(A.) We are lying in the Spaulding just below a burnt railroad-bridge, on the Pamunkey River, and, as usual, in the middle of the fleet of forage boats. The shores are at once wooded and wonderful to the water's edge, the fulness of midsummer with the vivid and tender green of Southern spring. Up the banks, where the trees will let us look between them, lie great fields of wheat, tall and fresh, and taking the sunshine for miles. The river winds constantly,—returning upon itself every half-mile or so, and we seem sometimes lying in a little wooded lake without inlet or outlet. It is startling to find, so far from the sea, a river whose name we hardly knew two weeks ago, where our anchor drops in three fathoms of water and our great ship turns freely either way with the tide. Our smoke-stacks are almost swept by the hanging branches as we move, and great schooners are drawn up under the banks, tied to the trees; the Spaulding herself lies in the shade of an elm-tree which is a landmark for miles up and down. The army is in camp close at hand, resting, this Sunday, and eating its six pies to a man, and so getting ready for a move, which is planning in ——'s tent. Half a mile above us is the White House, naming the place,—a modern cottage, if ever white, now drabbed over, standing where the early home of Mrs. Washington stood. We went ashore this morning with General ——, and strolled about the grounds,—an unpretending, sweet little place, with old trees shading the cottage, a green lawn sloping to the river, and an old-time garden full of roses. The house has been emptied, but there are some pieces of quaint furniture, brass fire-dogs, &c., and just inside the door this notice is posted: "Northern soldiers who profess to reverence the name of Washington, forbear to desecrate the home of his early married life, the property of his wife, and now the home of his descendants"; signed, "A Granddaughter of Mrs. Washington"; confronted by Gen. McClellan's order of protection.

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(M.) We were going up to head-quarters, but refrained, on consideration, and came back to the Spaulding, through army-wagons and pie-pedlers, and rewarded the three Generals who had come over to meet us with much-needed towels, handkerchiefs, and cologne. The river above us to the burnt railroad-bridge is crowded with steamboats and schooners. Four gunboats are our next-door neighbors. Beyond the bridge, round the corner, and out of sight, winds the Pamunkey, trees crowding down to the brink and dipping their feet in the water. The Harbor-Master wanting the room in the evening, we dropped down the stream and anchored by a feathery elm-tree.

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(A.) The next morning I saw the Medical Director at head-quarters. He seems to be in a worse boggle than ever as to the disposition of his sick. There are a great many still at Yorktown to be removed, but the work is now fairly systematized there, and the sick begin to collect here by hundreds, with a prospect of thousands, and no thought of system in disposing of them, as far as I can see. The Director has ordered us to take on men at once, but our bunks are not up, and I have promised him the Daniel Webster and Elm City, which should be here to-morrow, and can take six hundred. B. has gone down to bring up our boats from Yorktown, with all the stores that can be spared from our supply-ship. I shall try my best here to carry out the plan I have always wished to have pursued,—namely, the establishment of a large receiving hospital, from which those who really need to be sent away may be deliberately selected and transferred to proper vessels, properly equipped. During my visit this morning to the Medical Director's tent, four persons reported their arrival with sick, and were informed that there were no accommodations for them. Tents had been received, but there was no detail on hand to pitch them, and if they were pitched, there were no beds to put in them. Sickness was increasing rapidly, every case showing the influence of malaria. The Medical Director said, apparently with justice, that he had anticipated all this waste and confusion, and had made ample provision against it, but that almost none of his ordered supplies had reached him.

By night the Daniel Webster and Elm City had come up from Yorktown, and I went up with the first, securing with some difficulty a berth for her, and began taking on the sick at once, the Medical Director being present and superintending the embarkation. He seemed to have entirely lost sight of the plan about determined upon the day before, to establish the shore receiving hospital, and was only anxious to get the sick off his hands as rapidly as possible, being appalled by their accumulation and the entire absence of provision for them. Just at this time B. got back from Yorktown, bringing a cheering account of the hospitals there, and at the same time the arrival of large medical supplies and hospital furniture was reported, so that I had little difficulty in bringing about a return to the plan of yesterday.

