[7] Mary Bickerdyke served in the Civil War from June 9, 1861, to March 20, 1865, working in a total of nineteen battles.

The letter was read aloud in their church and Galesburg's citizens collected $500 worth of supplies and selected Bickerdyke to deliver them (no one else would go).

[1][2][14] After meeting Mary Livermore, she was appointed a field agent for the Northwestern branch of the Sanitary Commission.

[2] Livermore also helped Bickerdyke find care for her two sons in Beloit, Wisconsin, while she was in the field with the army during the later part of the war.

She packed up the soiled clothes and bedding that had been used by the men, added disinfectants, and sent it on a steamer bound for Pittsburg Landing to be cleaned by the Chicago Sanitary Commission.

She had left Gayoso to run errands and returned to find the medical director had sent away the escaped and former slaves who helped her provide care for the hospital's patients.

[24] Bickerdyke also worked closely with Eliza Emily Chappell Porter of Chicago's Northwestern branch of the United States Sanitary Commission.

As chief of nursing, Bickerdyke sometimes deliberately ignored military procedure, and when Grant's staff complained about her behavior, Union Gen. William T. Sherman reportedly threw up his hands and exclaimed, "She outranks me.

"I watched the dreadful combat until the clouds hid all from view," she wrote in a letter to Mary Holland, "In fancy I can hear General Hooker's artillery now.

"[31] Bickerdyke set up the field hospital of the Fifteenth Army Corps for the Battle of Missionary Ridge, where she was the only female attendant for four weeks.

[33] On the march to capture Atlanta, Georgia, despite General Sherman's orders to inflict "all the damage you can against [the enemy's] war resource," Bickerdyke worked to build hospitals for Confederate soldiers.

[17] By the end of the war, with the help of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Mother Bickerdyke had built 300 hospitals and aided the wounded on 19 battlefields including the Battle of Shiloh and Sherman's March to the Sea.

[34] At Sherman's request, she rode at the head of the XV Corps in the Grand Review of the Armies in Washington at the end of the war.

[35][36] With the aid of Colonel Charles Hammond, who was president of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, she helped fifty veterans' families move to Salina, Kansas, as homesteaders.

[49] Clara Barton wrote a poem entitled "The Women Who Went to the Field" that honored Bickerdyke, Cornelia Hancock, Dorothea Dix, Mary Livermore, and Annie Etheridge.