“Through these thirty years or more—my brother and many, many more who could have borne evidence to the faithful work of the Sisters of Mercy in New Berne—have answered the roll call to the Home above. But those days stand out in my memory as clearly as if yesterday, with all the pain, anxiety, hope, fear and faith, and no scenes are more real to me than those hours with those devoted women who were helping God’s children so wisely, so gently, with no thought of reward or glory! God bless their memories to us all.”
General David McMurtrie Gregg ranks as one of the most distinguished cavalry officers that served in the Union Army. No man on either side had a more brilliant record for discretion in camp and bravery in battle. He graduated at West Point, and after meritorious service in the regular army in New Mexico, California, Oregon and Washington Territory he became colonel of the Eighth Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry. He served with his regiment during the entire Peninsular campaign of 1862, and in November of that year he became brigadier general of volunteers. He was placed in command of a division of cavalry on the battlefield of Fredericksburg and served as its commander in the Stoneman’s raid, in the campaigns of Gettysburg, Mine Run, the Wilderness and in front of Petersburg. He commanded the cavalry of the Army of the Potomac from August, 1864, until his resignation from the army, in February, 1865. He was breveted major general United States volunteers, August 1, 1864. General Gregg has occupied many positions of distinction in civil life.
The writer of this volume recently communicated with General Gregg regarding his experiences with the Catholic Sisterhoods in the war, and received the following very interesting reply:
“My Dear Sir: I am in receipt of your letter of the 8th instant, inclosing an article taking from a newspaper published in 1866, and in which the name ‘General Gregg’ is mentioned. The person referred to was my cousin, General John I. Gregg, who commanded one of my brigades.
“I do not recall that at any time in the field I was brought in contact with representatives of any of the Catholic Sisterhoods, yet the mere mention of the matter makes me reminiscent, and whilst my experience with a representative of a Sisterhood was purely personal, it was so pleasant and profitable to me that I cannot refrain from mentioning it. In the summer of 1861 I was made a captain in the Sixth Regular Cavalry, and was ordered East from Oregon, where for several years I had been serving as a lieutenant in the First Dragoons. In crossing the Isthmus of Panama I contracted the low fever of that region.
“In September I joined the Sixth at Bladensburg, near Washington, and after a short time I was prostrated by this fever. Just at this time the regiment was ordered away, and I was left in the camp seriously ill. Stretched on the bottom of an ambulance I was hauled over a rough road to Washington and placed in a bed in the old Kirkwood House in a state of delirium. A few hours after Major Ingalls, who subsequently became Quarter Master General, a warm personal friend, heard of my condition, and with another friend came to the hotel with a carriage, and I was taken to the E Street Infirmary, which was in charge of a surgeon of the regular army. At the entrance of the infirmary stood the doctor, and at his side an elderly Sister of Charity.
“I was carried in and placed in a large room next to the surgeon’s, and was at once put into a clean, comfortable bed. The good Sister, who had some superior rank, saw that I was made comfortable, and, it is needless to say, that after what I had gone through, I felt as though I were in heaven. Then followed weeks of severe illness with typhoid fever. I had the attendance of my own man, and had many visits each day from doctors, stewards and their assistants, but the real nursing was done by another Sister of Charity, Sister Margaret.
“I have never forgotten her gentleness and cheerfulness. She was simply the highest type of a Christian woman. Her good nursing continued for weeks, and I was kept alive only to go through another trying experience, for an a cold and rainy night early in November, and nearly midnight, this infirmary took fire and was entirely destroyed. How I escaped has nothing to do with this narrative, but to my exceeding regret I never again saw Sister Margaret.
“But I have never forgotten her, and when in the street I meet one of the Sisterhood to which she belonged there is in my heart a feeling of respect and gratitude to those self-denying and devoted women who are spending their lives in doing good to their fellow-beings.
“I have written more than I intended, but I love to talk about the good Sister Margaret, and it is not surprising that if, as now, I am inclined to write about her, I allow my pen to run away a little.
“Sincerely yours,
“D. McM. GREGG.“Reading, Pa., Jan. 11, 1898.”
The South Bend Tribune, shortly after the return of the Sisters of the Holy Cross to their convent homes, printed the following:
“When in September, 1861, General Lew Wallace, commanding the Federal forces in Southern Kentucky, applied to St. Mary’s for nurses, Mother Angela, with five other Sisters, hastened to the relief of the suffering soldiers at the camp in Paducah. And before the opening of the year 1862 seventy-five Sisters were sent from St. Mary’s, and her branch houses, to the military hospitals at Louisville, Paducah, Cairo, Mound City, Memphis and Washington.
“Of this number, two died from fever, caught in the discharge of their duties. When the Western flotilla of gunboats opened the Mississippi River Commodore Davis asked and obtained the services of seven Sisters of the Holy Cross to take charge of the floating hospital, in which hundreds of lives were saved. These deeds were not done for the world’s praise; they were the duties to which the lives of the Sisters of the Holy Cross are devoted, whenever suffering humanity requires their help. A memorial of those days now rests in St. Mary’s grounds, in the shape of two immense shattered cannon, captured at Island No. 10, and presented to Mother Angela by the commander of the flotilla. These cannon are destined to be moulded into a statue of ‘Our Lady of Peace,’ and will remain in St. Mary’s grounds as an historical monument of the dark days of our civil war.”
A correspondent of the (Protestant) Church Journal, writing from New Orleans in 1862, highly compliments the Sisters of Charity in that city for the amount of good they are unostentatiously doing, saying among other things:
“One misses here a church hospital. Many of our Federal officers and men are cared for when sick in the Roman Catholic institutions, the Hotel Dieu and the Charity Hospital. The Sisters attend most winningly on their patients and force them to confess on recovering that their own mothers and sisters at home could not have done better for them. On leaving the patient carries away in his hand some Roman Catholic book of prayer, or controversy, or instruction, and in his heart a grateful remembrance of the fair donor, a resolution to peruse the book, and a profound conviction that the Roman Catholic Church, with all its faults, certainly has a soul of true Christian love. Surely the time will come when all churchmen will acknowledge the angelic influence of Christian Sisterhoods in the natural connections between curing the body and renovating the soul, the imperative necessity of organizing Christian and accomplished nurses and placing them in institutions where their love and skill can do the highest possible service.”
The Charleston Mercury, during the siege of that city, said: