Where Sister Xavier Brought Smiles

Across Mazyck Street from Roper Hospital was the Roman Catholic Orphanage and nearby convent. When Union soldiers were confined at the hospital, nuns would bring them food and medical supplies. One prisoner, a member of the 7th Connecticut who had been captured at Secessionville, June 16, 1862, remembered that: Sister Xavier came to the hospital daily, accompanied by another Sister and gave fruit, cornbread, cake, meat, gruel, arrowroot, and sometimes chicken broth. She brought me daily either a bottle of wine or brandy, generally a bottle of old Malaga wine. There were eight wounded men confined in our cell, only one of whom, Capt. Lawler, was a Roman Catholic. All received the same attention. After the war a Union artillery captain who had been imprisoned at Roper thanked Sister Xavier and the other Sisters of Charity of our Lady of Mercy for taking care of comrades who were sick with yellow fever after even the physicians had fled the plague. “I received letters from them after they recovered,” he wrote, “they blessed you, because they said they owed their lives to you.”

This is the caption as printed in 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Charleston in the War. It has not yet been through this site’s research and fact-checking pass.