Grant in the Wilderness 391the competence of these women gradually
brought the generals around. Clara Barton,
a schoolteacher and government clerk, was
among the first women to dress wounds at
forward stations on the battlefield. After
she ran out of bandages at Antietam, she
dressed wounds with green corn leaves.
The chief surgeon declared her to be “the
angel of the battlefield.” The “proper
sphere” of American women was expand-
ing, another illustration of the modernizing
effect of the war.
Barton,Memoirs About
Medical Life at the Battlefieldatwww.myhistorylab.comGrant in the Wilderness
Grant’s strategy as supreme commander
was simple, logical, and ruthless. He would
attack Lee and try to capture Richmond,
Virginia. General William Tecumseh
Sherman would drive from Chattanooga
toward Atlanta, Georgia. Like a lobster’s
claw, the two armies could then close to
crush all resistance. Early in May 1864
Grant and Sherman commenced opera-
tions, each with more than 100,000 men.
Grant marched the Army of the Potomac directly
into the tangled wilderness area south of the
Rappahannock, where Hooker had been routed a year
earlier. Lee, having only 60,000 men, forced the battle
in the roughest possible country, where Grant found it
difficult to make efficient use of his larger force. For two
days (May 5–6) the Battle of the Wilderness raged.
When it was over, the North had sustained another
18,000 casualties, far more than the Confederates. But
unlike his predecessors, Grant did not fall back after
being checked, nor did he expose his army to the kind of
devastating counterattack at which Lee was so expert.
Instead he shifted his troops to the southeast, attempt-
ing to outflank the Confederates. Divining his intent,
Lee rushed his divisions southeastward and disposed
them behind hastily erected earthworks in well-placed
positions around Spotsylvania Court House. Grant
attacked. After five more days, at a cost to the Union
army of another 12,000 men, the Confederate lines
were still intact.
Grant had grasped the fundamental truth that the
war could be won only by grinding the South down
beneath the weight of numbers. His own losses of
men and equipment could be replaced; Lee’s could
not. When critics complained of the cost, he replied
doggedly that he intended to fight on in the same
manner if it took all summer. Once more he pressed
southeastward in an effort to outflank the enemy. At
Cold Harbor, nine miles from Richmond, he foundReadtheDocumentThe family of a soldier in the 31st Philadelphia Infantry, camps near Washington, DC.
Although both armies discouraged women from following soldier-husbands, the
practice was fairly common. Women proved indispensable as laundresses and cooks.
Although women were initially excluded from army hospitals, the policy quickly
changed and camp women often worked as nurses during battles.
left Atlanta” and their homes. Such women learned to
fend for themselves. “Necessity,” Davidson later wrote
her husband, would “make a different woman of me.”
Large numbers of women also contributed to
the northern war effort. As in the South, farm
women went out into fields to plant and harvest
crops, aided in many instances by new farm
machinery. Many others took jobs in textile facto-
ries; in establishments making shoes, uniforms,
and other supplies for the army; and in govern-
ment agencies. But as was usually the case, the
low wages traditionally paid women acted as a
brake on wage increases for their male colleagues.
Besides working in factories and shops and on
farms, northern women, again like their southern
counterparts, aided the war effort more directly.
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman doctor
of medicine, had already founded the New York
Infirmary for Women and Children. After war broke
out she helped set up what became the U.S.Sanitary
Commission, an organization of women similar to
the Christian Commission dedicated to improving
sanitary conditions at army camps, supplying hospitals
with volunteer nurses, and raising money for medical
supplies. Many thousands of women volunteers took
part in Sanitary Commission and related programs.
An additional 3,000-odd women served as regular
army nurses during the conflict. At the start the high
command of both armies resisted the efforts of women
to help, but necessity and a grudging recognition of