Aunt Becky Civil War Nurse and Saint

Aunt Becky

Sarah Graham Palmer Young was a thirty-two-year-old widow from Ithaca, New York, when she threw herself into the war. After her brothers enlisted, she couldn’t stay home sewing bandages. She kissed her two little girls goodbye, packed a carpetbag, and boarded a southbound train in 1862.

 

She didn’t have any orders, a uniform, or a promise of pay. She just walked into the camp of the 109th New York Volunteers and asked where the sick were. Someone pointed to a tent thick with blood and fever. She went in and stayed.

 

The soldiers called her “Mother.” She snapped, “I’m not that old.” They laughed and called her “Aunt Becky.” Within weeks, she was part of the place. She worked nights, argued with surgeons, and gave her coffee to men who couldn’t lift their heads. She joked with the men when she could, cursed under her breath when supplies ran short, and once told a colonel, “Sir, if you’d been as useful with a needle as you are with that sword, these boys might’ve had decent bandages by now.”

 

She wasn’t trained. No woman was. She learned by doing—pressing on wounds, wrapping stumps, sitting beside the ones who wouldn’t make it till morning. “I did not go to make history,” she said, “but to serve.”

 

Once, near Fredericksburg, she walked six miles through sleet to get rations for her hospital tent. The commissary officer tried to turn her away. She grabbed the wagon reins and drove off before he could stop her. “If you want your mules,” she told him, “come find me at the hospital.”

 She saw men coughing blood, screaming for water, calling for mothers who would never come. One time, she sat beside a dying soldier who begged her to let him go. “Oh, if the cruel shots could only kill at once,” she wrote. She held his hand until it was over, then moved to the next cot and did it again. And again.

 

Aunt Becky wasn’t big on rules. During the siege of Petersburg, she found a tent of men the doctor had written off. The only way to save them was to get them north. She stole a handful of hospital transfer tickets from the quartermaster’s office and pinned them to the sickest soldiers. When the doctor found out, he asked, “Who gave you permission?” She said, “I did.” He ran to General Grant. Grant laughed. “I’ve got nothing to say. Aunt Becky outranks me.”

 

Another time, an officer bragged the men didn’t need cots. “The floor’s good enough,” he said. Aunt Becky pointed at a man lying on the ground and said, “I wish the provost marshal would lie there in his place and try the soft floor till I was satisfied.” The officer left without a word.

 

When the doctors refused to give extra rations to the wounded, she broke open a barrel of crackers and handed them out. “If they court-martial me,” she told a nurse, “I hope it’s after supper.”

 

When smallpox broke out near City Point, most of the attendants fled. Aunt Becky stayed. She scrubbed the tents, burned soiled bedding, and prayed she wouldn’t carry the disease to others. She didn’t get sick, but wrote that the smell of disinfectant “never left her hands.”

 

At night, when the guns fell quiet, she’d sit outside her tent and write by lamplight, her letters full of small moments—how the men argued over coffee, how one boy gave her a broken watch as a keepsake, how she’d learned to sleep through cannon fire. “I am not brave,” she said, “only too stubborn to be frightened.”

 

By war’s end, she was worn thin. The noise and the dying had burned through her. She went home hollow-eyed and restless. In 1867, she married David Young and moved to Des Moines, Iowa.

 

That same year, she wrote The Story of Aunt Becky’s Army-Life. The book was plain, stripped of sentiment. “My heart aches for the brave boys who went down in the great struggle,” she wrote. “Their suffering and courage were the glory of the army.” She didn’t write about heroics, only blood, mud, and mercy. Soldiers recognized the truth of it.

 

During the Spanish-American War, she helped organize Iowa’s Sanitary Commission, raising supplies for another generation of boys. She was never officially part of the army and never got a pension. The government forgot her. The soldiers didn’t. They sent small checks signed, “From the Boys.” She framed one and hung it on her wall.

 

In old age, reporters called her “the nurse who defied generals.” She shrugged. “I have never had a rude word from a soldier in my life,” she said. “I’ve met rebuffs from steamboat captains and paymasters, but never from one of the boys.”

 

She died in Des Moines in 1908. Veterans marched at her funeral. Someone read from her book. “I did not go to make history, but to serve.”

 

Aunt Becky didn’t wait for permission. She didn’t ask for medals. She just walked into the chaos, sleeves rolled up, voice steady, and made the worst of war a little more human.