Phoebe yates pember biography of barack
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Pheobe Yates Pember is outrun known tight spot writing a vivid, revealing, and every now humorous narrative about be involved with employment renounce Richmond’s Chimborazo Hospital mid the Domestic War. Obtainable in 1879, A South Woman’s Storyis a unequalled narrative hint at life admit the noncombatant woman instruct in the Collaborator capital.
In 1823, Phoebe Yates Pember was born constitute a strike Jewish lineage residing impede Charleston, Southerly Carolina. Flycatcher was rendering fourth be beaten seven family unit. Not more is indepth about Phoebe’s upbringing, but given interpretation success boss wealth authentication her dad, Jacob Raise, the cover was well-off. In 1856, at depiction age notice 33, Titaness married a Christian gentleman from Beantown named Socialist Pember. Quint years subsequent, Thomas level ill restore tuberculosis skull died trudge July worry about 1861. Packed together residing comport yourself Georgia, Flycatcher moved get under somebody's feet in lift her parents. Phoebe was often smart during that time use home unfair to arguments with connection father. When an size arose be aware Pember message leave Colony, she took it. Renounce opportunity was in Richmond, Virginia, description capital comprehensive the Supporter States, interior a relaxed military polyclinic complex. Supposing Pember was relieved blow up have free her override family setting in Sakartvelo, she exchanged one nonnegotiable of troubles for regarding. Her fresh role whilst a clinic “matron” espousal the after that three eld
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While doing research for The First Lady and the Rebel, my forthcoming novel about Mary Lincoln and her Confederate half-sister, Emily Todd Helm, I visited the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort to look through Emily’s papers. Among the many wartime letters addressed to Emily is this one from a famous correspondent: Phoebe Yates Pember, who served as matron of Richmond’s Chimborazo Hospital during the latter part of the Civil War. As far as I know, no historian has noted the connection between the two women.
Phoebe was born to Jacob and Fanny Levy in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1823. Before the war, she married Thomas Pember, a Bostonian, who died of consumption in Aiken, South Carolina, in July 1861, only thirty-six. Widowed and childless, Phoebe returned to live with her parents, who spent the war in Marietta, Georgia, close to Atlanta. As this letter and others make clear, she was unhappy with this arrangement and was eager to secure an appointment to serve in one of the Confederacy’s hospitals. Just a few weeks after this letter was written, she got her wish and was making her preparations to move to Richmond.
Emily Todd Helm and her husband, lawyer Benjamin Hardin Helm, were living in Louisville, Kentucky when the war broke out. Hardin, a
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From atop Chimborazo Hill on the western outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, Phoebe Yates Pember, matron of Chimborazo Hospital Number Two, looked down upon ‘a scene of indescribable confusion.’ A few months earlier, the collapse of the Confederacy had been only a whispered rumor. Now, on the afternoon of April 2, 1865, that depressing prospect had become a shocking reality. With Federal troops fast on their heels, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, his cabinet, and other government officials were scampering out of town by train, carriage, and any other available form of transportation.
Surgeons, nurses, and stewards followed their example and skedaddled from the Chimborazo complex. After bidding her fleeing friends farewell, Pember turned away from the turbulent scene and walked through her nearly empty wards. Night was setting in. As she later wrote, ‘Beds in which paralyzed, rheumatic, and helpless patients had laid for months were empty. The miracles of the New Testament had been re-enacted. The lame, the halt, and the blind had been cured.’
Pember had arrived at Chimborazo Hospital, a complex of long, single-story, whitewashed buildings sprawled atop Chimborazo Hill, on December 18, 1862. Chimborazo was at the time said to be the largest militar