Thea

= Dorothea Dix = Fig. 1 Source: WQED.org

==== **Dorothea Dix** Congress has issued a draft of men aged 20 to 45, except those willing to pay $300 or provide a substitute. Now less wealthy Northerners are arguing that “the blood of a poor man is as precious as that of the wealthy.” I can’t say I disagree.==== March 3, 1863

**Dorothea Dix** President Lincoln has issued a final Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all the slaves in Confederate territories. Well, nobody’s perfect, I suppose.
January 1, 1863

==== **Dorothea Dix** President Lincoln has replaced General McClellan with General Ambrose E. Burnside. It seems the president told McClellan, who has been slow to lead his men to another battle since the battle at Antietam on September 17th, “If you don’t want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.” Oh my!==== November 7, 1862

==== **Dorothea Dix** Good heavens, what can I say? General McClellan stopped General Lee at Antietam in what turned into the bloodiest day in US military history. Over 26,000 men are dead, wounded or missing. I’m so depressed thinking about it. Anyone online want to chat?==== September 17, 1862 ==== **Dorothea Dix** General Robert E. Lee has assumed control of General Joseph E. Johnston’s army and renamed it the Army of Northern Virginia. General McClellan claims Lee is “likely to be timid and irresolute in action.” Why does a bloody war at times remind me of the squabbling of schoolchildren, trading insults to hide their fear?==== June 1, 1862

==== **Dorothea Dix** General Joseph E. Johnston’s army has attacked that of General George B. McClellan. Johnston almost defeated McClellan, but he has been badly wounded. I wonder if he’ll be able to continue leading his men.==== May 31, 1862

==== **Dorothea Dix** A surprise attack on General Ulysses S. Grant’s men at Shiloh on the Tennessee River has left 13,000 Union men and 10,000 Confederate men dead. The concept becomes more sickening the more I think about it. 23,000 men dead—but how many wives are left husbandless? How many children left fatherless? How many mothers and fathers have been told, are being told, are destined to be told that their sons have perished?==== April 7, 1862

==== **Dorothea Dix** I’ve just learned that President Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, has died of a fever. My heart bleeds for both the child and his father—will he be able to truly grieve, I wonder, with this war demanding his complete emotional commitment?==== February 22, 1862

==== **Dorothea Dix** General John C. Frémont has been relieved of his duty as a major general by President Lincoln. A wise choice, in my opinion. Frémont’s choice to impose martial law on Missouri was the sign of an irrational thinker and foolish man.==== November 2, 1861

==== **Dorothea Dix** President Lincoln has revoked General Frémont’s unauthorized military claim of emancipation in Missouri. Thank heaven for his swiftness—I pray that fool Frémont will not be allowed to remain in his position of power much longer.==== September 11, 1861

==== **Dorothea Dix** I just heard that General John C. Frémont imposed martial law on the state of Missouri. I wonder if that’s really a wise choice—setting aside my own biases here, won’t it further alienate Missouri and lead more states to join the Confederacy?==== August 12, 1861

==== **Dorothea Dix** I had the good fortune of obtaining a copy of the passionate speech that President Lincoln made yesterday. I’ve also heard that Congress has authorized a call for 500,000 more men to fight the Confederacy. 500,000! What are the implications of that, do you think?==== July 5, 1861

==== **Dorothea Dix** So Virginia has seceded from the US. My less refined instincts make me inclined to simply say “good riddance” to the state, but I know it isn’t as simple a matter as waving goodbye and hoping it loses the game of chicken and comes running back. Once one state has gone, others will have an easier time following. I’m afraid that this will only fuel the fire of the war that has just begun—now the pro-slavery states really have something to fight for.==== April 17, 1861

==== **Dorothea Dix** General Pierre Beauregard attacked Fort Sumter! I supposed I shouldn’t be as shocked as I am that the tension between the North and the South finally reached this point—but knowing that the worst is yet to come, as it must be, is terrible. I’m not embarrassed to say that I’m rather frightened.==== April 12, 1861

