LEWIS B. PARSONS,
Col. & Chief of Rail and River Transportation.”
Resting only a few days after my return to my home, I was urged by friends on the Sanitary Commission to assist, with another, a lady of remarkable ability, a Miss Baldwin, in dispensing some surplus funds for the Sanitary Commission, with Headquarters in New York City. This surplus could not, according to their organization, be used for other purposes than for the benefit of soldiers. After much discussion it seemed that the soldiers’ families should be the natural recipients. So during most of that unusually severe winter, 1865-6, I went daily from my home in Brooklyn to New York, and with my companion found many families in need of help, who might otherwise have perished with cold. When spring brought relief, the last dollar of that grand life-saving organization was expended.
ADELAIDE W. SMITH, 1867
This was, of course, before the day of pensions. We continued this work until the funds were exhausted. Then I retired finally from the engrossing activity of hospital life and caring for soldiers’ families, in which I was engaged from 1862 through 1866.
I had been very happy in this ministration that daily brought its reward in the gratitude and appreciation of my “Boys in Blue,” and in the thought that I had done at least what I could in that fearful struggle to save our Union and glorious country.
No one really desires to grow old, but I would not have missed that call for every heart and hand to respond to its duty, even to be young again.
And the star spangled banner
In triumph shall wave,
O’er the land of the free