April 27, 2021 • 35 mins
On May 25, 1861, Emma Edmonds became Private Franklin Thompson and was mustered into Company F of the Second Michigan Regiment of Volunteer Infantry as a 3-year recruit. Fueled by love of her country and a see slavery's end, Emma, as Frank, volunteered to fight for the Union armies.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the
third season of Criminalia. Our first season was all about
women poisoners. Our second season was all about stalkers. And
(00:22):
this season we were exploring the lives and motivations of
some of the most notorious impostors in history. I'm Maria
Tremarqui and I'm Holly Fry. And today we are talking
about a woman who did not dawn, a new identity
for financial or social game, which many of the impostors
were talking about this season due Sarah Emma Edmondson pretended
(00:43):
to be a man so that she could enlist in
the army during the American Civil War. Sarah or Emma
as she was known, was born in December of eighteen
forty one to Isaac Edmondson and Elizabeth Leeper's in Mackadavick,
which is in the province of New Brunswick, Canada. Isaac
and Elizabeth had had a son who was born with
epilepsy before Sarah arrived. Isaac had been hoping for another
(01:06):
son to help him with the family farm, but that
wasn't meant to be, and beginning with her birth, Isaac
resented his daughter. In eighteen fifty seven, at the age
of sixteen, Emma left home to escape not only her
father's abuse, but also to escape an impending arranged marriage.
She changed her name slightly to Sarah Emma Edmonds, and
(01:29):
she worked in a milliner's shop in the town of Moncton,
which was about a hundred and forty miles from her family.
Since we are talking about Canada, will do the translation here,
that's about two thirty kilometers. And after about a year
she decided to escape her father completely and get out
of the country. So she immigrated to the United States
to travel undetected and also to find a decent paying job.
(01:52):
Emma cut her hair and put on a men's suit,
disguising herself as a man. She began calling herself Franklin
Thompson or Frank. She landed her first job in the
United States as a traveling Bible salesman based out of Hartford, Connecticut.
Much later, and this was long after her deception had
been exposed. Her employer recalled in the last thirty years
(02:12):
he'd been hiring salesman that no one ever sold Frank
Thompson Emma had by this time developed Frank's reputation as
an upstanding young man. By eighteen sixty, that is, three
years after leaving the family farm, Emma moved to Flint, Michigan.
In the following year. In April, the Civil War began.
(02:33):
Fueled by a love of her new country and a
desire to stamp out slavery, Emma went to Detroit and
they're volunteered to fight for the Union Armies. So it
may sound a little weird that a Canadian woman would
enlist in the United States Army to fight an American war,
but it actually wasn't that unheard of. While Emma may
(02:54):
have been the only female Canadian to enlist, which we
can't be one sure that she was or wasn't, she
certainly wasn't the only Canadian to do so. There was
an estimated fifty thousand who fought, mostly motivated to end slavery.
But it absolutely should sound a little weird that a
woman enlisted, because that was not at all legal at
(03:15):
the time of the Civil War. Regardless, though a lot
of women put on pants to volunteer, up to two
hundred and fifty women disguised themselves as men to serve
in the Confederate armies, and historians have found that an
estimated four hundred to one thousand women and perhaps even
more fought on the Union side because they were disguised.
(03:36):
Though this makes all of this reckoning a little bit difficult.
It is impossible to know just how many female soldiers
actually served in the war because they all would have
been in some sort of disguise. So it actually took
a few tries for Emma to enlist, and it wasn't
because she had a poor disguise. It was because she
(03:57):
was five six, which meant that inc was five six,
and that was just shy of the army's height requirement,
which Holly and I think was about five eight or so,
maybe a little bit shorter. Yeah, there are some differing
statistics about that, but it's almost always mentioned that her
height was the the factor that kept her out. Yeah,
(04:19):
so we're looking at probably five seven, five eight, you know,
not not too off from the five six um. But regardless,
it wasn't until President Lincoln ordered seventy additional troops to
fight that height really became a non issue. Yeah, those
rules got loosened a bit a bit. What changed, you
may wonder between her first physical and the one that
(04:40):
she passed well. Although army regulations required all recruits to
have a physical, both the Confederate and the Union armies
were at this point so desperate for troops that examinations
became we'll call it lax, Yeah, a little, a little lax.
I would call it sloppy gelop. But I say that
(05:01):
there weren't in it at all. Historian Dane Blanton explained
this in the following way quote, Often they just have
recruits walk by, and if they weren't lame or blind,
and if their trigger finger worked, they were in some
standards right there. Um So, on May eighteen sixty one,
(05:24):
Emma became Private Franklin Thompson and was mustered into Company
F of the second Michigan Regiment of Volunteer Infantry as
a three year recruit. On an interesting historical note here,
it wasn't actually until eighteen seventy two when army physicals
became actually important, and because of that change, it would
(05:45):
have been almost impossible, if not impossible, for Emma or
any other woman to disguise herself an enlist. It makes
you wonder how many people realized this was going on
kind of turned a blind eye, and then we're like,
we're gonna have to change those rules. Actually, that's going
to have to stop. Somebody's going to ask us a question,
and I don't want to be the one to answer right.
(06:07):
And there were a variety of reasons a woman would
decide to join the army. So some enlisted to follow
a man, whether that was a member of the family
or just a friend or a lover, while others were
simply looking for adventure or wanted to outrun a bad situation.
And some of them, though we should say, we're in
it for the money. Many of the women who volunteered
(06:28):
were girls who worked in factories or as seamstresses, and
in those jobs you would make about four dollars a month,
and if you were looking for a better paycheck, and
if you were looking for freedom from the traditional domestic
role of women at the time, the thirteen dollars a
month that the Union paid an army private probably sounded
pretty great. Emma, disguised as Frank, was not, of course,
(06:50):
as we said, fighting for any of that. She was
motivated by her love for her adopted country, and she
also wanted to be a nurse as Private Thompson. Emma
did actually find herself in the role of nurse as
well as an active fighter in the war. She participated
in several major battles, among them the Skirmish at Blackburn's Ford,
(07:13):
the Peninsular Campaign, the Battle of Antietam, and the Battle
of Fredericksburg. At Fredericksburg, she served actually as an orderly
for her commander, who was Colonel Orlando po So. As
we said earlier, in addition to a woman enlisting in
the army, there is another unusual part to this story.
Emma was able to serve for two years undetected, disguised
(07:36):
as Frank. We have to put an asterisk here because
that's kind of like mostly she was undetected. She was right.
There is some very small, small evidence that has come
up that was written in two journals. One was written
by a male nurse named Jerome Robbins and the other
(07:57):
was written by a Lieutenant Reid. By October of eighteen
sixty one, Emma had begun a possible romantic relationship with
one of those two soldiers, and at least one fellow soldier,
probably Jerome, actually knew her true identity. Scandalous and so
many levels. Uh. So, we we know that Emma is
(08:20):
a master at deception, and we know she's really good
at it because she's a private in the army. But
she was so stealthy that she was sometimes asked to
serve as a spy. So as Frank, Emma actually made
at least eleven trips, if not more or way more
behind Confederate lines, disguised as one of a few different characters.
