New York Times News Service
c. 2002 New York Times Company
Saturday, March 23, 2002
THE STORY OF 250 WOMEN WHO FOUGHT IN THE CIVIL WAR, MANY DISGUISED AS MEN.
By AMY DOCKSER MARCUS.
Lauren Cook had been participating in re-enactments of famous Civil War
battles for two years, and she took the hobby seriously. She spent
thousands of dollars buying Civil War-period clothing. She taught
herself how to play the fife, then memorized hundreds of Civil War tunes
to play at battles. She bound her breasts under her uniform so no one
would guess she was a woman. She even tried to adopt male mannerisms to
aid her disguise. "I would always squint," she said. "Women's eyes are
larger than men's, so they really give you away."
But one weekend in 1989 at a re-enactment at the Antietam National
Battlefield in Sharpsburg, Md., something else gave her away. The
re-enactment was taking place in an open field with no trees, and Cook
had to go to the bathroom. Unable to find a spot outdoors with any
privacy, she darted into a restroom. "Someone told a park ranger he saw
a soldier come out of the ladies' room," Cook recounted. The ranger
confronted her and said women were not allowed to portray Civil War
soldiers at re-enactments. He asked her to leave the park.
Later she filed suit against the National Park Service for sexual
discrimination and won. But then a more contentious debate broke out
about women's roles in the Civil War. Many in the ranks of re-enactors
argued that Cook should not be allowed on the battlefield because women
did not serve as soldiers in the Civil War.
Cook already knew, however, that some women had disguised themselves as
male soldiers during the war, including women at Antietam, where, on
Sept. 17, 1862, 22,000 Union and Confederate troops were killed; it was
the bloodiest single day of the war. But she had no idea how many women.
So she set out to document the full story of women who went into combat.
"Lauren didn't just want to win in the court of law but in the court of
history," says James McPherson, a prominent Civil War historian who
teaches at Princeton University.
Now, almost 10 years later, Cook will finally present her case with the
publication in September of "They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in
the American Civil War" (Louisiana State University Press). In the book,
Cook and her co-author, DeAnne Blanton, a military archivist at the
National Archives in Washington, document the lives and experiences of
250 women on both sides of the conflict who went to war disguised as
men. No one knows for certain how many of the 3 million soldiers who
fought in the Civil War were women, although Cook and Blanton believe
that in addition to the 250 they found, there are far more who went
undetected.
Over the years, as Civil War historians have expanded their research
efforts beyond the study of battles and military stratagems into social
and gender issues, other books chronicling women's roles in the war have
appeared. Most highlight the stories of prominent female soldiers like
Sarah Emma Edmonds and Loreta Janeta Velazquez, who both wrote popular
memoirs about their wartime adventures. But Cook and Blanton go beyond
already published accounts or newspaper records. To write the book, the
two pored over regimental histories, searched archives across the
country and, most important, used unpublished diaries and memoirs given
to them by the descendants of female soldiers who heard about their work
and wanted the stories of their relatives told.
"The families often had the kind of information and manuscripts that are
not publicly available that had been preserved over the generations,"
Blanton says.
Civil war history remains largely the province of male scholars, and
Cook and Blanton came to the field largely by accident. Blanton, 36, a
history buff, grew up in Newport News, Va. Her ancestor Pvt. Joseph
Blanton fought with the Confederates in the 52nd North Carolina
Infantry, was captured in 1864 at the battle of Cold Harbor and died of
smallpox a year later in a Union prison camp in Elmira, N.Y.
At the National Archives, Blanton had been working with 19th-century
Army records for several years when she stumbled on a file kept by a
postwar clerk in the Adjutant General's office; it was about women
caught serving in the armies of the Civil War. "There were handwritten
notes, obituaries that were clipped out; it was a carefully kept file,"
Blanton says. "I had never heard of such a thing as women Civil War
soldiers, and I was fascinated."
