Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

They were not ordered into companies and regiments, but they constituted a great army of their own. Within the first full year of the Civil War, the women of northeastern Ohio, what was once called the Connecticut Western Reserve, had mustered themselves into hundreds of soldiers’ aid societies, electing officers and reconnoitering every village, town and city in the region for food, money and hospital supplies.

Raids were not out of the question. Sixteen young women in Cleveland conducted a “blanket raid” less than two weeks after President Abraham Lincoln had declared war. A thousand men, volunteers for the coming fight, had amassed at Camp Taylor, east of the city, and they lacked the supplies necessary for a cold April night on the shores of Lake Erie. The women foraged the city, and by nightfall they had seized, through patriotic appeal, 729 coverlets, among them “delicate rose blankets, chintz quilts, thick counterpanes.” By sundown others had provided “two carriages heaped with half-worn clothing” for the men who “had no coats” or “wore thin linen blouses.” By the end of the next day enough bedclothes had been secured to ensure a night’s warm sleep for all the new recruits.

In June 1861 three wealthy women with careers in philanthropy, Rebecca Rouse, Mary Clark Brayton and Ellen F. Terry, formed the Cleveland Ladies’ Aid Society; four months later they joined with other local benevolent associations to create the Soldiers’ Aid Society of Northern Ohio, the first such organization in the Union to be aligned with the United States Sanitary Commission.

From there a web of regional and local societies emerged. Within a month, 120 organizations had affiliated with the society; by July 1862, some 445 societies in northern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, western New York State, southern Michigan and Wisconsin had sent money and goods to the Cleveland society’s “depot” at 95 Bank Street (now West Sixth Street). By war’s end, the Soldier’s Aid Society of Northern Ohio would count 525 auxiliary societies in just the 18 northeastern-most counties of Ohio, raising and making over $1 million worth of food, clothing and hospital stores.

On a summer Saturday I sat in the Western Reserve Historical Society’s reading room and carefully unfolded the letters from one such auxiliary, that of my hometown of Vienna. Although I could not locate any wartime diaries or letters of Vienna’s residents, or its 90-plus soldiers (a tenth of the town’s 1860 population), I had already worked my way through the local newspaper, The Western Reserve Chronicle. Now the unpublished letters allowed me to explore the Vienna Soldiers’ Aid Society members’ work and to link town support for the Vienna Society to the vicissitudes of the war.

Led by no women of special wealth or influence beyond their shared Connecticut heritage and family connections, Vienna’s Soldiers’ Aid Society was organized in late 1861, when the Union was coming to realize that the war would last longer than a season. Even as it organized, skepticism abounded: in their initial letter to Rebecca Rouse, the members asked whether the quartermaster was selling donated articles to the soldiers and pocketing the money.

The society’s month-to-month success was largely a function of whether Vienna’s soldiers had recently engaged in battle. The oft-used phrase “our suffering soldiers” could be read selfishly and selflessly. On April 10, 1862, too soon for the community to have responded to the Battle of Shiloh that had ended just three days earlier, the society secretary, Docia Woodford Squires, sent a “small box of hospital stores” with an apology for “our inactivity in doing for” the soldiers. Citing “much sickness and so many deaths in our usual quiet town the past winter,” Squires told Rouse that “it has been almost impossible to do aught for benevolence out of our own limits.”

That changed as the news spread that 12 Vienna men had fought at Shiloh. At 11 p.m. on April 16, Squires sent Rouse two boxes: the first contained “20 lbs of Maple-Sugar, 9 lbs Dried-Elderberries, 1 can Maple-Molasses, 5 lbs Dried Peaches, 21 lbs dried Currants, 10 lbs Dried-Beef, Also a small bag of dried plums, cherries, Raspberries & Strawberries,” while the second was filled with “2 P[ie]c[e]d-quilts; 14 Pillows, 34 Pillow-cases, 12 Sheets, 100 Linen Towels, 5 Shirts (half-worn), 6 Boxes Lint, 540 Yds Bandages, 2 Pairs Socks, Also some pieces cotton.” A postscript boasted that 79 cans of concentrated chicken “nicely soddered [sic] up” had been added to the shipment. “What think you of our day[‘s] work in a small town?” Squires proudly asked.