The substance of the plan was this. The Elm City, able to accommodate four hundred patients, was to remain at White House as a receiving hospital; the Spaulding as a reserve transport in case of a battle; on the occurrence of a battle, the serious cases of sickness to be transferred to the Spaulding, and the Elm City used as receiving hospital for surgical cases; the Knickerbocker to remain as a surgical transport. If an engagement should occur at the close of the week, the Spaulding would take to sea three or four hundred sick, freeing the shore hospitals to that extent, making about six hundred with what the Webster would take; the Webster to return and take two hundred more the next week; the Knickerbocker to take two hundred and fifty every twenty-four hours to Fortress Monroe; thus relieving the shore hospitals to the extent of two thousand by the end of the next week, which would probably be all that was necessary. The Webster and Spaulding, being low between decks, crowded with berths, and deficient in ventilation, were not suited to the reception of sick and wounded for any other purpose than that of immediate transportation.

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(A.) To relieve myself of further responsibility in case of another change of plan, I wrote a memorandum of what we expected to be able to do, and got the Director to sign his approval of it. He told me yesterday that he meant to have those who were to take ship carefully selected, and that he did not believe there were half a dozen who ought to go from here. I however saw being put on board the usual proportion of sick-in-quarters men, and told him. He attributed it to disregard of his orders by volunteer surgeons, a difficulty for which he declared that there was no remedy short of an act of Congress. I found Dr. ——, his chief executive officer, and got him to go to the sick camp, from which the men were being brought, when he discovered, as he afterwards told me, that the surgeon in charge had heard a report that the Sanitary Commission intended to have a receiving-ship here, and on his own responsibility (assuming that the Webster was to be used for this purpose) was sending men on board at random, and without reference to the gravity of their cases, his object being merely to get room. He also found that ambulances coming in from the advance had entered the train after it left the hospital, and the men thus brought to the shore were allowed to go on board with those brought from the hospital, as if assigned for sea transportation by the surgeon in charge. I begged him to go on board and send off such as he found of these interlopers, but he thought it impracticable; and finally, instead of the half-dozen proposed by the Medical Director yesterday, I found that he had passed two hundred and fifty on board. Meantime the tents before spoken of had been finally pitched on a large field near the White House. They were bare of everything but shelter for the sick flocking in from the different regiments. A thousand men will probably be in them before to-morrow night. All day long to-day the surgeons and young men of the Commission have been working over there, and we have sent over bed-sacks, straw, blankets, and supplies for several hundred. After much sanitary poking, pushing, and oiling, the tents are some of them floored, and five great pig-kettles are started boiling, and kept always full of food for the sick. The patients will, however, greatly overbalance the provision made for them. It is hard work to galvanize the proper authorities into action. The post hospital record certifies now to sixteen hundred. There are five surgeons and assistants, one steward, no apothecary, and no nurses, except those selected from among the patients. Two wells have been dug, but the water of neither has as yet been fit for using. Water is brought from the White House well, nearly a quarter of a mile distant, and until yesterday the whole supply was brought by hand. It is now wagoned in casks. We sent up three casks of ice from the Webster's stock, which was found of great value. The greater part of the men are not very ill, and, with nice nourishment, comfortable rest, and good nursing, would be got ready to join their regiments in a week or two; but this is just what they are not likely to have.

