In 1862, Lyons Wakeman, who was then 19, left his family farm and became a coal handler on a canal barge out of Binghampton, N.Y. The next year Wakeman met some Union soldiers, who urged him to enlist.
The bonus for joining was $152, the same as a year’s wages, which was too good to pass up. So Wakeman signed on with the 153rd Regiment of the New York State Volunteers, sending the money home to help pay family debts.
Wakeman liked the army. He wrote home that that he felt “as independent as a hog on ice” and described camp routine: “I have to go on guard every other day and drill the day that I am not on guard. I like to drill first rate.”
The enlistee was also a first-rate soldier. In Louisiana in 1864, the private and his comrades made hard marches of almost 700 miles, enduring horrible heat, putrid water and meager rations and engaging Confederate forces in two fierce, costly battles.
In a letter home, Wakeman wrote of the first: “I was under fire about four hours and laid on the field of battle all night. There was three wounded in my Co. and one killed. . . .”
The letters are contained in a book, “An Uncommon Soldier.”
Pvt. Wakeman was uncommon because, like several hundred other Civil War soldiers, he was a woman who posed as a man. His real name was Sarah Rosetta Wakeman.
Wakeman and her masquerade as a rifleman in the Union army have been saved for posterity by Lauren Cook Burgess, a historian who is the author of “An Uncommon Soldier” (The Minerva Center), and was among the six scholars presenting papers last Friday during the second annual Civil War symposium at the Chicago Historical Society.
The theme was “The Experience and Meaning of Combat in the Civil War,” which has a timely resonance in the popular culture because of the extraordinarily graphic depiction of battle in the recent movie “Saving Private Ryan.”
Noting that this subject tends to be overlooked by Civil War researchers, Theodore Karamanski, professor of history at Loyola University, said: “To paraphrase (war historian) John Keegan, we have studied the face of war–the strategies and decisions of the generals, the tactics of battles won and lost–at the expense of revealing the face of battle–the actions and motivations of individual soldiers.”
The symposium also examined the actions and motivations of blacks and American Indians, two groups that sometimes suffer from inattention in Civil War inquiries, but it was Burgess’ investigation that promises to break new ground.
Indeed, when she was introduced, Burgess was praised, with tongue only partly in cheek, for having come up with a new topic in America’s most intensely investigated war, and a topic that touches a modern controversy about women soldiers in combat.
While there have been isolated accounts of women soldiers in the Civil War, it was observed, these generally had been sensationalized in one way or another.
Burgess, on the other hand, is preparing, with a co-author, a second book on the subject, looking at some 200 women who served as males in the military.
“People also ask me how they did it.” she said. “There’s a great deal of skepticism that they could pull it off.”
Burgess suggested these factors made it possible:
– Cursory physical examinations, if any. After the war, comrades of Pvt. Albert Cashier, who was actually an Irish immigrant named Jennie Hodgers, served three years in the 95th Illinois regiment and was never discovered, said none of the enlistees had to strip. “All that were shown were (our) hands and feet,” one said.
When one sergeant’s wife asked why he and his tentmates couldn’t detect a woman corporal, he replied that no one ever undressed for bed. “On the contrary, we dress up. We go to bed with boots and overcoat and all on.”
– Inside support. Many women enlisted with a husband or brother, which gave them someone “to rely on for assistance in carrying off their masquerade.” An example was Mary Margaret Murphy, who enlisted in the 98th Ohio Volunteers with her father. She later explained that “a few days after I enlisted, I was detected by my laugh and was suspicioned as being a woman. My father (a prominent sergeant in the unit) reported to the captain that he had examined me and I was a man.” Six months later, she was discovered after getting drunk and discharged.
– Primitive conditions. Most soldiers lived in outdoor camps, not permanent barracks, where they could be closely scrutinized. Thus, women soldiers could take care of sanitary matters outside the view of their comrades. And Victorian society did not place a great premium on bathing, which helped women soldiers.
– Young recruits. Boys as young as 9 or 10 were soldiers. Their lack of beards and high voices served as camouflage for women soldiers.
“Another question people always ask is why did they do this?” Burgess said.
Women were motivated by many of the same things that many men were, she found: good pay, adventure and freedom in being away from home. And in following loved ones and relatives, women were likewise mirroring males, many of whom enlisted to be with friends and neighbors.
“The lack of any legal, social or economic status for mid-19th Century women also inspired these few to pass as men, even prior to the war,” Burgess said.
“Women could not vote, and a married woman could not sign contracts or open a bank account. Women were not accepted into most colleges or universities at the time. No one would take a woman on as an apprentice to learn a trade. Women were commonly paid far less for the same work a man did. So in other words, for a woman to make her way honorably in the world, if she was not married and had no marriage prospects and her family wasn’t well to do, her only recourse was to dress and act as a man.”
To understand how women soldiers fared, Burgess has explored the data of 124 documented cases. (She has information and references about more than 75 others.) Among the findings:
– 21 (17 percent) were wounded in battle, several more than once.
– 23 (18.5 percent) were captured, and 12 (10 percent) died, 9 in battle and 3 of disease. The latter was the inverse of statistics for male soldiers: “Twice as many males died of disease than from battle wounds.”
– 4 were discovered when they delivered babies. A colonel with a Pennsylvania regiment wrote home to his wife: “A corporal was promoted to sergeant for gallant conduct at the battle of Fredericksburg–since which time the sergeant has become the mother of a child. What use have we for women, if soldiers in the army can give birth to children?”
– The promotion rate was 13 percent, about the same as for men, and the average service was 16 months.
“Women, on the whole, were quite successful as soldiers, and their experiences were very much like those of males,” Burgess said.
Regimental records list Pvt. Lyons Wakeman as 5 feet tall, fair complected, with brown hair and blue eyes. The records show that some three weeks after the battles against the Confederate forces of April 1864, Wakeman was admitted to a hospital with chronic diarrhea, the most deadly disease of the Civil War.
Sarah Rosetta Wakeman died on June 19, 1864, and was given a soldier’s burial in Chalmette National Cemetery in New Orleans. “On the headstone,” Burgess writes, “is her enlisted name, Lyons Wakeman.”