Pride quickly turned to worry. Vienna’s society had acted before receiving the Cleveland society’s circular warning against canned chicken, and in its next letter the society was “anxious to hear what state they were in when they reached you.” Many other auxiliaries had also canned in haste. It seemed that no chicken in northeast Ohio was pardoned from this patriotic duty. Stewed, reduced and sealed in handmade, tin-plated iron cans sealed with lead solder, the concentrated chicken stored in the Cleveland society’s Aid Rooms fermented, releasing “an ominous ‘chipper’ and bubble … among the cans on the shelf, followed by a gaseous explosion” and a “decidedly stronger ‘bouquet.’” Of the 2,811 cans of chicken received in Cleveland, two-thirds were unfit to use.

The society’s shipments ebbed during the next few months. But they picked up again with the enlistment of 19 men from Vienna into the newly formed 105th Ohio Volunteer Regiment. They mustered in on Aug. 20 at Camp Cleveland and the very next day received orders to go to Kentucky.

The lack of training and what the regiment’s member-historian Albion Winegar Tourgée later described as a “hell-march” across Ohio and Kentucky exacted a toll on the unit. On Oct. 8, The Western Reserve Chronicle published a letter relating that 10 men, including two from Vienna, had been hospitalized. The letter’s author added that daily he saw “some article sent by some of the soldiers aid societies of Trumbull County,” where Vienna is located.

As the county’s residents read this news the 105th was engaged in the Battle of Perryville on Oct. 8, only 48 days after mustering and with no training in close-order drill; they lacked even a battle flag. The wounded flooded into makeshift hospitals in and around Perryville and Louisville, opening multiple lines of (mis)communication and supply diversions. Vienna’s Laura Woodford reported to Rouse on Oct. 22:

Some Soldiers from the hospitals in Kentucky … bring rather discouraging accounts about the patients getting any of our dried & canned fruits — Jellies, &c. we have often heard such reports but these last reports seem to discourage people about sending such things more than any previous report. I hope we may be able to do considerably for our suffering soldiers. There are but few who take or seem to take much interest in helping us.

Were Vienna’s residents weary from worry as so many of their neighbors and family were in harm’s way? Had prices so risen that support for other families’ men could not be sustained? Or had the war’s setbacks deflated the aid spirit in Vienna? “Our people are as bitterly disappointed in the result as the rebels can be,” the Chronicle reported a week later for the wider region. “They failed in taking Cincinnati and Louisville, and we failed in capturing them.”

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In January 1863, the women published in the Chronicle that they had met with “some discouragement, owing to the various rumors in circulation … that the hospital stores are misapplied, that the needy ones do not receive them.” Referring readers to the Sanitary Commission field reports and soldiers’ letters that “a great deal of suffering is alleviated” by the work the soldiers’ aid societies do, the women of Vienna pledged themselves to “continue in the good work in which we are engaged.” Dependent on the precarious balance of good news and good will, fighting rumors about the Sanitary Commission strengthened by news of government contractors’ shoddy practices, the Vienna Soldiers’ Aid Society could only keep faith that its work would continue to find support. Though it struggled through to the end of the war, it proved a vital source of supplies and solace to the town’s soldiers fighting and suffering far away.

The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Vienna bears on its cool grey granite the names of fallen and the names of men who returned home, some of whom died of their battle wounds years later. But the names of the women who nursed them from afar with wine and dried fruits, who tucked words of comfort and encouragement into the hospital shirts they sewed, are recorded only in fading inks on yellowing letter paper.

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Sources: Sanitary Commission Records, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland; Mary Clark Brayton and Ellen F. Terry, “Our Acre and Its Harvest: Historical Sketch of the Soldiers’ Aid Society of Northern Ohio”; Linus Pierpont Brockett and Mary C. Vaughan, “Woman’s Work in the Civil War: A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience”; Albion Winegar Tourgée, “The Story of a Thousand: Being a History of the Service of the 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, in the War for the Union From August 21, 1862, to June 6, 1865.”

Shirley T. Wajda, a public historian specializing in American material culture, currently works as a curator at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Museum and

Historical Commission, Harrisburg.