The weather is growing excessively hot, and the army is pushing forward in a malarious country in the face of the enemy. We have received a few wounded men from the skirmishes of yesterday. There is obviously great danger that we shall be altogether overwhelmed with sick and wounded in a few days. If the recommendation of my telegram of Sunday is adopted by the Surgeon-General, and a complete hospital for six thousand sent here from Washington, there will be reasonable provision for what is to be expected; otherwise it is dreadful to think of it. There is no doubt that we might take care of a few hundred on our boats,—probably save the lives of some of them; but considering what a week, or, for that matter, a day, may bring forth, I think it right to throw the authorities still on their resources as much as we can, and, if possible, force them to enlarge their shore accommodations.... Nor, when ready, shall I be inclined to hasten the removal of the sick. I shall do my best to avoid taking any but serious cases. It is plain that the facilities so far offered in this respect have been abused, and that serious evils have come of it. Those responsible for the care of the sick here—I mean the military administrative as well as medical officers—have made the presence of the transports near them an excuse for neglecting all proper local provision, and evidently have the idea that, in hurrying patients on board vessels, they relieve themselves of responsibility.^[4] I saw this danger from the first, and have (I wish the Surgeon-General and our friends to be sure of this) constantly done all that I could to counteract it, not only by verbal protest, but by a habit of action which I know that B. and other friends here, who have not had the duty of looking at the matter as comprehensively as I have, have not been able always to regard as justifiable....

But this is not all. Of this hundred thousand men, I suppose not ten thousand were ever entirely without a mother's, a sister's, or a wife's domestic care before. They are wonderfully like school-boys. Then this is really the first experience of nearly all our officers (who are their schoolmasters and housekeepers) in active campaigning. They are learning to take care of their men as a matter of self-interest. The men need to learn to make themselves content—of contented habit—away from home, to understand that this is in the bargain. It is obvious from the remarks we hear, that the rumor that sick men are to be sent home has a disturbing influence upon the education of the army in both these respects....

The Knickerbocker has arrived while I have been writing; thus I have all the elements of my plan approved by the Medical Director on Monday. But the question still troubles me greatly, If they should have several hundred more patients on shore than they have tents or beds for, and among them all several hundreds seriously ill, such as would properly be sent North, shall I break up my reserve, and have no provision for the avalanche of suffering which a great battle before Richmond would send down upon us? I am afraid that I stand alone in my resistance to the demands of the present.^[5]

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As it has been publicly reported that the Commission removed forty thousand men from the Peninsula, it should be here stated that the total number of soldiers, sick and wounded, conveyed on the vessels in charge of the Commission, during the summer, was eight thousand. Except under positive orders, which it was not at liberty to disregard, the Commission took no patient on board its vessels until the opinion of a medical officer was had that his wound or illness was of such a character that he could not be fit for duty within thirty days. This was a standing order of the service, and was strictly enforced.

It is impossible to give in small compass an adequate idea of the difficulties of the duty which the Commission had taken upon itself; difficulties which, though seeming small in themselves, were terrible, because the lives of men frequently hung on their being overcome, and that instantly. To present a full picture, in true and living colors, we must be qualified to throw over the whole the atmosphere of sympathy and enthusiasm which animated every heart in presence of our suffering soldiers. On a fixed and recognized basis we can do almost anything; grooves are soon formed, in which affairs run smoothly. But to build with infinite toil on shifting sands; to be called upon to fill leaky cisterns and keep them full; to give our best strength to labors, the results of which often fade while we work,—these things require a great and good cause, and a certainty of being sustained.

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(A.) All our vessels are, from the nature of engagement and intentions of those on board, in a constant state of pre-organization and disorganization. Our relations to the crews (seamen, firemen, &c.), upon whom we are dependent, differ in every vessel. Scarcely a day passes in which there is not a real mutiny among them, in which we have no right to interfere, but which it is necessary we should manage to control. We have scarcely any established rights, and are carrying on a very large business by the favor of a multitude of agents, whose favor in each case hangs upon a separate string. Every hour brings its own difficulty, which must be met by itself.... Except in the results accomplished, I need not say that the whole duty is exceedingly unpleasant, from the amount of dependence without rights, and of command without authority.

No two individuals have the same understanding of our duty or of our rights; no two expect the same thing of us; no two look in the same direction for the remedy of any abuse, or the supply of any organic deficiency to which attention is called. I must caution you again not to form theories of what we are to do, and expect us to do it. We are liable to occurrences every day which make a new disposition of all the forces necessary. In fact, new and previously unexpected arrangements are made daily, and these involve a continual modification of all plans. All that can be done is to be as fully prepared as possible for whatever can occur.... I must act a little blindly, sometimes,—at all events, cannot always give you my reasons readily for what I determine upon. Twice I have come up the river from hardly anything more than a crude notion that it would be prudent to be feeling that way, and would cost but little; and in each case it proved to be what —— calls "a grand good providence," leading to a complete change in our tactics, and to the saving of many lives.... The ladies are all, in every way, far beyond anything I could have been induced to expect of them. The dressers (two-years medical students) are generally ready for whatever may be required, and work heroically. The male nurses are of all sorts. The convalescent soldiers have been the most satisfactory, because there was not among them the slightest taint of the prevailing sentiment of the volunteer nurses, that they were going upon an indiscriminate holiday scramble of Good-Samaritanism. There cannot be too much care in future that whoever comes here on any business comes, not to do such work as he thinks himself fit for, but such as he will be assigned to, and under such authority as will be assigned him. He or she must come as distinctly under an obligation of duty in this respect as if under pay, and must expect to submit to the same discipline.... But, in truth, I have had comparatively little trouble of this sort as yet, and in all respects am surprised at the good sense and working qualities of companies made up as ours have been.

As an illustration of the sudden changes of arrangement often found necessary at a moment's notice, a report is found, in which it is stated that on one occasion, after overcoming great difficulties in preparing the Spaulding for the conveyance of the sick,—having procured a party of thirty persons, including four surgeons and four ladies from New York, to go on board of her—on the 26th of May, while taking sick on board, an order was received immediately to remove all the Sanitary Commission's people and effects, and send her to Fortress Monroe to convey troops. The process of embarkation was at once arrested; but by permission of Colonel Ingalls, the post commander, the removal of those on board was delayed until an answer could be received to the following telegram, which was immediately despatched to the Assistant Secretary of War, Mr. Tucker, then at Fortress Monroe.

(Telegram.) "The Spaulding was assigned to the Sanitary Commission after the Ocean Queen had been taken from them. The Spaulding was not well adapted to the duty, but was the only vessel then on York River which I would accept. There was no other, and there is none now here in which I would consent that a sick man should be sent outside. The hospitals at Washington and Alexandria are over-full, and I suppose the sick must go outside if they are to be taken away. There is here no hospital but a few tents pitched by the sick themselves, in which robust men could not spend a night, crowded as they are, with impunity. There is not the first step taken to provide for the wounded in case a battle should occur. We have been two weeks trying, under great difficulties, to get the Spaulding tolerably fitted for the business; have a hospital corps of thirty, sent for her from New York; one hundred very sick men on board, one hundred more along-side; shall we go on, or quit?"

After waiting an hour, the Harbor-master's boat came past, hailing with "Mr. Tucker says, 'Go ahead,' sir!"—and the transshipment of the sick to the Spaulding from the Elm City was recommenced. The same night, as it appears from letters, just after dusk, the Harbor-master's boat appeared again, and Captain Sawtelle, the Master of Transportation, hailed with—

"I am ordered to have the Elm City and every other available vessel ready to leave here, with water and coal enough for eighteen hours' steaming, by break of day. You will oblige me very much if you will get the Elm City ready for me. How much coal has she on board?"

"Not half enough for eighteen hours' steaming!"

"That is bad. I have to coal half a dozen others to-night; there'll not be time for all."

"Very well, sir; then we'll manage it, by clubbing that which is on the Knickerbocker and the Elizabeth."

"If you can do that I shall be very glad, for the order is urgent."

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(B.) We had just got through with a very long and hard day's work loading the Spaulding, and were sitting at supper when this order came; but there was no help for it, so "All hands!" it was again for a hard night's work.

