She was in Cambridge in 1861, when the first gun was fired at Fort Sumter. After the First Battle of Bull Run, she offered her services to the government as an army nurse. On 1 September 1861, she began working at the hospital of the Third Maine Regiment, encamped near Alexandria, Virginia. She was transferred to the Fifth Maine Regiment, and was soon appointed matron of the Seventeenth Brigade Hospital, General Slocum's Brigade, of which she had charge during the winter. In the spring of 1862, she responded to a call from the Relief Department of the United States Sanitary Commission, and went with Dorothea Dix to Fort Monroe. She was assigned to service on the transport boats, and labored throughout the Peninsula Campaign. In December, 1862, she was sent to Convalescent Camp, Alexandria, and remained in charge of the Relief Department until the close of the American Civil War.
