charles P. Heuzé
Chapter XXI. Rev. James Sheeran, C.Ss.R.: Chaplain th Louisiana Volunteers
Chapter XXII. Rev. James Sheeran, C.Ss.R., Continued
Chapter XXIII. Rev. James Sheeran, C.Ss.R., Continued
Chapter XXIV. Rev. James Sheeran, C.Ss.R., Continued
Chapter XXV. Rev. James Sheeran, C.Ss.R., Continued
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T HE SI ST ERS Chapter XXVI. The Sisters in the Army
Chapter XXVII. The Sisters of Mercy, Charleston
Chapter XXVIII. The Sisters of Mount St. Vincent, Cincinnati
Chapter XXIX. Mount St. Vincent, St. Joseph’s Military Hospital, Central Park Grounds
Chapter XXX. The Sisters of Mercy, St. Louis
Chapter XXXI. The Sisters of Mercy, New York
Chapter XXXII. The Sisters of Mercy, New York, Continued
Chapter XXXIII. The Sisters of the Holy Cross
Chapter XXXIV. The Sisters of the Holy Cross, Continued
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Editors’ Introduction
The story of Catholic chaplains and sister nurses during the Civil War (–) is generally underappreciated, known mainly to historians of Catholic America. Yet as soon as the war ended, efforts were made to record their wartime contributions and make known their service to historians and the wider public. Their wartime roles were seen as among the most important contributions of Catholics to American society in the nineteenth century, a testimony to selfless service that often transcended regional and religious differences. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholics remembered the accomplishments of both priest chaplains and sister nurses in celebratory books and speeches, by erecting a statue of chaplain William Corby in Gettysburg in , and by building a monument to the “nuns of the battlefield” in Washington, DC, in . American Catholic historians have analyzed, detailed, and celebrated their contributions in a number of articles and a few scholarly books.1 Yet historians’ efforts remain incomplete. The role of chaplains and sister nurses is still underappreciated in the academic world outside of the subfield of American Catholic history. With very few exceptions, they are largely ignored by historians of the conflict and those specializing in gender and social history are often unfamiliar with the religious archives that hold the stories of Catholic chaplains and sister nurses.2 Consequently, their role is usually absent from the general historical narratives of the war. It is hoped that this scholarly edition of David Power Conyngham’s unpublished work, Soldiers of the Cross, will help to bring greater recognition for Catholic chaplains and sister nurses on both sides during the Civil War and help inform future scholarship. xi
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“HOLY JOES” AND “SISTERS OF CHARITY” The service of priest chaplains, on both sides of the conflict, began with the war’s commencement. During the four years of conflict, about fifty priests, often called “Holy Joes” by the soldiers, ministered to the Union’s Catholic soldiers. Another thirty priests ministered to Confederate regiments, providing the sacraments to Catholic soldiers from the South. Other chaplains stationed near battlefields or in proximity to hospitals served in an unofficial capacity, sometimes providing spiritual care indiscriminately to Federal3 and Confederate soldiers.4 The Catholic clergy faced most of the same hardships as their Protestant and Jewish counterparts, not the least of which was the lack of standard regulations for chaplains in the Union and Confederate armies at the conflict’s beginning. Clergymen working in Union hospitals, for example, were not officially considered military chaplains until May . Union regimental chaplains received two rations a day and were paid the same as captains of the cavalry while their Confederate counterparts received only a month. In both cases, chaplains were generally nominated by their regiment’s troops or commander, pending an official commission by the Union or Confederate government. While better paid than enlisted men and treated as officers without an official command, chaplains on both sides shared the tedium of camp life, the difficulty of long muddy or dusty marches, and, occasionally, the possibility of violent death at the front with the men of their regiments. Even hospital chaplains far from the front suffered and even died from diseases they contracted from hospital patients. Chaplains on both sides were generally expected to look after the morale of their men, provide spiritual instruction and preaching, and help take care of the sick and dying. According to one recent study, , men served as chaplains on both sides of the conflict. The approximately Catholic priests were only a very small part of that number.5 The role of Catholic women religious as nurses was more numerically significant than that of the Catholic clergy who served as chaplains. Perhaps twenty percent of all American nuns served as nurses in the war, totaling nearly seven hundred from at least twenty different religious communities. One historian estimated that one in six female