(08:41):
Um one was an Irish immigrant, there was a black
enslaved woman, and I believe I read that there was
a white boy that she would sometimes go in as,
and sometimes a black man. However, let's have a side
conversation about this espionage business, because in eighteen sixty five,
Emma wrote a book of memoirs entitled Nurse and Spy
(09:03):
in the Union Army. And though she writes about her
experiences crossing enemy lines, some historians today question if it
actually happened or if she had added some embellishment to
her story. So, after this espionage intrigue go, there's actually
one more thing in her memoirs that we learned about
her career in the military, and it sounds so commonplace
(09:26):
compared to spy. But she from time to time also
served as a mail carrier. I feel like there's a
fun play on words with the mail, but too lazy
to make the connection right now. Well, well I'll just
make it for you. We are going to take a
break and have a quick word from a sponsor, and
(09:48):
when we're back, we are going to talk about how
and why the war challenged the traditional role of the
American woman. Welcome back to Criminalia. We're back to talk
about how the Civil War became a formative part of
(10:09):
the proto feminist movement. Okay, So this image of the
woman warrior appears in the myths and histories of various
cultures throughout human history. Joan of Arc is a very
well known example, as are the Amazons, but there are
way more out there. There is a famous and perhaps
infamous depending on your point of view, eighteenth century British
(10:31):
woman named Mary Reid who disguised herself as a man
named Mark Reid to serve in the infantry and the
cavalry in the War of the Spanish Succession. And all
of that was before she more famously became a pirate,
and all the way back to the American Revolutionary War,
historians know that Deborah Sampson, Margaret Corbin, and Nancy Hart
(10:53):
all fought for the North American colonies. Like Emma, these
were women who saw the war as an opportunity to
fight for their country and for their meets. During the
Civil War, Southern black women were known to work as spies, scouts, careers,
and guides to support the Union, Harriet Tubman being the
most famous among them. We also immediately think of Kathy Williams,
(11:15):
who fought under the name William Cathy and as William.
She became the first black woman to enlist and became
the only documented female Buffalo soldier. The Buffalo Soldiers were
a regiment known for their buffalo coats and really their
general badassess. Maria Lewis is another great example. She was
(11:37):
a black woman who was able to pass as a
white male soldier in the eighth New York Cavalry. The
Civil War, regardless of a woman's desire to join the
military or not, also challenged what was considered the traditional
role of an American woman. Up until the war began.
An American woman was expected to be submissive and domestic.
(12:00):
Mostly women played the rules of nurses, cooks, and laundresses
during the war, but sometimes it was necessary for a
woman to defend herself and that was usually with a gun.
All of this was considered the honorable work of a
woman while men went to war. But things were a
little different for women who were disguising themselves as men
in order to enlist. The act of dressing in men's
(12:23):
clothing was a brazen choice at the time, and it
actually wasn't until the twentieth century, early twentieth century when
it was acceptable for women to wear pants, and then
only on very few occasions like bicycling. Right, we just
gotta you gotta wear some pants, as we've said on
the show before, illegal in France to wear pants until
(12:46):
the modern era. We're not lying so today, many historians
considered the American Civil War to really be a formative
part of the proto feminist movement in the US. Feminism
is a concept that has come up for us before.
It's the first flavor of feminism that happened specifically before
(13:07):
the turn of the twentieth century. During this period in history,
some women were eyeing or even enjoying the freedom that
came from living disguise as a man. A woman named
Lizzie Cook told The Missouri Democrat that her quote strong
impulse to shoulder a musket came from her desire to
quote escape the monotony of a woman's life. But you know,
(13:31):
of course, there are always the dissenters. So not all
women saw equality as a positive thing, and many argued
that Many among that group argued that politics weren't proper
for women. Women's rights might have been some sort of
new and possibly threatening thing to men of the time,
(13:51):
but to these women, it was just unacceptable. Some pronounced
that voting might cause women to and I'm going to
quote this here because it's that great grow beards. When
I had to start shaving after I turned eighteen and
started voting, I mean very difficult. I mean, you're eighteen,
so embarrassing my stubble. Well, you cover it nicely, right,
(14:17):
And here's the thing, right, that also presumes that women
never have facial hair like it's based on a very
specific identity of what femininity and womanhood is. That's already
messed up. So there are layers to this onion of wrongitude.
I would love to hear some of the other things
that this group of women thought was proper and It
(14:37):
was Clara Barton, who is known for founding the American
Red Cross, who once claimed that the four year Civil
War advanced the social role of women by at least
fifty years. Additionally, in their eight one manifesto called History
of Woman Suffrage, written by women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony,
Elizabeth Katie Stanton, and Matilda Gauge, it was a serted
(15:00):
that females who served on the front line of the
Civil War should be granted the same rights as men
who defend their country. We don't have to make a
quick side step here, because that movement, if you know
much about it, was unfortunately riddled with problems, uh, particularly
racial divisions. It was basically all about white women's suffrage
rather than voting rights for all women or even all people.
(15:21):
Because at one point they were like, no, no, we
want black people to vote, but after we get it
for us, which I laughed that, but I'm just laughing
because it's ridiculous thought. Yeah, yeah, we only want those
bearded women. They wanted their rights first, and they will
(15:42):
help you, we swear, but us first. I promise that
I won't leave you by yourself. So um, continuing women
who disguised themselves as men, fought for the North and
the South, and virtually every major battle of the Civil War.
We know that four Confederate women were promoted to the
(16:04):
rank of captain and at least one held the rank
of major. Historians report that at least eight women fought
at the Battle of Antietam, which is considered the bloodiest
day in American history. And as a side note, I
did look it up to see if it still was
the bloodiest day in American history, and it is. Union fighters.
(16:24):
Catherine Davidson's right arm was amputated, and Mary Galloway was
shot in the neck. A woman fighting for the Confederacy
died in the cornfield. Five women also fought at Gettysburg,
and one Confederate woman was shot in the leg, and
the list goes on and on. So these discovered women,
which is what you'll often see them called, we're often
(16:46):
discovered after being wounded and sent to a field hospital
for care. Clara Barton, who we mentioned earlier, was caring
for wounded soldiers when Mary Galloway was brought in with
a neck wound that she received at the Battle of Antietam,
and at that point her true identity was revealed to Clara.