==== **Dorothea Dix** Just heard that Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president—how exciting! I’m not a fan of his anti-slavery stance, but he seems like an intelligent, reasonable man—and, from what I have heard, he has battled with depression. Perhaps this will make him for sympathetic to my cause. He might have enough to handle for the moment, though, so perhaps I won’t immediately run off to Washington to ask for help on my quest.==== March 4, 1861

==== **Dorothea Dix** Sometimes I'm absolutely ashamed of this country for choosing who we choose to wield power. After arguing against slavery and attacking Senator Andrew Pickens Butler in his speech, "The Crime Against Kansas," Senator Charles Sumner was beaten with a cane by Butler's own nephew, Preston S. Brooks--on the floor of the Senate, no less.==== May 20, 1856

==== **Dorothea Dix** God bless Abba Alcott and the 73 other women who petitioned the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention for women's suffrage--you have my blessings! It's time men recognized the greatness that women can achieve. I know I'll never be one of those flighty, flirty women who thinks of nothing but this one's betrothal and that one's dress. I may never even marry!==== December 4, 1853

====** Dorothea Dix ** I'm not Catholic or an immigrant, but I can't say I'm a fan of this "Know-Nothing" party. They seem loud and disorganized, which is never a combination destined for success. Does anyone else feel that they're wasting their own time?==== September 6, 1852 July 9, 1850
 * Dorothea Dix** Can't believe President Zachary Taylor is dead! I suppose I'd better get used to having President Millard Fillmore... what will it mean for the country, I wonder?

Birthday: April 4, 1802 Relationship status: Single Hometown: Hampden, Maine Political views: Republican Religion: Unitarian Profession: Union's Superintendent of Female Nurses, activist Hobbies: Teaching Sunday School lessons to female jail inmates Likes: Literature, and lots of it Dislikes: Neglectful, drunk parents; poor treatment of the mentally ill Favorite book: //Sermons Delivered before the First Society of Unitarian Christians, in the City of Philadelphia; wherein the Principal Points, on which that Denomination of Believers Differ from the Majority of their Brethren, are Occasionally Elucidated// by Ralph Eddowes ||
 * Gender: Female

=Notes=

Note 1 I was recently filling out one of those Facebook notes that consist solely of a list of somewhat personal questions that no one would ever care to read my answers to. Number 26 in the note was “If you were a slave trying to get to freedom, how would you want to escape?” I gave some inconsequential answer that even now I cannot remember. Yet, as I’ve been hearing recently about slaves resisting their masters, I wonder if a better question wouldn’t have been, “How would you least want to escape?” I have my answer ready: “In the manner of Henry Brown.” I wonder if the lunatics I work so hard to protect could think up a more miserable way to travel than 27 hours in a wooden crate. To be sure, shipping a slave as dry goods is clever—ingenious, perhaps—but many great artists have been called geniuses, and though geniuses they may be, they remain lunatics as well. As well as miserable, Brown’s escape was incredibly dangerous. I have heard, though, that prior to escaping, Brown married another slave named Nancy and had children with her. Nancy and their children were then sold away. Perhaps when a man has lost so much that is dear to him, death does not necessarily seem something to be avoided at all costs. Then again, I doubt any slave ever escaped in a “safe” way. Escaping slavery is dangerous no matter what method one chooses. For most fugitives, I should think, this would make them unwilling to take any more risks than are necessary once they reach safety. Not so for Harriet Tubman, apparently. Born into slavery, she escaped when she was about 27 to the North. Yet she could not stand to be free while her family was enslaved. She returned to the south to lead her niece, Kessiah, and Kessiah’s husband and children to freedom. The next year, she went back again to bring more family members to the North. Time and time again, she went back to the land of her enslavement to help bring others to freedom. She and other abolitionists, including organized societies such as the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, worked together to form a well-organized system of hideouts and safe houses that could be used to lead slaves to the North. This system soon became known as the Underground Railroad, of which Tubman (also sometimes called Moses) was the leader. Even with a head injury (the result of being hit as a teenager with a two-pound weight that had been intended for another slave) that caused her to have blackouts and seizures, she risked her life without a second thought. Whenever I hear about a new example of slaves’ resistance to their masters and their position, I wonder if there aren’t many slaves who resist in smaller, quieter ways, whose efforts are never known by others. Surely, when there are those such as Henry Brown and Harriet Tubman, the entire rest of the slave population cannot simply consist of those who quietly and obediently toil until they drop dead. There must be some who live in between, those who are perhaps never noted by the rest of the world as rebels but do rebel in their own smaller ways. I have heard rumors of slaves breaking tools or feigning illness and injury in order to avoid work; purposely working slowly; and stealing from their masters things such as money, alcohol, and most frequently food. Slaves even justify this stealing—if they are the master’s property, and so is what they steal, then is it really stealing? It remains under the control of the master. These small rebellions are admirable in their own way, I think. If only they did not have to be done secretly, perhaps we could know more about them.

Note 2 It's strange to think that the war is over—that it was even possible for the war to end. With the indescribable carnage and strife that it spread throughout the country, there were times when I wondered if the fighting wouldn't simply go on for eternity. And yet it feels like I’m just now grasping the full truth of the war, as soldiers return home with horribly mangled bodies and even more horribly mangled minds. As others struggle with the physical complaints of the soldiers, as I myself spent so long doing during the war, I find my attention directed more towards the psychological burdens they carry. It is painfully clear to see the damage that war has inflicted on the psyches of these men, yet because their physical ailments pose more immediate problems—not to mention the risk of illnesses spreading to others—the soldiers’ mental health seems to be regarded by most as unimportant. Perhaps the straightforwardness of medical problems as opposed to psychological ones makes some feel that once the last influenza patient is recovered and the final leg is amputated, the problem will be over. But surely the collective psychological plight of all these men cannot be ignored, and when steps are taken to respond, I fear that there will be a whole new wave of helpless, mentally disturbed souls who become the victim of “treatments” that are little more than imprisonments. I am not afraid or unwilling to stand up for them; I merely doubt my ability to turn around an almost undoubtedly inevitable wave of mistreatment of the mentally scarred. I am only one woman—yes, I have accomplished many things, but still I am only one woman, and I often feel that my cause is unsupported except, of course, by those I help—but they cannot help themselves, so what good is their support?

Note 3

I’m not embarrassed to tell you that I felt tears come to my eyes when I heard Sojourner Truth’s passionate, beautifully eloquent and straightforwardly honest speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Even though I can’t truly sympathize with the suffering Ms. Truth speaks of so beautifully, as I am a white woman (and receiving, as I often do, the special treatment which she talks of watching white women receive and herself never receiving), I am no stranger to the discrimination that she talks about or the horribly frustrating injustice of being treated like some ornament who has nothing but dresses and gossip to occupy the space between her ears. Having crossed time and time again powerful men in order to help those who are suffering, both from wounds acquired in battle and damage to the psyche, I have spent too much of my life being told I lack the innate intellect to be an agent of any real or powerful change in the world—as evidenced by the fact that I lacked the good sense to be born male. Ms. Truth makes an especially powerful point when she mentions the fact that many men use the fact that Jesus Christ was male as “proof” that men are superior to women—as if Jesus was not born and raised by Mary, a woman, the icon of purity and virtue. Perhaps if the Bible had included a verse of some other epitome of sinlessness speaking out against the prejudices against women, our society would not have become one built by women and ruled by men. Perhaps there is such a verse, but men choose to ignore it—in fact, this does not seem entirely implausible. Having studied the Bible myself, I’ve found a number of things that we choose to ignore—I won’t go into them at length here, but know that anything justified with a reference to the Bible should be taken with a sizeable grain of salt. But then again, most of our society’s rules have little to justify them. Perhaps this is something we should all keep in mind as our country undergoes a drastic change. Perhaps what most struck me about Ms. Truth’s speech was her declaration that “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, [that being, if Eve could bring sin upon the world and destroy paradise all by herself,] these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!"

