I have sometimes called Nellie Chase "Dorothea Dix's worst nightmare," and so she might have been. Nellie Chase Leath was only twenty-two when she offered her services as a nurse with the 100th Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment. She was tiny and unusually attractive, with a classically oval face, deep dark eyes, a pouting lower lip, and long wavy hair. She had no references, no experience, and a limited education. She had eloped at the age of nineteen with a man she later described as a "drunk, a gambler, a liar, a forger, and a thief." She left him when he ordered her to become the madame of his new brothel. On her own, she had been supporting herself by mending costumes in the basement of a theater. She lived in a dirty tenement teeming with transients and others who were trying to hide from the authorities, a building so dangerous that the 1860 census takers in Pittsburgh skipped it entirely. The woman with whom she shared a single room had taken an overdose of opium in an effort to escape a life of prostitution. Nellie enlisted because life in the midst of a war seemed safer than the one she had been living. So how did such a young woman manage to become head matron for one of the most devout regiments in the Union Army? If ever a man tried to use a woman’s own experiences to ruin her reputation, surely it was the Rev. Robert Audley Browne, who believed that the battlefield was “no place for a lady.” But Nellie was an uncooperative target. She was headstrong enough to have risked parental disapproval by eloping with the man she loved. She was strong enough to escape from a potentially abusive relationship, and resourceful enough to support herself in a world that did not easily accept single career women. She believed so passionately in her country’s cause that she went off to war with the enthusiasm of a soldier. She displayed compassion and skill in her nursing duties. She took over the task of running a southern plantation with all the aplomb of a lady to the manor born. And after the war she found a new life, her self-esteem and her reputation intact. The men she cared for remembered her as their very own Florence Nightingale. All that remained was for her to find a new theater in which to commit a final act of self-sacrifice and martyrdom.
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A soldier described Nellie M. Chase:
"My
life was saved by one of those angels of mercy, a volunteer army
nurse. I fell into good hands—the blessed hands of a kind-hearted
woman! Even here, amid the roar and carnage, was found a woman with the
soul to dare danger; the heart to sympathize with the battle-stricken;
sense, skill, and experience to make her a treasure beyond all price.”
Nellie M. Chase, with some of the staff of the 100th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment (known as "The Roundheads"). This picture was taken at the Leverett House in Beaufort, South Carolina, in March, 1862.
Included in the picture are Rev. Robert Audley Browne, the regimental chaplain; Pvt. John Stevenson, "Uncle Bob", the slave who ran the Leverett House; Col. Daniel Leasure, regimental commander; and Dr. Horace Ludington, the regimental surgeon.
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