DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I want you to sit with this one for a moment. On January 1, 1863, the Confederate forces recaptured Galveston. That's the headline.
But the story the marker wants you to know happened inside the walls of the Ursuline Convent — and it's the kind of story that doesn't need any embellishment. Before the battle even began, someone offered the nuns of this monastery a chance to get out. Pack up, clear out, leave the coming storm behind.
They declined. They stayed. And when the guns went quiet and the wounded started arriving, the east wing of that convent became a hospital — and it took in men from both sides of the fight.
That detail alone says something about the women who ran this place. Then there's young Lieutenant Sidney Sherman. Mortally wounded.
And in his final moments, he died here — not on a battlefield, not alone in some field — but in the arms of Mother St. Pierre Harrington. The Confederate medical director, when it was all over, put it plainly in his official report.
He wrote that all their exertions would have failed but for the noble conduct of the ladies of the Ursuline Convent. A military man, writing after one of the war's fierce engagements, giving credit not to a regiment, not to artillery, but to the women who stayed when they didn't have to. That's the whole story.
And somehow, that's enough.
What the marker says
Before the Confederate recapture of Galveston on January 1, 1863, the nuns of this monastary declined an evacuation offer. During and after the battle the east wing was used as a hospital for treatment of wounded from both sides. Young Lieutenant Sidney Sherman, mortally wounded, died here in the arms of Mother St. Pierre Harrington. The Confederate medical director's report said , "all our exertions would have failed but for the noble conduct of the ladies of the Ursuline Convent." A Memorial to Texans Who Served the ConfederacyErected by the State of Texas, 1963