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from Malcolm Forbes, Jeff Bloch, Women Who Made a Difference: One Hundred Fascinating Tales of Unsung Heroines & Little-Known Stories of Famous Women Who Changed Their World & Ours [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991]

      In the diary that he kept during the Civil War, Union soldier Jerome Robbins wrote of a fellow recruit named Frank Thompson. They had trained together, camped together, and marched side by side into battle, and Robbins wrote, "Though never frankly asserted by her, it will be understood that my friend Frank is a female, which accounts for the singularity of the use of pronouns."

      Frank, it was later discovered, was really Sarah Emma Edmonds, a Canadian-born woman who served with the Union army for two years in the Potomac region. While it was not unheard of for women to pose as soldiers during the Civil War -- it was estimated some four hundred tried it -- Emma Edmonds succeeded well beyond the others.

      Her ruse began before the war when, in 1839 at the age of seventeen, she ran away from home in New Brunswick to escape her hard-driving father, a farmer. She dressed as a man, since that was less conspicuous, and got a job selling Bibles door-to-door. By 1861 Edmonds -- that is, Frank Thompson -- was selling books in Flint, Michigan. her guise was so convincing that she escorted young women out riding in her horse carriage. When President Lincoln issued his first call for volunteer troops, Edmonds enlisted along with the rest of her male friends. At first, the army, -- which didn't require a physical -- rejected the five-foot six-inch "beardless boy" (as one officer called Thompson) for being too small. But soon Thompson was allowed to join and was sent with the Michigan regiment of the Potomac.

      Edmonds later wrote, "I went to war with no other ambition than to nurse the sick and care for the wounded." She never fully explained why she posed as a man to accomplish that, but some historians guess that she simply ad come to enjoy the freedom that her disguise gave her. Edmonds apparently spent most of her military career behind the front lines. One soldier wrote, "He seemed happiest when caring for the sick, and after the first fights at Blackburn's Ford and Bull Run [in Virginia], spent much of his time in the various hospitals."

      But she had her harrowing moments. Twice Edmonds was sent to spy behind Confederate lines. Once she posed as a black boy, the second time she was "disguised" as a peddler woman. During one mission, Edmonds said, she shot a rebel farm wife through her hand after the woman had shot at her first. "I told her that if she uttered another word or scream she was a dead woman," Edmonds said. Her spying provided Union officers with information about Confederate troop movements and, more importantly, identified several spies in the Union camps.

      Edmonds clearly was well thought of by her commanders. She was appointed an aide to Colonel Orlando Poe, who later testified "that her sex was not suspected by me or anyone else in the regiment." She also was the brigade's mail-carrier, and she said she "was more than once obliged to swim my horse across the swift-running streams in going back and forth with the mail."

      Edmonds once was thrown from her horse, seriously injuring her ribs, but she didn't seek medical treatment because that would have ended her ruse. She later said it was that same fear that caused her to desert the army in the spring of 1863 when she developed a severe fever. However, her friend, Jerome Robbins, said in his diary that Edmonds deserted because of a failed romance with a Union officer.

      Whatever caused her to give up her soldier career, Edmonds also gave up her male guise. As a woman, she went back to the battlefront as a nurse. She wrote a fictionalized account of her life called Nurse and Spy in the Union Army that was widely popular, selling some 175,000 copies when it was published in 1865.

      In 1867 Edmonds went back to New Brunswick and married a carpenter, Linus Seelye. Their three children all died young and they adopted two boys. In 1882, after she and Seelye had moved several times and never successfully settled anywhere, Edmonds finally went public with her soldier's story to qualify for a veteran's pension. Her captain wrote on her behalf. "She followed that regiment through hard-fought battled, never flinched from duty, and was never suspected of being else than what she seemed. The beardless boy was a universal favorite."

      Her army buddies invited her to their reunion in 1884, and that same year Congress granted her a pension of twelve dollars a month. After she died of malaria in 1898 at the age of fifty-six, Edmonds was buried with full military honors in the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery in Houston -- the only woman there. Her tombstone read, "Emma E. Seelye -- Army Nurse."

For More Information

      Women of the Civil War

      Michigan Historical Marker Number 639

      Playbill, Canada

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