A woman soldier and a nurse, though probably not a spy

Memoirs of a Soldier, Nurse and Spy, Sarah Emma Edmonds

I first learned about Sarah Emma Edmonds from a book about women soldiers in the Civil War, They Fought Like Demons.  When I saw this on the shelves at Half Price Books, the title caught my eye, and then the author's name.  Sarah Edmonds enlisted in the Union Army in May of 1861.  As "Franklin Thompson," she served in the 2nd Michigan regiment for two years, much of the time as a hospital nurse or orderly.  In 1863 she deserted, resumed dressing as a woman, and spent the rest of the war working as a nurse in army hospitals.  After the war, she married and had several children.  Twenty-one years later, like many aging veterans she applied for a military pension, for which she had to document her service as "Franklin Thompson."  Before she could receive the pension, the charge of desertion had to be expunged from her record, which wasn't difficult, since if she had been outed as a woman while serving, she would have been immediately discharged.  The military records of her service and of the pension granted her prove that Edmonds, a woman, served as a soldier in the war.  That much is clear.  The memoir she wrote about her service rests on that fact, but she seems to have taken some liberties with the details of what exactly that service entailed.

Sarah Edmonds first published her memoir in 1864, under the title Unsexed: or, The Female Soldier.  It was reprinted in 1865, by a new publisher, as Nurse and Spy in the Union Army.  The annotated edition I read was published by Northern Illinois University Press in 1999.  The editor, Elizabeth Leonard, does not discuss why the title to the present edition was changed yet again, not just with the addition of "Soldier" to the title, but also with the subtitle, "A Woman's Adventures in the Union Army."  I am sure it was to highlight what made those adventures ground-breaking.  Lots of women served as nurses, many served as spies.  While other women served as soldiers, none is as well-documented as Edmonds, and only one other (a Confederate woman soldier) wrote a memoir about that service.

Changing the title to emphasize Edmonds' role as soldier highlights an ambiguity in the book: nowhere in it did Edmonds state that she was a soldier.  She was incredibly coy about it. According to the introduction, Edmonds left her home in New Brunswick to come to the United States, probably in 1859, and probably already presenting herself as a male.  Her readers wouldn't have known that, so when she talked about feeling the call to serve her adopted county in its hour of need, and being "employed by the government" as a "FIELD NURSE," they would have assumed it was as a woman, not a newly-enlisted volunteer soldier.  At this time, though, all army nurses were male soldiers.  In answering the call to serve, she wrote, "I could only thank God that I was free to go forward and work, and was not obliged to stay at home and weep."  Maybe her readers took it for granted that she was "free" because she was unmarried, with no family ties.  They couldn't have guessed that her freedom was based on her male persona.

In telling stories about her spying missions, Edmonds mentioned that she wore male civilian clothes when she snuck through the Confederate lines to gather information. She just didn't mention that she took off "Private Thompson's" Federal uniform to do so.  At one point "Thompson" disguised "himself" in women's clothes, so à la "Victor/Victoria," we have a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman.

Watching these convolutions was fascinating.  They carried me through some of the less entertaining parts of the book.  Edmonds wrote in the first chapter that she came to America because she wanted to be a foreign missionary (I don't think she meant it was to evangelize godless Americans, but maybe so).  That should have prepared me for the piety that permeates this book.  The pages are filled with prayers and poems and portions of sermons.  There are frequent stories of camp meetings, conversions, and soldiers dying holy deaths.  These are interspersed with gruesome accounts of the battles that brought the soldiers to the hospitals, and the primitive medical care that could not save them (and may have killed some of them).

One soldier's death highlights the tensions in Edmonds' story.  After the battle of Antietam, in September of 1862, Edmonds was crossing the field, searching for the wounded among the dead, when she "was attracted by the pale, sweet face of youthful soldier who was wounded in the neck."  The soldier confided to Edmonds that she was a woman, an orphan who had enlisted with her brother, killed earlier that day.  Edmonds called a chaplain, and then stayed with her until she died, and helped with her burial, to keep her secret safe.  I wonder if it would have comforted that unknown soldier, to know there was a woman comrade by her.  Edmonds chose not to tell her.

