April 29, 2013 • 30 mins
Though she was Canadian, Sarah Emma Edmonds fought for the Union during the Civil War. She adopted the name Franklin Thompson while traveling. Disguised as a man, she enlisted and began a career as a nurse, courier and spy (if you believe her memoir).
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housetop
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I
am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and we
got a request on Twitter recently asking if we were
(00:21):
going to do any more Civil War episodes for the
hundred and fifty anniversary of the Civil War. And the
answer is yes, it is now. Yes. At the time
it was somewhere on the spectrum between maybe and probably
and now it's yes. Yeah. We always want to um
fulfill those desires of our listeners, but it's not always
feasible to get everybody's wishes granted, and the short amount
(00:44):
of time that we have, I think the real answer
is never feasible because we get literally ten suggestions for
every one episode that we can record. At least that's
a conservative guest. But the Civil War very broad topic
with lots and lots of things that she's from. So
I chose one of my favorite favorite themes, which is
(01:05):
ladies dressing up as gentleman to go fight. Yeah. I
don't know why I love that so much, but I do. Well,
it's fascinating on a number of levels. So today we're
going to talk about Sarah Emma Edmonds. She was a
Canadian woman who went to fight for the Union just
after the start of the Civil War and she served
disguised as a man without discovery for almost two years.
(01:29):
And according to her memoir, she wasn't just a nurse
in the army, she was also a spy. And we'll
talk more about the memoir as we go on. Yes,
we're gonna We're gonna talk about some things that she
that she discusses in it, and then we'll talk about
why maybe those things happened. So uh. Sarah was born
Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmondson in New Brunswick, Canada, in December
(01:52):
of eighty one. As was often the case at the time,
her father wanted a boy to help him in his
farming work, and he resented her for not being one.
He didn't treat her very well when she was young,
and when she was sixteen, she was also facing an
arranged marriage that she really didn't want to have any
part of. So around eighteen fifty seven she left home
(02:13):
and at that time she also dropped the Sun from
her last name, and she worked for about a year
in month in New Brunswick. She was afraid that her
father would find her, so she eventually fled to the
United States. To make it easier and safer for her
to travel by herself, she adopted a new identity, which
was Franklin Thompson, and she started dressing as a man.
(02:35):
And a note on the pronouns here, we are going
to use she and her when talking about her, because,
based on all the information we have, Franklin Thompson is
a disguise that she adopted and not an expression of
her gender identity. It's also a little unclear whether she
went by Sarah or Emma, so for the sake of simplicity,
we're just going to call her Sarah. So, first of all,
(02:57):
after um Lee even New Brunswick, Sarah went to Hartford, Connecticut,
and she got work as a traveling Bible salesman, making
her way to other cities including Boston, Massachusetts, and Flint, Michigan.
And an interesting point of note, she actually used the
middle name Flint as part of her male alias, and
this could be why. In eighteen sixty one, after the
(03:19):
fall of Fort Sumter started the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln
called for seventy five thousand volunteers to join the Union Army.
At that point, Sarah was in Flint, so even though
she wasn't born an American, Sarah still felt it was
her duty to join the side of the Union and
she wanted to help out by being a nurse. She
could have done this in the civilian world by working
(03:41):
in hospitals with recuperating soldiers, but she really felt like
the role of battlefield nurse was more crucial and more needed,
and it's possible that the excitement of it was also
a draw for her. But that job working in the
field as a nurse, along with pretty much everything else
in the military at the time, was reserved exclusively for men. So,
maintaining her Franklin Thompson disguise, she went to enlist. Recruitment
(04:05):
offices were really busy at the time, and there was
really not a lot of physical examination going on of
the people who were going to join the army, so
she joined without anyone detecting that she was a woman.
She joined the second Michigan Infantry on April eighteen sixty one,
and she was ranked as a field nurse. She was
in Company F, which was the Flint Union Grays, and
(04:28):
this was the first three year regiment in Michigan and
the first Western regiment to arrive in Washington, d C.
When the second Michigan arrived in Washington, she worked in
temporary hospitals with soldiers who were either sick when they
got to Washington, or had gotten sick after they arrived,
or had been injured in some kind of mishap. Because
of very hot weather and how many soldiers were arriving
(04:51):
in Washington, the hospitals were actually really busy and there
weren't enough doctors to go around. Typhoid and heat related
illnesses were also really and along with infections that got
worse because of the heat. And to top all of
that off, they were also having a problem with summer storms.
Um Since most of these temporary hospitals were set up
(05:11):
in tents and they didn't always have flooring, the ground
could quickly flood during a thunderstorm, so things were really
pretty tough and a little bit dicey for administering medical aid.
The provisions that they had available were also poor. There
was plenty to eat, but it was mostly things like
hard bread and coffee that might be really good for
a healthy young soldier, but not the best choices for
(05:35):
somebody who was sick or recuperating, so on the advice
of the chaplain and his wife, who figure into her
story at other times. Later, she started an initiative to
ask for help for sick and wounded soldiers from the
families and businesses in that area, and she helped bring
in better provisions for the men who were recovering. So
(05:57):
on July fifteenth, eighteen sixty one, and Sarah's unit got
their marching orders to go to bull Run, which is
also known as Manassas, and they departed two days later
on the seventeenth. The Battle of First Manassas also known
as the Battle of First bull Run, took place on
July one. In this battle, what the Union was hoping
to do was gain control of a railroad junction that
(06:19):
would give them easier access to the Confederate capital of Richmond.