All the hospital fittings and furnishings of the Elm City, including the bedding, commissary and small stores, medical stores, and what not, required for the hospital treatment of four hundred and fifty sick men and the maintenance of their attendants, had to be unshipped, packed, and conveyed to the store-boats, and ninety sick men, some of them very sick indeed,—two died during the night,—to be transferred and put to bed again on the Spaulding and Knickerbocker. It was a very dark night, and most of those who were engaged in this work were men of sedentary occupations,—students and clerks,—and women accustomed to a quiet and refined domestic life, and, as I said, all had just gone through with an extraordinarily fatiguing day's work. Some few broke down before morning. At the same time twenty tons of coal were to be got on board the Elm City from the Elizabeth and the Knickerbocker, and wheeled to her deck-bunkers. Then quarters had to be found for her whole hospital company, as well as provisions, on the other boats of the fleet, and to accommodate this necessity a general reorganization was found to be necessary. This was our Sunday's night-work after our Sunday's day-work. It was all done, everybody in place, and, except those required to watch the sick, asleep by four o'clock, and the Spaulding (with 350 sick in bed) and the Elm City (stripped for battle) both reported ready to sail with the morning tide.

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One day later, B. writes:—

"Here we are at work again upon the Elm City. Sunday, we spent all night in stripping her, and now we have a day and night's work at least before us in handling over again the very same articles, refitting her for hospital service. It is an exercise of patience, but it must be done without delay. After we had got her all ready for transporting troops, a change in the plans of government occurred, and on application she was again assigned to the Commission."

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(M.) The Spaulding is bunked in every hole and corner, and is a most inconvenient ship for carrying sick men, everything above decks running to first-classing, and everything below to steerage. The last hundred patients were put on board, to relieve the over-crowded shore hospital, late last night. Though these night scenes on the hospital ships are part of our daily living, a fresh eye would find them dramatic. We are awakened in the dead of night by a sharp steam-whistle, and soon after feel ourselves clawed by the little tugs on either side our big ship,—and at once the process of taking on hundreds of men, many of them crazed with fever, begins. There's the bringing of the stretchers up the side ladder between the two boats, the stopping at the head of it, where the names and home addresses of all who can speak are written down, and their knapsacks and little treasures numbered and stacked;—then the placing of the stretchers on the platform, the row of anxious faces above and below decks, the lantern held over the hold, the word given to "Lower!" the slow-moving ropes and pulleys, the arrival at the bottom, the turning down of the anxious faces, the lifting out of the sick man, and the lifting him into his bed;—and then the sudden change from cold, hunger, and friendlessness, to positive comfort and satisfaction, winding up with his invariable verdict,—if he can speak,—"This is just like home!"

"Jimmy," eleven years old, one of the strange little city boys who are always drifting about, ran away from home last summer, after a drum, finally turning up on our stern-wheeler as char-boy, where he recognized a friend among the sick men, and devoted himself to him in the prettiest way. His runaway fever over, he longed for his mother; so we tucked him into the Spaulding and sent him home. The astonishing lack of common sense among men strikes us very forcibly.... Those who came down here have hearts, plenty of them, but not more than a head to four, and so they run round the wards, wondering where the best tea is, and the ice-water, which they are probably looking at, at the time, and ask questions about everything under the sun.

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(B.) The Spaulding, being all in order, with her sick men, corps of nine surgeons, ladies, and nurses, was started off, and the reserve force went on board the Knickerbocker.

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(A.) I have just bought what is left of a small cargo of ice, probably sixty tons, at twelve dollars, sent here on speculation for sale to sutlers. We are now fairly well supplied at all points, I think.