Cook, 45, had seven Indiana ancestors who fought for the Union,
including one, Col. Absalom Hanks Markland, who served on the staff of
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. After the war, Grant gave Markland the saddle he
had used during the Civil War as a token of his esteem. Cook's middle
name is Markland, after the colonel. Still, she says, she had initially
been more interested in the American Revolution than in the Civil War.
That changed after she married. Her former husband, Frederick Burgess,
is an avid Civil War buff. At their 1990 wedding, they dressed in Civil
War-era clothing and cut their wedding cake with an officer's sword that
was 130 years old. On weekends, Cook started accompanying him to
re-enactments of famous Civil War battles. Most of the other women she
met there were dressed in hoop skirts and portrayed more traditional
female Civil War roles, like grieving widows or sutlers, merchants who
traveled with the armies and sold goods to the soldiers. Cook, a
flutist, wanted to play the fife and drums during battles, something
that required taking to the field dressed as a male soldier. Eventually
she also learned how to shoot a musket.
One day Cook received a letter from Ruth Goodier of Chipley, Fla.
Goodier said she had heard of Cook's lawsuit and supported her right to
serve as a male soldier during re-enactments. She added that she knew
women had fought in the war because her great-grandmother's older
sister, Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, had served two years, and that she had a
collection of Wakeman's letters home from the front. She also had a
daguerreotype of Wakeman, dressed in her uniform, holding her musket
with the bayonet attached, that had remained hidden in a family attic
for years.
Cook was astounded, since no collection of letters written by female
soldiers was known to exist. In the hope of getting the letters
published, she started researching the life of Wakeman, who used the
name Lyons Wakeman while serving in the 153rd New York Volunteer
Infantry. Wakeman saw action around Washington and in the 1864 Louisiana
Red River campaign before dying that year in an Army hospital from the
effects of chronic diarrhea. Oxford University Press published the
Wakeman letters, edited and annotated by Cook, in a 1994 book entitled
"An Uncommon Soldier."
It was while researching the Wakeman letters at the National Archives
that Cook and Blanton met and talked about pooling their resources and
writing a book together about female soldiers. In the beginning, they
simply set out to document as many as they could find. This alone was a
challenge, as many of the women came from working-class backgrounds and
couldn't write. Others went home after the war, married and had
children, and, not wanting to seem different, never talked about their
war experiences. But Blanton and Cook quickly realized that they didn't
want just to tell the stories of the individual women who had served.
They also wanted to set them in a context, to explore how the women fit
into the broader society.
"One of the things that bothered me when I was asked to leave the
Antietam battlefield after portraying a male soldier was the attitude of
the park officials there," Cook recalled. "They considered Civil War
women soldiers eccentrics and oddballs, that something wasn't quite
right about them."
As the two women delved more deeply into how Civil War society viewed
these soldiers, they were astonished to discover that, although
politicians and pundits were often critical, male soldiers usually
accepted their female comrades once they were unmasked. Women who were
quickly discovered in the ranks and dismissed went home in disgrace, but
those who managed to keep their secret for a time and serve in battle
found that their fellow soldiers supported them even after their
identities became known. In letters home and in wartime diaries, male
soldiers praised the bravery and military prowess of the women who
served with them and in many cases kept the women's identities a secret
from their officers so that the women could continue to serve.
"What surprised me the most is that these women did something so
unacceptable to society at that time, but they were so accepted by the
men they served in the ranks with," Blanton says. "It was war, and on
the battlefield people couldn't afford to indulge in social
conventions."
Blanton and Cook found that especially true on the Confederate side,
where manpower was short and officers were desperate to keep the ranks
filled as the war dragged on. By 1864 many of the Confederate female
soldiers weren't even pretending to be men anymore. They were growing
their hair long again and no longer trying to conceal their figures.
For Cook, whose journey into the world of female soldiers started when
she was sent home from the re-enacted battle, this was the best
discovery of all. That and the evidence from their research that eight
women had served disguised as male soldiers at the battle of Antietam,
the highest number they documented at any one battle. Five of the eight
were casualties that day.