They were not successful. Sarah's regiment did not participate in
the battle itself, but when the order came to withdraw,
the army's means of retreat was blocked by carriages of
people who had traveled out from Washington to watch the
fighting as spectators. So Sarah's regiment was crucial in helping
(06:42):
to cover the Union's botched retreat. While her regiment was
providing cover, what she was doing was helping with the wounded,
as well as delivering water to the fighting soldiers. It
was so hot that day that they were becoming dehydrated
and their performance was weakening. And after the battle was over,
Sarah actually stayed behind to tend the wounded who had
(07:03):
to be left behind because they couldn't travel, and as
important as her nurse work was delivering water to all
of these wounded troops. Once she was ready to leave,
she had to evade the eye of Confederate soldiers and
make her way back to Washington by herself. The army
remained in d c for quite a while after Manassas,
and she continued to work in the hospital. She was
(07:24):
caring for patients, She was securing food and provisions, just
as she had started to prior to the fighting. In
March of eighteen sixty two, she became a mail carrier
for her regiment, and for the remainder of her service,
she combined doing work as a nurse with various mail
and courier duties, including acting as a postmaster. The second
(07:46):
Michigan Infantry eventually joined the Peninsula Campaign, and this was
part of the Union's attempt to capture the Confederate capital
of Richmond by moving up the Virginia Peninsula rather than
by going overland from d C. This would allowed the
Union to get the support of the Union Navy as
well as the army. As part of the Peninsula Campaign,
her regiment was part of the Siege of Yorktown, the
(08:09):
Battle of Williamsburg, the Battle of Fair Oaks also known
as Seven Pines, and the Seven Days Battles before Richmond,
at which the Union was ultimately defeated and had to retreat.
In all of these battles, she worked as a nurse
and a stretcher bearer and helped carry wounded men off
the field. In the Battle of Williamsburg, all of that
happened while a heavy rain was going on, and the
(08:31):
fighting was also really fierce, and at one point she
took up arms herself. Her regiment was involved in many
other battles, but the next most notable event in her
own personal story was during the Battle of Second Manassas
also called Second bull Run, which was on August twenty nine,
eighteen sixty two. She was acting as a courier during
(08:51):
the battle, so she was relaying instructions from one part
of the battlefield to another, and her horse was killed,
so she had to ride a mule instead. This mule,
as mules are known for being stubborn, threw her into
a ditch and she was badly injured. She hurt her
leg and experienced internal hemorrhaging. It was not her first injury,
(09:12):
but it was one that continued to affect her throughout
her life, and while she had become a depth at
treating her own wounds so that people wouldn't discover that
she was a woman, this was one that would have
taken some time for her to recover from now. Her
memoir references her being at Antietam, which is also known
as the Battle of Sharpsburg, and burying a soldier who
(09:34):
confessed while dying that she was also female, but this
may have been an embellishment on Sarah's part, since two
different sources don't actually list the second Michigan as having
been an Antietam or. It's also possible that her regiment
didn't participate in the action, but that she did participate
in treating the wounded after the fact, and also Antietam
(09:55):
took place just a couple of weeks after her injury
at Second Manassas, so it may to be a slightly
romanticized version of what was actually taking place there, right,
And I found lots of sources that mentioned antietam Is
one of the battles that she was in, but they
all seemed to be referencing this one maybe questionable part
of who of her memoir, but regardless, she was definitely
(10:18):
recovered enough to return to battle in the Battle of Fredericksburg,
which went from December eleventh toft and she was an
orderly and relayed messages between headquarters and the front on horseback.
Fredericksburg was followed by the failed mud March, which was
a Northern Virginia campaign the Union undertook that went so
badly that they had to abandon it after three days
(10:40):
because the rain had completely obliterated the roads. Right right,
everybody was getting bogged down in a quagmire, essentially not
really um the most ideal conditions. Now, the war was
not going really well for the Union at this point,
so both Fredericksburg and the mud March had gone pretty poorly. Uh,
and the loss of Fredericksburg had brought huge casualty, casualty
(11:03):
tools with it, and the mud March, as we said,
was basically a fiasco. It just it did not go
well at all. General Ambrose Burnside, who had been commanding
the Army of the Potomac since November eighteen sixty two,
was actually removed from command on January, and at that
point General Joseph Hooker was put in command of the
Army of the Potomac. At this point, Sarah wanted to
(11:25):
leave the Army of the Potomac as well, so she
put in for a transfer and was sent to the
ninth Army Corps. After a few days of leave, she
met up with them in Louisville, Kentucky. She doesn't really
explicitly spell out why she wanted a transfer, but it
seems kind of obvious from what was going on in
the war at that point. The last entry she made
in her journal before she left is pretty telling. She wrote,
(11:48):
the Weather Department is in perfect keeping with the War Department,
its policy being to make as many changes as possible,
and everyone worse than the last. May God bless the
old Army of the Potomac and save it from total annihilation.
So in her memoir, which we have already suggested is
pretty heavily embellished. Sarah also wrote some really interesting things
(12:12):
about becoming a spy for the Union. There's no mention
of her being a spy in her service record, but
she allegedly donned a disguise and went behind enemy lines
eleven different times. So it doesn't necessarily mean that it
never happened, because they wouldn't necessarily have recorded spy work
(12:33):
in somebody's service record. But at the same time, the
things that we're going to talk about next are a
little vague in historical record. We don't have hard facts
on everything. It's largely her recounting of it right, And
exactly when this started is a little unclear, but it
seems from her memoir to have been sometime during the
(12:53):
siege of Yorktown and after a friend of hers, Lieutenant
James Vessey, who she had known before the time. Exactly
when this spy work began as a little unclear, but
it seems from her memoir to have started sometime during
the siege of Yorktown and after the death of a friend,
Lieutenant James Vessey, who she had known from before she
(13:15):
joined the army, and at about the same time, a
spy who had been doing reconnaissance for the Union in
Richmond was captured and shot by a Confederate firing squad.
The chaplain so it was the same chaplain who had
recommended that she seek out new provisions for the soldiers
in the hospitals in d C. The chaplain heard about this,
(13:37):
and when Sarah confided in him that she was becoming
dissatisfied in her nursing work and wanted to avenge her friend.
