By 1861 her reputation was well established. She was then almost sixty years of age and had gained the well-merited confidence of the medical profession. She was on her way from Boston to Washington, and was spending a few days at the Trenton Asylum, when the Sixth Massachusetts was fired upon in Baltimore on April 19, 1861. Like Clara Barton she hastened immediately to the place of service. On the very next day she wrote to a friend: “I think my duty lies near military hospitals for the present. This need not be announced. I have reported myself and some nurses for free service at the War Department, and to the Surgeon-General.” Her offer was accepted with great heartiness and with ill-considered promptness. She was appointed “Superintendent of Female Nurses.” She was authorized “to select and assign female nurses to general or permanent military hospitals; they not to be employed without her sanction and approval except in case of urgent need.” Whether the United States contained any woman better qualified to undertake such a task as this than Dorothea Dix may be questioned. Certainly none could have been found with more of experience or with a higher consecration. It was an impossible task for any one, and, while Miss Dix was possessed of some of the essential qualities, she did not possess them all. Her biographer very justly says: The literal meaning, however, of such a commission as had thus been hastily bestowed on Miss Dix--applying, as it did to the women nurses of the military hospitals of the whole United States not in actual rebellion--was one which, in those early days of the war, no one so much as began to take in.... Such a commission--as the march of events was before long to prove--involved a sheer, practical impossibility. It implied, not a single-handed woman, nearly sixty and shattered in health, but immense organized departments at twenty different centers.”[8]