Fannie Beers' Civil War: A Confederate Lady's Experiences of Nursing During the Campaigns & Battles of the American Civil War

A dauntless and humane woman of the South

Young Fannie Beers, a Connecticut girl, married southerner A. P. Beers when he was a student at Yale. Naturally, she accompanied him to his home and there she formed an abiding affection for the land and its people. When the Civil War broke out her husband enlisted in the Confederate Army becoming a sergeant in Fenner's Louisiana Light Artillery. Fannie, with one small child and pregnant with a second, moved back to the security of her Northern family. Her support for the Southern cause and her refusal to renounce it soon made her position in the north untenable, so she returned to her husband's side. She thereafter worked with great commitment as a nurse with Confederate forces in Virginia, Georgia and Alabama, finally becoming a matron at a field hospital. So high was the regard in which she held that she earned the appellation, 'The Florence Nightingale of the South'. This is a remarkable story in Fannie's own words and was originally published under the title of Memories.