Beloved as the “Mother to the Boys in Blue,” Mother Bickerdyke began her career by delivering $500 worth of medical supplies to the Union forces stationed in Cairo, Illinois. Appalled at the poor level of care given to the soldiers upon her arrival in Cairo, she quickly set to work, with her hallmark energy and determination, improving the makeshift field hospital that she found there. This was th
e first of approximately 300 hospitals she would improve or establish during the Civil War as an agent of the U.S. With the blessings of Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, Mother Bickerdyke and her fellow nurses followed the Union forces in the Western Theater of operations. She cared for the wounded on nineteen battlefields, including Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and Atlanta. At the conclusion of the war, as a gesture of the esteem in which she was held by the soldiers of the North’s western armies, General Sherman requested that Bickerdyke ride at the head of the 15th Corps of the Army of the Tennessee in the triumphant Grand Review of the Armies, held in Washington, D.C., on May 23–24, 1865. In the years that followed, Mother Bickerdyke helped secure federal pensions for numerous U.S. Army veterans and for more than 300 nurses who served in the Civil War.
