"…I received from you…the last year’s report…I am not quite ready to do anything you desire of me and only await the papers to embody something in this year’s report…I hear that Grace is to be here on Monday for a short visit. On many accounts I still cling to the hope that she may relinquish her Hospital plan - but if she goes it will be an infinite consolation to have her with you, & Sally - I trust I shall hear when you go, & where...Such a blessing as your Ministry tho afforded at great cost to those at home, shd. not be withheld from our suffering soldiers…” Called “the first noted female writer in America”, Catherine Sedgwick (1789-1867) published nearly a dozen novels, but was also active in the Womens Prison Association of New York, founded by social reformer “Abby” Gibbons to aid poor Irish women alcoholics. At the start of the Civil War, Gibbons was among the first women to volunteer as a nurse for Union Army soldiers. After setting up military hospitals in Washington and Maryland, but failing in her bid to become Superintendent of Army Nurses (a position given to Dorothea Dix, famed champion of the mentally ill) Abigail, joined by her daughter Sarah (called “Sally”), and Grace Sedgwick, Catherine’s 19 year-old niece, trekked to Virginia battlefields to care for the thousand wounded soldiers who suffered terribly in makeshift field hospitals. Catherine’s concern, in this letter, for her young niece’s welfare, was more than justified, as the nurses were in constant danger of capture by Confederate troops. When Texas Rangers burst into Grace’s room in Virginia, demanding to know if there were any “damned Yankees” around, the girl who had hidden Union flags and letters under the mattress of her bed, replied, “Yes, I am a Yankee, but not a damned one.”