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(A.) We began taking sick on the Elm City this afternoon. I telegraphed you about the crowded state of the post hospital. We had fed this morning sixty men who had been turned away from it on the ground that there was no room. I wrote to the surgeon in charge about this, and B. called on him with my note. He merely said that he thought there could not have been as many as sixty turned away! These sixty men we heard of as lying upon the railroad, without food, and with no one to look after them. So some of the ladies got at once into the stern-wheeler Wissahickon, which is the Commission's carriage, and with provisions, basins, towels, soap, blankets, etc., went up to the railroad-bridge, cooking tea and spreading bread as they went. After twenty minutes' steaming, the men were found, put on freight-cars, and pushed down to the landing, fed, washed, and taken on the tug to the Elm City. Dr. Ware, in his hard-working on shore, had found fifteen other sick men, without food, and miserable; there being "no room" for them in the tent hospital. He had studied the neighborhood extensively for shanties, found one, and put his men into it. The floor of the one room up-stairs was six inches deep in beans, and made a good bed for them, and in the morning the same party ran up on the tug, cooking breakfast for them as they ran, scrambling eggs in a wash-basin over a spirit-lamp.

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(A.) The army struck its tents one night last week, and silently stole away up the river. Bottom Bridge is ours, and no enemy met; the railroad is repaired at White House, and trains will be running to-morrow; barges, loaded with rolling stock and cannon, have been passing us on the river all day.

The sick brought on board the Elm City this afternoon had been lying in a puddle, which nearly covered them. The water stood several inches deep in some of the tents. These men were selected by Dr. Ware, as the worst cases out of sixteen hundred in the shore hospital. (Several died before they reached the mouth of the river.) Dr. Ware himself laid hold to put up tents to protect men before the storm, and said that he saw half a dozen tents yet remaining, not put up at nightfall, though men were constantly arriving, and were left out in the ambulances.

If an engagement occurs this side of Richmond, my opinion is that we shall have all the horrors of Pittsburg Landing in an aggravated form. I have tried in vain to awaken some of the Head-quarters officers to a sense of the danger; but while they admit all I say, they regard it as a part of war, and say, "After all, there never was a war in which the sick were as well taken care of. England does no better by her wounded; true, they will suffer a good deal for a time, but that is inevitable in war," &c.

What ought to be done? The Surgeon-General cannot at once do our sea-transport business as well as we. By recruiting deficiencies at each trip, we can for the present continue to employ the Webster and the Spaulding for this purpose advantageously. We can maintain the distribution of supplies. We want also a depot at this end for our sea-transports. For the rest, the Surgeon-General can at once have it done a great deal better than we, if he can place two steamboats under the Medical Director's orders, in addition to the Commodore and Vanderbilt, equip them, or take them equipped from us; put one good authoritative surgeon on board each, with two to four assistant surgeons, and six to ten dressers and stewards, and twenty to thirty privates for nurses, and require certain rules, to secure decent provision for the sick, to be maintained on them.

It is ludicrous to see the enthusiasm of some of the surgeons at the outset about details; the cleansing of patients, numbering, records of disease, pure water, &c., and their entire forgetfulness and inaptness to provide for more essential matters,—food, buckets, cups, vessels of any sort, and water of any sort. Doctors, nurses, and philosophers are much easier to be had, it seems, than men who would be able to keep an oyster-cellar or a barber-shop with credit.

Dr. T. says that he is pestered by volunteer surgeons, who leave their business at home to have a short holiday professional excursion, and who always expect to be put in the "imminent deadly breach" at once. He has not tents, horses, forage, nor table-room for them. Don't let any more surgeons come here, if you can help it. We try to treat them civilly, but all, ashore and afloat, feel anything but civilly to a man when he graciously proposes to be entertained and sent to the front as an honored guest, because, you understand, he is not one of your "physicians," but a "surgeon," and not at all unwilling to take an interesting gunshot case in hand, though everybody else declines it! If there is anything the regimental surgeons hate, it is to let these magnanimous surgical pretenders (it is of the pretenders I speak) get hold of their pet cases. For this reason I hope ——, who has a name, will assume the responsibility of our surgical hospital.