FEBRUARY 8, 1865:
Esther Hill Hawkes M.D.
(1834-1906) was a Massachusetts-born gynecologist who received her medical
degree in 1857, one of the very few female Medical Doctors to serve in the
Civil War. Late in the war and during Reconstruction, Dr. Hawkes was put in
charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau of Charleston, South Carolina. As of early
February 1865, Dr. Hawkes was aiding the blacks and poor whites of Union-held
Jacksonville, Florida. In her diary for this day she notes the late wartime
conditions in the area:
The [Union garrison] is so small here now that the rebels are
giving us some annoyance. Dickinson's band of cavalry, about two hundred
strong, is in this vicinity, and have recently captured several small parties
of our soldiers, amounting, in all, to over a hundred men.
Our Schools are in a
flourishing condition; we have an average attendance of one hundred and sixty .
. .
Last Saturday, I visited
thirty-seven different families, white and black, in town. I wish I could give
you some idea of the difference between the two,—equally poor, equally dirty
and destitute!
The whites, have a hopeless, listless appearance; and no words
of encouragement or cheer seem to reach them. They do not hesitate to beg, and
are full of complaints. There is no elasticity in them; with the blacks, it is
just the opposite: they are cheerful, willing to work, do not beg or complain,
and are far more hopeful . . .
I ought not to have said they are equally dirty;
some of them are; but we have many colored families here who are patterns of
neatness . . . The health of the place is remarkably good at this time.
