Originally aired on November 15, 1996 - In part 116 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson profiles the life and career of Union surgeon George Stevens, who, according to Dr. Robertson, wrote “one of the most quotable memoirs of the Civil War,” Three Years in the Sixth Corps.
#116 – A Surgeon’s View
George Stevens never imagined that his life would be anything more than usual and quiet. The son of a Congregationalist minister, he was born in 1832 in Essex County, New York. Stevens was twenty-five when he graduated from medical school. He then established a practice in Westchester.
Civil war shattered the national tranquility, and it soon beckoned for George Stevens. In October, 1861, he joined the Union army. Stevens accepted appointment as surgeon in the 77th New York. For the next three years and eight months, he moved from one terrible battlefield to another.
Surgeons in that chaotic war had little time to make notes of what they saw and did. Stevens was an exception, which is extraordinary in light of how busy he stayed. An astute and incisive man, able to grasp the big picture of war and to catch the little details of human involvement, he produced an incredible story from his unique vantage point. That account appeared in 1866 under the title, Three Years in the Sixth Corps. It is one of the most quotable of all Civil War memoirs.
For example, Stevens closed his account of the end of the 1862 Peninsular Campaign by describing the final element of the retreating Union army. “Long processions of sick and wounded men (he said), leaning on canes and crutches, their heavy steps and sunken faces now for a moment lighted up at the thought that their melancholy pilgrimage was nearly ended, filed by us…”
In the 1863 Chancellorsville campaign, Stevens remembered two wounded men from his New York unit. One had a leg torn to shreds by a shell. Using his musket as a crutch, the soldier hobbled from the battlefield while loudly singing The Star-Spangled Banner. The other soldier, Corporal Henry West, was shot through the thigh. He calmly told Stevens: “I guess that old Joe West’s son has lost a leg.” Young West died the following day.
Stevens was caught in the middle of the heavy 1864 fighting in the Wilderness. He was sent to Fredericksburg to tend to the wounded. Even after almost three years in the field, Stevens was shocked at what he saw. “The churches had been filled first,” he noted, “then the warehouses and stores, and the private homes, until the town was literally one immense hospital.” Thousands of men awaited attention from forty available physicians.
One of those surgeons told his wife: “We are almost worked to death…yet we cannot rest for there are so many poor fellows who are suffering. (This is the) fourth day that I have worked at those terrible operations since the battle commenced…Oh! It is awful. It does not seem as though I could take a knife in my hand to-day, yet there are a hundred cases of amputations waiting for me. Poor fellows come and beg almost on their knees for the first chance to have an arm taken off. It is a scene of horror such as I never saw. God forbid that I should ever see another.”
Surgeon Stevens survived the Civil War without injury or impairment. He returned to New York and became a professor of physiology and diseases of the eye at Albany Medical College. In 1880 he moved to New York City and soon was internationally known for surgical techniques and instruments in his field. Stevens was one of the first surgeons in America to remove a foreign object from an eye with a magnet.
The venerable physician died in 1921. His eighty-eight years had been full of professional accomplishment. However, Stevens readily admitted that nothing ever equaled those four years when he ministered to the human debris so much a part of the nation’s bloodiest war.