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nurses during the war was a Catholic sister. The sisters, invariably called “Sisters of Charity” or “Sisters of Mercy” no matter their membership in a particular religious congregation, served in proportionally higher numbers than any other group of American women, irrespective of region of origin or denomination. In addition to the Daughters of Charity and Sisters of Charity who comprised more than half of all female religious nurses, significant numbers of Sisters of the Holy Cross, Sisters of St. Joseph, Mercy Sisters, Dominicans, and Franciscans also served. Many of these sister nurses remain unknown, omitted even from the historical record out of a sense of modesty. In some cases, especially when abbreviations were used in records, further research has determined their identities.6 While many Catholic sisters were better trained in nursing than Protestant lay women in the mid-nineteenth century, the sister nurses shared many of the duties and experiences as other women nurses in the Union and Confederacy. When compensated at all, female nurses or hospital workers were poorly paid. To obtain work they required letters of reference from local politicians, prominent civilians, or military officials, and to keep their places they needed to win the trust of the male surgeons and doctors in charge of most Civil War–era hospitals. Many male doctors on both sides initially opposed the appointment of female nurses, preferring instead to employ convalescing male soldiers as helpers around hospital wards. Nonetheless, the famous examples of the English nurse Florence Nightingale and the Sisters of Mercy in the Crimean War (–) paved the way for Civil War female nurses like Kate Cumming in the South and Clara Barton in the North. Nurses cared for the sick, washed clothes, cleaned hospital wards, assisted at surgeries, wrote letters to loved ones, distributed rations and care packages, and did whatever was necessary to comfort their patients. In addition to their filthy and exhausting work, many women contracted diseases from their patients and some died as a result. Despite such dangers, the good service Catholic sisters and Protestant lay women rendered during the war helped pave the way for women’s greater participation in nursing and health care to the present day.7 In the later decades of the nineteenth century, Catholic historians and leaders began to herald publicly the service of Catholic chaplains
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during the war. Among chaplains on both sides, the most famous is Father William Corby, C.S.C., two-time president of the University of Notre Dame and long-serving chaplain of the Union’s famous Irish Brigade. A member of several veterans’ groups including the Grand Army of the Republic, Corby wrote a memoir of his service in that was well received by his fellow veterans and the Catholic community. Corby is memorialized with a bronze statue on the Gettysburg battlefield at the spot where he famously gave absolution “under fire.” A copy of the statue and a large painting depicting the event can be found on prominent display on the University of Notre Dame’s campus.8 James B. Sheeran, C.Ss.R., among the best-known Confederate chaplains, served the many Irishmen of the th Louisiana Infantry. The Irish-born father of three was an unusual candidate for the chaplaincy, entering the priesthood after his wife died. During the war the self-assured Sheeran famously informed his general, Stonewall Jackson: “As a priest of God I outrank every officer in your command. I even outrank you.” Sheeran’s extensive wartime journal, first published in excerpted form in , has been recently published in its entirety, helping to assure that Sheeran will continue to be remembered.9 Despite the fame of a few of the chaplains, the experiences of the rest of the approximately eighty government-recognized priest chaplains and many of the seven hundred sister nurses who served are not well known to Civil War scholars or students of American history. Several recent works detail the contributions of individual chaplains or communities of nuns, but many of their contributions remain obscured because of a lack of published sources.1
DAVID POWER CONYNGHAM David Power Conyngham (–), an Irish American journalist, author, and Civil War veteran, sought to preserve the deeds of Catholic chaplains and sister nurses forever in a work he titled The Soldiers of the Cross, an unpublished manuscript compiled between the late s and his death in . Born in Crohane, County Tipperary, Ireland, Conyngham arrived in the United States in shortly after the begin-
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ning of the conflict as a war correspondent for The Dublin Irishman. In late , armed with letters of introduction, he joined General Thomas Meagher and the Irish Brigade before the Battle of Fredericksburg. In early , Conyngham became a member of Meagher’s staff and served with the brigade at the battles of Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Bristoe Station. In the spring of , he was sent by the New York Herald’s editor, James Gordon Bennett, to cover Union General William T. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign. He not only wrote for the Herald but served as a volunteer aide-de-camp to General Henry M. Judah during the Battle of Resaca in mid-May . Even after Judah was relieved from command, Conyngham continued with Sherman’s forces through their famous March to the Sea and subsequent invasion of the Carolinas. He briefly contemplated a career as a captain in the U.S. Army, for which generals Joseph Hooker and Judah heartily recommended him. Not receiving the appointment, Conyngham returned to life as a journalist and author in New York City. He was officially naturalized on October , , with the endorsement of his friend, the Irish American postmaster of New York City, James Kelly.11 Both a committed Irish nationalist and a devout Catholic, Conyngham wrote a number of novels or historical accounts about Irish saints, Irish history, and his experiences during the Civil War. His Sherman’s March Through the South () provided a first-hand account of his service during the war with General Sherman. His most famous work, however, was The Irish Brigade and Its Campaigns (). Conyngham wrote from personal experience and his own research into the famed brigade’s wartime exploits. The book established the heroic sacrifice of Irish Catholics on behalf of the Union cause, as represented by those who died or were injured in the brigade’s many bloody battles, and his work has been useful to historians ever since. If Soldiers of the Cross had been published shortly after the war, it would have been a complimentary volume to this work, establishing the loyalty, sacrifice, and Christian virtues of the Catholic clergy and sisters on both sides of the conflict.12 Soldiers of the Cross is the fullest record of the Catholic Church’s involvement in the war written during the nineteenth century. Many of Conyngham’s chapters contain new insights into the clergy during the
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war that are unavailable elsewhere, either during his time or ours, making the work valuable to Catholic and Civil War historians.13 The introduction contains over a dozen letters written between and from high-ranking Confederate and Union officials praising the ser vices of Catholic priests and nuns during the war. Such figures as Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Union Surgeon General William Hammond, and Union General George B. McClellan all heaped praise on the religious of the Catholic Church for their selfless devotion to Union and Confederate soldiers. Chapters on Father William Corby, Father Peter Paul Cooney, and the Sisters of the Holy Cross cover subjects relatively well known to Catholic scholars, but others are so useful and unique that they prompted this project to annotate and publish his entire work. The Sisters of Mercy of St. Louis and their wartime efforts on behalf of the sick and imprisoned, for example, are unknown to historians as are the careers of such chaplains as Fathers Innocent A. Bergrath, Paul E. Gillen, C.S.C., and Thomas Scully. Father Jeremiah Trecy, an Alabama resident at the start of the war, soon became the favorite of Catholic General William S. Rosecrans. Trecy’s exploits are well chronicled by Conyngham and present a prime example of the larger manuscript’s worth to historians. Letters from soldiers who had received excellent care from the Sisters of Mercy of Charleston and New York attest to the good work sister nurses did during the war in healing broken bodies and dispelling long-held prejudices toward Catholics and their faith. The apologetic tone of Conyngham’s work throughout, as well as its occasional anti-Protestant bias, reveals much about the state of the Church and its uneasy place in American society at the time. Although Conyngham portrays many examples of Protestants repenting of their anti-Catholic ways during the war, antipathy to the Church and its largely immigrant and Democratic membership remained strong, especially in the North, among many Protestants, Republicans, and nativists. They tended to remember anti-war Catholics’ criticism of President Abraham Lincoln’s wartime policies or Irish Catholic participation in the infamous New York City Draft Riots instead of their service in the Union Army. As a New Yorker, Conyngham would have been familiar with the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic cartoons regularly penned dur-
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ing Reconstruction in Harper’s Weekly by famed Republican cartoonist Thomas Nast.14 Thus Conyngham clearly was determined to portray the Church in the most positive light possible, and his great reverence for the chaplains and especially the sisters may strike modern readers as overly sentimental, too positive, and not sufficiently critical. Thus, both scholars and readers should approach Conyngham’s text with the understanding that his work is part history, part hagiography. Still, most Catholic scholars agree that the sister nurses and chaplains generally left behind a positive legacy.15 Putting aside the many letters praising priests and sisters in this volume’s introduction, there is even more evidence of Protestant contemporaries appreciating what these Catholic men and women did during the war. For example, General Benjamin F. Butler praised Catholic chaplains before a congressional committee in January , stating that he had “never seen a Roman Catholic chaplain that did not do his duty. . . . They have always been faithful, so far as my experience goes.” Similarly, Mary Livermore, an ardent pro-Union, anti-slavery member of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, praised the Sisters of the Holy Cross for their “their devotion, faithfulness, and unobtrusiveness” in tending to patients in Union hospitals.16 If Conyngham was prone to filiopietistic exaggeration, he nonetheless grounded his account in historical reality. Conyngham compiled parts of Soldiers of the Cross from various newspapers, books, and other published sources dealing with Catholic