Re-enactor tells tale of former slave who became nurse aboard Civil War ship

Clad in a dark dress with a black head scarf and starched white apron, Marlene Rivero incorporated song, props and stories to tell about the life of Ann Stokes, a nurse on Civil War hospital ship USS Red Rover built in Cape Girardeau.

Hanover Lutheran Church in Cape Girardeau offered the program as part of its Cape Girardeau Civil War Roundtable, which meets the third Sunday of every month.

Rivero, a 31-year employee of the U.S. Forest Service at Shawnee National Park, was asked to do a program on Harriet Tubman many years ago and has been using storytelling to interpret history ever since.

Rivero said she learned of Ann Stokes in 2011, when officials at Fort Massac State Park in Southern Illinois approached her to "help bring her to life," she said.

Stokes was a former slave, or "contraband," as they were called during the Civil War, who escaped from bondage in 1862, Rivero said.

According to Rivero's research, Stokes served as a nurse on a Union hospital ship, the USS Red Rover, between January 1863 and late 1864.

Portraying Stokes, Rivero said, "We slaves had to take our chances."

She pulled out a cat o' nine tails, brandishing it as she described the punishments runaway slaves would receive if they were caught.

Regardless of the possible consequences, she and a group of other slaves took off under cover of night and started up the Cumberland River in Tennessee.

There, they briefly met Union and Confederate forces engaged in a skirmish at the mouth of the Duck River.

"We left them behind," she said. "The business of death was about to take place."

In December 1862, the "contraband" were let off without food or extra clothing from a ship at the Ohio River town of Mound City, Illinois.

Rivero, as Stokes, said she decided to put her name in to work on the USS Red Rover, which was docked there.

The three-story steamer ship was built in 1859 in Cape Girardeau.

Confederate forces docked it at Island No. 10 near New Madrid, Missouri. Union forces captured the boat in 1862, refit it as a hospital ship and docked at Mound City before taking on a crew including Stokes and nuns from Indiana, Rivero said.

While on the ship, Stokes would have gone to aid Union forces fighting at Vicksburg, Mississippi, where a siege lasted from May 18 to July 4, 1863 -- 47 days in all.

Dysentery plagued soldiers on both sides, but she said the flies on board helped patients on the Red Rover avoid limb amputations.

"War is not pretty," Rivero said. "But the maggots cleared the pus out so you wouldn't die of gangrene."

Her research included several books on the topic and visits to archives in Washington, D.C., where she found photos of the Red Rover and records, including Stokes' pension.

"She was a forerunner of women and nurses," Rivero said. "She was one of the first women to get a documented pension from the Navy."

Stokes married twice after the war -- first to Gilbert Stokes, who died in 1867, then to George Bowman.

She first applied for a pension under each of her husband's names and was denied. Because she was illiterate, she had friends who applied for a pension under her name, and she again was denied.

But she persevered, learning to read and write well enough to write her own arguments. Finally, the pension was granted her in about 1890.

Rivero said one of the great joys to her in retelling history this way is the ability to extrapolate on sometimes sparse information.

Rivero looked at several writings, she said, and pieced together a portrait of what Stokes' life would have looked like.

"She saw a lot," Rivero said. "Whatever the Red Rover was doing, she would have been privy to it."

mniederkorn@semissourian.com

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Pertinent address:

2949 Perryville Rd., Cape Girardeau, Mo.