L. P. Brockett, Women's work in the civil war: a record of heroism, patriotism and patience

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[138] afforded her wherever she stopped to plead the cause of the soldier to the people, who readily assembled at her suggestion. She thus stimulated energies that might otherwise have flagged, and helped to swell the supplies continually pouring in to the depots of the Sanitary Commission. But Miss Gilson's crowning work was performed during that last protracted campaign of General Grant from the Rapidan to Petersburg and the Appomattox, a campaign which by almost a year of constant fighting finished the most terrible and destructive war of modern times. She had taken the field with Mr. Fay at the very commencement of the campaign, and had been indefatigable in her efforts to relieve what she could of the fearful suffering of those destructive battles of May, 1864, in which the dead and wounded were numbered by scores of thousands. To how many poor sufferers she brought relief from the raging thirst and the racking agony of their wounds, to how many aching hearts her words of cheer and her sweet songs bore comfort and hope, to how many of those on whose countenances the Angel of death had already set his seal, she whispered of a dying and risen Saviour, and of the mansions prepared for them that love him, will never be known till the judgment of the great day; but this we know, that thousands now living speak with an almost rapturous enthusiasm, of “the little lady who in their hours of agony, ministered to them with such sweetness, and never seemed to weary of serving them.”

A young physician in the service of the Sanitary Commission, Dr. William Howell Reed, who was afterwards for many months associated with her and Mr. Fay in their labors of auxiliary relief, thus describes his first opportunity of observing her work. It was at Fredericksburg in May, 1864, when that town was for a time the base of the Army of the Potomac, and the place to which the wounded were brought for treatment before being sent to the hospitals at Washington and Baltimore. The building used as a hospital, and which she visited was the mansion of John L. Marie,