lina, in November, 1862, to engage
in teaching the colored people. While there she regularly visited the
army hospitals, and interested herself in the practical details of
nursing, to which she afterwards more particularly devoted herself, and
that spring and summer did the same at Fernandina and St. Augustine.

In November, 1863, she rejoined her husband on St. Helena Island, to
which he had returned with his regiment from the siege of Charleston.
She visited the Beaufort and Hilton Head General Hospitals, as well as
the post hospital at St. Helena frequently during the winter, especially
after the severe battle of Olustee, in February, 1864. When the Tenth
Corps went to Fortress Monroe, to join General Butler's army, Mrs.
Hawley went with them, and failing to find work in the Chesapeake
Hospital, went to Washington and was assigned the charge of a ward in
the Armory Square Hospital, on the very morning when the wounded began
to arrive from the battles of the Wilderness.

Her ward was one of the two in the armory itself, which for a
considerable time contained more patients than any other in that
hospital. "Armory Square" being near the Potomac, usually received the
most desperate cases, which could with difficulty be moved far. There
could be no operating room connected with this ward, and the operations,
however painful or dreadful, were of necessity performed in the ward
itself. The scenes presented were enough to appal the stoutest nerves.
The men exhausted by marching and by a long journey after their wounds,
died with great rapidity--in one day forty-eight were carried out
dead--many reaching the hospital only in time to die.

Among scenes like these Mrs. Hawley took up her abode, and labored with
an untiring zeal over four months in the hottest of the summer
weather--never herself strong--often suffering to a degree that would
have confined others to the bed of an invalid. She was ever at her post,
a guiding, directing, and comforting presence, until worn-out nature
required a temporary rest. After two months of repose she again returned
to the same ward, and continued her labors from November to the last of
March, 1865.

About the first of March, directly after its capture, her husband had
been assigned to the command of Wilmington, North Carolina.

She arrived at Wilmington, directly after nine thousand Union prisoners
had been delivered there, of whom more than three thousand needed
hospital treatment.