Posts tagged with: Civil War
Smithsonian in Wartime – A New Web Exhibit!
Founded just a few years before the start of the Civil War, wartime quickly made an impact on the Smithsonian. Though not every conflict could be seen from the Castle towers, the Smithsonian’s location in our nation’s capital has guaranteed that wartime concerns have been a part of life at the Smithsonian. Smithsonian staff have contributed scientific expertise and critical knowledge to the war effort. As a Washington, D.C. institution, our buildings and collections have also had to respond to the threat of wartime danger. To explore the various wartime roles the Smithsonian has played, we have created a new web exhibit, Smithsonian in Wartime, where you can learn more about the Smithsonian during the Civil War, World War I and World War II. Here’s a quick look at what you can find.
During the Civil War, the Smithsonian was close enough to the front lines to see fighting from the Castle towers. The Henry family lived in the Castle and watched the war’s progress with interest as they felt the danger and isolation that the nearby battlefront brought. Secretary Joseph Henry also advised President Abraham Lincoln. He brought balloonist Thaddeus Lowe to the attention of Lincoln and the Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, suggesting that he would be useful for military reconnaissance. Playing to our scientific strengths, the Smithsonian also produced disinfectant for local hospitals treating wounded soldiers. In just two months, the laboratory prepared over a thousand bottles.
As the United States watched World War I unfold and the nation entered the fray, the Smithsonian paid careful attention to the war as it developed. Even before the United States entered the war, men and women at the Smithsonian left their positions to volunteer for military service. While men joined the armed services or transferred to the War Department, Florence A. Graves, an employee of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, left her position to work as a nurse in France. At home, staff created a Red Cross Auxiliary that sponsored an ambulance and sent innumerable mittens, scarves, sweaters, and other knit and sewn items to those who desperately needed them on the front lines.
However, the biggest impact World War I had on the Smithsonian was the War Risk Insurance Bureau moving into the Natural History Building. Set up to provide life insurance for soldiers and sailors shipping out to the front, it grew exponentially along with the armed forces. The Smithsonian closed exhibits and turned the building over to this critical service. Yet just as their exhibit space was shrinking, curators were busy reaching out to those on the front lines to document what was sure to go down in history.
During World War II, the Smithsonian was one of few places in the country that had a long history of research in the Pacific. In addition to the staff who enlisted and volunteered on the home front, the natural history expertise of Smithsonian scientists was put to use creating guides for armed forces sent to the Pacific. This effort culminated in Survival on Land and Sea, a booklet summarizing survival skills and other necessary information. Many servicemen in turn gave back to the Smithsonian. During their travels, servicemen like Sammy Ray, a pharmacist’s mate in the Navy, collected specimens and sent them to the Smithsonian. Even future Secretary S. Dillon Ripley collected for the museum while stationed in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
Smithsonian involvement in the war effort was as varied as the Smithsonian’s many areas of expertise. You can learn more about what you’ve read here in the full exhibit. From its pages you can find links to the documents and photos that trace the Smithsonian’s involvement in the United States’ war efforts. So explore and learn!
Related Resources
Record Unit 298, Smithsonian Institution, Local Notes Newsletter, 1916-1933, Smithsonian Institution Archives
A Field Collector’s Manual in Natural History, Smithsonian institution, 1944, Smithsonian Libraries
The Smithsonian Survival Guide, Smithsonian Air and Space Magazine
Dorothea Dix: Mental Health Reformer and Civil War Nurse
Throughout the next months, the Smithsonian Institution Archives will feature posts related to the Smithsonian and the Civil War in honor of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War.
Throughout her life, Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802–1887) worked in many different occupations to improve the lives of the less fortunate. Dix’s devotion to caring for others was evident from her youth. From an early age, Dorothea was a caregiver to her two younger brothers, and later, to her grandmother. At only fifteen years old, Dorothea began a small school for girls, who were not welcome in public schools at the time. Dix continued to teach for many years, until a troubling experience in a Massachusetts jail influenced her to take up a new cause. Emboldened by her observations of the appalling conditions that mentally ill prisoners were subjected to, Dix visited other prisons throughout the state and successfully petitioned for improvements. She then travelled throughout the US and parts of Europe evaluating prisons and mental hospitals and advocating for better treatment for the mentally ill and less fortunate. She was a caretaker for her family, a school teacher to girls, and an advocate and reformer for the mentally ill. In addition to this impressive list of efforts, during the US Civil War, Dix volunteered her services and directed a body of nurses to minister to injured Union soldiers.
