True Bits: Clara Barton & Mary Galloway

(Spoiler alert! You might not want to keep reading if you haven’t finished the book–each “true bit” gives the background on something real that inspired part of the novel: some big, some small). This one isn’t a huge one, but it does give away some fun plot points toward the end of the novel, so… I leave it up to you if you want to read more.

I was worried it would seem too coincidental that Rosetta meets Clara Barton at Antietam, but I just felt like I had to include that part of the story. For one thing, I wanted to honor the many different ways women served during the war. For another thing, Clara Barton is known to have nursed soldiers near The Cornfield and also at the nearby farmhouses-turned-hospitals. Indeed, when I visited Antietam, I discovered that the monument to Clara Barton is placed right near where the 97th New York Volunteers camped the night before the battle. But even more importantly, it is a historical fact that Clara Barton came to the aid of a female soldier after the battle.

The story told in the book They Fought Like Demons is that there was an extremely distraught soldier who was brought to a shed outside one of the farmhouse hospitals. Even two days after the battle, the soldier still refused the surgeon’s exam, although there was a bullet hole in the left side of his neck. The surgeon summoned Clara Barton who was able to calm the soldier enough that the doctor could exam the wound. It turned out that the bullet had entered at the neck and lodged in the right side of the soldier’s back, somehow missing all of the soldier’s vital organs. Without anesthesia (eek!) the doctor removed the bullet. As Clara Barton cared for the soldier, she learned that the soldier was 16 year old Mary Galloway and she had enlisted in order to find her sweetheart. Clara must have been struck by this girl’s story, because she helped find Mary’s sweetheart at a hospital in nearby Frederick, Maryland. The story has the ultimate happy ending as the couple ended up getting married.

In honor of Mary Galloway and Catherine Davidson (who had her arm amputated after being wounded at Antietam), I gave the wounded soldier that Jeremiah discovers at South Mountain the alias David Galloway. And there was a female soldier named Ida Remington who fought for the Union at South Mountain.