Women were also discovered if they got sick, or if
(17:07):
they were taken prisoner, or as with a New Jersey
sergeant and five other soldiers gave birth, which I have
to tell you, just the fact that they were fighting
right up until that point. I like to think that
there was like some colonels somewhere who was like, we
can even give birth in the military. We don't know
anybody else, so finding a woman in their ranks wasn't
(17:32):
really a problem. Men during the war described being surprised
and for some even feelings of respect similar to what
we just discovered. I I can't believe you managed all
of this and had a child. However, this also served
as a reminder that war was considered a man's job. Yes,
getting caught could mean one's moral character could be questioned,
(17:55):
and I wouldn't want that. You could also be discharged
and sent home noe. Most wouldn't be punished Beyond that,
although there are a couple of reports of women being imprisoned,
but very very few, hard to know if they're real.
And though there were hundreds of women fighting, the press
was actually more interested in covering the women dressed in
(18:15):
men's uniforms, than whether or not the women were good soldiers,
or even the philosophical take on whether or not women
should be fighting at all. Well, because one sells papers
and the other harder, I mean, it's right. Okay, We're
going to take a quick break here, and when we
come back we will talk about how Emma, as Frank
(18:38):
was considered a deserter. Welcome back to Criminalia. We're going
to talk now about Frank as a deserter and what
that meant for Emma. In April of eighteen sixty three,
(18:58):
the Second Michigan were so in to the Army of
the Cumberland and they were sent to Kentucky, and by
the time they arrived near Vicksburg, Mississippi, Emma had contracted malaria.
That's something that actually claimed the lives of a lot
of people during the Civil War. And as Frank requested
a furlough, but that request was denied. Not wanting to
(19:19):
be discovered by one of the nurses, she disguised herself
again and she sneaked out of her camp and it
was then that Franklin Thompson was charged with desertion, which
can of course be punishable by death. During this time.
So after Emma escape, she resurfaced in one of two places,
um and so it was maybe Pittsburgh, but it was
(19:41):
also maybe and more likely that she resurfaced in Oberlin, Ohio.
Some sources report that she enrolled at Oberlin College. This
was the first college to offer higher education to both
men and women, and they began admitting women long before this.
I think it was back in seven So it was
either there Pennsylvania or Ohio where she recuperated from malaria.
(20:05):
And there is no record she studied at Oberlin, but
there is proof she worked at the Christian Commission as
a nurse from June until the end of the war.
And it's right around this time when she resumed using
her female identity end name right. Why would you go
to the trouble of keeping up the ruse if you
(20:25):
do not have to? Exactly it doesn't I don't know
if she kept wearing pants though, I mean I went
they're comfortable. Almost immediately following the Civil War was what's known,
of course, is the Progressive era, and this was a
time budding with activists and reformers who wanted to end
the political corruption and improve the lives of all citizens
(20:47):
and expand government intervention to protect citizens. One end the
goal through the suffrage movement was to grant women equal rights,
including of course, the right to vote, and that took
some time, when men were not granted full voting rights
until long after Emma had passed away. On August nineteen twenty,
state legislatures ratified the nineteenth Amendment giving women the right
(21:11):
to vote. Okay, So, while that's a super important history lesson. Actually, um,
this is all happening right around the time that Emma
decides to move to Harper's Ferry, which is in West Virginia,
and it's there where she worked as a nurse with
the Christian Commission. Again um, but it's also in Harper's
Ferry where she met and fell in love with Lina Seely.
(21:34):
He was a carpenter who was like Emma from New Brunswick, Canada.
The couple married on April eighteen sixty seven in Okay. Again,
because this is actually getting funny to me, probably Cleveland, Ohio.
It's really hard to pin Emma down because she moves
around a lot, and at this time, just to make
(21:54):
things even a little bit more confusing, Emma, now that
she was married decided that she would start using her
first name again. Sarah. I like that she's addicted to change.
She just needs to jazz it up a little bit
from time. I need a different locale, I need a
different moniker. I got to switch it up. Sarah and
(22:16):
Linus went on to have three children. They had two
sons named Linus and Homer, and a daughter named Alice Louise,
but their family was really beset by tragedy. Linus died
just before his third birthday, and Homer passed away shortly
after he was born. Alice too died while she was
still very young, and their deaths were blamed on measles,
(22:37):
although there isn't any verification of that. That's not unusual
for children's deaths during this time for there to not
be a lot of paperwork about it. Many sources report
that the Seelye's also adopted two boys, that was George
Frederick and Charles Finney. In eighteen seventies six, Sarah decided
to attend a reunion of the Second Michigan and was
(22:59):
war only welcomed by her fellow male soldiers. It always
bothered Sarah that, as Frank Hopson, she was considered a deserter.
She always maintained her reasons for leaving camp were the
fear of being found out that she was a woman,
of course um, but also exhaustion, and she always expected
that she would return. But it turns out the men
(23:21):
she fought side by side with didn't consider her a
deserter either. The group began a writing campaign in an
effort to get the U. S. War Department to recognize
Sarah's service as Frank Thompson and to remove the charge
of desertion from her military records. They were joined by
others who had served with her, including former military officers
and other distinguished men, and their campaign it worked. But
(23:46):
even with all of that support behind her, there was
still a lot of bureaucratic red tape surprise. It took
eight long years for this to work, but it did work.
On July before, in special Act of Congress, Sarah was
granted an honorable discharge from the Army for quote her
sacrifice in the line of duty, her splendid record as
(24:09):
a soldier, her unblemished character and disabilities incurred in the service.
Sarah also received a modest cash bonus, as well as
a veterans pension of twelve dollars a month. She was
the only woman to receive a veterans pension after the
Civil War that was huge. For fifty years, the Adjudent
(24:30):
General's office denied that female soldiers even existed. According to
historian Blatin, who we mentioned earlier, Jewil Early, who was
the Confederate general and also the head of the Southern
Historical Society, dismissed females among Confederate troops, calling the whole
idea a hoax. What we could wrongly but easily assume,
(24:53):
if you listen to the rhetoric at the time, is
that any discovered or dismissed female soldiers were and I'm
going to quote this crazy whores or homosexual. Despite this
whole judgment that she was going to get a pension,
Sarah didn't actually receive any payments until eighteen eighty nine,
and with back pay that's some amounted to write around
(25:14):
a hundred dollars. The Sea Leaves had hoped to open
a veteran's home. That was a long held dream, but unfortunately,
in they lost all of their belongings. When a major
economic depression swept the country that was known as the
Panic of eighte It was a national economic crisis, usually
cited as being catalyzed when two of the country's largest employers,
(25:37):
that's the Philadelphia and the Reading Railroad and the National
Courtage Company both collapsed. That has its own long and
interesting story as part of American history, which we are
not going to get into today. I will talk forever
about gold and silver standard and why um. But it
affected every part of the economy, and of course that
(26:00):
that it negatively impacted the Seeley's dream. So after moving
around the United States from Ohio to Michigan, to Kansas
to Kentucky and pretty much everywhere in between, which makes
me think that Sarah wanted to live in every state,
and Sarah and Lynas finally settled in Texas in Laport. There,
Emma was accepted as a full member of the Grand
(26:22):
Army of the Republic, the Union Army Veterans Organization. She
was the only female member. Sarah passed away from a
stroke on the morning of September five, and though she
was initially buried at Laport Cemetery, in nineteen o one,
her remains were relocated to the Military Section of Washington
(26:43):
Cemetery in Houston, Texas, where she is the only female
whose burial in the Civil War Veterans plot has been permitted.
