The U.S. Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, had a profound impact on the lives of every American who lived through it. Eddy was no exception; both her son and several friends served, and she herself lived through incredible hardships at a time when the entire country was being torn apart.
At the outset of the war, Eddy was Mary Morse Patterson, married to Daniel Patterson and living in Rumney Village, New Hampshire. She was in constant ill health and frequently bedridden.
Eddy’s son, George Glover II (born of her first marriage with George Glover, who died before their son was born) reconnected with his mother in 1861. He had been taken away from her in 1851 and in 1856 moved to Minnesota with his foster family. Glover served in Company “I” of the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry regiment during the war. He may well have been the inspiration for her poem “Christmas Day,” which she published in the Portland Daily Press on December 31, 1863. “How my sad eyes, dim with teardrops/Long to look upon my son,” she wrote.
Throughout the war, Daniel Patterson was often absent, and Eddy had to live with others or attempt to support herself by writing articles and poems for publication. Patterson was “entrusted by the governor of New Hampshire with carrying to Washington certain funds that had been raised in New Hampshire to aid Northern sympathizers in the South.”1 In March 1862, Patterson was captured by Confederate forces while sightseeing behind enemy lines on the battlefield of Bull Run and sent to Libby prison in Richmond, Virginia, and later to a prison in Salisbury, North Carolina. After six months, he escaped, and over the course of seven weeks he made his way back to Eddy.
It was also during this time that Eddy sought the care of Phineas P. Quimby, a magnetic healer in Maine. “[I]n October 1862…Eddy appeared in his…office seeking relief from her long-standing physical problems.”2 Initial treatments brought relief to Eddy, so she began to study his methods, give lectures, and write about his work in newspapers. “During the winter months of 1863-64 Mrs. Patterson spent hours with Quimby almost every afternoon, observing his cases, talking with him, discussing the notes he jotted down on his cases.”3 Eddy’s discovery of Christian Science would come in 1866, after the war’s conclusion, and after Quimby’s death.