This Women’s History Month we commemorate the altruistic accomplishments of Dorothea Dix, who, we discovered, had an interesting connection to the Smithsonian Institution’s first family. In 1848, she requested that the US Congress set aside lands across the country for facilities for the mentally ill, which initiated legislative deliberations for many years to come. During these years, Dorothea constantly visited Washington, DC, to negotiate with Congress, and became a close friend and frequent house guest of Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and his family. In 1852, Congress finally succeeded in establishing the Government Hospital for the Insane in DC, today known as St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, which formally opened in 1855. In 1863, Joseph Henry was appointed to the board of the hospital, and remained a member until his death in 1878.
At the start of the Civil War in 1861 Dix was inspired to aid the war effort. On April 19, when a Massachusetts regiment en route to Washington was attacked by a secessionist mob in Baltimore, Maryland, Dix immediately took action. She took a train to Baltimore intending to help care for the wounded, but found improvised hospitals already providing aid. She then continued on to DC where, on the same day as the attack in Baltimore, she offered her services as a nurse at the War Department. Though she had no formal medical training or experience, Dix was made Superintendent of the United States Army Nurses on June 10. She quickly and adeptly acquired medical supplies and selected and trained nurses to administer to DC hospitals. Dix was a strict captain, requiring that all of her nurses be over thirty, plain looking, and wear dull uniforms. She earned a reputation for being firm and inflexible, but ran an efficient and effective corps of nurses.
Though extremely busy during the war, Dix did stay in contact with her friends the Henrys. On one occasion in 1861 she visited Joseph Henry to discuss "business connected with the storage of articles for the invalids." Henry noted her exhaustion, and asked Dix why she had walked over instead of riding in a horse-drawn wagon, to which she replied that "her expenses were so great in the way of her sanitary operations that she could not afford to hire a carriage." The following day Henry wrote to Simon Cameron, the Secretary of War, to request that the War Department furnish a one-horse wagon for the use of Dorothea, who was "devoting her time and pecuniary means to the welfare of the army of the United States and with exertions far beyond a prudent regard for [her own] health." Cameron approved of Henry’s suggestion and shared the note with President Abraham Lincoln who did the same. But when a carriage was offered to Dorothea Dix she refused, in keeping with her charitable nature. She wrote to Cameron "I give cheerfully my whole time, mind, strength and income, to the service of my country," and would not "receive any remuneration for what I cheerfully render as a loyal woman."
Dix served as Superintendent of Nurses through the end of the war in 1865, at which time she returned to her work advocating for the mentally ill. She continued this service until her death in 1887.
Also see So Much Need of Service: The Diary of a Civil War Nurse, a 2011 exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which highlights the diary of Civil War nurse Amanda Akin, to learn more about the lives of Civil War era nurses.
From Defense to Decoration: the Renwick Gallery in the Civil War
Throughout the next months, the Smithsonian Institution Archives will feature posts related to the Smithsonian and the Civil War in honor of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War.
At the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street NW sits the Renwick Gallery, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum. Today, the notable building is filled with works that exemplify American crafts and decorative arts, but before art collections ever graced its halls the building was loaded with stock of a different sort. The Renwick Gallery was first packed with supplies of the union troops during the Civil War. Later it had a brief tenure displaying the collection of the building’s original owner, William Wilson Corcoran, and then a long term holding court offices, until finally being restored to its original purpose.
Corcoran was a banker and philanthropist in nineteenth century Washington, DC. His financial firm, Corcoran and Riggs, was a substantial money lender to the US government and our own Smithsonian Institution. Such successful ventures gained Corcoran a fortune, and he put his money to good use, collecting many notable artworks by American artists. By 1858, his collection had grown so immense that he sought to build a gallery to house and display it.
He chose the site for his gallery on Pennsylvania Avenue, in the heart of the city and neighboring the White House. As architect he chose James Renwick, Jr., who had earlier designed the Smithsonian Institution Building, or “Castle.” Having completed one DC icon, Renwick began work on the next in 1859, constructing the Corcoran Gallery in the Second-Empire style of Paris’s recently opened museum of art, the Louvre. By 1861, construction was nearly complete, with the exterior of the building entirely finished.