Edmonds wrote that the nursing work was a terrible strain, which I can imagine it was.  As she told it, she learned that the army "Secret Service" had an opening for a spy, and she volunteered.  Part of the interview included a phrenological exam, which showed that her "organs of secretiveness, combativeness, etc., were largely developed," which qualified her for the job (though the exam apparently missed the fact that the head in question was a woman's).  Even before I read the editor's note that Edmonds' service as a spy has been called into question, I had begun to have my doubts.  The first assignment she recounted was to dress as a (male) contraband, an escaped slave, to cross to Confederate lines.  In her account, on the Confederate side she was pressed into a work gang, before she was given a rifle and sent out alone on picket duty, which allowed her to escape back to the Union lines.  No Confederate would have given an African American a gun in the first place, let alone allowed him out of his sight with it.  In another adventure, while she was trying to buy food for the hospitals, a Confederate woman shot at her.  Edmonds returned fire, deliberately aiming at the woman's hand.  She immediately treated the wound, converted the rebel from the Confederate cause, and escorted her new friend "Alice" to the Union lines, where she became a devoted nurse herself.  However fanciful, her adventures are definitely entertaining.

Of course, writing about her exploits in disguise as a contraband, Edmonds used the broadest "Gone With the Wind" dialect, both for herself in character and for all the African Americans she encountered (usually referring to them as "darkies," which is at least slightly less offensive to modern readers than the n-word).  But they are not the only characters spouting stage dialect.  Edmonds later impersonated an Irish pedlar woman (in another bit of cross-cross-dressing), with the worst "Faith and begorrah" Oirish accent I think I've ever read.  In the course of that adventure, she met an H'inglishman, who h'only wished 'e was h'at 'ome with 'is family, far from Jeff Davis.  There is also a "Dutchman," as 19th-century America labeled Germans, who sounded just like Professor Bhaer in Little Women.

Though I rolled my eyes frequently reading this, it is still a fascinating book.  Despite the probably fictionalized elements, it is an eye-witness account of the Civil War, from a unique perspective.  Edmonds included a lot of information about hospitals and nursing care, as well as the daily lives of soldiers in camp and on the march.  She was present at many major battles, including the surrender of Vicksburg in 1863.  She analyzed the officers she served under or met, including Generals George McClellan and Ulysses Grant, both of whom she admired greatly.  And there is a genuine poignancy in her accounts of the young soldiers, suffering and dying for a cause they believed in, far from their families.  Parents often traveled to the battlefields to help care for their sons, but many arrived too late.  I think it's to Edmonds' credit that she dedicated not just her book, but the proceeds from it, "To the Sick and Wounded Soldiers of the Army of the Potomac," among whom she served.

What really floored me was to learn that Sarah Edmonds and her husband, a fellow Canadian, ended up right here in Houston, in the 1890s.  Here Edmonds was inducted into the Grand Army of the Republic, the premier Civil War veterans' organization, and she was inducted as a woman.  She died near Houston in 1898, and the GAR later had her buried with full military honors here in the city.  I plan to visit her grave as soon as I can.

N.B. As I mentioned above, the publication history of Edmonds' memoir is convoluted.  The 1865 version reprinted the text of the 1864 original with no changes except to the title.  The 1999 edition I read reprinted the 1865 version, again with no changes except to the title.  I am using the 1865 date for the "Mid-Century of Books" challenge.

A woman soldier in the Civil War

An Uncommon Soldier, Lauren Cook Burgess, ed.

The subtitle of this book is "The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, alias Pvt. Lyons Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers, 1862-1864."  I first learned about Rosetta Wakeman from another book Lauren Cook has written, this one with Deanne Blanton.  They Fought Like Demons is an overview of women soldiers in the Civil War, and an important part of the authors' thesis is to document the reality of the women soldiers.  Blanton and Cook have identified at least 250 women who served in the Federal and Confederate armies, which is admittedly only a fragment of the total number of enlisted personnel.  But they make a convincing argument that there were undoubtedly more women serving, who have never been identified and who chose not to reveal their service.

One of the women soldiers highlighted in their book was Rosetta Wakeman, who served in the Union army for almost two years.  Like thousands of her fellow soldiers, she died of disease, not in battle.  She was buried among her comrades in a military cemetery outside New Orleans, under her male nom de guerre.  Though she spent almost two months in a military hospital before her death, no one apparently discovered that she was a woman, or else chose not to reveal it.  The rudimentary medical care available at the time, and the very brief medical exams for army recruits, posed few problems for women who wanted to serve.

In her introduction to Rosetta Wakeman's letters, and in her meticulous notes, Lauren Cook Burgess tries to give as much context as she can both to Wakeman's life and military career, within the context of the experiences of women soldiers and generally of military service in the Civil War.  Unfortunately, there is little information about Wakeman's life prior to her enlistment.  She grew up on a farm in New York State, the oldest of nine children.  When she was 19, she left home to work, under a man's name, on a canal boat.  A few weeks later she enlisted with the 153rd New York, probably at least in part for the $152 enlistment bonus.  Her regiment was first assigned to guard and picket duty around Washington.  In February 1864, they were sent to Louisiana, to join General Nathaniel Banks' ill-fated drive up the Red River, which ended in defeat and retreat.  The hardships of the campaign, with forced marches and bad water supplies, took a heavy toll on unacclimated northerners like the 153rd New York, and "Lyons" Wakeman was among those who died from chronic diarrhea (which with dysentery would kill nearly half a million soldiers during the war).