They're a small limestone marker reads Harold, the life of
a heroic Canadian who helped preserve the United States and
free a people from slavery. In addition to that quote,
(27:03):
in her own words from her memoir Sarah said about
her experience, and I'm gonna quote this, I could only
thank God that I was free and could go forward
and work, and I was not obliged to stay at
home and weep. I love that quote so much. I mean,
it's summits so beautifully, like the desire for agency. Yes,
(27:24):
it's I feel it sums up her entire reason and experience. Yeah,
it's a great one. Her memoirs, which are dedicated to
quote the Sick and Wounded Soldiers of the Army of
the Potomac, recount the story of her remarkable life. Years
after the war, when she was asked if her book
was true, she was a combination of truthful and coy
(27:46):
about it, she said, quote not strictly so. Most of
the experiences they are recorded were either my own or
came under my own observation. I would like, however, to
write differently of that portion of my life. She wanted
to be more of a male carrier. She may have
(28:06):
wished to just do a more truthful version, we don't know,
or a very salacious version. I want to believe that
she wanted to set the record completely straight, but actually
I feel like she would be that kind of a
woman too. Yeah, she did work on a sequel to that,
but it was never published, and anything that she did
(28:26):
create out of that that effort has since been lost
to the ages. All proceeds of Sarah's memoirs went and
still go to the Sanitary Commission, the Christian Commission, and
other soldier aid organizations. And so I'm going to take
us on a quick trip forward. Up to this is
when Emma's courage and her contribution to the Union's espionage
(28:48):
and military fronts were recognized beyond her pension. She was
inducted into both the United States Military Intelligence Hall of
Fame and the State of Michigan Women's Hall of Fame.
In her own country, she was elected to New Brunswick's
Hall of Fame. In So, this is not exactly a
funny story. There's not a fake princess involved, made up
(29:10):
foreign land, but Emma instead makes being a pretender and
an impostor seem fairly righteous. Agree. Are you ready for
a mocktail Maria? That's right, it's mocktail time. Tell me
about it. It's mocktail again. Remember, for my drinkers in
(29:33):
the crowd, I'll tell you how um, I'll tell you
how to kick it up to a more adult version.
This is when I was thinking about all of the
different roles that she had in her life, and so
I tried to include a lot of different things, each
of which contribute their own aspect to this particular drink.
(29:56):
And this is called Sarah's Secret. It's intriguing. So it
starts out pretty simply. It's a mix of juices. You're
gonna do one ounce of each of these, so one
ounce of orange juice, one ounce of pineapple juice, one
ounce of guava nectar, or if you can just get
guava juice, that also works great. This is an instance where,
(30:17):
even though it is a mocktail, I encourage you to
use a shaker and put those three together and give
it a good hard shake and a cocktail shaker, because
it's gonna all infuse together a lot better. You're gonna
get better incorporation than if you just stir it, and
then you can pour that into your glass and top
it off with three ounces of lemon lime soda. I
find it to be very very sweet if you use
(30:38):
regular lemon lime soda, so I went for a diet version.
Not everybody likes diet versions because they don't like that
artificial sweetener thing. So either way it's fine. But here's
the secret. So this on its own is very bright
and refreshing and quite a pretty color and really fun
to drink. But then you're gonna take a fresh halipeenio
(30:59):
And now I've sat up in my chair. This is
the secret part. So cut a slice, a circular slice
of a fresh hallepegno, and you're also gonna cut a
little bit from an orange peel, like the exterior of
an orange peel. Like a channel knife is your friend
if you have one. That's just kind of like dig
into the skin and and pull it off, but you
(31:20):
can also do it with a knife. Just be very careful.
Give the orange peel a little squeeze over your glass.
It's not going to create a bunch, but there's like
a fine mist of orange oil that adds to it.
But then you're gonna put those two things together on
a toothpick or a skewer, depending on the depth of
your drink, and you're just gonna drop it on in
there and give it a little swizzle and let it
sit there while you drink, and it honestly does this
(31:42):
completely weird thing that changes the flavor. It was funny
because my husband and I were each trying this and
he was like, why do I keep getting a note
of coconut when there's street like the Guala and you
think it like there's something that happens where it. I
didn't catch that initially, but then after he said it
(32:04):
and I tasted it, I was like, I understand exactly
what you're saying. So that was interesting. It just changes
the flavor of it completely, and as you're drinking it,
that gets a little bit more intense, you get a
little more hallpeenia flavor. Obviously, a fresh hallepeno depending on
which one you get, is going to have a different
character anyway. Some are very hot, some are milder, and
(32:24):
that just adds an extra bound of fun. Now, if
you are like Maria and myself a drinker, you might
want to add something extra to it. Let me tell
you how amazing this is. With an ounce or an
ounce and a half of good bourbon, Oh my goodness,
it just adds this beautiful, smoky depth to it that's
(32:47):
a little bit subtle, but it makes all of the
fruit flavor like pop in a new way. It's absolutely delicious.
I'm literally going to make when when you finished recording,
so I never know what in what like the ingredients
of the drink are going to be before Holly comes
on the show. And I do it on purpose because
I don't want to know, Like I like it to
(33:08):
be like a little Christmas evening your song for me um.
And so when you got to the bourbon, I literally
was like, wow, what this is not going to be
a mocktail for me. I also was thinking when you
mentioned um, depending on the depth of your glass, and
I'm sorry, my mind immediately went to my glass has
no death. Just keep pouring the bourbon into it. If
(33:33):
you don't have a long skewer, you want to stick
to something like a rock's glass. It's a little shorter
so a toothpicks will not completely get devoured by the liquid,
like you'll still be able to see it a little bit.
You could always use one of those like grilled forks
for your your bucket sized version of this work to U. Yeah,
(33:55):
but if you put it in like a Collin's glass
or something, that's just gonna be taller and you would
lose your your toothpick, You're never going to touch it
again until you dumped the whole thing out. Also, you
could put other spirits in it. If you're not a
bourbon person, I still recommend you try it that way
because I'm not historically a bourbon person. Loved bourbon with this.
I was surprised, but it would work fine with gin
(34:18):
or um a vodka if you get a botanical of
either of those extra bonus points for new flavors. That's
Sarah's secret. And it's quite tasty and like I said,
I want another immediately. I loved it in its non
alcoholic version. I wanted another. And then I was like,
this is a perfect happy hour drink as well. It
(34:39):
does sound delicious both ways. Yes, I'm telling you, man,
it's like it's just right beautiful. Well, you sip this.
