Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Southern Woman's Story by Phoebe Yates Pember Phoebe Pember. Phoebe Yates Levy Pember was born on August 18, 1823 to Jewish parents in Charleston, South Carolina. Her father, Jacob Levy, was a successful merchant and because of their wealth and status they socialized with the city’s elite in spite of any anti-Semitism they may have encountered. In 1856, Pember married outside her faith to Thomas Pember of Boston. Their marriage only lasted five years before her husband succumbed to tuberculosis in July 1861. Following her husbands death, Pember moved back in with her parents who fled their new home of Savannah, Georgia for the safety of Marietta, Georgia. However, the time Pember spent at home was not happy as she often quarreled with her father. Thus, in November of 1862, she accepted an offer from her good friend and wife of the Confederate Secretary of War Mary Pope Randolph to serve as chief matron for Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. During Pember’s tenure as matron Chimborazo was one of the largest hospitals in the world; in which its staff treated over 76,000 wounded and ill Confederate soldiers. Although Pember did not practice medicine she was a successful administrator. As chief matron, Pember oversaw the nursing operations in the second of the hospital’s five divisions with limited supervision from a chief medical officer, in which she attended to the dietary needs and the comfort of over 15,000 men. Pember was the first female administrator at Chimborazo and as such faced numerous attempts to undermine her authority. These attempts primarily manifested themselves in her staff underestimating her resilience by trying to steal medical supplies, especially whiskey, which was placed under her control. In one instance, Pember threatened a would-be thief with a gun she kept hidden in order to keep him away from the barrels of whiskey. Pember served as chief matron from December 1862 until the Confederate surrender in April 1865. Following the war, Pember traveled extensively throughout the United States before passing away of breast cancer on March 4, 1913 while visiting Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pember’s memoirs A Southern Woman’s Story: Life in Confederate Richmond recounts her time at Chimborazo and provides valuable insight into the plight of southern women during the Civil War. Pember defied gender expectations and excelled in her position as administrator. As one Richmond citizen wrote Pember was a “brisk and brilliant matron” with “the will of steel under a suave refinement.” Phoebe Yates Pember. Phoebe Yates Levy was born on August 18, 1823. She was the fourth of six daughters of a prosperous and socially prominent Jewish family in Charleston, South Carolina. Her father was a successful merchant and her mother was a popular actress. Members of Phoebe’s family were quite active in public life during the war. Her sister Eugenia Levy Phillips, a Confederate spy, was banished to an island. Her brother Samuel was the highest ranking Jewish officer in Savannah, Georgia. The family’s wealth enabled them to gain acceptance in the community, which wasn’t easy for Jews. They moved among Charleston’s elite until a series of financial setbacks sent them to Savannah, Georgia, in 1850. Phoebe was then 27 years old and wanted a life of her own. She married Thomas Pember, a non-Jew, in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1856. Soon after the wedding, Thomas contracted tuberculosis, and the couple moved to the South, hoping his health would improve there. On July 9, 1861, Thomas died of tuberculosis in Aiken, South Carolina. He was 36 years old. Widowed and childless, Phoebe returned to her family, who had fled to Marietta, Georgia, to escape the ravages of war. In November 1862, Mrs. George Randolph, wife of the Confederate Secretary of War, offered Phoebe a position as a matron at the Chimborazo Hospital, a Confederate military hospital outside of Richmond, Virginia. Though Phoebe had no professional medical training, she believed that caring for her husband through years of illness qualified her for hospital work. Chimborazo was said to be the largest military hospital in the world at that time. A complex of long, one-story whitewashed buildings sprawled atop a hill, the hospital began receiving patients in 1862 and was eventually expanded to 150 wards. Each ward was a separate building, thirty feet wide and one hundred feet long, and housed approximately forty to sixty patients. Phoebe supervised 150 wards, and an estimated 15,000 soldiers were under her care during the Civil War. On December 1, 1862, 39-year-old Phoebe Yates Pember became the chief matron of the Second Division at Chimborazo, which was one of five divisions in the hospital. Though she was confident in her abilities, she encountered much opposition, but she was not one to be pushed around. In response to criticism that ladies should not see the horrors of a hospital, Phoebe replied: In the midst of suffering and death, hoping with those almost beyond hope in this world; praying by the bedside of the lonely and heart stricken; closing the eyes of the boys hardly old enough to realize man’s sorrows, much less suffer man’s fierce hate, a woman must soar beyond the conventional modesty considered correct under different circumstances. Though plagued by shortages of medicine and supplies, and having to contend with doctors who didn’t approve of female nurses, Phoebe cared for sick and wounded Confederate soldiers for the balance of the war. But her position seemed little more than that of a cook, until the surgeon-in-charge, Dr. James McCaw, found her peeling potatoes one day. McCaw made a thorough study of hospital rules and organized a full staff under Phoebe’s jurisdiction. She was provided with an assistant matron, cooks and bakers, and two laborers to perform menial tasks. She also made