Spies and nurses: that’s what most have heard of the role of women in the Civil War. The picture for Michigan’s contingent is painted on a larger and more colorful canvas. The role women played in the antebellum antislavery movement in Michigan, from surreptitious assistance on the Underground Railroad to open advocacy of abolition, must be acknowledged first. Before statehood, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler at age twenty-three organized the Logan Female Anti-Slavery Society in Lenawee County and published abolitionist poems. Laura Smith Haviland aided Chandler’s efforts and, after her friend’s death, founded the Raisin Institute, the first school in Michigan to admit African Americans. This contingent of freedom fighters was not lily white: Sojourner Truth of “Ain’t I a Woman?” fame took up antebellum residence in Battle Creek.60 On the prewar stage, Michigan’s women played a large and important role.
Their contributions to liberty and equality only increased after the conflict was joined. Units were sent off to the field with flags conceived and stitched together by women of the community. On November 6, 1861, the nation’s first “Ladies’ Soldiers’ Aid Society” organized in Detroit for the benefit of troops away at camps, in hospitals and on battlefields. The smoke from First Bull Run “had hardly disappeared before scores of Detroit ladies were busily engaged in scraping lint, and in collecting and preparing needed comforts for the sick and wounded.”61 Society members extended their services to soldiers’ homes in Detroit and other Michigan locales, as well as to facilities such as the one Lincoln frequented in Washington during trips to his “summer White House.”
As ninety thousand men marched away to war, women served in every capacity on the home front that society would permit. Precursors to World War II’s Rosie the Riveter, some performed the jobs in which men were employed before enlistment. The leading occupations in 1860s Michigan were agrarian; with husbands gone as soldiers, wives assumed the responsibility to ensure that planting, nurturing and harvesting would occur. Although they did not enjoy equal property rights during this era, women effectively became copartners on farms all across the state. In filling this gap, women confronted challenges no one had prepared them to face: business decisions, financial choices, family care giving, loneliness, fear and anxiety. Isolation became all the more difficult because of the distance Michigan was from the two theaters of war and the difficulties of travel.
The birth of their child while her husband was absent—in a time when pregnancy could be life threatening—became even more of an ordeal. A typically evocative letter written nearing full term while the husband was away ends: “Oh how I wish you nere [sic] to come to the bed and talk to us once but as you can’t do this I am thankful we can right [sic] to each other.”62 Letter author Nan Ewing would, later that same year, open a letter from her husband to discover he had lost an eye in combat near Petersburg, Virginia. She could do nothing but write back to him. Despite everything, Michigan women persevered.
War can bring momentous changes to the social order, and Civil War Michigan experienced this phenomenon. Not all women felt that duty required remaining at home. Some wives went to the front with their husbands, attempting to take care of them as they had when civilians. Some stayed at nearby havens, paying visits as frequently as military discipline permitted to offer encouragement and support. Some were permitted to stay in camp to serve as laundresses or matrons, helping the soldiers with domestic chores. And some did serve as medical personnel, working with the Sanitary Commission or the U.S. Christian Commission.63
The most dramatic development was the female in uniform. Some women attempted to join up, only to be discovered and discharged. Mary Burns disguised herself in order to enlist in the Seventh Michigan Cavalry. Before the regiment left Detroit, however, her gender was found out. Since she was in uniform, it prompted her arrest, imprisonment in the city jail and a charge of masquerading as a man.64 The criminal code of the 1860s enforced the common assumption that women could not face hostile fire.
The most widely known female soldier’s story is that of Private Franklin Thompson of Company F, Second Michigan Infantry, and an enlistee from Flint. In April 1863, Private Thompson deserted—or, more accurately, fled the ranks. The cause for flight was not fear of battle but of discovery, for Thompson was no ordinary man. He was, in fact, a woman,
and a good looking one at that. She succeeded in concealing her sex most admirably, serving in various campaigns and battles of the regiment as a soldier; often employed as a spy, going within the enemy’s lines, sometimes absent for weeks, and is said to have furnished much valuable information. She remained with the regiment until…it is supposed she apprehended a disclosure of her sex and deserted at Lebanon, Kentucky, but where she went remains a mystery.65
Sarah Emma Edmonds Seelye.
In May 1882, the mystery was solved. Sarah Emma Edmonson Seelye wrote the Michigan adjutant general, asking for a certificate of service—under Thompson’s name—which was required to pursue a claim for a federal soldier’s pension. Once it was ascertained that the claim was truthful, she approached the United States Congress for relief. On July 5, 1884, a private bill awarding her the pension was signed into law, confirming her claim to have served in the military.66 In July 1886, a bill became law removing the charge of desertion from her military record. A century later, Michigan erected a historical marker in Flint with this text: “The Second Michigan saw action at the first Battle of Bull Run and, as part of the Army of the Potomac, at the Second Bull Run and Fredericksburg. Thompson performed all of the duties of a soldier including nurse and mail carrier. In 1863 he became ill, but was denied a furlough. To preserve his identity, he deserted.” Whether Thompson/Edmondson really served as a spy may be fiction. But completely genuine was the warmth with which she was greeted at the October 1884 regimental reunion in Flint.67 Her comrades accepted her as one of Michigan’s own.
Lesser known is the story of a soldier in the Twenty-fifth Michigan Infantry. At the Battle of Tebbs Bend, Kentucky, occurring on the day after the Battle of Gettysburg and on the surrender of Vicksburg, one of the soldiers in the regiment was badly wounded. At the field hospital, the surgeon was shocked to find his patient was not a male and thus, for yet one more time, a young woman named Lizzie Compton, who had fought and received a wound on behalf of the Union. Unlike some female Civil War combat vets, Lizzie’s story has not yielded a book about her exploits. Several of the works that treat the general subject of women in the war reference her.68 She appears to have originally joined when only fourteen, serving with several units until she was wounded at Tebbs Bend while in the Michigan unit. She was then sixteen. According to one source,69 she “enlisted in eight different Union regiments” only to be discovered each time, resulting in discharge. In “A Strange Story: ‘Truth Stranger than Fiction’—Lizzie Compton, the Soldier Girl,” a contemporaneous article attributed first to the Rochester Union, this account is given of a traveler’s arrest:
She stated that she was about sixteen years of age, assuming that she had been correctly informed as to the date of her birth. Her parents died in her infancy, near Nashville, Tenn., and she was left, as too many children are, to the tender mercies of unfeeling wretches. She was put into the field to work at an early age, and was never taught any duties of the household. When a child she wore a frock—but really was never fully clad in the apparel of her sex. At the age of thirteen, when the rebellion commenced, she put on the clothes of a boy and worked about the steamboats on the Western rivers. At length she sought a place in the army as a bugler, on which instrument she soon excelled.
Lizzie has been eighteen months in the service and in seven or eight regiments. She got into the ranks by fraud—taking the place of some person who had passed muster and was discharged as soon as her sex was discovered. Among the regiments in which she served were the 79th New York, 17th and 28th Michigan, and the 2nd Minnesota. Her first engagement was at Mill Springs, and she relates minutely the details of the fall of Zollicoffer. She was captured with her company and paroled by the guerrilla Morgan near Gallatin, Tenn. She fought at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and several other places in the West. Finally she went to the Army of the Potomac and got into the 79th New York. At the battle of Fredericksburg, early in July, she was wounded by a piece of shell in the side; and the surgeon discovered and disclosed her sex, which led to her dismissal after recovering in the hospital. Her secret was twice betrayed by surgeons. While in a Western regiment she undertook to ride a horse which none of her companions dare mount, and being without a saddle, she was thrown and injured, which led to betrayal.
This girl, familiar with the use of a musket, understands the manual perfectly, has performed picket and other duties of camp and field, and delights in the service. She recites camp incidents and scenes with the ardor of a youth of twelve, and longs to be with her old companions in arms. When asked if she had no fears, she replied that she was some “skeered” in the first battle, but never since, and she added that as she had done nothing to lead her to believe she would go to a bad place in the next world, she was not afraid to die.
Lizzie is five feet one inch in height, and weighs 155 pounds, and is of course of rather stout build. She has light hair, fair complexion, and in her half military suit with high boots, and pants tucked in the tops, she has the appearance of a rosy soldier boy of fifteen years. She carries with her a paper from the Chief of Police of Louisville, Mr. Priest, stating who she is, and commending her to the favor of the railroad superintendents. She came to this city a few days since, and went to New York to see Barnum, who had written to her. He was not then in the city, and after spending a day or two there, she became disgusted and started Westward. She arrived here without money, and sought to enlist to provide for herself. She was not discouraged at her failure. She declared that she could work at any business a boy could do, and would earn her living if permitted to do so. She was told that the statute forbade a woman wearing a man’s clothing, and that she must abandon the practice. She would not promise to make a change—indeed she insisted that she would prefer any punishment—death even—rather than be compelled to act the part of a woman.
Bail was entered for the good behavior of the soldier girl, and she took the cars to go where, we know not. She will no doubt appear soon in some other locality.
A story to rival Annie Oakley’s, yet the Michigan adjutant general’s postwar report does not include her name in the record of service in any unit.
It remains difficult to verify the service of women in uniform. An example is “Michigan Bridget,” a woman associated with the First Michigan Cavalry. Some accounts report that she remained with the unit throughout the war, others that she went into battle as well. A letter written in March 1865 reported a visit “in company with Miss Bridget Deavers, two large camps of dismounted cavalrymen lying along the James River, a few miles from City Point. Bridget—or, as the men call her, Biddy—has probably seen more hardship and danger than any other woman during the war.”
