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  • This Birth Place of Souls: The Civil War Nursing Diary of Harriet Eaton ed. by Jane E. Schultz
  • Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein
This Birth Place of Souls: The Civil War Nursing Diary of Harriet Eaton. Ed. Jane E. Schultz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-539268-5, 352 pp., cloth, $74.00.

During the Civil War, Harriet Hope Agnes Bacon Eaton (1818-1884), the widow of a Baptist minister, left her home in Portland, Maine, to serve as a relief agent with the Maine Camp Hospital Association, a group committed to providing supplies and other assistance to Maine soldiers in the field. Eaton served three terms: with regiments in Maryland and Virginia (October 1862-May 1863); in City Point, Virginia, hospitals (October-December 1864); and in Alexandria, Virginia, working with released prisoners of war (May-June 1865). Only the first two periods are represented in the diary and letters transcribed and annotated in this book. Eaton's son Frank (1843-1886) had enlisted in the 25th Maine Infantry before Eaton began her work, a fact that helped motivate her service to other soldiers. She left her two daughters, Agnes (1849-1887) and Hatty Belle (1855-1942), with friends or relatives in Maine and Massachusetts, writing to the children often.

Eaton's diary justifies its publication. Schultz contextualizes it as one of only five published accounts by female Civil War medical workers that were not rewritten later as memoirs. The other four writers were Confederates Kate Cumming and Ada Bacot and northerners Esther Hill Hawks and Hannah Ropes. Even more important, Eaton is quite detailed about her work, experiences, associates, and opinions. She is unusual because in her first term she was not settled in a particular place but traveled from one Maine regiment to another, dispensing supplies and other assistance. For example, on January 12, 1863, she rode in a well-stocked ambulance to the 19th Maine, where she distributed "dried apples, tea, canned chicken, currant and rhubarb wine, and apple jelly, also soft crackers" (106). It took her three hours by ambulance to get to the camp of the 7th Maine on March 23, where she gave "an apple, orange, lemon, some candy, a handkerchief, and cologne to each man" in the hospital as well as those who were sick in their quarters (130). At other times, she supplied potato starch for gruel, condensed milk and nutmegs to a hospital kitchen, and provided clothes for soldiers being given medical discharges from the army. While on occasion she did cook for some of the patients and perform other nursing tasks, Eaton most often discussed her work of dispensing supplies and evidently did not regard herself as a nurse.

The transcription of the diary, which is now in the Southern Historical Collection [End Page 399] at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is augmented by twenty-five letters from Eaton found in newspapers and other collections, elaborating on the diary entries. Schultz identifies as many of the people mentioned in the diary as possible, 434 of them, in a very extensive biographical dictionary.

Schultz opens the volume with a fifty-one-page introduction. Here she identifies Eaton and her family, gives some background on Maine in the period, establishes the context of the diary, and discusses transcription policies, all of which are important for one to understand before reading the diary. Unfortunately, Schultz also includes some other sections that in another context would be called "spoilers." This reviewer found it frustrating that before she could even read the diary she had been influenced by the editor's interpretation of Eaton's experiences, attitudes, and collegial relationships. This material would have been much more useful at the end, when the reader could consider it from the perspective of her own diary perusal. At that point, one might well differ with Schultz about whether Eaton really should be considered a nurse or whether discussion about Eaton's relationship with Nathaniel P. Jaques may be more speculative than the evidence warrants. The book is also somewhat oddly arranged. The diary itself has footnotes, as it should. The introduction, however, has endnotes, that are placed after the diary...

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