by Tim Rowland
Sarah Emma Edmonds was a complicated girl.
Edmonds decided early on that it would not do to “stay at home and weep,” so she cut her hair and enlisted in the 2nd Michigan Infantry. Her upbringing had prepared her for this day. She was born in Nova Scotia, and her father was profoundly disappointed that Sarah was not a boy, a fact that he constantly reminded her of with his fists. Escaping her father was a matter of slipping across the border, dressing as a man, and entering the male-dominated workforce. By the time the war came along, cross-dressing was a piece of cake. (It was also a petticoat that cut two ways; while some women were cross-dressing to get into the army, it was rumored that some men were cross-dressing to get out.)
Edmonds was one of perhaps 500 to 1,000 women on both sides who disguised themselves as men and joined the ranks—dropping one’s pants was not a part of army entrance exams in a war that needed every warm body it could get. Any potential soldier who wasn’t obviously club-footed and had a reasonable understanding of which end of the rifle to point at the enemy was considered to be good enough.
Nor were there many other obstacles to fitting in with an army of men, curiously enough. A woman might not have fired a weapon before, but neither had a large number of the men prior to service. They all learned as one.
Boys, or virtual boys, were no strangers to the military ranks, so facial hair—or lack thereof—was not an issue. Baggy and bulky wool uniforms concealed a soldier’s figure while being amenable to areas of strategic padding and binding, as the need might be. Writing for the National Archives, DeAnne Blanton noted that “Victorian men, by and large, were modest by today’s standards. Soldiers slept in their clothes, bathed in their underwear, and went as long as six weeks without changing their underclothes. Many refused to use the odorous and disgusting long, open-trenched latrines of camp. Thus, a woman soldier would not call undue attention to herself if she acted modestly, trekked to the woods to answer the call of nature and attend to other personal matters, or left camp before dawn to privately bathe in a nearby stream.”
At least one wife fought alongside her husband and one sister alongside her brother. A woman was shot in the chest at Antietam, and a woman killed at Gettysburg was believed to have participated in Pickett’s Charge. Mollie Bean of North Carolina probably fought at Gettysburg too. She served for two years, and when discovered it was assumed that she was a prostitute, which would have been understandable, but when it turned out she wasn’t they threw her in the insane asylum. Cathay Williams simply swapped first and last names, and “William” wasn’t discovered until (s)he fell sick. In addition to the more obvious trouble a woman might have enlisting in the army, Cathay Williams was black.
Many weren’t discovered until they were captured or shot or … well, there is the unglamorous story of a couple of women serving surreptitiously under Phil Sheridan who got drunk and fell into a creek. Their rescuers hauled them up to headquarters, where their particular brand of femininity was enough to make even the notoriously coarse general wince. In his memoirs, the only term that came to his mind for one of them was a “she dragoon.”
Yet as far as military service was concerned, female fighting wasn’t just for the butch. Far from it, really. Mostly they mirrored the men they fought alongside, who were interested in the cause, or even simply the pay. Edmonds, who repeatedly mentions “patriotism,” might have been the norm.
If so, that’s where her similarity to the rest of the flock, male or female ends. Edmonds was an elegant writer with a dry wit and a good ear for dialect whose book Nurse and Spy in the Union Army was a sensation after the war and remains interesting as a tale of the war from a woman’s perspective—unlike some men, perhaps, she found it amusing when a local preacher handed out copies of the New Testament with the scribbled advice inside to 1. Put your trust in God, and 2. Keep your powder dry. On arriving in Washington, she also found it curious that “The Capitol and White House were common places of resort for soldiers. Arms were stacked in the rotunda of the one and the lobbies while our ‘noble boys in blue’ lounged in the cushioned seats of members of Congress, or reclined in easy chairs in the President’s Mansion.”
In a harbinger of what was to come, the nurse described in detail the rows of hospital tents and the severe need for supplies to tend to the rows on rows of cots filled with disabled men. And this was before the outbreak of hostilities; the swamps of Washington were fine breeding grounds for typhoid, malaria, and other diseases and throughout the course of the war, illness would kill far more men than would bullets.
When the time for the war’s first battle (First Bull Run) drew near, the atmosphere was much like the preliminaries to a modern sporting event, Edmonds reported:
Oh, what excitement and enthusiasm that order produced—nothing could be heard but the wild cheering of the men, as regiment after regiment received their orders. The possibility of a defeat never seemed to enter the mind of any. No gloomy forebodings seemed to damp the spirits of the men, for a moment, but ‘On to Richmond,’ was echoed and re-echoed, as that vast army moved rapidly over the country.
The attitude began to change the further the army marched into enemy territory. From her (his) position near the rear, Edmonds (Thompson) would hear a volley of rifle fire up front and suspect the battle had been joined. It would usually turn out, however, that the increasingly skittish advance guard had heard a rustling in a hedgerow and unleashed a maelstrom of fiery hell at a pheasant.
