The Western Sanitary Commission.

Abstract

Eighty years ago, in addressing the Mississippi Valley Historical As- sociation, Roland G. Usher remarked: Probably the name Western Sanitary Commission connotes little more to most students of the Civil War than the fact, so naturally inferred from the name itself, that it was a western philanthropic society engaged on a small scale in that humane work for which the United States Sanitary Commission and the United States Christian Commission were so noted. Usher reported that histories of the period gave it, at most, one or two lines. Regrettably this still holds true today. Only three works of recent vintage, other than local histories, have given the WSC more than scant attention. William Quentin Maxwell's Lincoln's Fifth Wheel (1956) discusses it as a thorn in the flesh of the USSC and gives a fleeting paragraph or two to the scope of its work. Robert Bremner's monumental study The Public Good (1980) acknowledges it as a separate organization and gives passing recognition to certain aspects of its work, primarily that with refugees. Louis Gerteis in his study From Contraband to Freedman (1973) cites the efforts of the WSCs president, James E. Yeatman, among blacks in the lower Mississippi Valley but says nothing about the broader role of the WSC in that area.' Yet the Western Sanitary Commission played a critical role in helping to alleviate suffering by troops and refugees in the Mississippi Valley and the Trans-Mississippi Theater during the Civil War while fiercely asserting its independence from its better known counterpart, the United States Sanitary Commission. Arising out of the peculiar circumstances of the war in Missouri, before war's end the WSC would receive and