Dr. Clement Finley was bornint Newville, Pennsylvania. His father, Samuel Finley, served in the Virginia cavalry during the Revolutionary War. President George Washington appointed him receiver of public moneys in the northwest, which took him to Chillicothe, Ohio, about 1796.
Dr. Finley received a land grant in Ohio as a result of his Revolutionary War service.
He returned to Pennsylvania for his formal education at Dickinson College in Carlisle. PA. He graduated in 1815. After graduation, he went to Philadelphia where, in 1818, he completed his M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
On August 10, 1818, he was commissioned as a surgeon’s mate of the 1st Infantry. His first army medical assignment was four years with his regiment in Louisiana, then two years in what was then the wilderness post on the Arkansas border at Fort Smith. Between 1825 and 1828 he served at Fort Gibson and then in Florida, at Jefferson Barracks Military Post, and back on the frontier at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
He next served at Fort Dearborn, Illinois and Fort Howard, Wisconsin, and while on this duty he was detached for service as chief medical officer (with rank of major) serving under General Winfield Scott in the Black Hawk War of 1832.
During the Black Hawk War he received the official thanks of General Scott for his handling of the cholera outbreak in the command.
He served a year with the 1st Dragoons in Florida, then two years again at Jefferson Barracks Military Post. In 1834, he was again sent to Florida where he served throughout the Seminole War until 1838.
With hostilities over he was sent to Fortress Monroe, Virginia, for a year, and then to Buffalo, New York for another year. From 1840 to 1844, he served at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania.
At the start of the Mexican War he was serving at Fortress Monroe. Because of his rank he was appointed medical director of the army commanded by General Zachary Taylor.
During his service in the Mexican War, be acted as a member of a number of examining boards. In 1847, he served under General Scott during the Siege of Veracruz. He was medical director of this force until illness intervened.
He was permanently relieved from Mexico duty and ordered to Newport Barracks, Kentucky. In 1849, he went back to Jefferson Barracks for a third tour of duty, and in 1854, to duty in Philadelphia with his quarters at Frankford Arsenal.
Having served at many sites, his duties in Philadelphia were largely administrative. It was here that he received the appointment as Surgeon General.
The current Surgeon General, Lawson, unexpectedly died. At the time the front runner for the appointment as Surgeon General was thought to be Acting Surgeon Robert C. Wood, who was in charge of the office during Lawson’s absence.
Wood was son-in-law to former President Taylor and brother-in-law to Jefferson Davis and, from his long duty in the War Department, had many other influential friends. With the Republicans now in charge, President Abraham Lincoln chose Finley, the senior officer of the Medical Corps on May 15, 1861.
The basic issue was that new Surgeon General was sixty-four at the time of appointment and was appointed based upon seniority not merit or competency.
He was busy with both legislation to expand the Medical Department and in the selection of hospital buildings and sites in the Washington (DC) City.
The Civil War was bringing hundreds of physicians to the door of the Medical Department, and Finley needed more office space for his expanding staff. He moved from the Winder Building at F and Seventeenth Streets to a building on the southeast corner of F and Fifteenth Streets, where he had several rooms. There, with his aides, at least eight civilian clerks and one messenger, he focused upon the procurement of medical supplies, construction of hospitals, recruitment of physicians, and all the other tasks that came with the war.
President Lincoln needed to quickly move from a peacetime Army to a war Army. His General Order 15, called for forty-two thousand men to suppress the rebellion.
Dr. Finley was a frontiersman, with a frontier scope on medicine and departmental organization.
He was more concerned with saving money than with suppling troops and thought that new medical equipment and books were a wasteful expenditure of funds.
He would not order medical supplies until after a battle started.
He was in the position of Surgeon General for only two months when First Manassas occurred.
This was a difficult time for any Surgeon General, much less Dr. Finley. The United States Sanitary Commission was active with criticism and recommendations and had significant influence with Congress.
On August 3, 1861, legislation passed increasing the number of officers and providing for the employment of medical cadets and female nurses.