Bull Run, or Manassas (which was how Southerners referred to Bull Run), drew the line between talk of blood and blood itself. The difference stunned many. Bragging of military glory was one thing; listening to the night-long screams of an incoherent, legless soldier driven out of his mind by the pain was quite another. The optimistic hoots and hollers that preceded the battle soon were all gone. Those Federals who were physically able, Edmonds noted, straggled back to Washington and got around to the business of self-medicating: “Every bar-room and groggery seemed filled to overflowing with officers and men, and military discipline was nearly, or quite, forgotten for a time in the army of the Potomac. While Washington was in this chaotic condition, the rebel flag was floating over Munson’s Hill, in plain sight of the Federal Capital.”
Early on, residents of Washington could have seen Confederate soldiers lounging on Munson’s Hill across the Potomac River in Virginia—a vivid reminder of why Maryland had to stay in the Union at all costs. In this sketch of Munson’s Hill, a log is made to look like the barrel of a cannon in order to deceive the Yankees into thinking the site is more heavily fortified than it is. These log cannons were known as “Quaker Guns.” (Courtesy Library of Congress)
Union Gen. George McClellan’s storied hesitancy to take action had one side benefit—by the time he eventually rousted the men to battle, they had all but forgotten that last beating they had been handed by the South. “On to Richmond!” once more resounded through the camp as the troops floated downstream to southern Virginia in the spring of 1862 to engage in the ill-fated Peninsula campaign. Edmonds performed as a nurse and general errand boy, scouting the countryside for food. This chore brought her into close contact with members of her own sex who left her clearly shaken. If Southern men were calling for blood, Southern women, Edmonds felt, had them beat: “The bitter and ferocious spirit of thousands of rebel women in Kentucky, Tennessee, and other States, is scarcely, if at all, surpassed by the female monsters that shrieked and howled for victims in the French Revolution.” Her opinion of Confederate men was not much higher, although she allowed that “perhaps prejudice had something to do in making the rebels appear so much inferior to our men.”
The slaves liberated by the approaching Federal army were more generous, Edmonds reported: “One old man, evidently their leader, stood up and said: ‘I tell you, my breddern, dat de good Lord has borne wid dis yere slav’ry long time wid great patience. But now he can’t bore it no longer, no how; and he has said to de people ob de North—go and tell de slaveholders
to let de people go, dat dey may sarve me.’”
And there were oddly poignant moments that could only be experienced by a person who was not at liberty to reveal her true identity. Edmonds recognized a friend and fellow Canadian she identified as “Lieutenant V,” with whom she struck up an independent friendship, of sorts, until he was shot to death on the Federal’s picket line.
At times my position became very embarrassing, for I was obliged to listen to a recapitulation of my own former conversations and correspondence with him, which made me feel very much like an eavesdropper. He had neither wife, mother nor sister, and, like myself, was a wanderer from his native land. There was a strong bond of sympathy existing between us, for we both believed that duty called us there, and were willing to lay down even life itself, if need be, in this glorious cause. Now he was gone, and I was left alone with a deeper sorrow in my heart than I had ever known before.
Since her enlistment, Edmunds had been angling for a job in espionage, which would have seemed appropriate for a woman of her talents. When a position came open, she went through a lengthy interview process, where “a committee of military stars” with great attention to detail checked her record, patriotism, motives, allegiance, weapons proficiency, and overall character—but happily, not her gender. Then, of course, came the oath. “This was the third time that I had taken the oath of allegiance to the United States, and I began to think, as many of our soldiers do, that profanity had become a military necessity.”
Edmonds had “three days to prepare for my debut into Rebeldom,” which she was to enter in the guise of a slave. She was able to color her skin readily enough with chemicals but had to wait three days on a wig. Returning to camp in costume, Edmonds was gratified to find no one noticed her, but a bit aggrieved at how few friends an escaped slave, or “contraband,” might find among the white race—even among the Northerners. To giver her disguise the ultimate test, she went back to her old boss and asked for work and was sent to the kitchen to make biscuits.
Soon after, Edmonds snuck past the Yankee and Rebel pickets and fell in with a group of slaves taking coffee and corn bread to the troops. Not knowing what to do next, her hesitation drew the attention of a Confederate officer who inquired after Edmonds’s master. “I answered in my best negro dialect: ‘I dusn’t belong to nobody, Massa, I’se free and allers was; I’se gwyne to Richmond to work.’ But that availed me nothing, for turning to a man who was dressed in citizen’s clothes and who seemed to be in charge of the colored department, he said: ‘Take that black rascal and set him to work, and if he don’t work well tie him up and give him twenty lashes, just to impress upon his mind that there’s no free niggers here while there’s a d—d Yankee left in Virginia.’”
Sara Edmonds concluded that it would not do to “sit at home and weep,” so the disguised herself as a man and made a major contribution to the Union effort. (Courtesy Michigan State Archives)
The work involved the construction of earthworks, which was difficult enough for the strongest of the men, and, after one day’s labor, left her hands in no condition to work the following morning. So she found a negro boy whose job was to carry water to the troops and swapped places with him. To repay the favor, she passed him $5 in greenbacks, but found it shoved back in her face: It was more money than he had ever dreamed of, and he was afraid such a magnificent sum might ruin his life.
