© 2024 WVIK
Listen at 90.3 FM and 98.3 FM in the Quad Cities, 95.9 FM in Dubuque, or on the WVIK app!
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Community

General in Calico

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.

After the attack on Fort Sumter in the spring of 1861 precipitated the great War Between the States, Rock Islanders slipped easily into their assigned roles. The men volunteered to go off and kill each other, while the women stayed behind to fold bandages and assemble medical supplies.

Except, that is, for Mary Ann Bickerdyke of Galesburg, Illinois. No one was going to tell her what she was and was not going to do. Mary Ann was born in Ohio and had been one of the first women to attend Oberlin College. She worked as a nurse until she married Robert Bickerdyke and moved to Galesburg in 1856. When he died two years later, she went into business as a "botanic physician."

Then, the Civil War interrupted her life. When the women of Galesburg collected a supply of drugs and hospital goods, Mary Ann decided to take the supplies to the main army hospital in Cairo, Illinois, personally. She arrived just as General Grant was marching his troops into battles in Tennessee. Mary Ann went with them. By 1862, she had set up battleground hospitals, which served hot soup, and cleaned soldiers' wounds with warm sponges.

That wasn’t enough. After battles, when the men had come in and declared there was no one left alive on the battle ground, Mary Ann wrapped herself in an old Army coat and went looking for them herself. Five times, she took wagons of seriously wounded men back from her field hospitals to the main hospital in Cairo.

Mary Ann Bickerdyke moved from battle to battle. She treated the wounded at Savannah, Tennessee; she was with her men at the Battle of Shiloh.

By the summer of 1862, she was on to new projects. Soldiers as the Savannah hospital saw a strange sight: Mary Ann and several ex-slaves she had recruited, tending large black kettles over a roaring fire. She was washing the blood-soaked cloths and linens taken from wounded soldiers. Until then, the Army had nothing like a laundry, and the disease spread by unsanitary conditions had cost more lives than bullets.

For her efforts, Mary Ann was given an unofficial rank by those she tended. The War produced many generals of all shapes and sizes and standings, but only one "General in Calico."

Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.

Community
Beginning 1995, historian and folklorist Dr. Roald Tweet spun his stories of the Mississippi Valley to a devoted audience on WVIK. Dr. Tweet published three books as well as numerous literary articles and recorded segments of "Rock Island Lines." His inspiration was that "kidney-shaped limestone island plunked down in the middle of the Mississippi River," a logical site for a storyteller like Dr. Tweet.