Then came the terrible civil war. Mrs. Swisshelm engaged in hospital work, bringing to it the consecration, indomitable energy and eccentric gumption that she displayed in politics and business. She walked through the red tape and professional etiquette which were killing more than bullets were, as she had through conventional chains. She says: “It was often so easy to save a life, where there were the means of living, that a little courage or common sense seemed like a miraculous gift to people whose mental powers had been turned in other directions.” In one hospital she found gangrene, and to her call for lemons, specific for it, she was gravely told by the surgeon that he had made a requisition a week before for them, and could not get them. She telegraphed the _Tribune_:
Hospital gangrene has broken out in Washington, and we want _lemons!_ LEMONS! LEMONS! No man or woman in health has a right to a glass of lemonade till these men have all they need. Send us lemons!
The next day lemons began to pour into Washington, and soon into every hospital in the country. Governor Andrew sent two hundred boxes, and at one time she had twenty ladies with ambulances distributing lemons. Gangrene disappeared.
She felt about equal anger and contempt for masculine indifference and the mushy inefficiency of women who flocked to Washington to nurse in the hospitals. She sarcastically says the vast majority of the women who succeeded in getting into hospitals were much more willing to “kiss him for his mother” than to render the soldier any solid service; they “were capable of any heroism save wearing a dress suitable for hospital work. The very, very few who laid aside their hoops—those instruments of dread and torture—generally donned bloomers and gave offense by airs of independence.”
Mrs. S. was one of three women who followed Grant’s advance upon the Wilderness. Her courage, endurance and good sense never showed to better advantage than during the Petersburg battles.
Mrs. Swisshelm’s marital experience was but an episode to her true career—the counter-irritant that brought out her character. Its unhappiness was due to four causes: 1. Religious differences. Both sides were fanatical, and her husband’s people felt a call to give her no rest till they had got her “converted and saved” by their theological scales. 2. It was a sad case of mother-in-law, on the husband’s side. 3. The brains, character and courage were all on one side. No woman had a higher reverence for strong manly character, and she was married to a male shrew and weakling. But above all she belonged to the last half of the nineteenth century in her ideas of woman’s sphere, and he to the last half of the eighteenth, in his. Aside from this, they loved each other, and after their separation each bore high testimony to the right intention and purity of the other.