Remembering Dr. Mary Walker

The following was written by Joseph C. Farrell, Chairman of the Albany County Civil War Centennial Committee for the August 1961 bulletin "New York State in the Civil War".

Dr. Mary E. Walker

When I was a boy of 14 in Oswego it was my privilege to know one of the most unusual women to take part in the Civil War – Dr. Mary E. Walker, first woman physician to serve the Union armies and only woman ever to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. It was a privilege I didn’t fully appreciate at the time, to be sure. Although Dr. Walker had been honored both in this country and abroad – I believe the King of England received her – she became the butt of considerable ridicule when she retired after the war to Bunker Hill, her birthplace, three miles from Oswego.  

The reader shouldn’t blame the townspeople – particularly the boys – too much. After all, Dr. Walker did present a most unusual spectacle in our small city. She insisted on wearing men’s clothing. In the summer she would wear a sort of Palm Beach suit with a man’s sailor hat. In the winter she wore a high silk hat or sometimes a soft slouch hat. I remember her wearing a black overcoat with a fur collar around the top. It looked like a woman’s fur piece on the collar of a man’s coat. 

Incidentally the Oswego Museum has her high silk hat, her glasses, the medical kit she carried throughout the Civil War and two or three pair of shoes and boots. She had a very small foot – I’d say a four or three and a half.

After she returned to the Oswego area, Dr. Walker published her first book, Hit. This dealt with the reforms she advocated. Among these were dress reform for women – one cannot help but wonder what she would think of women’s dress today! She also advocated prohibition of liquor and tobacco, uniform divorce laws for the United States, women’s suffrage and election of members of the United States Senate by direct vote of the people. Her reform campaigns made her a familiar figure in the halls of Congress and in many state legislatures. Indeed she became an international figure. Later she wrote another book, Un Masked or the Science of Immortality.

Her violent opposition to tobacco in any form is one of the reasons I had a chance to know her. My grandfather operated a wholesale and retail tobacco store at 31 East Bridge Street in Oswego. Dr. Walker would come to the store to get her newspaper but she would not set foot in a shop selling cigars and cigarettes. We can well imagine her lectures if she were alive today!

Dr. Walker had to have her New York papers so she would send someone into the shop for them. Naturally enough we boys would gather around while she waited on the sidewalk. Sometimes we asked her questions about the Civil War, indeed part of my interest today stems from her comments. More often, I’m afraid, we would follow along after her and mock her – and she wasn’t above chasing us with a stick either.

Dr. Walker maintained an office to practice medicine in Oswego but logically enough she was anything but accepted by the medical profession of her day. The doctor who brought me into the world, who had been a lieutenant in the medical corps in the Civil War, would fairly turn purple and stalk out of my grandfather’s shop if her name were mentioned!

Mary Elizabeth Walker was born November 26, 1832 at Bunker Hill, the daughter of Alvah and Vesta Whitcomb Walker, whose forebears settled Plymouth, Mass. about the year 1643. Her father had been educated as a physician but abandoned this profession for teaching. He erected the first Free School in Oswego county and both he and his wife taught there for years.

In 1855 Mary Walker became the second woman to graduate from Syracuse Medical School, later a part of the University of Syracuse. She practiced medicine in Columbus, O., briefly and then moved to Rome. She found it a hard struggle to support herself in a field then so generally reserved for men.

When the news of the fall of Fort Sumter reached Rome, N.Y. in April, 1861, Dr. Walker, age 29, was resting in her office. She had been up all night taking care of a very ill patient. She heard the newsboys screaming the Fort Sumter disaster and rushed across the muddy street to seize a paper.

She determined to offer her services. We must remember that at the opening of hostilities in 1861 the personnel of the Medical Department of the Regular Army of the United States was composed of one Surgeon General with the rank of colonel, thirty surgeons with the rank of major and eighty-four assistant surgeons with the rank of first lieutenant for the first five years of service, and thereafter with the rank of captain until promoted.

There was no Hospital Corps, as we know it today, and the work of nursing and other hospital assistance was performed by soldiers detailed to hospital duty. Of the little force of trained medical officers at the beginning of the war, many were of Southern birth and sympathy and twenty-seven of these resigned their commissions and went with the Confederacy. Three others went into private practice.