Her experience apparently was at the front line:
She has been with the cavalry all the time, going out with them on their cavalry raids—always ready to succor the wounded on the field—often getting men off who, but for her, would be left to die, and, fearless of shell or bullet, among the last to leave.
Protected by officers and respected by privates, with her little sunburnt face, she makes her home in the saddle or the shelter-tent; often, indeed, sleeping in the open air without a tent, and by her courage and devotion “winning golden opinions from all sorts of people.”70
A number of Michigan women merited special commendation, whatever the renown. Anna Blair Etheridge received the Kearny Cross for distinguished service with the Second and Third Michigan Infantry. The medal was awarded to those who had performed acts of extreme heroism in the face of the enemy. Etheridge was known to have ridden her horse onto battlefields to act as nurse to wounded Michiganders. She was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in 1913. Julia Susan Wheelock, by then Mrs. Porter Freeman, under an 1890 Act of Congress, was awarded a pension of twelve dollars per month “on account of disability resulting from disease contracted while serving as a hospital nurse during the war of the rebellion.” Wheelock left Ionia in 1862 to care for her brother after he was wounded at Chantilly, Virginia. Arriving to find him a battle fatality, she decided to remain with the Michigan Soldier’s Relief Association alongside Elmina Brainard, a young Michigan woman who had also volunteered as a nurse. Contemporary newspapers called Wheelock “the Florence Nightingale of Michigan.”
Anna Etheridge.
Some women, as shown, merited a pension for service in a Michigan regiment. For others, societal issues prevented them from receiving their just due. Their service is known only to God. One who deserved a different kind of recognition was Winifred Lee Brent. Under her married name of Mrs. Henry Lyster,71 she penned the words in late 1862 to “Michigan, My Michigan,” a musical piece commemorating the service of Michigan troops during the war. It would become an official state song. Recounting the scenes of the Peninsula Campaign (“from Yorktown on to Richmond’s walls”), Shiloh, Antietam and Fredericksburg, the lyrics hail those fighting in battle and those at home whose pride in their servicemen was mingled with loss.
Included is this salute to the fallen:
Their strong arms crumble in the dust,
And their bright swords have gathered rust;
Their memory is our sacred trust,
Michigan, my Michigan.
The final stanza reflects the pathos of war:
A grateful country claims them now,
Michigan, my Michigan,
And deathless laurel binds each brow,
Michigan, my Michigan;
And history the tale will tell,
Of how they fought and how they fell,
For that dear land they loved so well,
Michigan, my Michigan.
One woman who sought to hold high such a deathless laurel for her soldier husband was Elizabeth Bacon. Known as “Libbie,” the Monroe native married George Armstrong Custer in her hometown in the social event of 1864. Her war memoir was never written, but an actress who portrayed Libbie in twentieth century productions took diary entries, notes and manuscripts and stitched them into a unified, chronological whole.72 Although Mrs. Custer’s use of some terms betrays the racial prejudices of the era, her descriptions of the Boy General reveal a persona quite different from popular understanding: in place of the vainglorious and reckless image appears a much humbler individual born for warfare, yet considerate both of his men and captured former comrades at West Point. While one might chalk this imagery up to Libbie Custer’s attempt at rehabilitating a tarnished reputation after Little Big Horn, the texts of letters and other contemporary materials are corroborating evidence.
At the same time, frequent references to “my husband” rather than something more formal keep reminding the reader of the fondness she felt for her soldier spouse. Mrs. Custer never remarried after the events of June 25, 1876, spending over a half-century after his death cherishing his memory, writing about their life together, seeking to enshrine the Boy General who had led the Michigan Cavalry Brigade into action during the war for the Union. She was no junior partner. An historian would adjudge that “no scholar ever has or ever will undertake a biography of George Armstrong Custer without due attention to his marriage and the character of his wife.”73
One female contribution originated on July 20, 1861, the day before the Battle of First Bull Run, but concluded at war’s end. A community meeting held in Detroit that July day resolved “to erect a monument to our ‘heroic dead,’” but the lengthening magnitude of the conflict caused the project to be deferred. In July 1865, after collapse of the Confederacy, the monument effort resumed, with funds being sought from all elements of Michigan society. Chief among the supporters were “various auxiliary Ladies Monument Associations”74 whose carefully husbanded funds helped make the imposing Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Campus Martius a reality soon after.
Women made many and varied contributions to Michigan’s participation in the conflict. They served at home and at the front, doing their part for victory. Without their efforts, the state’s response would have suffered. The Michigan women of the Civil War era helped secure the Union’s triumph.