He told her about this this reconnaissance opportunity, and he
borrowed some army manuals for her to use to prepare
and in her account, she says that she faced a
lengthy interview and exam, which include a which included a
(14:01):
phrenological exam of her skull to examine the parts associated
with things like secretiveness and combativeness before she got the
okay to become a spy. In her first account of espionage,
she disguised herself as Contraband, which was a former slave
who had started to work with Union forces. She wore
a wig and used silver nitrate to color her skin,
(14:23):
and went by the name of Cuff on this On
this mission, she gathered information from the Richmond area while
working on the fortifications there and while carrying water. Sarah
also wrote of dressing as an Irish peddler, and this
time the disguise was that of a woman named Bridget,
and in this instance she took shelter in an apparently
(14:45):
abandoned house, only to find a gravely injured Confederate soldier
already staying there. Uh He gave her a watch to
deliver to a major McKee at a nearby Confederate camp
if she happened to pass by there, and she took
advantage of this opportunit unity to gain entry to the
camp and scout her own for information. She also wrote
of finding official documents in the pocket of a Confederate
(15:08):
officer while disguised as a launderer, and she returned these
to her commanding officer. Allegedly, her spying continued after she
moved into the Ninth Army Corps. She wrote in her
memoir about doing some recon while dressed as a Confederate
soldier and then shooting the Confederate commander that she had
been reporting to in the face once she fell back
(15:31):
in line with her Union troops. And just how much
of this is real? As we said, is pretty unclear.
We do know she enlisted, and we know she served,
but the spy stories just have not been substantiated. Apart
from her own descriptions that are in her memoir, her
military service didn't last much longer after she joined the
(15:51):
Ninth Corps. Not long after arriving in Kentucky, she developed malaria.
She knew she'd be discovered if she got medical treatment
in the regim it, and she asked for a furlough
and was denied. Now her account diverges from the historical account.
At this point. In her memoir, she wrote that she
went to the surgeon to say she was no longer
fit for duty, and that he agreed and wrote her
(16:14):
up a certificate of disability, and then she went back
to Washington to recover. So it's a little different than
what happened in the official record right and the historical
record she uh. Most other accounts say that sometime in
the spring of eighteen sixty three she left her post,
probably to seek treatment for malaria outside of the army,
and then Franklin Thompson, her alias, was marked as a deserter.
(16:37):
She did recover well enough to return to service, but
she couldn't actually do so because of the desertion charge,
so instead she found work in a hospital, this time
as herself with no disguise, and she worked with returning
soldiers until the end of the war. Her memoir was
called Unsexed or The Female Soldier, and then when it
(16:58):
was reprinted it was renamed Nurse and Spy and the
Union Army. It's definitely embellished. It's a very romanticized account
of her service. There's plenty of battle action and fighting
and shooting, but there's also there's a whole lot that's
more about the emotional side of service, and lots and
lots of stuff about what the emotional state of the
(17:20):
men was like, what life in camp was like. And
then every time, it seems like every other page, there
is someone handing her a locket or a ring, or
a note or a package to return home by a
comrade who has fallen. And it's also worth noting that
she donated all the proceeds from the sale of this
book to help wounded soldiers, so even though it may
(17:44):
be a romanticized account, it was ultimately beneficial. She at
one point wrote of a friendship with a woman named
Nellie in the story, and in this telling, Nellie's husband,
who was a Confederate soldier, as well as Nellie's other relatives,
had been killed by Union soldiers, and that when Sarah
first encounters Nellie and she asked her if she could
(18:06):
buy provisions for the Union army, Nelly actually drew a
gun on her, but Sarah allegedly shot her through the
hand and then captured her. But by the end of
the book their pals and Nellie has begun to work
in a Union hospital. So it reads kind of like
a subplot in a movie. Uh, this relationship that she
has with Nellie and and something that if you think
(18:28):
about it, maybe that could have happened, But it also
seems a little far fetched. So as I was reading
her memoir, I read it with a pretty big grain
of salt. Yeah, we do know that. In eighteen sixty seven,
Sarah married Lina Seelie, who was a Canadian mechanic, and
they had three children together. They moved around quite a
(18:49):
bit before they eventually settled in Texas as their home.
The Second Michigan Infantry held a reunion in eighteen seventy
six and Sarah attended, and when people figured out who
she was. They welcomed her into the fold the people
who had served with her. Some of them also helped
her fight the desertion charge that was on her record
(19:09):
and obtain a pension, which she thought because of the
injury she had incurred at Second Manassas. They had continued
to trouble her throughout her life. So eventually Franklin Thompson
was cleared of the desertion charges that took place in
eighteen eighty four, and he was given an honorable discharge
and then was awarded a pension of twelve dollars a month.
(19:29):
In eighteen Sarah was admitted to the Grand Army of
the Republic, which was a Civil War veterans organization. She
was the only woman to do so, and on September
five of eight Sarah died of malaria in Laport, Texas,
which was where she was living with her family. She
was fifty eight years old. She is actually buried in
(19:50):
the Washington Cemetery in Houston, Texas. I love this story.
It's really uh, I don't want to say fun because
there's so much sort of darkness about it, but there
is just such a sense of adventure and uh spiritedness
about it that there is a fun element to it, right,
It's just it's a wild ride. It is even without
(20:13):
her embellished version. It is a wild ride, even without
all of the things that you kind of go this women.
So she was not the only woman to serve in
the Civil War, and I found a pretty wide range
of estimates from a few as two hundred and fifty
to more than seven hundred and fifty women who disguised
their sex and went to serve in the Civil War.
(20:35):
And it was feasible for women to pass his men
thanks to the modesty and sanitary standards at the time.
Uh you know, soldiers slept in their clothes and sometimes
would go for weeks without bathing, especially during uh active wartime.
Women could bind their chest, pat out their waist and
pretty easily passed for men. Uh you know. The facial
(20:56):
hair thing was not as much of an issue because
at that time a lot of really of young boys
were enlisting as well, and a lot of volunteers were
coming from all walks of life and had to learn
everything about being a soldier. So being a little bit
lost in the world of the military was not unusual
for anybody, male or female. So if you couldn't fire
a gun or do other tasks, it wasn't a red
(21:18):
flag that you might be a woman. So we know
that there are other women who made it all the
way through their service without being discovered. There are some
whose sex was discovered only after the woman had been
severely wounded or killed, but we don't have a lot
of really documented historical examples. Here are a few, though.
(21:38):
One was Lauretta Alaska's who wrote about serving in the
Civil War as Lieutenant Harry Buford and her memoirs, which
were published in eighteen seventy six. Mary Stephens Jenkins enlisted
in Pennsylvania and was wounded in battle, and she served
for two years without anyone discovering her sex. She died
in eighty one. Mary Owens of Pennsylvania sir for eighteen
(22:00):
months using the name John Evans. She was discovered to
be a woman and was sent home after being wounded
in the arm. Stronia Smith Hunt enlisted alongside her husband,
who died of wounds. One of the other most famous
examples is Albert D. J. Cashiers, who enlisted in eighteen
sixty two and served until eighteen sixty five when his
regiment was mustered out of the Federal Army in nineteen thirteen.