sure that the orders of surgeons were performed properly, and that the medical and dietary needs of her patients were fulfilled. She wrote letters for the soldiers and comforted the dying, and set a pattern of compassionate care for the terminally ill that served as a model for future generations of nurses. She eventually found some respite from her duties by renting a room in town, to which she returned at night. Meanwhile, her patients taught her something about courage: No words can do justice to the uncomplaining nature of the Southern soldier. Day after day, whether lying wasted by disease or burning up with fever, torn with wounds or sinking from debility, a groan was seldom heard. As the war progressed, casualties multiplied and Phoebe’s duties increased. Large numbers of incoming wounded caused shortages of medical supplies, surgeons and assistants, and hospital beds. She arranged for makeshift beds and continually washed and dressed minor wounds, preparing the more difficult cases for the surgeons. Phoebe wrote in her memoir about Richmond: The horrors that attended, in other and past times, the bombardment of a city, were experienced to a great degree in Richmond during the fighting around us. The close proximity to the scenes of strife; the din of battle, the bursting of shells, the fresh wounds of the men hourly brought in, were daily occurrences. Walking home after the duties of the Hospital were over, often when evening had well set in, during this time, the pavement around the railroad depot would be lined with wounded men, laid there to wait for ambulances to take them to the receiving hospital; some on stretchers, others on the bare bricks, or a thin blanket, suffering from wounds hastily wrapped around with the coarse, galling, unbleached homespun bandages, in which the blood had stiffened till every crease cut like a knife. Women, passing like myself, would put down their basket or bundle, and ringing at the bell of any neighboring house, ask for basin and soap, and a few soft rags, and going from one sufferer to another, alleviate, with what skill they had the pain of wounds, change the uneasy position and allay the thirst. Many passing, would stop and look on, till the labor appearing to require no particular skill, they too would follow the example set them, and asking occasionally a word of advice, do their part carefully and willingly. Idle boys passing, would get a pine knot, or tallow candle, and stand quietly as torch bearers, till the scene, with its gathering accessories, formed a strange picture, not easily forgotten. Persons passing in vehicles would sometimes alight, and, choosing the patients most in want of surgical aid, put them in and send them to the Seabrook Hospital, continuing their way on foot. There was very little conversation carried on, no necessity for introductions, and no names ever asked. Phoebe remained at Chimborazo until the Confederate surrender in April, 1865. She stayed with her patients after the fall of Richmond and until the facility was taken over by Federal authorities. During that time, she cared for both Confederate and Union soldiers. A total of 76,000 patients had been cared for at Chimborazo by the end of the Civil War. She suddenly found herself alone in Union-occupied Richmond, without prospects, and with just a silver 10-cent piece and a box of useless Confederate money to her name. Laughing at her lot, she spent her paltry remaining funds on “a box of matches and five cocoa-nut cakes.” When her responsibilities in Richmond were completed, Phoebe returned to Savannah, Georgia. There, she maintained her elite social status, and traveled extensively in the United States and Europe. She was honored by Confederate veterans’ organizations during her later years. Phoebe also wrote her memoirs, A Southern Woman’s Story: Life in Confederate Richmond. First published in 1879, it is rated by Civil War historian Douglas Southall Freeman as “the most realistic treatment of the war” ever published. Phoebe Yates Pember died on March 4, 1913, at the age of 89, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was buried in Laurel Grove Cemetery in Savannah. An obelisk was later erected there in her memory. In 1995, her portrait appeared on a sheet of 20 stamps issued by the United States Postal Service, which commemorated important persons and events during the Civil War. Phoebe Yates Pember. PEMBER, PHOEBE YATES (1823–1913), hospital superintendent during the American Civil War and author of a highly regarded memoir. Pember was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to the well-to-do Jacob Clavius Levy and Fanny Yates, the fourth of seven children. Widowed in 1861 when her husband, Thoman Pember, died of tuberculosis, she arrived in Richmond, Virginia, where her acquaintance with the wife of Secretary of War Randolph led to an offer to serve as superintendent or chief matron of one of the five "divisions" of Chimborazo Hospital, the largest in the world at the time and fated to treat 76,000 patients during the war. Each division consisted of around 30 wards housing 40–60 patients and another 20 or so Sibley tents for convalescents. Pember took up her duties in December 1862 and remained at her post until the collapse of the Confederacy in April 1865, walking through near-empty wards as "every man who could crawl had tried to escape a Northern prison." Pember's memoir, A Southern Woman's Story (1879), tells of hospital life at a time when twice as many patients were dying of disease as were being killed in battle, neither the etiology of disease nor the principles of hygiene were understood, and the only surgical procedure known to physicians was amputation. In this environment, facing chronic shortages of food, medicine, and equipment and fighting off raiders of the medicinal whiskey barrel and hordes of rats consuming the flesh of the dying, Pember acted with energy and determination, heroically