If you would like to subscribe to the show, we
recommend that, But otherwise, thank you so much for spending
this time with us. We cannot wait to talk to
you again next week about more imposters. Criminalia is a
(35:02):
production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the
third season of Criminalia. Our first season was all about
women poisoners. Our second season was all about stalkers. And
(00:22):
this season we were exploring the lives and motivations of
some of the most notorious impostors in history. I'm Maria
Tremarqui and I'm Holly Fry. And today we are talking
about a woman who did not dawn, a new identity
for financial or social game, which many of the impostors
were talking about this season due Sarah Emma Edmondson pretended
(00:43):
to be a man so that she could enlist in
the army during the American Civil War. Sarah or Emma
as she was known, was born in December of eighteen
forty one to Isaac Edmondson and Elizabeth Leeper's in Mackadavick,
which is in the province of New Brunswick, Canada. Isaac
and Elizabeth had had a son who was born with
epilepsy before Sarah arrived. Isaac had been hoping for another
(01:06):
son to help him with the family farm, but that
wasn't meant to be, and beginning with her birth, Isaac
resented his daughter. In eighteen fifty seven, at the age
of sixteen, Emma left home to escape not only her
father's abuse, but also to escape an impending arranged marriage.
She changed her name slightly to Sarah Emma Edmonds, and
(01:29):
she worked in a milliner's shop in the town of Moncton,
which was about a hundred and forty miles from her family.
Since we are talking about Canada, will do the translation here,
that's about two thirty kilometers. And after about a year
she decided to escape her father completely and get out
of the country. So she immigrated to the United States
to travel undetected and also to find a decent paying job.
(01:52):
Emma cut her hair and put on a men's suit,
disguising herself as a man. She began calling herself Franklin
Thompson or Frank. She landed her first job in the
United States as a traveling Bible salesman based out of Hartford, Connecticut.
Much later, and this was long after her deception had
been exposed. Her employer recalled in the last thirty years
(02:12):
he'd been hiring salesman that no one ever sold Frank
Thompson Emma had by this time developed Frank's reputation as
an upstanding young man. By eighteen sixty, that is, three
years after leaving the family farm, Emma moved to Flint, Michigan.
In the following year. In April, the Civil War began.
(02:33):
Fueled by a love of her new country and a
desire to stamp out slavery, Emma went to Detroit and
they're volunteered to fight for the Union Armies. So it
may sound a little weird that a Canadian woman would
enlist in the United States Army to fight an American war,
but it actually wasn't that unheard of. While Emma may
(02:54):
have been the only female Canadian to enlist, which we
can't be one sure that she was or wasn't, she
certainly wasn't the only Canadian to do so. There was
an estimated fifty thousand who fought, mostly motivated to end slavery.
But it absolutely should sound a little weird that a
woman enlisted, because that was not at all legal at
(03:15):
the time of the Civil War. Regardless, though a lot
of women put on pants to volunteer, up to two
hundred and fifty women disguised themselves as men to serve
in the Confederate armies, and historians have found that an
estimated four hundred to one thousand women and perhaps even
more fought on the Union side because they were disguised.
(03:36):
Though this makes all of this reckoning a little bit difficult.
It is impossible to know just how many female soldiers
actually served in the war because they all would have
been in some sort of disguise. So it actually took
a few tries for Emma to enlist, and it wasn't
because she had a poor disguise. It was because she
(03:57):
was five six, which meant that inc was five six,
and that was just shy of the army's height requirement,
which Holly and I think was about five eight or so,
maybe a little bit shorter. Yeah, there are some differing
statistics about that, but it's almost always mentioned that her
height was the the factor that kept her out. Yeah,
(04:19):
so we're looking at probably five seven, five eight, you know,
not not too off from the five six um. But regardless,
it wasn't until President Lincoln ordered seventy additional troops to
fight that height really became a non issue. Yeah, those
rules got loosened a bit a bit. What changed, you
may wonder between her first physical and the one that
(04:40):
she passed well. Although army regulations required all recruits to
have a physical, both the Confederate and the Union armies
were at this point so desperate for troops that examinations
became we'll call it lax, Yeah, a little, a little lax.
I would call it sloppy gelop. But I say that
(05:01):
there weren't in it at all. Historian Dane Blanton explained
this in the following way quote, Often they just have
recruits walk by, and if they weren't lame or blind,
and if their trigger finger worked, they were in some
standards right there. Um So, on May eighteen sixty one,
(05:24):
Emma became Private Franklin Thompson and was mustered into Company
F of the second Michigan Regiment of Volunteer Infantry as
a three year recruit. On an interesting historical note here,
it wasn't actually until eighteen seventy two when army physicals
became actually important, and because of that change, it would
(05:45):
have been almost impossible, if not impossible, for Emma or
any other woman to disguise herself an enlist. It makes
you wonder how many people realized this was going on
kind of turned a blind eye, and then we're like,
we're gonna have to change those rules. Actually, that's going
to have to stop. Somebody's going to ask us a question,
and I don't want to be the one to answer right.
(06:07):
And there were a variety of reasons a woman would
decide to join the army. So some enlisted to follow
a man, whether that was a member of the family
or just a friend or a lover, while others were
simply looking for adventure or wanted to outrun a bad situation.
And some of them, though we should say, we're in
it for the money. Many of the women who volunteered
(06:28):
were girls who worked in factories or as seamstresses, and
in those jobs you would make about four dollars a month,
and if you were looking for a better paycheck, and
if you were looking for freedom from the traditional domestic
role of women at the time, the thirteen dollars a
month that the Union paid an army private probably sounded
pretty great. Emma, disguised as Frank, was not, of course,
(06:50):
as we said, fighting for any of that. She was
motivated by her love for her adopted country, and she
also wanted to be a nurse as Private Thompson. Emma
did actually find herself in the role of nurse as
well as an active fighter in the war. She participated
in several major battles, among them the Skirmish at Blackburn's Ford,
(07:13):
the Peninsular Campaign, the Battle of Antietam, and the Battle
of Fredericksburg. At Fredericksburg, she served actually as an orderly
for her commander, who was Colonel Orlando po So. As
we said earlier, in addition to a woman enlisting in
the army, there is another unusual part to this story.
Emma was able to serve for two years undetected, disguised
(07:36):
as Frank. We have to put an asterisk here because
that's kind of like mostly she was undetected. She was right.
There is some very small, small evidence that has come
up that was written in two journals. One was written
by a male nurse named Jerome Robbins and the other
(07:57):
was written by a Lieutenant Reid. By October of eighteen
sixty one, Emma had begun a possible romantic relationship with
one of those two soldiers, and at least one fellow soldier,
probably Jerome, actually knew her true identity. Scandalous and so
many levels. Uh. So, we we know that Emma is
(08:20):
a master at deception, and we know she's really good
at it because she's a private in the army. But
she was so stealthy that she was sometimes asked to
serve as a spy. So as Frank, Emma actually made
at least eleven trips, if not more or way more
behind Confederate lines, disguised as one of a few different characters.
