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 C H A P T E R F I V E  The Sanitary Commission and Its Critics If the U.S. Sanitary Commission was so great, why did so many contemporaries attack it? The record of the USSC during the Civil War was one of sustained benevolence and significant reform. Why, then, did the agency spend so much effort during the four years of its existence defending its record and actions? How could such a beneficent organization earn opprobrium from contemporaries and, later, historians? The USSC was both patriotic and, in a peculiar sense, antiwar. It served as a reminder that although war might be glorious, war also maimed and sickened men. The soldier might begin as a brave, strong fellow, but the war machine would spit him out dead or as helpless as a child. This hard fact of war was not popular then—or now. It was in trumpeting this unwelcome fact that the USSC raised money to relieve the suffering. It took the woman’s perspective on war, and the womanly task was not to shoot and fight but to clean up all the mess left afterward. The dissonance between masculine and feminine approaches to war created ambivalence toward the USSC, which was in turn forced to defend itself. By its very existence, the commission chided the army’s Medical Department and proved to be an irritant throughout the war, in spite of continued rhetoric on both sides about cooperation. The commission also challenged prevailing attitudes toward philanthropy and charity, raising concerns that unreimbursed aid would breed dependency. The USSC pushed a doctrine of nationalism in consonance with the major theme of the war, but states’rights attitudes did not cease in Union states just because the South had seceded. The states of the Midwest particularly resisted the dominance of the commissioners, whose worldview radiated from New York City. Finally, there was the fussy self-righteousness that infused so much of the USSC’s advice and action; it was an attitude that could not help but raise hackles. The USSC did a world of good—and generated clouds of annoyance. 132 Marrow of Tragedy Like Mother Was Here In representing the women’s role in the war, the Sanitary Commission struck at the deep ambivalence of men toward their dependence upon women. War—fighting, glory, and conquest—was the preeminent male domain. Yet much of the day-to-day life in the army demanded that men take on duties that women had done at home, such as cooking, cleaning, sewing, and washing . In the aftermath of battle, traditional female roles of nursing, feeding, and comforting came to the forefront. As the channel that brought women’s influence to the army, the Sanitary Commission both basked in gratitude for that kindly presence and endured resentment that such an insertion of female work was needed at all in the manly world of the army. Sometimes the USSC and similar state relief agencies brought women to the wounded or ill men; at other times men took on these female roles in their guise as USSC workers. When they showed up to inspect camps, Sanitary Commission agents must have come across to the annoyed officers as scolding women. They expected the men to take baths, keep their clothing in order, and clean up their living quarters. They chided the men to use the latrines and not pee behind the nearest bush. The Sanitary Commission was appalled that so many men lacked toothbrushes, and it instructed the soldiers to eat their vegetables. All together, the USSC brought a mother’s discipline to a disorderly bachelor campground, seeking to train not just the enlisted men but also the officers in the importance of domestic order to the preservation of health. Their initial inspections of the army camps dismayed the Sanitary Commission agents: “In many regiments the discipline is so lax that the men avoid the use of the sinks, and the whole neighborhood is rendered filthy and pestilential. From the ammoniacal odor frequently perceptible in some camps, it is obvious that the men are allowed to void their urine . . . wherever convenient.” The men were dirty and often literally lousy, with filthy clothing. The raw food provided by the army was abundant but “atrociously cooked and wickedly wasted.”1 A later report concluded, “Slovenliness is our most characteristic national vice.”2 The Union Army grew tenfold in 1861, and the growth spurt brought both enlisted men and officers into the field with little prior...

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