Edmonds gained considerable intelligence on the foray, learning the size of the Confederates’ army, the number of cannons in its possession, and its upcoming plans—unlike in the Union, Confederate foot soldiers were told of the army’s next move in advance. Although she was never discovered, there were several close calls. She needed to behave, because a whipping would have exposed the white skin of her back. And at one point, she was chatting with some slaves when she noticed the eyes of one of her compatriots growing noticeably wider by the second. Finally he elbowed his neighbor and stammered, “Jim, I’ll be darned if that feller ain’t turnin’ white.” Sure enough, the nitrate of silver was wearing off. Edmonds told the members of the group that it was to be expected, as his mother was white—and then while they were thinking that one over, she scooted out to reapply the chemical solution.
One particular piece of her gathered information was useful from both a professional a personal standpoint. As she was refilling the soldiers’ canteens with water, she saw a peddler approach who she recognized from his visits to the Federal camp, where he sold newspapers and stationery, and usually found an excuse to hang around for a half a day or so. She listened, stunned, as the paper salesman began to spill all manner of Union secrets. Only one detail seemed to bother his conscious a bit, that being that he had given away the position of “Lieutenant V,” a “fine man” who had been killed as a result of his intelligence. Edmonds fought back a cold chill, taking comfort only in the knowledge that from that point on the salesman was a dead man walking.
Meantime, after doggedly driving back the Confederates from the lower James River in a series of relatively successful but costly battles, McClellan’s army was now pointed directly at Richmond. Blessed with such an advantageous position, McClellan took immediate action by wiring Washington to complain about how badly outnumbered he was, how greatly the odds were stacked against him unless he received more troops, and how he planned to attack—at some point pretty soon, any time now probably—but he could not be held responsible for a loss, seeing as how the South held every card in the deck. An exasperated Lincoln finally wrote back telling him to attack Richmond or forget the whole thing and come home.
Edmonds, meanwhile, was again disguising herself, this time in a more accustomed role as a woman. Prior to the Battle of Seven Pines, which began on May 31, 1862, (s)he morphed into a female Irish pie salesman named Bridget, with a brogue good enough that the Confederate Irish considered her one of the “rale ould stock of bog-trotters,” and began collecting intelligence.
Two days later, McClellan addressed a wildly cheering army of men, explaining that, based on their successful body of work, they were finally about to march on Richmond. Two months later the army moved, but not in the direction the men had hoped. Edmonds noted that “the ominous fact that we turned our backs toward Richmond was very suggestive of a retreat.” Soldiers reacted in one of two ways. “The men were deeply moved; some wept like children, others swore like demons, and all partook in the general dissatisfaction of the movement.” Their unannounced destination was Newport News, seventy miles back in the direction they had come. “It was well for us that we did not know it then, or there probably would have been more swearing and less weeping among the soldiers.”
Despite his accomplishments through several major campaigns as a spy and nurse, Frank Thompson didn’t finish out the war. And he would have been shot had he tried. Edmonds and her male persona silently left the ranks after contracting malaria, choosing to be treated at a private hospital where matters of gender would not raise as many eyebrows as they would in an army hospital. In better health, she started to return to her regiment, but thought better of it when she noticed posters seeking information about the whereabouts of one Frank Thompson, deserter. She finished out the war playing the role of herself, ministering to the sick and wounded in a Washington hospital. She married after the war and had three children. Ultimately, her service was acknowledged and she received an honorable discharge and a military pension for her role in a small but passionate sorority.
Somewhere in the rolling hills outside of Sharpsburg, Maryland, was, or perhaps is to this day, an unmarked grave containing the bones of a soldier who wanted to remain anonymous. Edmonds understood; in fact, she dug the grave herself after administering to the soldier, who had suffered a mortal neck wound at Antietam. Something about the youngster caught Edmonds’s attention and something about Edmonds gave the dying boy confidence. “I can trust you,” the soldier said. “And I can tell you a secret. I am not what I seem, but a female. I enlisted from the purest motives, and have remained un
discovered and unsuspected. I have neither father, mother nor sister. My only brother was killed today. I closed his eyes about an hour before I was wounded; I will soon be with him.”
Her last wish was to be buried off by herself, her secret kept for eternity. It would take a special person to be able to fill that request, and the chances of discovering such a person at that particular point in time might have been only a few out of a couple of hundred thousand. And yet, according to Edmonds’s account, it happened. In a sea of men, on a field of honor, sister had found sister.
CHAPTER 5
The North Finds Its Hero, Briefly
In retrospect, not everyone in the North saw the First Battle of Bull Run as a disaster. “On the 21st July, 1861, the North lost the battle of Bull Run,” wrote John Watts De Peyster, years after the fact. “But the rebels did not win anything but the possession of the field, for the gain was altogether with the North.”
This would have come as news to residents in and around Washington, D.C., who had packed picnic hampers full of wine, cheese, and other goodies into their carriages and trundled down to the crossroads of Manassas to “tailgate” before the battle, much as they do today with their beloved Washington Redskins.