This critical legislation was a result of both the Surgeon General’s office and the Sanitary Commission.
The act also provided for the creation of boards for the consideration of cases of disability. Help for the office of the Surgeon General, two assistants with the rank of lieutenant colonel, contained in the original bill, was eliminated.
After The Battle of First Bull Run, George Templeton Strong of the Sanitary Commission, indicated that after dealing with Surgeon General Finley that, “Old Finley, the head of that office, is utterly ossified and useless.”
The Medical Purveyor the Union Medical Department was “out of bandages” and asked the Commission if they would supply him with some. Mr. Strong noted on the department of the Surgeon General, “The fogies of that department manage it in the spirit of a village apothecary.” After the Battle at First Manassas, with all the time and money spent investigating transportation of the wounded, there was no action to swiftly and efficiently remove the wounded when a large-scale battle occurs. Surgeon General Finley’s frontier medical mentality did not work with the size and scope of this Civil War.
By December 15, 1861, Secretary of the Sanitary Commission, Fred L. Olmsted stated his opinion of Finley, “…it is criminal weakness to entrust such important responsibilities as those resting on the surgeon general…merely because he is the oldest of old mess-room doctors of the old frontier-guard of the country. He knows nothing and does nothing and is capable of knowing nothing and doing nothing but quibble about matters of form and precedent…”
He demonstrated his disapproval of the Sanitary Commission’s action by expressing they were generously giving out “comforts” for the “inmates” being treated in the military hospitals. The inmates, of course, were wounded soldiers. He resented that these “comforts” are given out “very liberally…I had no control over these issues… they should not be given out unnecessarily …kept in reserve, [until] an emergency, such as a battle.”
Finley ordered that any use of drugs not on his official approved list had to get his personal authorization.
He insisted that promotions should only be based on seniority rather than merit. He quibbled over the need for medical equipment purchases, and on one astounding occasion he vetoed the funds for building a hospital on the islands off the coast of South Carolina, captured in the summer of 1861, declaring that the climate was too pleasant for hospital buildings to be needed.
By April 16, 1862, Congress passed the reorganization of the medical department act which gave the Surgeon General the rank of Brigadier General, created an assistant Surgeon General and a medical inspector with rank of colonel, eight medical inspectors with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and provided for medical purveyors.
This was the first time when actual rank in the medical department had exceeded the grade of major, except that the Surgeon General had the grade of colonel. Finley was not to achieve the advanced grade, as he was retired on his own application on April 14, 1862, two days before the passage of that act.
Secretary of War Stanton and Dr. Finley had a falling out over reported problems with Dr. John Neill, whom Finley appointed as the head of several Army hospitals located in Philadelphia.
After a heated meeting with the Secretary of War, Finley was relieved from his office and directed to go to Boston and await further orders. From Boston, he appealed against the treatment accorded him, but despite the efforts of influential friends, he was unable to influence Stanton’s decision. Dr. Finley then applied for admission to the retired list. In the meantime, and until the appointment of his successor, Surgeon Wood performed the duties of Surgeon General.
Two weeks into The Siege of Yorktown, McClellan had Secretary of War Stanton replace Surgeon General Finley with William Alexander Hammond. General McClellan picked Dr. Hammond from a list of candidates selected by The Sanitary Commission.
Dr. Finley probably would have been a satisfactory leader during peacetime with a staff of less than 100 surgeons in the entire U.S. Army.
He lacked the vision to take the department from a peacetime to a wartime organization.
He did not act fast enough, according to his critics, in developing the small medical department into the large, energetic organization needed by the Federal armies during war.
After his retirement, Finley made his home in West Philadelphia. In 1865, he was given the brevet rank of Brigadier General “for long and meritorious service in the army.”
On July 18, 1876 he was finally put on the retired list as full Brigadier General. He passed eighteen peaceful years in Philadelphia, where he died at his residence on September 8, 1879. He is buried at The Woodlands in Philadelphia.
Until next time….
Your Obt. Servant,
Surgeon Trevor Steinbach
17th Corps Field Hospital