Wakeman's letters home are in many ways typical of other Civil War soldiers' letters (I've read quite a few, through my own research in school and then my work as an archivist).  There are frequent comments about the weather and the food and her officers, questions about the family left behind and about friends also serving.  Remarkably, Wakeman was able to get leave to visit a cousin and another friend in their regiments, neither of whom apparently told anyone about her. It is elements like these that make Wakeman's letters very atypical, and in fact the collection is unique, among only a handful of primary source documents from women soldiers serving in the field during the Civil War.

In a Foreward to the book, Dr. James McPherson, the dean of Civil War historians, notes that Lauren Cook Burgess is herself a Civil War re-enactor, who represented a soldier in the field.  In 1989, after she was "outed," the National Park Service tried to ban her from re-enactments, on the grounds that there were no women soldiers in the Civil War.  Burgess ended up taking the NPS to court, and the resulting publicity caught the attention of Ruth Goodier, a great-grandniece of Rosetta Wakeman, who offered Burgess copies of the letters.  From that came this book, and Burgess's later work with Deanne Blanton.

There are thousands of collections of Civil War soldiers' letters in archives and in private hand across the United States.  Each one documents an individual's experiences in America's great struggle, and each is a voice from the past.  In An Uncommon Soldier, Lauren Cook Burgess ensures that one unique soldier's voice will be heard, and by extension that of her sisters in arms.

Women soldiers in the Civil War

They Fought Like Demons, DeAnne Blanton and Lauren Cook

The subtitle of this book is "Women Soldiers in the Civil War."  I'm sure a lot of people would automatically say, "There were no women soldiers in the Civil War."  Women's traditional roles in the conflict have been well-documented. Nurses, yes, and aid workers, and even spies.  Everyone knows Clara Barton, and Belle Boyd, and maybe even Louisa May Alcott.  But not warriors.  Part of the story that Blanton and Cook have to tell is how the women soldiers have been erased from the history of the Civil War.  The troops fighting in the Union and Confederate armies knew about the women soldiers - and not as urban myths, that a woman "somewhere" was serving.  They wrote their families about their encounters with these women, living and dead (some discovered only among the corpses after a battle).  Stories about these women made it into the newspapers, both during the war and afterwards.  There are official records of women in both armies, including pension records.  At least one woman Union veteran became a member in good standing in the GAR veterans' organization after the war, as a woman.  It was only as the Civil War veterans died off that the memory of these women soldiers was lost.  In the 20th century, the historical evidence was dismissed or interpreted to show these women as deranged or prostitutes, or the stories as romantic fiction.

DeAnne Blanton is a senior military archivist with the National Archives. She and Lauren Cook spent ten years in painstaking, detailed research for this book.  They identified 250 women soldiers in both armies, but their research suggests there may have been many more who never revealed themselves or were discovered as women, who simply served until death or discharge.  The evidence they present is clear, compelling, and incontrovertible.

The book is organized thematically, with chapters on why women served (for the same reasons men did, but also for the freedom that men had); how they disguised themselves and how they experienced life in the ranks; the experiences of wounds and capture; how they fared on discovery; how they were perceived both by fellow soldiers and by the general public; and their post-war experiences.  The authors and the reader are left with a lot of unanswered questions, in part because the women's experiences are poorly documented compared with those of male soldiers.  Many of the women simply disappear from the record, especially in the post-war years.

The larger story is compelling, and the details are endlessly fascinating.  Women could easily pass a medical entrance exam that was primarily some questions and a quick visual once-over.   Women who were discovered and booted from the army often traveled to a different city or town and re-enlisted, which was easy in the days before national identity documents.  At least two women soldiers were discovered only when they gave birth in camp - one had fought in battles into her third trimester, one went into labor while on picket duty.  Women soldiers were most often discovered when wounded in an area that required disrobing; a head, hand or calf wound was usually safe.  Capture as a prisoner of war almost always meant discovery.  One woman soldier went with her husband as a prisoner to Andersonville, and she remained after his death, never revealing herself as a woman, though that would have brought release.  She died a prisoner, and her grave is the only one marked with a headstone.

Anyone interested in the Civil War, or 19th century American history, or women's history, needs to read this book.