(08:41):
Um one was an Irish immigrant, there was a black
enslaved woman, and I believe I read that there was
a white boy that she would sometimes go in as,
and sometimes a black man. However, let's have a side
conversation about this espionage business, because in eighteen sixty five,
Emma wrote a book of memoirs entitled Nurse and Spy
(09:03):
in the Union Army. And though she writes about her
experiences crossing enemy lines, some historians today question if it
actually happened or if she had added some embellishment to
her story. So, after this espionage intrigue go, there's actually
one more thing in her memoirs that we learned about
her career in the military, and it sounds so commonplace
(09:26):
compared to spy. But she from time to time also
served as a mail carrier. I feel like there's a
fun play on words with the mail, but too lazy
to make the connection right now. Well, well I'll just
make it for you. We are going to take a
break and have a quick word from a sponsor, and
(09:48):
when we're back, we are going to talk about how
and why the war challenged the traditional role of the
American woman. Welcome back to Criminalia. We're back to talk
about how the Civil War became a formative part of
(10:09):
the proto feminist movement. Okay, So this image of the
woman warrior appears in the myths and histories of various
cultures throughout human history. Joan of Arc is a very
well known example, as are the Amazons, but there are
way more out there. There is a famous and perhaps
infamous depending on your point of view, eighteenth century British
(10:31):
woman named Mary Reid who disguised herself as a man
named Mark Reid to serve in the infantry and the
cavalry in the War of the Spanish Succession. And all
of that was before she more famously became a pirate,
and all the way back to the American Revolutionary War,
historians know that Deborah Sampson, Margaret Corbin, and Nancy Hart
(10:53):
all fought for the North American colonies. Like Emma, these
were women who saw the war as an opportunity to
fight for their country and for their meets. During the
Civil War, Southern black women were known to work as spies, scouts, careers,
and guides to support the Union, Harriet Tubman being the
most famous among them. We also immediately think of Kathy Williams,
(11:15):
who fought under the name William Cathy and as William.
She became the first black woman to enlist and became
the only documented female Buffalo soldier. The Buffalo Soldiers were
a regiment known for their buffalo coats and really their
general badassess. Maria Lewis is another great example. She was
(11:37):
a black woman who was able to pass as a
white male soldier in the eighth New York Cavalry. The
Civil War, regardless of a woman's desire to join the
military or not, also challenged what was considered the traditional
role of an American woman. Up until the war began.
An American woman was expected to be submissive and domestic.
(12:00):
Mostly women played the rules of nurses, cooks, and laundresses
during the war, but sometimes it was necessary for a
woman to defend herself and that was usually with a gun.
All of this was considered the honorable work of a
woman while men went to war. But things were a
little different for women who were disguising themselves as men
in order to enlist. The act of dressing in men's
(12:23):
clothing was a brazen choice at the time, and it
actually wasn't until the twentieth century, early twentieth century when
it was acceptable for women to wear pants, and then
only on very few occasions like bicycling. Right, we just
gotta you gotta wear some pants, as we've said on
the show before, illegal in France to wear pants until
(12:46):
the modern era. We're not lying so today, many historians
considered the American Civil War to really be a formative
part of the proto feminist movement in the US. Feminism
is a concept that has come up for us before.
It's the first flavor of feminism that happened specifically before
(13:07):
the turn of the twentieth century. During this period in history,
some women were eyeing or even enjoying the freedom that
came from living disguise as a man. A woman named
Lizzie Cook told The Missouri Democrat that her quote strong
impulse to shoulder a musket came from her desire to
quote escape the monotony of a woman's life. But you know,
(13:31):
of course, there are always the dissenters. So not all
women saw equality as a positive thing, and many argued
that Many among that group argued that politics weren't proper
for women. Women's rights might have been some sort of
new and possibly threatening thing to men of the time,
(13:51):
but to these women, it was just unacceptable. Some pronounced
that voting might cause women to and I'm going to
quote this here because it's that great grow beards. When
I had to start shaving after I turned eighteen and
started voting, I mean very difficult. I mean, you're eighteen,
so embarrassing my stubble. Well, you cover it nicely, right,
(14:17):
And here's the thing, right, that also presumes that women
never have facial hair like it's based on a very
specific identity of what femininity and womanhood is. That's already
messed up. So there are layers to this onion of wrongitude.
I would love to hear some of the other things
that this group of women thought was proper and It
(14:37):
was Clara Barton, who is known for founding the American
Red Cross, who once claimed that the four year Civil
War advanced the social role of women by at least
fifty years. Additionally, in their eight one manifesto called History
of Woman Suffrage, written by women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony,
Elizabeth Katie Stanton, and Matilda Gauge, it was a serted
(15:00):
that females who served on the front line of the
Civil War should be granted the same rights as men
who defend their country. We don't have to make a
quick side step here, because that movement, if you know
much about it, was unfortunately riddled with problems, uh, particularly
racial divisions. It was basically all about white women's suffrage
rather than voting rights for all women or even all people.
(15:21):
Because at one point they were like, no, no, we
want black people to vote, but after we get it
for us, which I laughed that, but I'm just laughing
because it's ridiculous thought. Yeah, yeah, we only want those
bearded women. They wanted their rights first, and they will
(15:42):
help you, we swear, but us first. I promise that
I won't leave you by yourself. So um, continuing women
who disguised themselves as men, fought for the North and
the South, and virtually every major battle of the Civil War.
We know that four Confederate women were promoted to the
(16:04):
rank of captain and at least one held the rank
of major. Historians report that at least eight women fought
at the Battle of Antietam, which is considered the bloodiest
day in American history. And as a side note, I
did look it up to see if it still was
the bloodiest day in American history, and it is. Union fighters.
(16:24):
Catherine Davidson's right arm was amputated, and Mary Galloway was
shot in the neck. A woman fighting for the Confederacy
died in the cornfield. Five women also fought at Gettysburg,
and one Confederate woman was shot in the leg, and
the list goes on and on. So these discovered women,
which is what you'll often see them called, we're often
(16:46):
discovered after being wounded and sent to a field hospital
for care. Clara Barton, who we mentioned earlier, was caring
for wounded soldiers when Mary Galloway was brought in with
a neck wound that she received at the Battle of Antietam,
and at that point her true identity was revealed to Clara.
Women were also discovered if they got sick, or if
(17:07):
they were taken prisoner, or as with a New Jersey
sergeant and five other soldiers gave birth, which I have
to tell you, just the fact that they were fighting
right up until that point. I like to think that
there was like some colonels somewhere who was like, we
can even give birth in the military. We don't know
anybody else, so finding a woman in their ranks wasn't
(17:32):
really a problem. Men during the war described being surprised
and for some even feelings of respect similar to what
we just discovered. I I can't believe you managed all
of this and had a child. However, this also served
as a reminder that war was considered a man's job. Yes,
getting caught could mean one's moral character could be questioned,
(17:55):
and I wouldn't want that. You could also be discharged
and sent home noe. Most wouldn't be punished Beyond that,
although there are a couple of reports of women being imprisoned,
but very very few, hard to know if they're real.
And though there were hundreds of women fighting, the press
was actually more interested in covering the women dressed in
(18:15):
men's uniforms, than whether or not the women were good soldiers,
or even the philosophical take on whether or not women
should be fighting at all. Well, because one sells papers
and the other harder, I mean, it's right. Okay, We're
going to take a quick break here, and when we
come back we will talk about how Emma, as Frank
(18:38):
was considered a deserter. Welcome back to Criminalia. We're going
to talk now about Frank as a deserter and what
that meant for Emma. In April of eighteen sixty three,
(18:58):
the Second Michigan were so in to the Army of
the Cumberland and they were sent to Kentucky, and by
the time they arrived near Vicksburg, Mississippi, Emma had contracted malaria.
That's something that actually claimed the lives of a lot
of people during the Civil War. And as Frank requested
a furlough, but that request was denied. Not wanting to
(19:19):
be discovered by one of the nurses, she disguised herself
again and she sneaked out of her camp and it
was then that Franklin Thompson was charged with desertion, which
can of course be punishable by death. During this time.
So after Emma escape, she resurfaced in one of two places,
um and so it was maybe Pittsburgh, but it was
(19:41):
also maybe and more likely that she resurfaced in Oberlin, Ohio.
Some sources report that she enrolled at Oberlin College. This
was the first college to offer higher education to both
men and women, and they began admitting women long before this.
I think it was back in seven So it was
either there Pennsylvania or Ohio where she recuperated from malaria.
(20:05):
And there is no record she studied at Oberlin, but
there is proof she worked at the Christian Commission as
a nurse from June until the end of the war.
And it's right around this time when she resumed using
her female identity end name right. Why would you go
to the trouble of keeping up the ruse if you
(20:25):
do not have to? Exactly it doesn't I don't know
if she kept wearing pants though, I mean I went
they're comfortable. Almost immediately following the Civil War was what's known,
of course, is the Progressive era, and this was a
time budding with activists and reformers who wanted to end
the political corruption and improve the lives of all citizens
(20:47):
and expand government intervention to protect citizens. One end the
goal through the suffrage movement was to grant women equal rights,
including of course, the right to vote, and that took
some time, when men were not granted full voting rights
until long after Emma had passed away. On August nineteen twenty,
state legislatures ratified the nineteenth Amendment giving women the right
(21:11):
to vote. Okay, So, while that's a super important history lesson. Actually, um,
this is all happening right around the time that Emma
decides to move to Harper's Ferry, which is in West Virginia,
and it's there where she worked as a nurse with
the Christian Commission. Again um, but it's also in Harper's
Ferry where she met and fell in love with Lina Seely.
(21:34):
He was a carpenter who was like Emma from New Brunswick, Canada.
The couple married on April eighteen sixty seven in Okay. Again,
because this is actually getting funny to me, probably Cleveland, Ohio.
It's really hard to pin Emma down because she moves
around a lot, and at this time, just to make
(21:54):
things even a little bit more confusing, Emma, now that
she was married decided that she would start using her
first name again. Sarah. I like that she's addicted to change.
She just needs to jazz it up a little bit
from time. I need a different locale, I need a
different moniker. I got to switch it up. Sarah and
(22:16):
Linus went on to have three children. They had two
sons named Linus and Homer, and a daughter named Alice Louise,
but their family was really beset by tragedy. Linus died
just before his third birthday, and Homer passed away shortly
after he was born. Alice too died while she was
still very young, and their deaths were blamed on measles,
(22:37):
although there isn't any verification of that. That's not unusual
for children's deaths during this time for there to not
be a lot of paperwork about it. Many sources report
that the Seelye's also adopted two boys, that was George
Frederick and Charles Finney. In eighteen seventies six, Sarah decided
to attend a reunion of the Second Michigan and was
(22:59):
war only welcomed by her fellow male soldiers. It always
bothered Sarah that, as Frank Hopson, she was considered a deserter.
She always maintained her reasons for leaving camp were the
fear of being found out that she was a woman,
of course um, but also exhaustion, and she always expected
that she would return. But it turns out the men
(23:21):
she fought side by side with didn't consider her a
deserter either. The group began a writing campaign in an
effort to get the U. S. War Department to recognize
Sarah's service as Frank Thompson and to remove the charge
of desertion from her military records. They were joined by
others who had served with her, including former military officers
and other distinguished men, and their campaign it worked. But
(23:46):
even with all of that support behind her, there was
still a lot of bureaucratic red tape surprise. It took
eight long years for this to work, but it did work.
On July before, in special Act of Congress, Sarah was
granted an honorable discharge from the Army for quote her
sacrifice in the line of duty, her splendid record as
(24:09):
a soldier, her unblemished character and disabilities incurred in the service.
Sarah also received a modest cash bonus, as well as
a veterans pension of twelve dollars a month. She was
the only woman to receive a veterans pension after the
Civil War that was huge. For fifty years, the Adjudent
(24:30):
General's office denied that female soldiers even existed. According to
historian Blatin, who we mentioned earlier, Jewil Early, who was
the Confederate general and also the head of the Southern
Historical Society, dismissed females among Confederate troops, calling the whole
idea a hoax. What we could wrongly but easily assume,
(24:53):
if you listen to the rhetoric at the time, is
that any discovered or dismissed female soldiers were and I'm
going to quote this crazy whores or homosexual. Despite this
whole judgment that she was going to get a pension,
Sarah didn't actually receive any payments until eighteen eighty nine,
and with back pay that's some amounted to write around
(25:14):
a hundred dollars. The Sea Leaves had hoped to open
a veteran's home. That was a long held dream, but unfortunately,
in they lost all of their belongings. When a major
economic depression swept the country that was known as the
Panic of eighte It was a national economic crisis, usually
cited as being catalyzed when two of the country's largest employers,
(25:37):
that's the Philadelphia and the Reading Railroad and the National
Courtage Company both collapsed. That has its own long and
interesting story as part of American history, which we are
not going to get into today. I will talk forever
about gold and silver standard and why um. But it
affected every part of the economy, and of course that
(26:00):
that it negatively impacted the Seeley's dream. So after moving
around the United States from Ohio to Michigan, to Kansas
to Kentucky and pretty much everywhere in between, which makes
me think that Sarah wanted to live in every state,
and Sarah and Lynas finally settled in Texas in Laport. There,
Emma was accepted as a full member of the Grand
(26:22):
Army of the Republic, the Union Army Veterans Organization. She
was the only female member. Sarah passed away from a
stroke on the morning of September five, and though she
was initially buried at Laport Cemetery, in nineteen o one,
her remains were relocated to the Military Section of Washington
(26:43):
Cemetery in Houston, Texas, where she is the only female
whose burial in the Civil War Veterans plot has been permitted.