That same year, however, the outbreak of the Civil War interrupted Corcoran’s plans. Corcoran himself was known as a Southern sympathizer, and when the war began he lost many friends in Washington, the seat of the Union government and war effort. At one point in 1861, he was briefly arrested, and for the remainder of the war he avoided the northern animosity in Europe. Sequestered across the Atlantic, Corcoran could not object to the Union government’s seizure of his unfinished gallery of art, along with many other of his properties.
From his nearby office at 17th and F Streets, Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs recognized the utility of Corcoran’s building. With the walls and roof completed, the broad, high-ceilinged halls were ideal spaces to hold the overflow of uniforms and other materials that Meigs was charged with organizing and distributing. On August 22, 1861, he claimed Corcoran’s would-be art gallery as the Union Army’s warehouse. Two years later, his expanding department moved their headquarters into the building, a convenient location providing the Quartermaster General with easy access to President Lincoln in the White House.
Meigs vacated the building following the end of the war in 1865, but the US government held it until 1869, when it was returned to Corcoran’s control. The Corcoran Gallery of Art officially opened in 1874, 15 years after construction on its building had commenced. Objects on display included some of the Smithsonian’s art collection, which were gifted to the Corcoran Gallery in 1874 because Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry felt that the art objects were “scarcely in place in the midst of specimens of natural history [in the Smithsonian Institution Building, or ‘Castle’], but would produce a better effect in connection with other works of art of a similar character.” The art works were returned to the Smithsonian in 1896 after Henry’s death.
However, Corcoran’s ever expanding collection once again required additional space, and in 1897 the new, and current, Corcoran Gallery opened just three blocks south at 17th and E Streets. From 1899 to 1964, the Renwick Building was used as the US Court of Claims Office.
Recognizing the importance of the building and its heritage, in 1964 Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley asked President Lyndon B. Johnson to turn it over to the Institution. In 1965, Ripley’s request was granted, and, exactly 100 years after Corcoran’s gallery, the Renwick Gallery opened its doors to the public in 1974, exhibiting the best examples of American crafts and decorative arts, and fulfilling this exquisite building’s intended purpose.
Wartime in Washington—Mary Henry on the First Manassas
Throughout the next months, the Smithsonian Institution Archives will feature posts related to the Smithsonian and the Civil War in honor of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War.
On July 21, 1861, the First Battle of Manassas raged just thirty miles southwest of Washington DC and the Smithsonian Institution Building that housed Secretary Joseph Henry and his family. His eldest daughter, Mary, kept a detailed account of events in the capital during this battle and throughout the Civil War. As the seat of the Union government, and on the boundary of the warring Confederacy, DC stood precariously in the center of conflict. Mary Henry, therefore, had a prominent vantage point from which to view the battle’s developments and encounter its participants.
The march into the First Battle of Manassas began on July 16th. Mary watched the procession of Union soldiers advance into Virginia from a tower in the Smithsonian Building or “Castle.” She knew many men among those soldiers heading to war, and so remarked that she “could not feel patriotic.” Instead, she felt sadness and concern, dreading the bloodshed to come. For the next few days, news was scarce; the newspapers printed only vague reports of “engagements at Bull Run” on July 19th. Mary consoled her friend Fanny, whose beau or relative was in the Union ranks across the Potomac.
Mary was in church on Sunday, July 21st, when she heard of the full-blown battle being fought at Manassas. Other members of her congregation had relatives on the battlefield, and her dear friend Fanny was extremely distraught. Together they stayed at the house of a friend, where at 10 p.m. news came of wounded acquaintances and Mary could hear ambulances rushing through the streets all night.
On the next morning, the doorbell rang while the group was eating breakfast. The door was opened to two soldiers, “bloodstained and dusty.” They brought both the good news that Fanny’s man was well, and the terrible story of the battle. One of the soldiers burst into tears three times during his telling of the tale, so horrible was the battle to recount. Later that morning Mary watched as the remains of the Rhode Island regiment filed back into Washington, describing them as looking weary and exhausted. On July 23rd, a soldier visited the Smithsonian Building to describe the battle to Joseph Henry, and spoke of both the disorganization and inability of the Union army which had caused such devastating losses.