(22:24):
While living in a soldier's home in Illinois, a sergeant
discovered that he was female. He lived as a man
for his entire adult life and died in in an
insane asylum in nineteen fourteen. There are affidavits on file
and his record from people who served with him who
said that they had no idea of his physical sex. So,
for its part, the army actually tried to deny the
(22:47):
involvement of women in the war at least once. In
nineteen o one, Ida Tarbell, writing for the American Magazine,
wrote to the Adjutant General to ask about how many
women had served in the Civil War, and she got
an answer that was just blatantly false. He said, quote,
I have the honor to inform you that no official
record has been found in the War Department showing specifically
(23:08):
that any woman was ever enlisted in the military service
of the United States as a member of any organization
of the regular or volunteer Army at any time during
the period of the Civil War. It is possible, however,
that there may have been a few instances of women
having served as soldiers for a short time without their
sex having been detected, but no record of such cases
(23:29):
is known to exist in the official files. Contrary to
that answer, the Army had compiled the records of the
Union and Confederate armies at that point, and there were
plenty of records on file of women's soldiers and of
discharged papers that were marked with sexual incompatibility. So when
the war was going on and afterwards, women's soldiers were
(23:49):
known of, and upon discovery often got quite a bit
of attention in newspapers. Word would spread of something like that.
But for a long time after the turn of the
century and even the until the nineteen eighties or so,
most writing about the Civil War actually omitted the women's
soldiers completely or branded them as freaks or deviance or prostitutes.
(24:10):
And it really wasn't until the late eighties and early
nineties that the stories of female Civil War soldiers started
to be told in a more positive light and their
service was actually recognized. So that is the story of
Sarah Emma Edmonds. And if number one, you can read
her whole memoir for free on the internet if you
(24:30):
would like to go read a very adventurous and probably
heavily romanticized tale of a woman's fight in the Civil War.
If you would like to read some fiction, actual fiction,
not probably fictionalized kind of truth. Another book is Terry
Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment, which tells the story of Polly who
joins the uh the Army after her brother goes missing
(24:54):
in battle, which I love because I love Terry Pratchett
and I love stories about the ladies who dresses gentlemen
to go off to war and fight. And now I
think you have some listener mail. I do. I have
listener mail. It's from our Facebook message box and it
is from Sina, and Sina says, I just listened to
the Cheese podcast and loved it. After all, who doesn't
(25:14):
love cheese? Many people do love cheese, including Holly and me,
she says. Just a quick question. In a comment question,
you spoke mostly about European cheese origins, and I was wondering,
is the cheese made in other parts of the world
just an offshoot of the cheese invented in Europe. Where
did you find any evidence of cheese being developed independently elsewhere?
(25:35):
Just curious. I once thought that the bagpipes were pretty
much just a Scottish thing, but was pretty interesting to
learn that bagpipe type instruments can be found in nearly
every region of the world. Perhaps an interesting podcast topic
comment and she links us to the to a video
and says that she has absolutely no Dutch connections and
therefore probably has no business pointing this out. I disagree
(25:58):
with that point or something that you would like to
point out, please do it. However, when I heard you
refer to the Netherlands as Holland several times during this podcast,
this video recently posted on Facebook by a Dutch friend
of mine immediately came to mine. It didn't fact check
the source of this video, but found it both educational
and quite entertaining, so I thought i'd pass it along.
And the video is about the difference between Holland and
(26:20):
the Netherlands, so I'll talk about that first. First of all,
if we accidentally called Holland called the Netherlands Holland, We're sorry. Yeah, um,
I'm sure at some point that we did. Having watched
the video, it is entertaining and it is confusing to
people who do not live there, in much the same
way as the nuances between the British Isles and the
(26:42):
United Kingdom and Great Britain maybe confusing to people who
don't live there, which is another thing that people have
written comments to us about before. So anytime we mess
that up, we're sorry. We're trying to get it right,
but I we may get it wrong. At some point.
On the cheese question, we talked about that in the
episode a little bit it and it was one of
those things that I was like, I'm gonna go double
(27:02):
check to make sure this is right, because what we
had talked about was that most of the cheese history
sort of started in the Mediterranean then branched out into
what is now Europe as people developed new methods for
controlling the spoilage of milk um with an exception being
in India, which had a long history of using milk
(27:24):
and to make butter and to to using cuisine and
made paneer, which is pretty much the only cheese that
is native to India. So I confirmed that's pretty much correct.
It was mostly what we think of as Western culture,
who were farming lots and lots of animals to use
for dairy purposes, and that just wasn't very prominent in
(27:45):
a lot of cultures outside of the Western world. I
did find that there are a few ethnic groups in
China that make cheese, and they these are real outliers
in the greater context of Chinese cuisine. They include the
Eye people and Tibetans, along with another a couple of
other Chinese ethnic groups, and all of these may have
(28:06):
learned how to make cheese from the buy. And in
the paper that I read about it, it was it
was clearly so unusual that it's remarked on multiple times
how unusual is um And it really just boils down
to that there were not many cultures that were raising
lots of animals that were both producing enough milk for
(28:26):
people to drink while still providing milk for young and
would allow themselves to be milked. So it's sort of
a cultural difference. You have to be raising herds of
milk producing animals in order to make cheese, and that
is why very much of the cheese history is from
a Western perspective. So I hope that clears that up. Yes,
(28:51):
you looked as though you had something that you wanted
to say. Truthfully, I was waxing rapsodic in my head
about cheese. We did them. We did some wrapsing exotic
about cheese in that episode too. Most people who have
written to us about that episode enjoyed that, so how
that makes me happy. If you would like to write
to us about cheese, or the Civil War, or anything
(29:13):
else you may We are at History Podcast at Discovery
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slash History class stuff, and on Twitter at missed in History.
