Ann Bradford was an illiterate enslaved woman born on a plantation in Rutherford County, Tennessee, in 1830. Because she was illiterate very few other details of her early life are known. She lived on the plantation for 33 years until she decided to escape in January, 1863. Under the 1861 Confiscation Act, slaves who escaped from Confederate states to Union territory were officially considered confiscated enemy property, known as “contrabands.” That same month President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in states that had left the Union including Tennessee.
Many contrabands spent the war in grim Union refugee camps. This included white, immigrant, and African American women (formerly enslaved, contraband, and free). However, many African American women were limited to jobs as cooks and laundresses due to racial discrimination common at the time. Ann Bradford was no loner contraband, but now a free woman. She found refuge aboard the U.S.S. Red Rover, of Mound City, Illinois, a former Confederate steamship that the Union had recently captured and recommissioned as a hospital ship. It was the first United States Navy hospital ship, and nearly 3000 patients were treated on board during the Civil War. At that time the United States Navy enlisted several young African American women into the Navy.
They were given the rank of “first class boy”, a rank given to young men under seventeen who performed general sailor duties, and paid accordingly, but they were employed as nurses on the Red Rover. Ann worked under the direction of the Sisters of the Holy Cross Notre Dame, who had recently come aboard the ship to act as nurses. The sisters needed all the help they could get, so they began enlisting female contrabands to join them as nurses’ aides. Ann Bradford was immediately pressed into service by the Navy, becoming the first African American woman ever enlisted as active duty personnel aboard a United States military vessel, cleaning, doing laundry, cooking and caring for the sick and wounded patients on board.
Duty aboard the Red Rover could also be dangerous. Around the time Stokes arrived, the ship’s hospital section was hit by two enemy shells, although fortunately there were no casualties. Out of necessity, Ann quickly learned wartime nursing skills. From February to May 1863, the medical staff of the Red Rover cared for the sick and wounded. Over a period of 18 months, Stokes and her comrades cared for more than 2,000 patients on the hospital ship with infected wounds, burns, and dangerous diseases such as typhoid and cholera.
The work was hard, the conditions were terrible—summer heat and humidity, flies and mosquitoes, poor sanitation and hygiene. In addition to providing nursing services, Stokes and the other women assisted with cleaning, cooking and other shipboard responsibilities. Wages were often sporadic, but for the first time in her life, she was free, and being paid for her labor. By the summer of 1864, Stokes was exhausted from months of hard shipboard duty. Shortly after leaving the Navy in 1864, Bradford married Gilbert Stokes, an African American man who had also been employed on the “Red Rover.”
Two years later in 1866, they moved to Illinois, but shortly afterward Gilbert Stokes died. Ann, then remarried a man named George Bowman in 1867 and lived on a farm in southern Illinois, with her husband, one child, and two step-children. In the 1880s she applied unsuccessfully for a pension based on her marriages to Stokes and Bowman. Her pension application was made more complicated because of her inability to read or write. Still as remarkably determined as ever, Stokes wouldn’t accept no for an answer. Stokes worked to greatly improve her reading and writing skills and applied again in 1890.
This time, she requested a pension based not on her former husband’s service, but on her own 18 months as a boy first class. The pension office asked the Navy to review her case and the Navy certified that she had actually served eighteen months as a “boy” in the United States Navy on the Red Rover and that she had a pensionable disability. In 1890 Stokes was granted a pension of $12 a month which was the amount usually awarded to nurses at that time. Ann stayed on her farm in Illinois until her death in 1903. Not only was Ann Bradford Stokes one of the first African American women to serve as a nurse in the United States Navy, but she was also the first American woman to receive a pension for her own service in the military.