Who Wears the Pants? Sarah Emma Edmonds, That's Who

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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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 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

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. 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 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, 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 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

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, 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 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. 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 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,

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, 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 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

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 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. 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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

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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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, 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 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 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. 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 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

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

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. 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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 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

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 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, 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.