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(29:34):
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dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
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(30:03):
Stuff You Missed in History Class is brought to you
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housetop
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I
am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and we
got a request on Twitter recently asking if we were
(00:21):
going to do any more Civil War episodes for the
hundred and fifty anniversary of the Civil War. And the
answer is yes, it is now. Yes. At the time
it was somewhere on the spectrum between maybe and probably
and now it's yes. Yeah. We always want to um
fulfill those desires of our listeners, but it's not always
feasible to get everybody's wishes granted, and the short amount
(00:44):
of time that we have, I think the real answer
is never feasible because we get literally ten suggestions for
every one episode that we can record. At least that's
a conservative guest. But the Civil War very broad topic
with lots and lots of things that she's from. So
I chose one of my favorite favorite themes, which is
(01:05):
ladies dressing up as gentleman to go fight. Yeah. I
don't know why I love that so much, but I do. Well,
it's fascinating on a number of levels. So today we're
going to talk about Sarah Emma Edmonds. She was a
Canadian woman who went to fight for the Union just
after the start of the Civil War and she served
disguised as a man without discovery for almost two years.
(01:29):
And according to her memoir, she wasn't just a nurse
in the army, she was also a spy. And we'll
talk more about the memoir as we go on. Yes,
we're gonna We're gonna talk about some things that she
that she discusses in it, and then we'll talk about
why maybe those things happened. So uh. Sarah was born
Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmondson in New Brunswick, Canada, in December
(01:52):
of eighty one. As was often the case at the time,
her father wanted a boy to help him in his
farming work, and he resented her for not being one.
He didn't treat her very well when she was young,
and when she was sixteen, she was also facing an
arranged marriage that she really didn't want to have any
part of. So around eighteen fifty seven she left home
(02:13):
and at that time she also dropped the Sun from
her last name, and she worked for about a year
in month in New Brunswick. She was afraid that her
father would find her, so she eventually fled to the
United States. To make it easier and safer for her
to travel by herself, she adopted a new identity, which
was Franklin Thompson, and she started dressing as a man.
(02:35):
And a note on the pronouns here, we are going
to use she and her when talking about her, because,
based on all the information we have, Franklin Thompson is
a disguise that she adopted and not an expression of
her gender identity. It's also a little unclear whether she
went by Sarah or Emma, so for the sake of simplicity,
we're just going to call her Sarah. So, first of all,
(02:57):
after um Lee even New Brunswick, Sarah went to Hartford, Connecticut,
and she got work as a traveling Bible salesman, making
her way to other cities including Boston, Massachusetts, and Flint, Michigan.
And an interesting point of note, she actually used the
middle name Flint as part of her male alias, and
this could be why. In eighteen sixty one, after the
(03:19):
fall of Fort Sumter started the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln
called for seventy five thousand volunteers to join the Union Army.
At that point, Sarah was in Flint, so even though
she wasn't born an American, Sarah still felt it was
her duty to join the side of the Union and
she wanted to help out by being a nurse. She
could have done this in the civilian world by working
(03:41):
in hospitals with recuperating soldiers, but she really felt like
the role of battlefield nurse was more crucial and more needed,
and it's possible that the excitement of it was also
a draw for her. But that job working in the
field as a nurse, along with pretty much everything else
in the military at the time, was reserved exclusively for men. So,
maintaining her Franklin Thompson disguise, she went to enlist. Recruitment
(04:05):
offices were really busy at the time, and there was
really not a lot of physical examination going on of
the people who were going to join the army, so
she joined without anyone detecting that she was a woman.
She joined the second Michigan Infantry on April eighteen sixty one,
and she was ranked as a field nurse. She was
in Company F, which was the Flint Union Grays, and
(04:28):
this was the first three year regiment in Michigan and
the first Western regiment to arrive in Washington, d C.
When the second Michigan arrived in Washington, she worked in
temporary hospitals with soldiers who were either sick when they
got to Washington, or had gotten sick after they arrived,
or had been injured in some kind of mishap. Because
of very hot weather and how many soldiers were arriving
(04:51):
in Washington, the hospitals were actually really busy and there
weren't enough doctors to go around. Typhoid and heat related
illnesses were also really and along with infections that got
worse because of the heat. And to top all of
that off, they were also having a problem with summer storms.
Um Since most of these temporary hospitals were set up
(05:11):
in tents and they didn't always have flooring, the ground
could quickly flood during a thunderstorm, so things were really
pretty tough and a little bit dicey for administering medical aid.
The provisions that they had available were also poor. There
was plenty to eat, but it was mostly things like
hard bread and coffee that might be really good for
a healthy young soldier, but not the best choices for
(05:35):
somebody who was sick or recuperating, so on the advice
of the chaplain and his wife, who figure into her
story at other times. Later, she started an initiative to
ask for help for sick and wounded soldiers from the
families and businesses in that area, and she helped bring
in better provisions for the men who were recovering. So
(05:57):
on July fifteenth, eighteen sixty one, and Sarah's unit got
their marching orders to go to bull Run, which is
also known as Manassas, and they departed two days later
on the seventeenth. The Battle of First Manassas also known
as the Battle of First bull Run, took place on
July one. In this battle, what the Union was hoping
to do was gain control of a railroad junction that
(06:19):
would give them easier access to the Confederate capital of Richmond.
They were not successful. Sarah's regiment did not participate in
the battle itself, but when the order came to withdraw,
the army's means of retreat was blocked by carriages of
people who had traveled out from Washington to watch the
fighting as spectators. So Sarah's regiment was crucial in helping
(06:42):
to cover the Union's botched retreat. While her regiment was
providing cover, what she was doing was helping with the wounded,
as well as delivering water to the fighting soldiers. It
was so hot that day that they were becoming dehydrated
and their performance was weakening. And after the battle was over,
Sarah actually stayed behind to tend the wounded who had
(07:03):
to be left behind because they couldn't travel, and as
important as her nurse work was delivering water to all
of these wounded troops. Once she was ready to leave,
she had to evade the eye of Confederate soldiers and
make her way back to Washington by herself. The army
remained in d c for quite a while after Manassas,
and she continued to work in the hospital. She was
(07:24):
caring for patients, She was securing food and provisions, just
as she had started to prior to the fighting. In
March of eighteen sixty two, she became a mail carrier
for her regiment, and for the remainder of her service,
she combined doing work as a nurse with various mail
and courier duties, including acting as a postmaster. The second
(07:46):
Michigan Infantry eventually joined the Peninsula Campaign, and this was
part of the Union's attempt to capture the Confederate capital
of Richmond by moving up the Virginia Peninsula rather than
by going overland from d C. This would allowed the
Union to get the support of the Union Navy as
well as the army. As part of the Peninsula Campaign,
her regiment was part of the Siege of Yorktown, the
(08:09):
Battle of Williamsburg, the Battle of Fair Oaks also known
as Seven Pines, and the Seven Days Battles before Richmond,
at which the Union was ultimately defeated and had to retreat.