Note 4 It seems like both supporters of both the North and the South are claiming that the Revolutionary War is evidence of their moral righteousness. I hear Southerners equating the current civil war to the Revolutionary war—the South being the equivalent in this metaphor of the Colonies, which fought their oppressors to form their own country and gain freedom. My friends in the North, meanwhile, argue that the Revolutionary War was fought to create the country of the United States of America as it is today, and the South has no right to secede. When I first heard these arguments, I dismissed them as both sides using a comparable past situation to avoid tackling the morality of the current situation, but now I wonder if perhaps their argument is more valid than I first thought. I won’t say that I oppose war because I’m a Unitarian—to say that I practice Unitarianism because I oppose war would be closer to the truth. So if I can really say that the Revolutionary War was justified, can I say that the war we are in now is not? The Colonies formed their own country because their way of life was being threatened, that much is true. And the Confederacy is trying to secede from the US because they feel that the North is impeding on their way of life—this is also true. Yet surely it cannot be as simple as that. The Colonies were not simply seeing their way of life threatened. They were being mistreated in more blatant and cruel ways, weren’t they? Taxing people without representation is different from simply denying them their way of life. Then again, the whole reason the South is trying to secede is that they fear the North will outlaw slavery, which, it could be said, is just as economically damaging as taxation without representation. So is the South really any less morally righteous than the Colonies were when they formed the United States of America? I suppose it all comes down to whether slavery is morally justifiable, but moral justifiability seems to be a rather tricky, slippery thing, hard to establish and harder to hold onto. Is morality even fact, really, or is it simply opinion? And if morality is not fact, then do we have any more right to impose our morals upon, then, say, our taste in art? Sometimes I think I might be just as mad as the poor souls I work to help. So much of our lives is governed by our ideas of morality, yet if morality is more opinion than fact… the implications stretch far beyond this war, or any war. Perhaps we’re better off abandoning the fight for moral righteousness and resorting simply to fighting. But surely that can’t be the answer… perhaps instead of trying to sort it out ourselves, we should just turn to the Lord to find the answer.

=Photos of Dorothea Dix= == = Fig. 2 Source: Unidentified photographer. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution =

A more recent photo of me. Goodness, I look so odd when I'm smiling like that.
Fig. 3 Source: Library of Congress

A picture Charles took of me last week when I visited him and his wife. What a wild night that was! No wonder I look so crazy in this.
Fig. 4 Source: WQED.org

A sketch of one of the many insane asylums I've founded. It was so exciting to visit it last week and see how so many mentally disturbed souls were finally getting the treatment they needed.
Fig. 5 Source: WQED.org ====One young patient who was transferred to the hospital (from a prison!) She suffers from delusions and periods of melancholy dementia, though her condition is said to be improving. She seems cheerful enough in this photograph.====

Fig. 6 Source: WQED.org

Dixmont Hospital's Reed Hall
Fig. 7 Source: Marilyn A. & Nicholas M. Graver, George Eastman House, International Center of Photography

Me showing off my new hairstyle!
Fig. 8 Source: Tom Normanly. Capitol Broadcasting Company.

Three guesses as to what this sign is for!
Fig. 9 Source: "Lunatic Asylum. Rear View." Inset illustration in "Bird's eye view in the city of Raleigh, North Carolina 1872. Drawn and published by C. Drie." Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

A sketch of an asylum I founded in North Carolina.
Fig. 10 Source: Northampton State Hospital official website

The Northampton State Hospital has finally opened its doors!
Fig. 11 Source: www.east-buc.k12.ia.us

A color portrait of me! Rather different from the other photographs, I think, but it's nice for a change.
Fig. 12 Source: Northampton State Hospital official website

Nurses at the Northampton State Hospital. You do a wonderful job, ladies!
Fig. 13 Source: Civilwarhome.com