The United States Sanitary Commission (USSC), created in June of 1861, was the largest private war relief charity of the Civil War. Organized to coordinate Union homefront donations, assist in military hospitals, and advise the government on recruitment and medical issues, the men who founded the Commission expected it would provide a national stage for their ideas about class, society, and nation-building. Headed by Henry Whitney Bellows, Unitarian minister of All Souls' Church in New York; landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted; and lawyer George Templeton Strong, the USSC approached the war less as a battle with the institution of slavery than as a contest for postwar political influence and social reform.

The idea of a centralized agency to coordinate home-front charity did not originate with Bellows or his colleagues. Rather, within days of the war's outbreak, a group of upper-class women in New...