In all of these battles, she worked as a nurse
and a stretcher bearer and helped carry wounded men off
the field. In the Battle of Williamsburg, all of that
happened while a heavy rain was going on, and the
(08:31):
fighting was also really fierce, and at one point she
took up arms herself. Her regiment was involved in many
other battles, but the next most notable event in her
own personal story was during the Battle of Second Manassas
also called Second bull Run, which was on August twenty nine,
eighteen sixty two. She was acting as a courier during
(08:51):
the battle, so she was relaying instructions from one part
of the battlefield to another, and her horse was killed,
so she had to ride a mule instead. This mule,
as mules are known for being stubborn, threw her into
a ditch and she was badly injured. She hurt her
leg and experienced internal hemorrhaging. It was not her first injury,
(09:12):
but it was one that continued to affect her throughout
her life, and while she had become a depth at
treating her own wounds so that people wouldn't discover that
she was a woman, this was one that would have
taken some time for her to recover from now. Her
memoir references her being at Antietam, which is also known
as the Battle of Sharpsburg, and burying a soldier who
(09:34):
confessed while dying that she was also female, but this
may have been an embellishment on Sarah's part, since two
different sources don't actually list the second Michigan as having
been an Antietam or. It's also possible that her regiment
didn't participate in the action, but that she did participate
in treating the wounded after the fact, and also Antietam
(09:55):
took place just a couple of weeks after her injury
at Second Manassas, so it may to be a slightly
romanticized version of what was actually taking place there, right,
And I found lots of sources that mentioned antietam Is
one of the battles that she was in, but they
all seemed to be referencing this one maybe questionable part
of who of her memoir, but regardless, she was definitely
(10:18):
recovered enough to return to battle in the Battle of Fredericksburg,
which went from December eleventh toft and she was an
orderly and relayed messages between headquarters and the front on horseback.
Fredericksburg was followed by the failed mud March, which was
a Northern Virginia campaign the Union undertook that went so
badly that they had to abandon it after three days
(10:40):
because the rain had completely obliterated the roads. Right right,
everybody was getting bogged down in a quagmire, essentially not
really um the most ideal conditions. Now, the war was
not going really well for the Union at this point,
so both Fredericksburg and the mud March had gone pretty poorly. Uh,
and the loss of Fredericksburg had brought huge casualty, casualty
(11:03):
tools with it, and the mud March, as we said,
was basically a fiasco. It just it did not go
well at all. General Ambrose Burnside, who had been commanding
the Army of the Potomac since November eighteen sixty two,
was actually removed from command on January, and at that
point General Joseph Hooker was put in command of the
Army of the Potomac. At this point, Sarah wanted to
(11:25):
leave the Army of the Potomac as well, so she
put in for a transfer and was sent to the
ninth Army Corps. After a few days of leave, she
met up with them in Louisville, Kentucky. She doesn't really
explicitly spell out why she wanted a transfer, but it
seems kind of obvious from what was going on in
the war at that point. The last entry she made
in her journal before she left is pretty telling. She wrote,
(11:48):
the Weather Department is in perfect keeping with the War Department,
its policy being to make as many changes as possible,
and everyone worse than the last. May God bless the
old Army of the Potomac and save it from total annihilation.
So in her memoir, which we have already suggested is
pretty heavily embellished. Sarah also wrote some really interesting things
(12:12):
about becoming a spy for the Union. There's no mention
of her being a spy in her service record, but
she allegedly donned a disguise and went behind enemy lines
eleven different times. So it doesn't necessarily mean that it
never happened, because they wouldn't necessarily have recorded spy work
(12:33):
in somebody's service record. But at the same time, the
things that we're going to talk about next are a
little vague in historical record. We don't have hard facts
on everything. It's largely her recounting of it right, And
exactly when this started is a little unclear, but it
seems from her memoir to have been sometime during the
(12:53):
siege of Yorktown and after a friend of hers, Lieutenant
James Vessey, who she had known before the time. Exactly
when this spy work began as a little unclear, but
it seems from her memoir to have started sometime during
the siege of Yorktown and after the death of a friend,
Lieutenant James Vessey, who she had known from before she
(13:15):
joined the army, and at about the same time, a
spy who had been doing reconnaissance for the Union in
Richmond was captured and shot by a Confederate firing squad.
The chaplain so it was the same chaplain who had
recommended that she seek out new provisions for the soldiers
in the hospitals in d C. The chaplain heard about this,
(13:37):
and when Sarah confided in him that she was becoming
dissatisfied in her nursing work and wanted to avenge her friend.
He told her about this this reconnaissance opportunity, and he
borrowed some army manuals for her to use to prepare
and in her account, she says that she faced a
lengthy interview and exam, which include a which included a
(14:01):
phrenological exam of her skull to examine the parts associated
with things like secretiveness and combativeness before she got the
okay to become a spy. In her first account of espionage,
she disguised herself as Contraband, which was a former slave
who had started to work with Union forces. She wore
a wig and used silver nitrate to color her skin,
(14:23):
and went by the name of Cuff on this On
this mission, she gathered information from the Richmond area while
working on the fortifications there and while carrying water. Sarah
also wrote of dressing as an Irish peddler, and this
time the disguise was that of a woman named Bridget,
and in this instance she took shelter in an apparently
(14:45):
abandoned house, only to find a gravely injured Confederate soldier
already staying there. Uh He gave her a watch to
deliver to a major McKee at a nearby Confederate camp
if she happened to pass by there, and she took
advantage of this opportunit unity to gain entry to the
camp and scout her own for information. She also wrote
of finding official documents in the pocket of a Confederate
(15:08):
officer while disguised as a launderer, and she returned these
to her commanding officer. Allegedly, her spying continued after she
moved into the Ninth Army Corps. She wrote in her
memoir about doing some recon while dressed as a Confederate
soldier and then shooting the Confederate commander that she had
been reporting to in the face once she fell back
(15:31):
in line with her Union troops. And just how much
of this is real? As we said, is pretty unclear.
