ABSTRACT
In h i s f i r s t d a y s in wartime Washington Olmsted seemed as if swimming through a motion of men and materials where nothing was orderly or controlled. Not only he, but everyone camped in the hot and humid capital this summer seemed to have lost his bearings. The army seemed a joke, ill provided for, its soldiers often without uniforms, its officers as ignorant as the men they were supposed to command. The volunteers who had joined in this effort were scornful of their lieutenants and often refused to salute generals whom they met in the streets. Each disorderly unit be longed more to its home district or state than to any national army. Its camps were scattered in disarray about the city on unhealthy ground, or ground soon made so by unsanitary practices. Dysentery, typhoid fever, and malaria began to be reported. Beyond the horizon in Virginia there was the rumor of an enemy, troops said to be out there, threatening the capital, but derided rather than feared, for it was all going to be over soon. Then hooray for home. (But Olmsted was soon to see the Confederates' flag from the top of a house in Washington.2 He knew, beyond rumor, that they were there.)
The work he had in hand involved him in relations with individuals all of whom had strong ideas of their own. The men who organized the United States Sanitary Commission were a masterful and idiosyncratic groupamong them a doctor, a lawyer, a preacher, a scientist, and military officers. The three military men appointed to the commission were nominal members; it was the civilians who remained active. Olmsted was to have the closest relations with these men for the next two years and was to be their principal agent. In the weeks of getting started in his work, it is probable that he cast
a measuring eye upon them. He was to insist on being an equal among equals, wrestling with the Commissioners as with top-hatted and frockcoated angels or demons. These men were a distinguished group: President Henry W. Bellows, a reform-minded and popular preacher in New York City; Vice President Alexander Dallas Bache, head of the Coast Survey; Corresponding Secretary Elisha Harris, Doctor of Medicine; Treasurer George Templeton Strong, attorney at law and connoisseur of music and N ew York fires, also a conscientious vestryman of Trinity Church and a trustee of struggling little Columbia College; Dr. Wolcott Gibbs, professor of chemistry at City College; Philadelphia lawyer Charles Janeway Stille; Cornelius Rea Agnew, youthful-looking surgeon general of New York, soon to be in charge of the State Hospital for Veterans; Dr. William H. Van Buren, professor of surgery of Bellevue Hospital; Samuel G. Howe; J. S. Newberry; and others. They conceived their task as a preventive and support ive one-to make the army of the republic as healthy before battle as pos sible, as curative of wounds and illnesses during campaigns as might be, and as humane a body as an army could be. Bellows was to say that he poured ten years of his life into the four years of the war. They all worked at this pitch, but none, perhaps, at the wrought up level of their secretary-general. His was the only full-time position among them. He was included in their policy meetings but had also the daily direction of the work of the commis sion.
