They were to direct their inquiries to the principles and practices connected with the inspection of recruits and enlisted men, the sanitary condition of volunteers, to the means of preserving and restoring the health and of securing the general comfort and efficiency of the troops, to the proper provision of cooks, nurses and hospitals, and to other subjects of a like nature. The mode by which they proposed to conduct these inquiries was detailed in the letter of the New York delegation to the Secretary of War on the 22d of May. The order appointing them directed that they should correspond freely with the department and with the Medical Bureau concerning these subjects, and on this footing and within these limits their relations with the official authorities were established. To enable them to carry out fully the purposes of their appointment the Surgeon General issued a circular letter announcing the creation of the Commission, and directing all the officers in his department to grant its agents every facility in the prosecution of their duties.

On the 12th of June the gentlemen named as Commissioners in the order of the Secretary of War (with the exception of Professor Wyman, who had declined his appointment) assembled at Washington. They proceeded to organize the Board by the selection of the Rev. Dr. Bellows as president. Their first care was to secure the services of certain gentlemen as colleagues, who were supposed to possess special qualifications, but whose names had not been included in the original warrant. Accordingly Dr. Elisha Harris and Dr. Cornelius R. Agnew were unanimously chosen Commissioners at the first meeting, and George T. Strong and Dr. J. S. Newberry in like manner at the one next succeeding. At different periods during the war Rt. Rev. Bishop Clark, Hon. R. W. Burnet, Hon. Mark Skinner, Hon. Joseph Holt, Horace Binney, Jr., Rev. J. H. Heywood, Prof. Fairman Rogers, J. Huntingdon Wolcott, Charles J. Stille, E. B. McCagg and F. Law Olmstead were elected by the Board members of the Commission.

At the first meeting a “Plan of Organization,” prepared by the president, was presented, discussed and finally adopted. On the 13th the Commission, in a body, waited on the President and Secretary of War, who gave their formal sanction to this plan of organization by affixing to it their signatures. The experiences of the war suggested but little alteration, even in the outline of this report, while to a strict adherence to the general principles it embodied the Sanitary Commission owed much of its wonderful success.

The plan reduced to a practical system and method the principles laid down in the letters of the New York gentlemen to the Government authorities and endeavored to apply them to the actual existing condition of the army. Confining its proposed operations within the limited sphere of “inquiry” and “advice,” which had been assigned to it by the Government, it declared what it proposed to do and by what methods in each of these departments of duty.

In order that its work might be carried on systematically and thoroughly two general committees were created, one respecting “inquiry,” the other “advice.” The object of the first was to determine by all the light which could be derived from experience what must necessarily be the wants and conditions of troops brought together as ours had been, to ascertain exactly how far evils which had proved the scourge of other armies had already invaded our own, and to decide concerning the best measures to be adopted to remove all causes of removable and preventable disease.

Each branch of “inquiry” under this head was referred to a distinct sub-committee. From the first was expected such suggestions of preventable measures as experience in former wars had proved to be absolutely essential; to the second was entrusted the actual inspection, by its own members or their agents, of the camps and hospitals, so that the real condition of the army, in a sanitary point of view, concerning which there were many conflicting rumors, could be definitely known. To the third was referred all questions concerning the improvement of the health and efficiency of the army in respect to diet, clothing, quarters and matters of a similar nature.

In regard to the other branch of duty assigned to the Commission under its appointment, that of “advice,” the Board took the same wide and comprehensive views as had guided them in regard to the needful subjects of inquiry. Their purpose was to “get the opinions and conclusions of the Commission approved by the Medical Bureau, ordered by the War Department and carried out by the officers and men.”

The interest excited in thousands of homes throughout the land, whose inmates were members of aid societies in favor of the Sanitary Commission, and who looked upon it only as the almoner of their vast offerings for the relief of the army, led to the popular error that it was only a relief association upon a grand scale and quite overshadowed in popular estimation its original purpose, if not the peculiar and exclusive work before it. The Commission itself, however, never departed from the true scientific idea and conception of a preventive system, and always regarded the relief system, vast as was the place occupied by it in the war, as inferior in the importance of its results to those due to well considered and thoroughly executed preventive measures.

The Commission at the close of the war established a pension bureau and war claim agency for the benefit of disabled soldiers and their orphans and widows. The entire money receipts of the Commission from 1861 to 1866 were $4,924,480.99, and the value of supplies furnished is estimated at $15,000,000.

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