Hoge, Jane Currie Blaikie (Medical Service)

(18 11-1890)

Civilian worker during the American Civil War in the Northwestern Sanitary Commission. Jane Currie Blaikie was born in Philadelphia on July 31, 1811. She attended Young’s Ladies’ College in Philadelphia and married Abraham Hoge, a merchant. In 1848, they moved to Chicago.

In 1861, fifty-year-old Jane Hoge assumed, with Mary Livermore, the management of the Northwestern Sanitary Commission branch based in Chicago. She would hold the post throughout the Civil War. She was already an experienced leader of women’s charitable organizations and probably more prepared for the responsibility than any other woman living in Chicago. Her outspoken demeanor, emboldened by her conviction that the war relief effort needed an efficient mother’s perspective, served the commission well.

Hoge’s wartime job drew her further into public life than she had previously ventured. She traveled, made speeches, raised large amounts of money, worked with both civilians and military personnel, helped manage the commission’s daily business deals, and organized the myriad donated supplies destined for the western armies. Along with Livermore and a number of clubwomen, she planned and implemented the Northwestern Soldier’s Fair in 1863, which earned almost $100,000. Although men in the commission had initially remained on the sidelines, by 1865 they made up the fair’s managing board, although they retained Hoge and Livermore.


In the course of Hoge’s wartime career, she met and corresponded with Abraham Lincoln. Whether she was nursing a wounded enlisted man in an army hospital, chairing a fair board in Chicago, or corresponding with the nation’s president, however, she was quintessentially a mother who did her work on a national stage. She was a woman who believed her patriotic and divinely sanctioned wartime duty was to work.

In 1867, Hoge published her war memoir, The Boys in Blue, which heaped praise on the enlisted men and became one of the earliest accounts of the war. With the exception of this foray into the broader public world, the postwar Hoge resumed her role as a well-known and respected regional mother. The skills she had learned while immersed in the Sanitary Commission and its work enhanced the activities that she took up after the war. In the late 1860s, for example, she helped to establish Chicago’s Home for the Friendless, a refuge for needy children and women. In 1871, she played a key role in launching the Evanston College for Ladies, and she served for more than a decade on the Women’s Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions for the Northwest.

Unlike her associate Mary Livermore, Hoge did not parlay her wartime experiences into a gainful career for herself. Moreover, she never joined the ranks of suffragists. More self-assured than Livermore had been but possessing less postwar energy, Hoge used her skills and reputation garnered from the war years to continue leading in women’s work. For the remainder of her life, she was a regionally respected advocate of women who knew how to get big jobs done. She died in Chicago on August 26, 1890.

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