We do know she enlisted, and we know she served,
but the spy stories just have not been substantiated. Apart
from her own descriptions that are in her memoir, her
military service didn't last much longer after she joined the
(15:51):
Ninth Corps. Not long after arriving in Kentucky, she developed malaria.
She knew she'd be discovered if she got medical treatment
in the regim it, and she asked for a furlough
and was denied. Now her account diverges from the historical account.
At this point. In her memoir, she wrote that she
went to the surgeon to say she was no longer
fit for duty, and that he agreed and wrote her
(16:14):
up a certificate of disability, and then she went back
to Washington to recover. So it's a little different than
what happened in the official record right and the historical
record she uh. Most other accounts say that sometime in
the spring of eighteen sixty three she left her post,
probably to seek treatment for malaria outside of the army,
and then Franklin Thompson, her alias, was marked as a deserter.
(16:37):
She did recover well enough to return to service, but
she couldn't actually do so because of the desertion charge,
so instead she found work in a hospital, this time
as herself with no disguise, and she worked with returning
soldiers until the end of the war. Her memoir was
called Unsexed or The Female Soldier, and then when it
(16:58):
was reprinted it was renamed Nurse and Spy and the
Union Army. It's definitely embellished. It's a very romanticized account
of her service. There's plenty of battle action and fighting
and shooting, but there's also there's a whole lot that's
more about the emotional side of service, and lots and
lots of stuff about what the emotional state of the
(17:20):
men was like, what life in camp was like. And
then every time, it seems like every other page, there
is someone handing her a locket or a ring, or
a note or a package to return home by a
comrade who has fallen. And it's also worth noting that
she donated all the proceeds from the sale of this
book to help wounded soldiers, so even though it may
(17:44):
be a romanticized account, it was ultimately beneficial. She at
one point wrote of a friendship with a woman named
Nellie in the story, and in this telling, Nellie's husband,
who was a Confederate soldier, as well as Nellie's other relatives,
had been killed by Union soldiers, and that when Sarah
first encounters Nellie and she asked her if she could
(18:06):
buy provisions for the Union army, Nelly actually drew a
gun on her, but Sarah allegedly shot her through the
hand and then captured her. But by the end of
the book their pals and Nellie has begun to work
in a Union hospital. So it reads kind of like
a subplot in a movie. Uh, this relationship that she
has with Nellie and and something that if you think
(18:28):
about it, maybe that could have happened, But it also
seems a little far fetched. So as I was reading
her memoir, I read it with a pretty big grain
of salt. Yeah, we do know that. In eighteen sixty seven,
Sarah married Lina Seelie, who was a Canadian mechanic, and
they had three children together. They moved around quite a
(18:49):
bit before they eventually settled in Texas as their home.
The Second Michigan Infantry held a reunion in eighteen seventy
six and Sarah attended, and when people figured out who
she was. They welcomed her into the fold the people
who had served with her. Some of them also helped
her fight the desertion charge that was on her record
(19:09):
and obtain a pension, which she thought because of the
injury she had incurred at Second Manassas. They had continued
to trouble her throughout her life. So eventually Franklin Thompson
was cleared of the desertion charges that took place in
eighteen eighty four, and he was given an honorable discharge
and then was awarded a pension of twelve dollars a month.
(19:29):
In eighteen Sarah was admitted to the Grand Army of
the Republic, which was a Civil War veterans organization. She
was the only woman to do so, and on September
five of eight Sarah died of malaria in Laport, Texas,
which was where she was living with her family. She
was fifty eight years old. She is actually buried in
(19:50):
the Washington Cemetery in Houston, Texas. I love this story.
It's really uh, I don't want to say fun because
there's so much sort of darkness about it, but there
is just such a sense of adventure and uh spiritedness
about it that there is a fun element to it, right,
It's just it's a wild ride. It is even without
(20:13):
her embellished version. It is a wild ride, even without
all of the things that you kind of go this women.
So she was not the only woman to serve in
the Civil War, and I found a pretty wide range
of estimates from a few as two hundred and fifty
to more than seven hundred and fifty women who disguised
their sex and went to serve in the Civil War.
(20:35):
And it was feasible for women to pass his men
thanks to the modesty and sanitary standards at the time.
Uh you know, soldiers slept in their clothes and sometimes
would go for weeks without bathing, especially during uh active wartime.
Women could bind their chest, pat out their waist and
pretty easily passed for men. Uh you know. The facial
(20:56):
hair thing was not as much of an issue because
at that time a lot of really of young boys
were enlisting as well, and a lot of volunteers were
coming from all walks of life and had to learn
everything about being a soldier. So being a little bit
lost in the world of the military was not unusual
for anybody, male or female. So if you couldn't fire
a gun or do other tasks, it wasn't a red
(21:18):
flag that you might be a woman. So we know
that there are other women who made it all the
way through their service without being discovered. There are some
whose sex was discovered only after the woman had been
severely wounded or killed, but we don't have a lot
of really documented historical examples. Here are a few, though.
(21:38):
One was Lauretta Alaska's who wrote about serving in the
Civil War as Lieutenant Harry Buford and her memoirs, which
were published in eighteen seventy six. Mary Stephens Jenkins enlisted
in Pennsylvania and was wounded in battle, and she served
for two years without anyone discovering her sex. She died
in eighty one. Mary Owens of Pennsylvania sir for eighteen
(22:00):
months using the name John Evans. She was discovered to
be a woman and was sent home after being wounded
in the arm. Stronia Smith Hunt enlisted alongside her husband,
who died of wounds. One of the other most famous
examples is Albert D. J. Cashiers, who enlisted in eighteen
sixty two and served until eighteen sixty five when his
regiment was mustered out of the Federal Army in nineteen thirteen.