chaplains and sisters during the war. For example, his chapter on Father Peter Paul Cooney, C.S.C., is taken largely from David Stevenson’s Indiana’s Roll of Honor (). In such cases, we have used indentation or other formatting changes to indicate Conyngham’s use of previously published material. Still, much of the work is original, based on his conversations and correspondence with former chaplains and nurses and drawing upon unpublished primary sources. His chapters on another Holy Cross priest, Father Joseph Carrier, contain the only known excerpts of Carrier’s diary from his service in General Ulysses S. Grant’s army at Vicksburg, Mississippi. Likewise, letters of thanks from soldiers or their families to the Sisters of Mercy of New York, who served in hospitals on the North Carolina coast in –, are invaluable sources unavailable elsewhere. The five chapters of the book dedicated to
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Confederate Chaplain Father James Sheeran were based on a much larger diary written by the priest during the war. Had Conyngham published his book during his lifetime, these chapters would have been the first time this important diary had ever been made available to the larger public. Although a modern and scholarly edition of the entire diary was recently published, Conyngham’s use of the diary is presented herein as he intended it to be published.17 After all, the inclusion of Confederates like Sheeran was essential to Conyngham’s argument that the Church had selfless heroes serving soldiers on both sides of the war. Unfortunately, Conyngham died unexpectedly from pneumonia on April , , while serving as the editor of the Catholic weekly New York Tablet. The manuscript then passed into the hands of his brotherin-law, Michael Kerwick, then living in Ireland. In , Kerwick sent it to Father Daniel Hudson, C.S.C., the editor of Ave Maria, a journal published at the University of Notre Dame. Kerwick hoped that Hudson would help him edit and publish the work for sale in the United States. Little of Hudson’s and Kerwick’s correspondence exists, but it is clear the manuscript was not published and was simply archived among the growing collection of Catholic historical items at the university. It received no special attention until rediscovered by Father Thomas McAvoy, C.S.C., a historian and priest at Notre Dame who published important transcriptions of letters written by Father Peter Paul Cooney, C.S.C., a former Notre Dame priest and Civil War chaplain. McAvoy seems to have entertained publishing Soldiers of the Cross himself, for he wrote numerous letters to scholars and historical societies seeking more information about Conyngham’s life. Along with a typescript of the manuscript prepared in the s, the original work still resides at the University of Notre Dame Archives, seldom consulted beyond a handful of Catholic and Civil War scholars.18
STATE OF THE MANUSCRIPT AND EDITORIAL METHOD Soldiers of the Cross, as it exists in manuscript form at the University of Notre Dame, is an early revised draft in Conyngham’s hand and that of
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another, probably a secretary or aide with better handwriting.19 The manuscript shows evidence of Conyngham or an aide having edited the work. Many spelling and grammatical mistakes remained uncorrected, however, and Conyngham was inconsistent in the way he spelled names, capitalized nouns, and abbreviated various places or military ranks. In addition, the table of contents and a few of the chapters, specifically those on the Sisters of the Holy Cross, still exist as multiple drafts.2 While it is difficult to tell when the draft was written, Conyngham clearly began his research by sending inquiries to Catholic authorities and famous Union and Confederate generals between and . The title page does not include any of Conyngham’s later works such as O’Mahoney, Chief of the Comeraghs (), Rose Parnell, the Flower of Avondale (), or Ireland: Past and Present (). Based on these omissions and the draft’s initial descriptions of where various chaplains lived or worked after the war, the work appears to have been substantially drafted by . Thereafter, the manuscript contains minor edits by Conyngham and a few other hands made between and — just a year before Conyngham’s untimely death. Most of these edits updated the status of chaplains after the war (to their new positions or whereabouts in the early s), trimmed the narrative to make it shorter, or softened the tone of the writing, eliminating offensive speech and some of his (or his subjects’) harsher criticisms of Protestants or soldiers on the other side of the war. Unfortunately, some of the manuscript has been lost or frayed at the edges over the years, necessitating the use of the s-era typescript of the manuscript to fill in the blanks. There are many errors in this typescript, which often left in large sections of text that Conyngham had deleted from the handwritten manuscript. The use of this later typescript has been carefully indicated with either square bracketed text or footnotes. The manuscript has been presented as faithfully as possible with as little intervention as possible in order to let Conyngham and his writing style speak for itself. Like many writers of his time, he capitalized words like “Sister” or “Chaplain” that are generally lowercased today, quoted primary sources such as letters in their entirety, and used em
