Georgeanna Woolsey’s journal.
July 12.
Lying off Harrison’s Point in sight of the hospital on shore to which we went the other evening. The fifty tents we brought from Washington are going up and are partly filled– men on cots, and not very ill. The place is to be used as a rest for a few days for men who can then join their regiments. The Medical Department is greatly improved, and the Sanitary Commission, who were chiefly instrumental in putting in the new Surgeon-General (Hammond), who in his turn has put in all the good new men, finds its work here at an end, and might as well retire gracefully. Four thousand sick have been sent north from Harrison’s. Soup, and food generally, are being cooked all the time, without the aid of the Sanitary Commission, and they would leave now but for the flag of truce sent in by Lee to arrange for the bringing away of our wounded left behind in the retreat. The transports are under orders.
Commodore Wilkes is here in charge of the gun-boat fleet, and Captain Rodgers sent his small boat for us the other day, and took us all over his vessel and then over the Monitor and the Maratanza. The Galena was full of cannon ball holes. The Maratanza gave me a piece of the balloon found on the rebel gun-boat Teaser. It was made of the old silk dresses of the ladies of Richmond, forty or more different patterns. They gave me, too, the signal flag of the little imp. We went over her to see the damage the shell did her, bursting into the boiler and disemboweling her.
The army is quiet and resting, and the surgeons of the regiments have been coming in constantly to the Sanitary Commission supply boat with requisitions for the hospitals. We are giving out barrels of vegetables. The Small will run up the river and be ready to fill a gap in bringing off our wounded prisoners, and it will be a comfort to do something before going home ignominiously. The last two weeks of waiting has been wearing to us all, and Miss Wormeley is a fascinating wreck.