(22:24):
While living in a soldier's home in Illinois, a sergeant
discovered that he was female. He lived as a man
for his entire adult life and died in in an
insane asylum in nineteen fourteen. There are affidavits on file
and his record from people who served with him who
said that they had no idea of his physical sex. So,
for its part, the army actually tried to deny the
(22:47):
involvement of women in the war at least once. In
nineteen o one, Ida Tarbell, writing for the American Magazine,
wrote to the Adjutant General to ask about how many
women had served in the Civil War, and she got
an answer that was just blatantly false. He said, quote,
I have the honor to inform you that no official
record has been found in the War Department showing specifically
(23:08):
that any woman was ever enlisted in the military service
of the United States as a member of any organization
of the regular or volunteer Army at any time during
the period of the Civil War. It is possible, however,
that there may have been a few instances of women
having served as soldiers for a short time without their
sex having been detected, but no record of such cases
(23:29):
is known to exist in the official files. Contrary to
that answer, the Army had compiled the records of the
Union and Confederate armies at that point, and there were
plenty of records on file of women's soldiers and of
discharged papers that were marked with sexual incompatibility. So when
the war was going on and afterwards, women's soldiers were
(23:49):
known of, and upon discovery often got quite a bit
of attention in newspapers. Word would spread of something like that.
But for a long time after the turn of the
century and even the until the nineteen eighties or so,
most writing about the Civil War actually omitted the women's
soldiers completely or branded them as freaks or deviance or prostitutes.
(24:10):
And it really wasn't until the late eighties and early
nineties that the stories of female Civil War soldiers started
to be told in a more positive light and their
service was actually recognized. So that is the story of
Sarah Emma Edmonds. And if number one, you can read
her whole memoir for free on the internet if you
(24:30):
would like to go read a very adventurous and probably
heavily romanticized tale of a woman's fight in the Civil War.
If you would like to read some fiction, actual fiction,
not probably fictionalized kind of truth. Another book is Terry
Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment, which tells the story of Polly who
joins the uh the Army after her brother goes missing
(24:54):
in battle, which I love because I love Terry Pratchett
and I love stories about the ladies who dresses gentlemen
to go off to war and fight. And now I
think you have some listener mail. I do. I have
listener mail. It's from our Facebook message box and it
is from Sina, and Sina says, I just listened to
the Cheese podcast and loved it. After all, who doesn't
(25:14):
love cheese? Many people do love cheese, including Holly and me,
she says. Just a quick question. In a comment question,
you spoke mostly about European cheese origins, and I was wondering,
is the cheese made in other parts of the world
just an offshoot of the cheese invented in Europe. Where
did you find any evidence of cheese being developed independently elsewhere?
(25:35):
Just curious. I once thought that the bagpipes were pretty
much just a Scottish thing, but was pretty interesting to
learn that bagpipe type instruments can be found in nearly
every region of the world. Perhaps an interesting podcast topic
comment and she links us to the to a video
and says that she has absolutely no Dutch connections and
therefore probably has no business pointing this out. I disagree
(25:58):
with that point or something that you would like to
point out, please do it. However, when I heard you
refer to the Netherlands as Holland several times during this podcast,
this video recently posted on Facebook by a Dutch friend
of mine immediately came to mine. It didn't fact check
the source of this video, but found it both educational
and quite entertaining, so I thought i'd pass it along.
And the video is about the difference between Holland and
(26:20):
the Netherlands, so I'll talk about that first. First of all,
if we accidentally called Holland called the Netherlands Holland, We're sorry. Yeah, um,
I'm sure at some point that we did. Having watched
the video, it is entertaining and it is confusing to
people who do not live there, in much the same
way as the nuances between the British Isles and the
(26:42):
United Kingdom and Great Britain maybe confusing to people who
don't live there, which is another thing that people have
written comments to us about before. So anytime we mess
that up, we're sorry. We're trying to get it right,
but I we may get it wrong. At some point.
On the cheese question, we talked about that in the
episode a little bit it and it was one of
those things that I was like, I'm gonna go double
(27:02):
check to make sure this is right, because what we
had talked about was that most of the cheese history
sort of started in the Mediterranean then branched out into
what is now Europe as people developed new methods for
controlling the spoilage of milk um with an exception being
in India, which had a long history of using milk
(27:24):
and to make butter and to to using cuisine and
made paneer, which is pretty much the only cheese that
is native to India. So I confirmed that's pretty much correct.
It was mostly what we think of as Western culture,
who were farming lots and lots of animals to use
for dairy purposes, and that just wasn't very prominent in
(27:45):
a lot of cultures outside of the Western world. I
did find that there are a few ethnic groups in
China that make cheese, and they these are real outliers
in the greater context of Chinese cuisine. They include the
Eye people and Tibetans, along with another a couple of
other Chinese ethnic groups, and all of these may have
(28:06):
learned how to make cheese from the buy. And in
the paper that I read about it, it was it
was clearly so unusual that it's remarked on multiple times
how unusual is um And it really just boils down
to that there were not many cultures that were raising
lots of animals that were both producing enough milk for
(28:26):
people to drink while still providing milk for young and
would allow themselves to be milked. So it's sort of
a cultural difference. You have to be raising herds of
milk producing animals in order to make cheese, and that
is why very much of the cheese history is from
a Western perspective. So I hope that clears that up. Yes,
(28:51):
you looked as though you had something that you wanted
to say. Truthfully, I was waxing rapsodic in my head
about cheese. We did them. We did some wrapsing exotic
about cheese in that episode too. Most people who have
written to us about that episode enjoyed that, so how
that makes me happy. If you would like to write
to us about cheese, or the Civil War, or anything
(29:13):
else you may We are at History Podcast at Discovery
dot com. We're also on Facebook at face Facebook dot com,
slash History class stuff, and on Twitter at missed in History.
Our tumbler is it missed in History dot tumbler dot com,
and we are also on Pinterest. If you would like
to learn a little bit more about today's podcast subject matter,
(29:34):
you can go to our website. Type in the words
civil War and you will find a Nation Divided the
Civil War quiz. You can do that and a whole
lot more at our website, which is how Stuff Works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
does it how stuff works dot com. This episode of
(30:03):
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!