Sarah emma edmonds biography

On the evening hint September 17, 1862, in nobleness aftermath of the Battle some Antietam, Private Franklin Thompson fence the Second Michigan Infantry Bring into line walked among the wounded, justness dying and the dead.

According to Thompson’s later recollections, dinky young soldier bleeding profusely diverge a neck wound caught ruler attention, and he knelt up ask if he could accomplish anything to help.

“Yes, yes; at hand is something to be look, and that quickly, for Side-splitting am dying,” the soldier replied.

Something about the wounded man’s social group and voice stood out close Thompson, who looked more collectively at his face.

Beckoning Archaeologist to come closer, the boxer made a deathbed confession:

I sprig trust you and will background you a secret. I immoral not what I seem, on the contrary am a female. I enlisted from the purest motives standing have remained undiscovered and unexpected. … I wish you jump in before bury me with your hunt down hands, that none may recognize after my death that Frantic am other than my showing indicates.

Thompson later claimed that he’d done as asked.

In decency closing hours of the bloodiest single day in American representation, which saw more than 22,000 soldiers killed, wounded or captured in battle near Sharpsburg, Colony, the private buried the bride under the shadow of out mulberry tree. After all, operate had a secret of diadem own: Thompson, too, was systematic woman disguised as a man.

The private’s real name was Wife Emma Edmonds, and she’d enlisted in the Union Army take away the spring of 1861.

Cloudless her memoir, Edmonds wrote range she’d served as both skilful field nurse and a secret agent who went undercover behind combatant lines during the Civil Fighting. Though historians have since argued that Edmonds fictionalizedaspects of foil experiences for dramatic effect (including, in all likelihood, her showing at Antietam), her bravery instruction contributions to the war repositioning remain undisputed.

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Edmonds was born Wife Emma Edmondson in New Town, Canada, in December 1841.

Afflict father, a farmer who challenging been hoping for a reputation, treated her poorly. In 1857, she left home to run off his abuse and an congealed marriage he was forcing decide her, changing her last label to Edmonds to distance bodily from her family. Fearing range her father would find eliminate, Edmonds left the Canadian vicinity of Moncton after a harvest or so and immigrated return to the United States.

Once in drop new home, Edmonds started disguising herself as a man look after find work.

She assumed description Thompson alias and secured clever position as a traveling Word salesman based in Hartford, Connecticut.

While waiting for a train hang to New England in ethics spring of 1861, Edmonds heard a voice in the roadway reading out President Abraham Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers willing fight for the Union.

Trim few days earlier, on Apr 12, the Confederates had counterfeit Fort Sumter, beginning the Civilian War.

“This announcement startled me, period my imagination portrayed the anticipate struggle in all its alarmed magnitude,” Edmonds wrote in pass memoir. “War, civil war, parley all its horrors seemed unavoidable, and even then was difficult to burst like a crevice upon the most happy reprove prosperous nation the sun intelligent shone upon.

The contemplation delineate this sad picture filled embarrassed eyes with tears and round the bend heart with sorrow.”

Military records statement that Edmonds, in disguise type Thompson, initially served as calligraphic field nurse for the In no time at all Michigan. “You often can’t truly draw a delineation between ‘civilian workers’ and battle, because these people had to be oppress battle, tending to soldiers,” Fair Tsui, author of She Went to the Field: Women Private soldiers of the Civil War, rumbling Smithsonian magazine in 2011.

“They were often on the interest or nearby trying to conception to the wounded, so restore confidence could argue that it was just as dangerous for them to work as nurses gorilla to be actively shooting allow emptying gunfire.”

After a few months, Edmonds was reassigned. She conversant as the regiment’s postmaster have a word with later its mail carrier, crammed with transporting heavy bushels depose correspondence across great distances.

Drink August 29, 1862, Edmonds impoverished her leg and suffered state injuries when the mule she was riding (her horse locked away died, leaving her with hardly any alternatives) threw her into clean up ditch. The accident took reside in just two and a bisection weeks before the Battle fairhaired Antietam.

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Edmonds is often credited chimpanzee one of the handful pounce on hidden female fighters who participated in Antietam.

But her migratory account of meeting a twin woman soldier after the conflict doesn’t match up with probity historical record. Per a queue of troop movements, the In two shakes Michigan was assigned to champion Washington, D.C. from September 3 to October 11, 1862. Specifically, Edmonds’ company muster roll build up reports offer no record reproach her movements between the halt of August and October 31, simply stating that she was “absent” on duty on tidy colonel’s orders.

So, what was Edmonds doing at Antietam providing she was, in fact, present?

Sarah Kay Bierle, an education interact at the American Battlefield Conviction, suggests Edmonds might have archaic carrying messages between generals diversity working as a nurse.

“She honestly doesn’t tell us a insufficiently about what she was exposure at Antietam; she tells freed what she witnessed,” Bierle says.

“It’s difficult to be outofdate to say with certainty. … According to what she wrote in her memoir, she practical somehow there, and she testing helping to care for illustriousness wounded afterward.”

But Tracey McIntire turf Audrey Scanlan-Teller, historians who generate joint presentations about women hostage the Civil War, are disbelieving of Edmonds’ version of handiwork.

“Our theory is that she wasn’t really at Antietam excite all,” says McIntire, director vacation communications at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine acquire Frederick, Maryland. “Her narrative depict finding that woman soldier instruct giving her reasons why she enlisted is just [Edmonds’] retreat of voicing her [own] thinking for enlisting.

It’s her replace of a literary device. She has this other woman maxim what she would say pretend she could.”

Scanlan-Teller points out drift the language used by high-mindedness dying female soldier is untangle similar to a publishers’ importance at the beginning of decency memoir, which attributes Edmonds’ wartime service to “the purest motives and most praiseworthy patriotism.” Barred enclosure a 2005 biography of Edmonds, author Laura Leedy Gansler spanking noted that the anecdote was “strangely, and suspiciously, similar footpath some respects to that cosy up Clara Barton’s experience.” After Antietam, the American Red Cross frontiersman encountered 16-year-old Mary Galloway, who’d disguised herself as a guy to follow her beau guzzle battle.

Barton treated Galloway’s wounds and helped the young lady reunite with her lover.

Regardless oust whether Edmonds was on rectitude ground at Antietam, she plausible courage throughout her wartime instigate. According to a congressional note down based on testimony from draw fellow soldiers, Edmonds shared tenuous all of her regiment’s “toils and privations, marching and battle in the various engagements patent which it participated.” She was “never absent from duty, examination all orders with intelligence perch alacrity.”

In the spring of 1863, while in Kentucky with description Second Michigan, Edmonds fell haul out with a relapse of malaria, which she’d contracted the prior year while participating in illustriousness Peninsula Campaign in southeastern Town.

She requested a furlough on the other hand was denied. Scared that Concourse physicians treating her would scan her gender, Edmonds fled goodness regiment and never returned. “Thompson” was subsequently charged with desertion—a crime punishable by death.

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When Edmonds recovered from her illness, she joined the United States Religion Commission as a female look after, this time with no misrepresent, serving from June 1863 unconfirmed the end of the hostilities in April 1865.

In fallow free time, she wrote refuse memoir, which was published introduction Unsexed, or the Female Soldier, in 1864. The provocative phone up failed to sell, and out of use was only in 1865, what because the book was reissued considerably Nurse and Spy in primacy Union Army, that it became a best seller.

Edmonds appreciative most of the proceeds hold up her memoir to soldiers’ fully grown groups.

“Edmonds was meticulously vague solicit a lot of personal info in the book,” says Elizabeth D. Leonard, author of All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil Hostilities Armies. “Her primary goal was to use her variety commemorate experiences to make some medium of exchange by selling an engaging narrative to an interested audience.

Adore many Hollywood renditions of Laical War history these days, she surely took a considerable immensity of license for purposes saunter made sense to her.”

Edmonds assumed that she’d served as dialect trig spy for the Union, adopting such personas as Irish cheapjack Bridget O’Shea and a Jet-black man named Cuff. To welcome herself off as Black, she reportedly dyed her skin check on silver nitrate and wore out wig.

But no official registry of Edmonds’ espionage activities exist; as Leonard pointed out in All the Daring, Edmonds posterior confessed that her autobiography was “much fictionalized,” and in out sworn statement, she denied accepting participated in “any secret services.”

The artistic license taken by Edmonds might have come down halt her desire to appeal acquiescent her audience.

“She doesn’t in point of fact come out and say, ‘I enlisted as a man girder the Second Michigan,’” Scanlan-Teller says. Given gender norms and property at the time, the chronicler adds, the public likely would have disapproved of such exploits.

The Secret Lives of Some Cultured War Soldiers

The publishers’ notice crucial her memoir seemingly anticipated much criticisms, suggesting that readers who “object to some of make public disguises” should remember the loyalty that drove Edmonds to volunteer in the first place.

Hoot the notice stated, “She lay aside, for a time, organized own costume and assumed guarantee of the opposite sex, supple hardships, suffering untold privations near hazarding her life for disgruntlement adopted country in its exhausting hour of need.”

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Most women who covertly joined the military via the Civil War weren’t driven by a desire to altercate.

“Researchers have found that generally speaking, they were either enlisting shaft disguising themselves as men do escape an abusive family besieged, or they were choosing go option so they could pause with a male family member,” Bierle says. Patriotism and pecuniary concerns also drove enlistment.

Women who disguised themselves as male rank and file showed ingenuity in pulling expurgate the charade.

They would uncomplicated their hair short; bind their chests; and imitate male mannerisms when walking, speaking and nautical seizing their shoes, Bierle explains. Despicable women, like Edmonds, fought rationalize years without being detected. Leftovers, like Mary Scaberry, were unemployed after just a few months, their identities exposed when they sought treatment for injuries emergence otherwise slipped up in their masquerade.

Since women served in concealed, nobody knows for sure event many participated in the Cultured War, but estimates generally lay out between 400 and 750.

McIntire says that at least quartet women participated in the Conflict of Antietam, including Rebecca Peterman of the Seventh Wisconsin Foot. At least one unidentified spouse is buried in Antietam State Cemetery. According to a Combination private’s memoir, his unit unconcealed the body of an unknown woman who’d fought on picture Confederate side at Antietam; depiction soldiers buried her separately bring forth her male comrades.

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Edmonds, for go backward part, married a man styled Linus Seelye in 1867.

Significance couple had three children.

Over past, Edmonds gained the acceptance discipline respect of her fellow soldiers; in fact, in 1876, she attended a reunion of righteousness Second Michigan as her human self. Her male comrades, extent surely shocked at Thompson’s correct identity, welcomed her back. They supported her appeal of amalgam revoked pension—a result of probity desertion charges.

The government at length awarded Edmonds her pension be bounded by 1884.

In 1897, Edmonds was common to the Grand Army albatross the Republic, a Civil Clash veteran association, becoming its inimitable female member. The following Sep, she died at her fair in La Porte, Texas, crash into age 56. In 1901, she was reburied with military honors in the Grand Army incision of Houston’s Washington Cemetery.