Ann Stokes: The Nurse Who Served Aboard America’s First Naval Hospital Ship
Updated: 1 day ago
NURSING HISTORY · PERIOPERATIVE NURSING
Ann Stokes entered the United States Navy record during the Civil War as a Black woman who had escaped slavery. She served as a nurse aboard USS Red Rover, the Union Navy hospital ship on the Mississippi, decades before the Navy Nurse Corps formally existed.
 | THE NURSES WHO CAME BEFORE US A Civil War nurse aboard the Union Navy hospital ship Red Rover.USS Red Rover · Union Navy · Civil War nursing · service before the Navy Nurse Corps existed |
USS Red Rover hospital ship. Library of Congress historical image; no known restrictions. No verified portrait of Ann Stokes has been established. | Ann Stokes |
The surviving record does not give Stokes the kind of biography later professional nurses often left behind. Her story appears through naval records shaped by the language and racial categories of the Civil War.
What can be established is significant: she was hired as a nurse aboard USS Red Rover in January 1863 and served until October 1864. Her documented Navy service later supported a pension claim.
NURSING BEFORE A NAVY NURSE CORPS EXISTED
The formal United States Navy Nurse Corps would not be created until 1908. During the Civil War, naval nursing was assembled from available personnel, religious nursing orders and women whose work did not fit later professional categories.
On Red Rover, Sisters of the Holy Cross served alongside Black women who had escaped slavery. Their nursing work took place within a military system that still reflected the legal and racial inequalities of the era.
Stokes served as a Navy nurse more than four decades before the United States formally established the Navy Nurse Corps.
INSIDE USS RED ROVER
Red Rover was a converted side-wheel steamer fitted out as a hospital ship for service on the Western Rivers. It carried wards, clinical supplies and facilities for caring for sick and wounded personnel.
The ship treated thousands of patients during the war. Its wards were part hospital, part transport system and part improvised military infrastructure.
Red Rover’s ward was a clinical workplace on a moving military vessel, a reminder that nursing has often adapted to environments never designed as hospitals.
WHAT THE RECORD SAYS, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT
The Naval History and Heritage Command records Stokes as a Black woman who had escaped slavery and was classified in wartime records using the period term “contraband”. That language belongs to the historical record, not to a modern description of her humanity.
There is no verified portrait of Stokes in the sources used for this article. The images shown here are therefore of the ship and its ward, not representations of Stokes herself.
A PENSION THAT CONFIRMED HER SERVICE
Stokes later received a pension based on eighteen months of Navy service. That administrative record matters because women’s wartime nursing labour was not always captured cleanly by later professional categories.
Her record places a Black woman who had escaped slavery inside documented naval nursing service during the Civil War, not as a symbolic figure, but as a working nurse aboard a hospital ship.
WHY WE TELL THIS ONE
Stokes’s story matters partly because the record is incomplete. Historical nursing was done by many people whose work was poorly documented, undervalued or recorded through systems that did not regard them as full professional actors.
For modern nurses, that is a useful warning about what history preserves. Titles, formal structures and awards matter, but care existed before many of those systems recognised the people providing it.
Thank you, Ann, for your service.
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