For days after, confusion ruled. Soldiers crowded the streets of DC, tending their wounds and telling their stories. The Union Army was so devastated that its men were dispersed and left on their own without instruction from their commanding officers. On July 29th, a grieving man sought Joseph Henry’s advice on how to go about visiting the battlefield to search for the body of his fallen son. Mary learned details of the battle, but an exact total of casualties, later estimated to be 4,700 killed and wounded, was not available due to the disordered retreat.
Today, on the 150th anniversary of the First Battle of Manassas, we appreciate Mary’s records as valuable accounts of wartime Washington, providing a firsthand view of the occurrences. But to Mary herself, the events she witnessed and described were extremely personal and often tragic. In her journal entries on the battle, one of the first of the Civil War, Mary was concerned for close friends who fought and was saddened by the anguish of the returning soldiers.
Three years later, Mary’s journal entries show that she had become accustomed to the war and its consequences. Describing the Confederate Army’s approach to DC in July of 1864, she wrote, “Life has grown sadly cheap within the last few years.” But her account of that early battle provides an intimate glimpse into the lives it affected. More than just a detail of the proceedings of the battle and its aftermath, Mary’s writing offers an understanding of the battle’s impact on those who experienced the distresses of war.
Read this diary entry and others in The Smithsonian Scrapbook from the Smithsonian Institution Archives.
How Hot Was It At Bull Run?
Throughout the next months, the Smithsonian Institution Archives will feature posts related to the Smithsonian and the Civil War in honor of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War.
“What were weather conditions during the First Battle of Manassas/Bull Run? I Googled it and looked on your website, but wasn’t able to find this information. I just need the temperature, humidity and wind speed. Thanks.”
This is a typical example of requests that comes in to the Smithsonian Institution Archives about weather data for a specific event. And it’s not as simple a question to answer as you might think. Eyewitness accounts say the day of the battle was, “hot and sultry.” That hasn’t changed much for Julys in Northern Virginian since. But do more specific numbers exist?
Today, 24/7 weather coverage and Doppler radar reports are available because sophisticated instruments gather and transmit data continuously. This, however, was not the case in the 1861, although things had gotten pretty darn close. Starting in 1847, Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, developed a network of hundreds of enthusiastic volunteer observers (crowdsourcing 19th century weather geeks) to take measurements for the Smithsonian Meteorological Project. They collected readings for temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, humidity, cloud conditions, and precipitation. They also reported on “casual phenomena” – tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, auroras, and meteor strikes.
By 1859, a far-flung network of 600 observers, from Canada to the Caribbean, telegraphed data daily to the Smithsonian. The volume and speed of the reports enabled Henry to devise a color-coded map displaying current weather conditions throughout the nation. As conditions changed, so did the map, which became a popular attraction in the Smithsonian Castle. But you didn’t have to travel to the Castle to see which way the wind blew. Henry shared his data with the Washington Evening Star newspaper and, in May of 1857, it began publishing daily weather reports from as many as twenty US cities.
So there was lots of data; but do we have what the Civil War researcher needs? The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 damaged the meteorological project. The linchpin of its success, the telegraph, was flooded with dispatches from the front and other wartime business as observers took up arms on both sides. Needless to say, the flow of data was seriously curtailed. It appears unlikely that the weather was reported for the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. And if it was, where is that information now?
After considerable lobbying following the war, the national importance of Henry’s weather project was recognized by the US government. In 1873, the data from Smithsonian Meterological Project and responsibility for its network of observers was turned over the US Signal Corps. Records from the Smithsonian Meteorological Project, 1848-91 are now in the custody of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and can be found in two locations, subsection RG 27.3 with related records are in subsection RG 27.5.7.
Now, whether there was an observer at Manassas Junction or in the vicinity who transmitted data during the first battle, I do not know. But I know where to look, so that’s where I pointed the researcher. I've never heard back as to whether anything has been found. But if the numbers weren’t there, diaries, reports, newspaper stories and eyewitness accounts would be every bit as valid when trying to understand the environmental conditions on the battlefield.
For more information on the Smithsonian Meteorological Project see, “Joseph Henry: Father of Weather Service” by Frank Rives Millikan and “Joseph Henry’s Grand Meteorological Crusade” also by Frank Millikan, Weatherwise, October/November 1997 (PDF available on request osiaref@si.edu).
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