Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

wrote angrily, “If I was only a man! I don’t know a woman here who does not groan over her misfortune in being clothed in petticoats; why can’t we fight as well as the men?” Julia LeGrand, another prolific Confederate diary keeper, also chafed at the bonds of womanhood, and sighed against leading “the lives which women have led since Troy fell… while men, more privileged, are abroad and astir, making name and fortune and helping make a nation.”42

Almost as an answer to that complaint, a number of American women managed to slip into direct roles in combat by donning men’s clothing and volunteering for the armies as men (and given the lax medical examination processes, this turned out to be easier than it might seem). Some of these women, such as Lucy Matilda Thompson, were simply following lovers, husbands, or brothers who cooperated in the disguise: Thompson saw her husband enlist in the 18th North Carolina in 1861, and then “cut her thick hair close to her head, took up a few seams in one of her husband’s suits, oiled her squirrel musket, and boarded a troop train for Virginia, under the name of ‘Private Bill Thompson.’” Not until her husband was killed and she herself wounded in 1862 was Thompson discovered to be a woman and summarily discharged. For other women, the war offered an opportunity not to follow men but to evade them and to escape the restraints of custom imposed by a “proper sphere.” Sara Emma Edmonds “was born into this world with some dormant antagonism toward man” and “longed to go forth and do” by killing “one rebel after another.” Edmonds managed to serve, with or without male connivance, as a Union nurse, spy, and soldier, and the frontispiece illustration to her 1865 memoirs shows her booted and spurred (and skirted), with a hard-set jaw and a savage grip on her riding crop, ready to ride down any opposition—even from her readers.43

All told, between 250 and 400 women disguised as men found their way into either the Federal or Confederate armies. A variety of complications made their enlistments short ones. “There was a corporal taken sick on the picket line close by us the other night,” wrote Henry Hunt of the 64th New York.

… the corporal was taken to a house close by and before morning there was a little corporal in bed with her. It appears that she enlisted with her lover last fall and dressed in men[’]s clothes and by some means deceived the doctor when examined and has been with the Army all winter and tented with her sweetheart.44

Others managed to elude detection and dismissal for considerable periods of time, some until the close of the war and beyond. Elizabeth Compton, a Canadian, enlisted seven different times under different names and with different male disguises, serving in the 125th Michigan for eighteen months in one instance before being detected. Jennie Hodgers was mustered into the 95th Illinois in 1862 as “Albert Cashier,” survived forty battles and skirmishes, and continued to live as an honored male Civil War veteran until 1911, when an automobile accident disclosed his/her identity. Some women kept their secrets far longer than anyone expected. In 1934, a farmer near the old Shiloh battlefield unearthed nine human skeletons with bits of uniforms and buttons that identified them as soldiers; one of the skeletons was that of a woman.45

Other women managed to find near-military roles that gave them a place in uniform without necessarily putting a rifle in their hands. Zouave regiments, for instance, followed the French model by enlisting vivandières, uniformed women auxiliaries such as Mary Tebe of the 114th Pennsylvania, who followed her husband into the Army of the Potomac and kept store, collected the regimental wash, and ventured out under fire to bring water to the wounded. Kady Brownell of the 1st Rhode Island, Bridget Divers of the 1st Michigan Cavalry, and Annie Etheridge of the 3rd Michigan served in similar roles.

Women who could not manage a way into uniform could still find a direct military role as a spy. Precisely because social convention disconnected white women from the waging of war, it was easier for women to obtain and pass along military information without being suspected. Actress Pauline Cushman parlayed her acting talents into a series of elaborate ruses that allowed her to pry information out of admiring and complaisant Confederate officers; Belle Boyd used an equal measure of talent as a northern Virginia coquette to elide the same kinds of information out of Federal officers. At the other social extreme, African American women were also generally dismissed as militarily harmless, a miscalculation that Harriet Tubman and Sara Edmonds used to immense advantage. Tubman, who had escaped from slavery in Maryland twenty years before the war and who had amassed considerable experience venturing south to guide runaways to the North, undertook spying expeditions for the Federal troops on the Carolina Sea Islands. Edmonds colored her white skin with silver nitrate to penetrate the Confederate lines on the Peninsula in 1862. Whether in uniform or not, the war permitted these women to experiment with a series of dramatic and subversive role reversals in gender—and in Edmonds’s case a reversal of both gender and race.46

None of these reversals was permanent, and most of them involved only the occasional acting out of a forbidden role within accepted male definitions of those roles. Despite the prediction of one Confederate commentator that “the beginning of our career as an independent nation… ought to be signalized by the beginning of a nobler, loftier career for women,” by and large Union and Confederate women stayed within the traditional circle of women’s “proper sphere” and turned their energies to the performance of war-related work defined as gender-appropriate. “As I can’t fight,” resolved Louisa May Alcott, “I will content myself with working for those who can.” Doing war work could begin with acting as recruiting cheerleaders, pushing and shaming men into volunteering. Kate Cumming, a Confederate