bringing what little relief she could to the stricken. Sometimes humorous, often harrowing, and never sparing in its criticism of incompetence, Pember's memoir throws light on the lives and deaths of ordinary people caught in a murderous war and giving "the last full measure" of themselves. After the war Pember traveled widely in Europe and the United States. She died in Pittsburgh. BIBLIOGRAPHY: B.I. Wiley, Introduction to Phoebe Yates Pember, A Southern Woman's Story (1959), with private correspondence appended; "History of Chimborazo Hospital, CSA ," in: Southern Historical Society Papers , 36 (1908; reprinted 1991), 86–94. Sources: Encyclopaedia Judaica . © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved. Phoebe Yates Pember and the Civil War. Phoebe Yates Levy Pember is one of the Confederacy’s most celebrated nurses. She was born to the wealthy Levy family in Charleston, South Carolina. Her husband, Thomas Pember, died from tuberculosis in the first year of the war. She joined the Confederate nursing campaign in December 1862 and served as chief matron of the Second Division of the Chimborazo Hospital on the outskirts of Richmond, the largest hospital in the Confederacy. In addition to her tireless commitment to patient care, perhaps she is most famous for waging a one-woman crusade against alcohol abuse at the Chimborazo Hospital. Pember was appalled by the abuse of the hospital’s limited alcohol supply by doctors, other hospital employees and even patients. As a result of this mismanagement of vital resources, by the end of the war, Pember insisted on monitoring the hospital’s alcohol supplies. While participation in the temperance movement was common for nineteenth-century middle and upper class women of the North and South, such involvement generally consisted of less extreme efforts than lobbying for command of a hospital’s entire alcohol supply. Pember’s vigilantism prompted repeated complaints from her male colleagues and even garnered interest from some of the most powerful men in the Confederate Medical Department, including Medical Director William Carrington. Chimborazo Hospital on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. He advanced towards the [whiskey] barrel, and so did I, only being in the inside, I interposed between him and the object of contention. The fierce temper blazed up in his face, and catching me roughly by the shoulder, he called me a name that a decent woman seldom hears and even a wicked one resents. But I had a little friend, which usually reposed quietly on the shelf, but had been removed to my pocket in the last twenty-four hours, more from a sense of protection than from any idea that it would be called into active service; so before he had time to push me one inch from my position, or to see what kind of ally was in my hand, that sharp click, a sound so significant and so different from any other, struck upon his ear, and sent him back amidst his friends, pale and shaken. ‘You had better leave,’ I said composedly (for I felt in my feminine soul that although I was near enough to pinch his nose, that I had missed him), ‘for if one bullet is lost, there are five more ready, and the room is too small for even a woman to miss six times.’ The men threatened to return, but never did. Phoebe Yates Pember wholeheartedly tried, sometimes even at the peril of her personal safety, to reform alcohol abuse at Chimborazo. One might wonder, what would have happened if Pember ran the show at Mansion House? Further Reading. Phoebe Yates Pember, A Southern Woman’s Story (1879) About the Author. Kristen Brill is a Postdoctoral Fellow in American Literature at the Harrison Institute for American History, Literature and Culture at the University of Virginia. A Southern Woman's Story. Phoebe Yates Pember's A Southern Woman's Story is the inaugural volume in the University of South Carolina Press's new paperback series, American Civil War Classics. First published in 1879, A Southern Woman's Story chronicles Phoebe Pember's experiences as matron of the Confederate Chimborazo Hospital from November 1862 until the fall of Richmond in April 1865. Long an important source in Confederate history, A Southern Woman's Story is also a valuable book for students and scholars of women's history and the social history of the Civil War. In many ways Phoebe Pember was a representative upper-class gentlewoman. Daughter of a prominent Jewish merchant of Charleston, South Carolina, who moved his family to Savannah, Georgia in the 1850s, she sought ways to help the Southern cause—but she broke all stereotypes by the character and length of her service. Her book is equally distinctive. No dilettante's romance or saccharine Lost Cause tale, it is a remarkably frank treatment of Confederate social and medical history. Pember reports on the gossip and scandals from inside the Confederacy's largest hospital and the embattled city of Richmond, presenting bureaucratic personalities and stock characters with insight and occasional flashes of humor. Phoebe Yates Pember (1823–1913) was born in Charleston, South Carolina and moved with her family to Savannah, Georgia, in the 1850s. Widowed and childless in 1861, Pember took the post of matron at the Confederate Army's Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. She labored there throughout the war and in 1879 chronicled her experiences in A Southern Woman's Story. Pember was honored by Confederate veterans' organizations in her later years, and in 1995 her portrait appeared on a U.S. Postal Service Civil War commemorative stamp. George C. Rable is the Charles G. Summersell Professor of Southern History at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He is the author of The Confederate Republic: a Revolution Against Politics (1994), and his Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism won the 1989 Jefferson Davis Award and 1991 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize.