This Female Civil War Soldier Participated in the Bloodiest Battle in American History and Spied on the South—or Did She?

On the evening of September 17, 1862, in the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, Private Franklin Thompson of the Second Michigan Infantry Regiment walked among the wounded, the dying and the dead. According to Thompson’s later recollections, a young soldier bleeding profusely from a neck wound caught his attention, and he knelt to ask if he could do anything to help.

“Yes, yes; there is something to be done, and that quickly, for I am dying,” the soldier replied.

Something about the wounded man’s tone and voice stood out to Thompson, who looked more closely at his face. Beckoning Thompson to come closer, the soldier made a deathbed confession:

I can trust you and will tell you a secret. I am not what I seem, but am a female. I enlisted from the purest motives and have remained undiscovered and unsuspected. … I wish you to bury me with your own hands, that none may know after my death that I am other than my appearance indicates.

Thompson later claimed that he’d done as asked. In the closing hours of the bloodiest single day in American history, which saw more than 22,000 soldiers killed, wounded or captured in battle near Sharpsburg, Maryland, the private buried the woman under the shadow of a mulberry tree. After all, he had a secret of his own: Thompson, too, was a woman disguised as a man.

The private’s real name was Sarah Emma Edmonds, and she’d enlisted in the Union Army in the spring of 1861. In her memoir, Edmonds wrote that she’d served as both a field nurse and a spy who went undercover behind enemy lines during the Civil War. Though historians have since argued that Edmonds fictionalized aspects of her experiences for dramatic effect (including, in all likelihood, her presence at Antietam), her bravery and contributions to the war effort remain undisputed.

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Edmonds was born Sarah Emma Edmondson in New Brunswick, Canada, in December 1841. Her father, a farmer who had been hoping for a son, treated her poorly. In 1857, she left home to escape his abuse and an arranged marriage he was forcing on her, changing her last name to Edmonds to distance herself from her family. Fearing that her father would find her, Edmonds left the Canadian town of Moncton after a year or so and immigrated to the United States.

Once in her new home, Edmonds started disguising herself as a man to find work. She assumed the Thompson alias and secured a position as a traveling Bible salesman based in Hartford, Connecticut.

While waiting for a train back to New England in the spring of 1861, Edmonds heard a voice in the street reading out President Abraham Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to fight for the Union. A few days earlier, on April 12, the Confederates had attacked Fort Sumter, beginning the Civil War.

“This announcement startled me, while my imagination portrayed the coming struggle in all its fearful magnitude,” Edmonds wrote in her memoir. “War, civil war, with all its horrors seemed inevitable, and even then was ready to burst like a volcano upon the most happy and prosperous nation the sun ever shone upon. The contemplation of this sad picture filled my eyes with tears and my heart with sorrow.”

Military records indicate that Edmonds, in disguise as Thompson, initially served as a field nurse for the Second Michigan. “You often can’t really draw a delineation between ‘civilian workers’ and battle, because these people had to be in battle, tending to soldiers,” Bonnie Tsui, author of She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers of the Civil War, told Smithsonian magazine in 2011. “They were often on the field or nearby trying to get to the wounded, so you could argue that it was just as dangerous for them to work as nurses as to be actively shooting and emptying gunfire.”

After a few months, Edmonds was reassigned. She acted as the regiment’s postmaster and later its mail carrier, charged with transporting heavy bushels of correspondence across great distances. On August 29, 1862, Edmonds broke her leg and suffered internal injuries when the mule she was riding (her horse had died, leaving her with few alternatives) threw her into a ditch. The accident took place just two and a half weeks before the Battle of Antietam.

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Edmonds is often credited as one of the handful of hidden female fighters who participated in Antietam. But her moving account of meeting a fellow woman soldier after the battle doesn’t match up with the historical record. Per a list of troop movements, the Second Michigan was assigned to defend Washington, D.C. from September 3 to October 11, 1862. Curiously, Edmonds’ company muster roll and reports offer no record of her movements between the end of August and October 31, simply stating that she was “absent” on duty on a colonel’s orders. So, what was Edmonds doing at Antietam if she was, in fact, present?

Sarah Kay Bierle, an education associate at the American Battlefield Trust, suggests Edmonds might have been carrying messages between generals or working as a nurse.

“She really doesn’t tell us a lot about what she was doing at Antietam; she tells us what she witnessed,” Bierle says. “It’s difficult to be able to say with certainty. … According to what she wrote in her memoir, she is somehow there, and she is helping to care for the wounded afterward.”

But Tracey McIntire and Audrey Scanlan-Teller, historians who give joint presentations about women in the Civil War, are skeptical of Edmonds’ version of events. “Our theory is that she wasn’t really at Antietam at all,” says McIntire, director of communications at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland. “Her narrative of finding that woman soldier and giving her reasons why she enlisted is just [Edmonds’] way of voicing her [own] reasons for enlisting. It’s her version of a literary device. She has this other woman saying what she would say if she could.”

Scanlan-Teller points out that the language used by the dying female soldier is very similar to a publishers’ notice at the beginning of the memoir, which attributes Edmonds’ wartime service to “the purest motives and most praiseworthy patriotism.” In a 2005 biography of Edmonds, author Laura Leedy Gansler further noted that the anecdote was “strangely, and suspiciously, similar in some respects to that of Clara Barton’s experience.” After Antietam, the American Red Cross founder encountered 16-year-old Mary Galloway, who’d disguised herself as a man to follow her beau into battle. Barton treated Galloway’s wounds and helped the young woman reunite with her lover.

Regardless of whether Edmonds was on the ground at Antietam, she exhibited courage throughout her wartime service. According to a congressional report based on testimony from her fellow soldiers, Edmonds shared in all of her regiment’s “toils and privations, marching and fighting in the various engagements in which it participated.” She was “never absent from duty, obeying all orders with intelligence and alacrity.”

In the spring of 1863, while in Kentucky with the Second Michigan, Edmonds fell ill with a relapse of malaria, which she’d contracted the previous year while participating in the Peninsula Campaign in southeastern Virginia. She requested a furlough but was denied. Scared that Army physicians treating her would discover her gender, Edmonds fled the 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 Christian Commission as a female nurse, this time with no disguise, serving from June 1863 until the end of the war in April 1865. In her free time, she wrote her memoir, which was published as Unsexed, or the Female Soldier, in 1864. The provocative title failed to sell, and it was only in 1865, when the book was reissued as Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, that it became a best seller. Edmonds donated most of the proceeds from her memoir to soldiers’ aid groups.

“Edmonds was meticulously vague about a lot of personal details in the book,” says Elizabeth D. Leonard, author of All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies. “Her primary goal was to use her variety of experiences to make some money by selling an engaging tale to an interested audience. Like many Hollywood renditions of Civil War history these days, she surely took a considerable amount of license for purposes that made sense to her.”

Edmonds claimed that she’d served as a spy for the Union, adopting such personas as Irish peddler Bridget O’Shea and a Black man named Cuff. To pass herself off as Black, she reportedly dyed her skin with silver nitrate and wore a wig. But no official records of Edmonds’ espionage activities exist; as Leonard pointed out in All the Daring, Edmonds later confessed that her autobiography was “much fictionalized,” and in a sworn statement, she denied having participated in “any secret services.”

The artistic license taken by Edmonds might have come down to her desire to appeal to her audience. “She doesn’t really come out and say, ‘I enlisted as a man in the Second Michigan,’” Scanlan-Teller says. Given gender norms and expectations at the time, the historian adds, the public likely would have disapproved of such exploits.

The Secret Lives of Some Civil War Soldiers

The publishers’ notice in her memoir seemingly anticipated such criticisms, suggesting that readers who “object to some of her disguises” should remember the patriotism that drove Edmonds to enlist in the first place. As the notice stated, “She laid aside, for a time, her own costume and assumed that of the opposite sex, enduring hardships, suffering untold privations and hazarding her life for her adopted country in its trying hour of need.”

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Most women who covertly joined the military during the Civil War weren’t motivated by a desire to fight. “Researchers have found that usually, they were either enlisting and disguising themselves as men to escape an abusive family situation, or they were choosing that option so they could stay with a male family member,” Bierle says. Patriotism and financial concerns also drove enlistment.

Women who disguised themselves as male soldiers showed ingenuity in pulling off the charade. They would cut their hair short; bind their chests; and imitate male mannerisms when walking, speaking and tying their shoes, Bierle explains. Some women, like Edmonds, fought for years without being detected. Others, like Mary Scaberry, were discharged after just a few months, their identities exposed when they sought treatment for injuries or otherwise slipped up in their masquerade.

Since women served in secret, nobody knows for sure how many participated in the Civil War, but estimates generally range between 400 and 750. McIntire says that at least four women participated in the Battle of Antietam, including Rebecca Peterman of the Seventh Wisconsin Infantry. At least one unidentified woman is buried in Antietam National Cemetery. According to a Union private’s memoir, his unit discovered the body of an anonymous woman who’d fought on the Confederate side at Antietam; the soldiers buried her separately from her male comrades.

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Edmonds, for her part, married a man named Linus Seelye in 1867. The couple had three children.

Over time, Edmonds gained the acceptance and respect of her fellow soldiers; in fact, in 1876, she attended a reunion of the Second Michigan as her female self. Her male comrades, while surely shocked at Thompson’s true identity, welcomed her back. They supported her appeal of her revoked pension—a result of the desertion charges. The government finally awarded Edmonds her pension in 1884.

In 1897, Edmonds was admitted to the Grand Army of the Republic, a Civil War veteran association, becoming its only female member. The following September, she died at her home in La Porte, Texas, at age 56. In 1901, she was reburied with military honors in the Grand Army section of Houston’s Washington Cemetery.