Kary, Elizabeth (69 page)

Author's Note

After
researching
Let No Man Divide,
I would like to credit as my main source of both
information and inspiration the work by Agatha Young,
The Women and the
Crisis: Women of the North in the Civil War.
Reading not only this book,
but others from her bibliography, gave me an understanding of the trials and
triumphs of women in the Civil War era and especially women involved in military
nursing. In writing
Let No Man Divide,
I adopted one of Young's premises
as my own: that the Civil War was the beginnings of the women's movement as we know
it (the convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 notwithstanding). That
until women were forced out of the home to care for the wounded and raise money
for relief, they did not realize either how repressed or how capable they
really were. The character Leigh represents a pioneer of sorts, a woman who
because of her wartime experiences would go on to a field that was then, and is
to this day, dominated by men. In truth, many of the women who organized the
North's relief agencies became women's rights activists and suffragettes.

After
reading a novel as grounded in history as
Let No Man Divide,
I always
want to know which characters were real and which were figments of the author's
imagination. While Leigh and Hayes were fictitious, they were both based on
actual people or amalgamations of people I read about. On the other hand, Mary
Ann Bickerdyke was a living, breathing person, remarkable and even stronger and
more flamboyant that I could make her. Stories about her experiences during the
war are legend, and I drew most of my information from Nina Brown Baker's
biography
Cyclone in Calico: The Story of Mary Ann Bickerdyke.
The other
nurses mentioned by name, with the exception of Delia, were all real people and
left records of their experiences in wartime.

James
Eads, too, was a prominent man in St. Louis at the time of the war. He did
start out as an urchin selling apples on street corners, and by 1861, he had
made his fortune and retired. He came out of retirement to build the ironclads
and, after the war in 1879, built Eads' Bridge, which is still in use and has
become a St. Louis landmark.

Researching
any period and then reproducing it in fiction is a business fraught with peril,
and a period of history like the Civil War is particularly difficult because
there is so much written about it. Yet there are things that fall through the
cracks. In researching the hospital-ship section of this book, information was
frustratingly sketchy. Young makes her first mention of them after Fort
Donelson. A recent article in
Civil War Times
credits the
Red Rover
as
the first U.S. Navy hospital ship. According to the records of the Western
Sanitary Commission here in St. Louis, the first ship designed for that purpose
was
The City of Louisiana.
As much as we would like it to be, history is
not absolute.

In
addition to the other books I have credited, I would like to cite
The
American Heritage Short History of the Civil War, The Civil War Almanac,
and
the Time-Life Civil War Series as my basic sources. I also read a number of
delightful journals, newspapers, guidebooks, and narratives of the various
campaigns in making
Let No Man Divide
as accurate as possible.

By
way of additional research I walked the streets of St. Louis. Camp Jackson is
now covered by a railyard, the Planters' House is a bank, Busch Stadium is
built over the Lynch slave pen, and Checkerboard Square is on the site of the
Gratiot Street Prison. One lone example of the town houses in Lucas Place
remains, and I would like to thank Thoren Ware, the curator of the Campbell
House, for the time he spent with me.

The
Mississippi has changed, too: through both nature and man's design. But there
is still a magnificence to it that the years cannot alter. One needs only to
stand on the levee and watch the ceaseless flow of water to understand its
permanence and hear the echoes of the past.

Elizabeth
N. Kary

St.
Louis, Missouri

February
1, 1986