Other Side of War, The. . . with the Army of the Potomac. Slipcased manuscript (a) and unslipcased first edition (b).
The Original Manuscript Of A Civil War Nursing Narrative,
Illustrated With Brady’s Photographs
Wormeley, Katherine Prescott. The Other Side of War. Letters from the headquarters of the United States Sanitary Commission [with the] Army of the Potomac. 1862. Illustrated by photographs which were made on the spot at the time by Brady & Co. at the time the letters were written. [N.p.: Newport, Rhode Island, c. 1880].
4to.; 176 pages of lined notebook paper; 16 original sepia photographs by Matthew Brady, tipped in and integral to text; green marbled boards, morocco spine and tips; covers well-worn, tips bumped, spine casing nearly exposed; text pages fresh & bright, internally fine. Housed in a specially built quarter-morocco folding box, spine stamped in gilt.
Together with:
Wormeley, Katherine Prescott. The Other Side Of War; With The Army Of The Potomac. Letters From The Headquarters Of The United States Sanitary Commission During The Peninsular Campaign In Virginia In 1862. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1889.
8vo.; frontispiece photograph of Frederick Law Olmstead; two additional uncredited photographs; green cloth, stamped in gilt, with U.S. Sanitary Commission seal; covers rubbed, buckling a bit, inner hinge starting.
The original holograph manuscript of Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s first-person Civil War narrative, together with a first edition. The original text, entered by Wormeley into a store-bought stationer’s record, varies significantly from the published edition, and features 16 original sepia photographs by Matthew Brady affixed to the pages by Wormeley; none of these Brady photographs are included as part of the first published edition of Wormeley’s masterwork. With the author’s extensive corrections and emendations throughout; also includes a 15-page fiction in manuscript, entitled “A True Story”; the tale, of a love affair between a young American girl and a Prussian officer, apparently remains unpublished.
Katherine Prescott Wormeley, Civil War relief nurse, hospital worker, author, translator, and philanthropist, was born in Ipswich England to American parents in 1830. Wormeley’s mother was the daughter of an East India merchant in Boston and niece of Commodore Edward Preble of the U.S. Navy; her father, a sixth-generation Virginian and a great-nephew of Edmund Randolph, George Washington’s Attorney General, moved to England as a child, where he was raised as a British subject. Katharine Wormeley lived a privileged early life: raised in London, France, and Switzerland, she moved with her family to Newport, Rhode Island in her mid-teens.
Wormeley was one of the first women to participate actively in relief work upon the outbreak of the Civil War. In July 1861, in the early days of the conflict, she organized the local Newport Women’s Union Aid Society, which she headed until April 1862. Concerned with the financial plight of the Union soldiers’ families, Wormeley secured from the Quartermaster General a government clothing contract providing employment for soldiers’ wives and daughters; under her supervision, the women turned out some 50,000 shirts during the winters of 1861 and 1862. In May 1862 Wormeley joined the hospital transport service of the newly-formed United States Sanitary Commission, under whose auspices many women volunteered for the war effort. Wormeley’s work with the Sanitary Commission, for whom she toured hospital ships throughout the Virginia peninsula, searching out and caring for the sick and wounded, is documented by the volume of correspondence that was eventually published in 1889 as The Other Side of War.
This manuscript includes the raw material for one of the earliest female first-person American war narratives. Wormeley’s correspondence—addressed primarily to her mother—renders in vivid detail her days and nights on the hospital ships on the York and Pamunkey rivers of Virginia during General George McClellan‘s ill-fated Peninsula Campaign of 1
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