March is Women’s History Month, and we thought it appropriate to cover some amazing women in history that people may not be familiar with. Today we’re recognizing two brave women who rose to the occasion during the war between the states. Certainly, there are countless stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things during the Civil War. Dr. Mary Walker and Sarah Edmonds were two such people. Here are their remarkable stories.
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker
Early Life
Mary Edwards Walker was born in Oswego, New York on November 26, 1832. Mary and her six brothers and sisters grew up in a progressive household. Her parents encouraged the children to be free thinkers and were raised to question everything. Being raised on a farm, Mary would opt to wear pants and shirts saying it was easier to do her job in that attire, a trait that would follow her through the rest of her life.
Career
Edwards attended Syracuse Medical College where she graduated with a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1855. After college, she married a fellow student, Albert Miller, and they opened a joint practice in Rome, NY. In her wedding vows, she refused to agree to “obey” her husband, wore a short skirt over a pair of pants instead of the traditional wedding dress, and kept her own last name. During their marriage, the practice failed, as the residents could not accept a female doctor.
The marriage ultimately would not last, and they later divorced. Dr. Walker did not like wearing dresses or skirts, always saying that they were uncomfortable, inhibited her mobility, and were prone to spread dust and dirt—something you don’t want as a doctor. Instead, she would wear pants with suspenders underneath a knee-length dress. Her attire was a source of ridicule, and in later years she would just wear pants and a jacket with no skirts. For a brief period in 1860, Dr. Walker did attend Bowen Collegiate Institute in Iowa, but she was suspended from the school after she refused to resign from the debate team.
Civil War
At the beginning of the Civil War, Dr. Walker went to Washington to join the Union army. She was denied a commission as a medical officer due to her sex but signed up anyway as an unpaid volunteer surgeon. She served at the U.S. Patent Office Hospital in Washington, DC. Throughout the first few years of the war, she served on the front lines at Fredericksburg and Chattanooga all while wearing men’s clothing and arguing that she did her job better dressed that way.
In September of 1863, she became the first female U.S. Army surgeon following her commission as a “Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian)” by the Army of the Cumberland. As an assistant surgeon with the 52nd Ohio Infantry, Dr. Walker routinely would treat civilians on either side of the line. On one trip behind lines in 1864, she was captured by Confederate troops and taken into custody as a spy.
While her stint in a prisoner of war camp was relatively short, only four months, it was spent in Castle Thunder prison in Virginia. The prison, like all others during the war, was overpopulated and disease and violence against the inmates went unchecked. During her capture and while imprisoned, she continued to refuse to wear traditional clothing. She was released in a prisoner exchange and was stationed at the Louisville Women’s Prison Hospital and an orphan asylum in Tennessee.
After the War
After suffering from muscular atrophy from her time in Castle Thunder prison, Dr. Walker was awarded a disability pension. Additionally, with the recommendation from Major Generals Sherman and Thomas, President Johnson signed a bill on November 11, 1865, awarding Walker with the Medal of Honor for Meritorious Service.
Proud of her accomplishments and how she obtained them, Dr. Walker never wavered from wearing men’s clothes or being a doctor, no matter the harassment or ridicule it brought her. She was arrested in New Orleans in 1870 because of how she was dressed. After an aggressive arrest, she was released when the court officers recognized who she was. That wasn’t the last time she was arrested for her clothing. It happened frequently and she responded to her critics by saying, “I don’t wear men’s clothes, I wear my own clothes.”
Dr. Walker was very active in the fight for suffrage, and tried to register to vote in 1871 but was denied. She was an early advocate who argued that women already had the right to vote by way of the Constitution and that Congress just merely needed to enact the correct legislation to allow it. She testified in front of the US House of Representatives in 1912 and 1914 in support of women’s suffrage.
Whether in part because of her participation in the suffrage movement or not, Dr. Walker was one of several recipients whose Medal of Honor was stripped by government action between 1916 and 1917. She, being true to her nature, refused to return it and wore it openly for the rest of her lifetime. She spent the rest of her years continuing to fight for women’s rights only to still be ridiculed for how she chose to dress. When she died on February 21, 1919, in New York, she chose to be buried in a black suit. Her medal wasn’t reinstated until 1977 and she remains the only woman to receive the Medal of Honor.
Sarah Edmonds
Early Life
Sarah Emma Edmonds was born in Canada in 1841. As a woman of the time, she did not receive much education in her early life. To escape her abusive father and a reported forced marriage, she ran away from Canada and eventually settled in the Flint, Michigan area in 1856. After running away, she found life much easier if she was dressed as a man. She supported herself as an itinerant seller of bibles, basically traveling around selling bibles.
War Time
With a sense of duty to her new country, Edmonds joined the military by enlisting in the 2nd Michigan Infantry under the name Franklin Flint Thompson. While acting as Thompson, Edmonds participated in many battles like Antietam, the First and Second Battles of Manassas, as well as the Vicksburg campaign. Under the command of Col. Orlando M. Poe, it was reported that she acted as a Union spy and crossed battlelines many times, though there is no official report of it. She had a list of alleged aliases including a Southern sympathizer as Charles Mayberry, a black man named Cuff, and an Irish peddler of soaps and apples named Bridget O’Shea.
With no clear indication of why she left, some reports indicate that while suffering from Malaria she knew she would be discovered as a female and deserted in April of 1863. Adopting her name from birth, she continued to serve the US as a nurse, albeit a female nurse this time, at a hospital for soldiers in Washington, D.C.
After the War
After her time in the war, in 1865, Edmonds published a book of her experiences in the war, “Nurse and Spy in the Union Army,” although some say it was a work of fiction more than a memoir. She met and married her husband in 1867 and started a family. In 1882, while living in Kansas, she began the arduous task of collecting affidavits from old army friends to apply for a veteran’s pension, which she secured in July 1884. The pension, approved by Congress, was under her now married name and included the reference to the name she took while serving. Prior to her death in 1898, she was admitted to the Grand Army of the Republic, as its only female member.
These two women are only a few of the several hundred that served during the Civil War as soldiers and spies. They faced many adversities and continued to show bravery in all things they did. While their stories might not be readily known, they are definitely worth knowing.
