Hands of Mercy

Six hundred nuns from twelve religious communities served as U.S. Army nurses during the Civil War. They served on the battlefield and gave their lives. A group of Sisters of Mercy traveling to St. Louis on a Union steamboat took fire from a Confederate gun battery and worked through it, tending the wounded. At Gettysburg one St. Joseph sister wiped the blood-covered face of a young soldier to discover that he was her 18 year-old brother. When the Sisters of Providence took over the military hos