Because of the great need for physicians and surgeons the army Medical Department created a new class to cover men from civilian life who were given the designation of Acting Assistant Surgeons. They were noncommissioned and served under contract.

Abraham Lincoln personally appointed Dr. Walker to this group. Her appointment, with Lincoln’s signature, was preserved for years in the vaults of the Oswego County Savings Bank and is now the property of the Oswego Historical Society.

On November 13, 1861, Dr. Walker wrote her brother and sister from the Indiana Hospital, a temporary establishment set up in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington. She described her dress as “the same as brother officers, blue coat and trousers with gold stripes, a black felt hat and an officer’s great coat of blue – the jacket… cut like a blouse and fitted loosely at the neck.”

Letters to her family in 1862 show the doctor was serving with the Army of the Potomac under General Ambrose Burnside. One of these letters mentioned the difficulty she had in getting supplies and how she had gone to her tent where she tore up one of her “pretty night gowns” and used the pieces to bandage the wounded of Fredericksburg.

Reportedly Dr. Walker was as skilled as other officers of the time in amputating legs and arms, suturing incisions and alleviating suffering. From 1862 to July 14, 1864, there is no official record of the whereabouts of Dr. Walker, but letters written to her family on the latter date indicate she was still serving both in the field and in military hospitals.

On August 20, 1864, Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, then in command of the Army of the Cumberland, reported by telegraph that Mary E. Walker had gone to Chattanooga the previous winter and had a letter from General Wood, Assistant Surgeon General of the United States, recommending her for hospital assignment.

Under date of August 23^rd, 1864, General Thomas assigned Dr. Walker to Maj. Gen. McCook with instructions that she be placed in the 52^nd Ohio Infantry as a contract physician. For this service she was to receive $436.36 a year. This contract was terminated at the doctor’s own request on July 15, 1865.

During her service with the army in the west, Dr. Walker was captured by the Confederates in front of Chattanooga. She was taken to Richmond, Va., and confined as a prisoner of war. She was later exchanged and returned to Maj. Gen. W.T. Sherman’s army.

Official army records are evidence that she was the only woman prisoner exchanged for a man of similar rank. There is no official record to show where she served after the exchange…if indeed she did. It is probable the terms of exchange barred further service.

Because of her war service, Dr. Walker was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on January 24, 1866, the only woman in the United States ever to receive such a distinction. The award had been approved November 11, 1865 by President Andrew Johnson and witnessed by Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War. Together with Dr. Walker’s Medal of Honor, the original order signed by President Johnson is preserved by the Oswego Historical Society.

After the war, Dr. Walker worked briefly on the staff of a New York City newspaper, but she soon returned to medicine and opened an office in Washington, D.C. Early in 1870, Dr. Walker returned to Oswego where she continued to practice medicine. About this time there were rumors circulated that by an act of Congress she had been given permission to wear attire. No such act was ever passed. It was after this she published her two books.

Dr. Walker appeared to welcome the widespread – and public – ridicule of her male attire. It provided her with opportunities to display her Medal of Honor. However, on February 15, 1917, by adverse action of the Board of Awards in Washington, the Congressional Medal of Honor award to Mary E. Walker was removed from the list…”nothing having been found in the records to show the specific Act or Acts for which the decoration was originally awarded.”

Possibly it was this hint of mystery surrounding the award that gave rise to reports that Dr. Walker had served as a spy for the Union armies, a report this historian strongly discounts. Anyway, the Board of Awards action brought a thundering reply from the aged doctor, then a patient in the U.S. Army hospital at Fort Ontario. The government would have to take the medal “over my dead body”, said the aged doctor fiercely.

Two years later – on February 21, 1919 – the aged doctor died at 87, still holding her precious medal. Dr. Walker is buried in Rural Cemetery, Fruit Valley, not far from where she was born. The simple shaft that marks her grave reads: “Dr. Mary E. Walker – Born Nov. 26, 1832 – Died Feb. 21, 1919”.