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dashes, commas, and semicolons liberally. Some of his sentences and passages, therefore, will appear stilted or as run-ons to readers. Our original goal was to alter the text only by including short introductory and concluding paragraphs to chapters and explanatory footnotes. Despite these intentions, however, there were many instances where corrections to punctuation and spelling were necessary to make the work more readable and useful to scholars and modern readers. There were numerous grammatical and spelling errors throughout, made by the original manuscript writers or later editors. Given the more polished nature of Conyngham’s spelling and grammar in other works published during his life, it was decided to make silent changes to the manuscript when absolutely necessary. These changes included silently correcting slight misspellings, adding missing punctuation such as periods at the end of sentences or apostrophes in possessives, standardizing inconsistent capitalization, standardizing the way regiments and corps were named, expanding abbreviated military ranks and most place names to their full spelling, creating consistent and uniform chapter titles, and breaking up very long run-on sentences and paragraphs. Occasionally, a phrase or word was restored when a deletion from the manuscript removed words necessary for the sentence’s meaning. In these cases, or when there was a significant spelling error or a missing word was supplied to improve clarity, the intervention was noted with a footnote or square brackets. In choosing to honor Conyngham and his editors’ revisions, text deleted from the manuscript was not included except in the cases noted above or when the text omitted was of potential use to scholars. Because the manuscript was an early draft, personal names were often represented in various spellings, and have been standardized whenever possible. For example, various spellings of Father Jeremiah Trecy’s surname as Trecy, rather than Tracy or Tracey, were standardized since the name’s spelling was not uniform throughout. Finally, a few words could not be deciphered. These are noted in square brackets with a question mark to indicate an indecipherable word and its most likely substitute. In some cases, illegibility or damage to the manuscript prevented us from making a guess, and such cases are indicated as [. . .]. Since Soldiers of the Cross is primarily a religious history of the war, minute details of battles or army movements described by Conyngham
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or his sources were not verified or corrected. If, however, there was a clear mistake such as dating the Battle of Gettysburg to instead of , the error was corrected by inserting the correct word, name, or date in square brackets or in a footnote. Grammatical mistakes, unusual punctuation, and misspellings were usually left unaltered when they occurred in quotations, such as when Conyngham was attempting to represent the Irish brogue phonetically. Just as in his work on the Irish Brigade, Conyngham utilized distinctive Irish accents and diction to add moments of humor to his depictions of the horrific suffering and bloodshed of the Civil War. While our primary focus and the bulk of our time as editors was spent on presenting a faithful transcription of Conyngham’s manuscript, we have included additional, brief contextual information throughout our edited edition. In addition to short biographical and concluding paragraphs for each priest or female religious community, footnotes have been provided where appropriate to explain events and persons likely unfamiliar to general readers. Although every person mentioned in the text could not be positively identified, short biographical annotations for significant religious or military figures and those appearing more than twice in the text were added. In some cases, where information was sparse or the individual’s rank, command, or position are explicitly stated in the text, we provide only a very short footnote with name and life dates. Conyngham generally identified officers, doctors, clergy, civilians, and others only by their surnames, and we have endeavored to provide first names and middle initials in square brackets where the individual first appears in the text. Sources utilized for identification included biographical reference works, studies of chaplains in the war, state and regimental histories, rosters of officers and soldiers, many local histories, clergy directories, an online database of Union surgeons, and digitized military records.21 When employed for identification, the use of these sources was not ordinarily noted in the footnotes. Discursive discussions about military history or the accuracy of battles or military maneuvers as represented by Conyngham or his sources are not included here. Rather, the work’s primary usefulness is the window it provides into the unique and underexplored Catholic experience of the war. The introductions, source citations, and anno-
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tations are thus aimed at this end: to present a useful edited version of Conyngham’s last great work that furthers the public’s and historians’ understanding of the important contributions of Catholic chaplains and sister nurses to the war effort on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. David J. Endres William B. Kurtz