They're a small limestone marker reads Harold, the life of
a heroic Canadian who helped preserve the United States and
free a people from slavery. In addition to that quote,
(27:03):
in her own words from her memoir Sarah said about
her experience, and I'm gonna quote this, I could only
thank God that I was free and could go forward
and work, and I was not obliged to stay at
home and weep. I love that quote so much. I mean,
it's summits so beautifully, like the desire for agency. Yes,
(27:24):
it's I feel it sums up her entire reason and experience. Yeah,
it's a great one. Her memoirs, which are dedicated to
quote the Sick and Wounded Soldiers of the Army of
the Potomac, recount the story of her remarkable life. Years
after the war, when she was asked if her book
was true, she was a combination of truthful and coy
(27:46):
about it, she said, quote not strictly so. Most of
the experiences they are recorded were either my own or
came under my own observation. I would like, however, to
write differently of that portion of my life. She wanted
to be more of a male carrier. She may have
(28:06):
wished to just do a more truthful version, we don't know,
or a very salacious version. I want to believe that
she wanted to set the record completely straight, but actually
I feel like she would be that kind of a
woman too. Yeah, she did work on a sequel to that,
but it was never published, and anything that she did
(28:26):
create out of that that effort has since been lost
to the ages. All proceeds of Sarah's memoirs went and
still go to the Sanitary Commission, the Christian Commission, and
other soldier aid organizations. And so I'm going to take
us on a quick trip forward. Up to this is
when Emma's courage and her contribution to the Union's espionage
(28:48):
and military fronts were recognized beyond her pension. She was
inducted into both the United States Military Intelligence Hall of
Fame and the State of Michigan Women's Hall of Fame.
In her own country, she was elected to New Brunswick's
Hall of Fame. In So, this is not exactly a
funny story. There's not a fake princess involved, made up
(29:10):
foreign land, but Emma instead makes being a pretender and
an impostor seem fairly righteous. Agree. Are you ready for
a mocktail Maria? That's right, it's mocktail time. Tell me
about it. It's mocktail again. Remember, for my drinkers in
(29:33):
the crowd, I'll tell you how um, I'll tell you
how to kick it up to a more adult version.
This is when I was thinking about all of the
different roles that she had in her life, and so
I tried to include a lot of different things, each
of which contribute their own aspect to this particular drink.
(29:56):
And this is called Sarah's Secret. It's intriguing. So it
starts out pretty simply. It's a mix of juices. You're
gonna do one ounce of each of these, so one
ounce of orange juice, one ounce of pineapple juice, one
ounce of guava nectar, or if you can just get
guava juice, that also works great. This is an instance where,
(30:17):
even though it is a mocktail, I encourage you to
use a shaker and put those three together and give
it a good hard shake and a cocktail shaker, because
it's gonna all infuse together a lot better. You're gonna
get better incorporation than if you just stir it, and
then you can pour that into your glass and top
it off with three ounces of lemon lime soda. I
find it to be very very sweet if you use
(30:38):
regular lemon lime soda, so I went for a diet version.
Not everybody likes diet versions because they don't like that
artificial sweetener thing. So either way it's fine. But here's
the secret. So this on its own is very bright
and refreshing and quite a pretty color and really fun
to drink. But then you're gonna take a fresh halipeenio
(30:59):
And now I've sat up in my chair. This is
the secret part. So cut a slice, a circular slice
of a fresh hallepegno, and you're also gonna cut a
little bit from an orange peel, like the exterior of
an orange peel. Like a channel knife is your friend
if you have one. That's just kind of like dig
into the skin and and pull it off, but you
(31:20):
can also do it with a knife. Just be very careful.
Give the orange peel a little squeeze over your glass.
It's not going to create a bunch, but there's like
a fine mist of orange oil that adds to it.
But then you're gonna put those two things together on
a toothpick or a skewer, depending on the depth of
your drink, and you're just gonna drop it on in
there and give it a little swizzle and let it
sit there while you drink, and it honestly does this
(31:42):
completely weird thing that changes the flavor. It was funny
because my husband and I were each trying this and
he was like, why do I keep getting a note
of coconut when there's street like the Guala and you
think it like there's something that happens where it. I
didn't catch that initially, but then after he said it
(32:04):
and I tasted it, I was like, I understand exactly
what you're saying. So that was interesting. It just changes
the flavor of it completely, and as you're drinking it,
that gets a little bit more intense, you get a
little more hallpeenia flavor. Obviously, a fresh hallepeno depending on
which one you get, is going to have a different
character anyway. Some are very hot, some are milder, and
(32:24):
that just adds an extra bound of fun. Now, if
you are like Maria and myself a drinker, you might
want to add something extra to it. Let me tell
you how amazing this is. With an ounce or an
ounce and a half of good bourbon, Oh my goodness,
it just adds this beautiful, smoky depth to it that's
(32:47):
a little bit subtle, but it makes all of the
fruit flavor like pop in a new way. It's absolutely delicious.
I'm literally going to make when when you finished recording,
so I never know what in what like the ingredients
of the drink are going to be before Holly comes
on the show. And I do it on purpose because
I don't want to know, Like I like it to
(33:08):
be like a little Christmas evening your song for me um.
And so when you got to the bourbon, I literally
was like, wow, what this is not going to be
a mocktail for me. I also was thinking when you
mentioned um, depending on the depth of your glass, and
I'm sorry, my mind immediately went to my glass has
no death. Just keep pouring the bourbon into it. If
(33:33):
you don't have a long skewer, you want to stick
to something like a rock's glass. It's a little shorter
so a toothpicks will not completely get devoured by the liquid,
like you'll still be able to see it a little bit.
You could always use one of those like grilled forks
for your your bucket sized version of this work to U. Yeah,
(33:55):
but if you put it in like a Collin's glass
or something, that's just gonna be taller and you would
lose your your toothpick, You're never going to touch it
again until you dumped the whole thing out. Also, you
could put other spirits in it. If you're not a
bourbon person, I still recommend you try it that way
because I'm not historically a bourbon person. Loved bourbon with this.
I was surprised, but it would work fine with gin
(34:18):
or um a vodka if you get a botanical of
either of those extra bonus points for new flavors. That's
Sarah's secret. And it's quite tasty and like I said,
I want another immediately. I loved it in its non
alcoholic version. I wanted another. And then I was like,
this is a perfect happy hour drink as well. It
(34:39):
does sound delicious both ways. Yes, I'm telling you, man,
it's like it's just right beautiful. Well, you sip this.
If you would like to subscribe to the show, we
recommend that, But otherwise, thank you so much for spending
this time with us. We cannot wait to talk to
you again next week about more imposters. Criminalia is a
(35:02):
production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Maria Trimarchi
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