Hot Teen Military Gf Does It Again

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  Faced with an abusive begetter and the certainty of an arranged wedlock, Emma Edmonds fled her New Brunswick abode at age fifteen and later on assumed a masculine guise. She joined the Union Army when the Ceremonious State of war broke out in 1861. Her true sex remained undetected until illness ii years subsequently forced her to finish the charade.

  State Archives of Michigan / 02255

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  The stone church at Centreville, Virginia, where Emma tended wounded and dying soldiers after the Battle of Bull Run, July 1861.

  Drove of the New York Historical Society / 75139

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  In male attire, Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds sold Bibles in the northeastern United states of america under the proper noun Frank Thompson prior to enlisting for the Civil War. Edmonds resumed her female identity in the middle of the state of war to undergo treatment for malaria, then worked as a nurse until state of war's end. In 1867, she married fellow New Brunswicker Linus Seelye and had three sons. They lived in various parts of the U.S. before finally settling in La Porte,Texas, where she died in 1898.

  Clarke Historical Library / Central Michigan University

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  On September 17, 1862, in the Boxing of Antietam, 23,000 soldiers were killed or wounded—the bloodiest single-solar day battle in American history. The battle in Maryland, the beginning major Civil War date on Northern soil, halted Confederate general Robert E. Lee's bold invasion of the Due north and was a turning bespeak in the 4-year conflict.

  Collection of the New York Historical Society / 75140

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  According to her 1865 memoir, Nurse and Spy in the Matrimony Ground forces, from which this illustration is taken, Edmonds disguised herself as a black slave and passed into the Amalgamated camp.

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  According to the Edmonds memoir, some other cross-dressing soldier—earlier dying—told Emma that she had enlisted as a man to be nearer her only blood brother. To go on the secret, Edmonds agreed to bury the woman herself.

Would you lot even remotely consider impersonating and living every bit a member of the opposite sex—or every bit a member of a dissimilar race?

How near doing both at the same time, in a foreign country, in atmospheric condition of acute physical hardship, and with a likelihood of being maimed or coming together a tearing at any moment?

New Brunswick-born Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds did all of that.

Prior to and during the American Civil War, Canada served as a haven for escaped slaves, a base for Confederate covert operations, and a source of volunteers for both the Northern and Southern armies. An estimated 50,000 Canadians went south to fight, most of them intent upon ending the "peculiar institution"—slavery.

Emma was among them.

She was one of an estimated four hundred women who successfully disguised themselves as men and served in combat over the course of that bloody conflict, merely her graphic symbol and astonishing exploits split up her from all the residuum. Her memoir Nurse and Spy in the Wedlock Army, published in 1865, recounts the story of her remarkable life.

Built-in in 1841, infant Emma fell innocently afoul of her hard and uncompromising father who, in all matters, demanded immediate and complete submission from wife and children alike. Longing for a healthy son to brand up for Emma's epileptic older brother, he took instant and unforgiving umbrage at Emma's arriving with the wrong credentials.

Growing up on the family farm in the rural settlement of Magaguadavic about Fredericton, New Brunswick, Emma developed into an accomplished rider, a crevice shot, and a strong swimmer by her early teens. Energetic and adventurous, she sought out physical claiming and delighted in climbing to the tops of the tallest trees and buildings.

When she was nine years quondam, a peddler gave her a book nigh the adventures of Fanny Campbell, a teenage daughter who disguised herself equally a man and went sailing to detect and free her sweetheart from the clutches of a ruthless band of pirates. Fanny'due south exploits fired Emma's imagination.

At xv, facing the unwelcome prospect of an arranged matrimony to an older man, she ran away to live and work with a family friend, making ladies' hats in the boondocks of Salisbury. Inside a year, she was co-owner of a millinery shop in Moncton.

Learning of her whereabouts, Emma's begetter demanded that she return domicile, but Emma, peradventure inspired by Fanny Campbell, suddenly packed up, moved to Saint John, and there "disappeared" by assuming a male identity.

Most her disguise, Emma after explained, "I think I was born into this world with some dormant antagonism toward men—my babe soul was impressed with a sense of my mother's endured wrongs—and I probably drew from her chest with my daily food my love of independence and my hatred of male tyranny"

Cropping her fine, dark pilus, tanning her face with stain, and donning a suit of men'south clothing, Emma strode out into the world as "Frank Thompson" and landed a job equally an itinerant Bible salesman. Her Connecticut-based employer later claimed that of all the salesmen he'd hired over a flow of 30 years, no one ever outsold Frank Thompson.

By the fall of 1860, Emma had fabricated her style due west to Flint, Michigan, where salesman Frank quickly gained a reputation equally an upstanding young boyfriend. When the Civil War began April 12, 1861, twenty-year-sometime Emma was fired with loyalty toward her adopted country and went to Detroit to answer the phone call for volunteers.

The army's perfunctory enlistment physicals rarely required recruits to strip downwards. Then long every bit an aspiring bit of cannon forage wasn't blind, lame, missing limbs, or discipline to fits, bounty-paid recruiters were happy to speed them into a uniform.

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At first, five-foot, six-inch Frank Thompson was turned abroad for being shy of the army's height standard. Nevertheless, to advance President Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops, the standard was lowered a couple of weeks later, and Emma tried once again. Her physical consisted of little more than answering a few questions and demonstrating a firm handshake. On May 25, 1861, Emma proudly emerged onto the streets of Detroit as Private Frank Thompson, Company F, 2nd Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

Like most rural women of her time, Emma was physically stiff, used to the outdoors, and—unlike her city-bred fellow recruits—handy with firearms and at home with horses and mules.

With her regiment filled with hundreds of smooth-faced boys in loose, poorly fitted uniforms, Emma gained easy acceptance as Individual Frank Thompson. The prevailing standards of male modesty and hygiene helped her. as well. Sleeping fully clothed and bathing in undergarments were mutual amidst Civil War soldiers in the field. Shunning the foul-smelling, open-trench pits that passed for latrines, many sought the privacy of nearby woods and freshwater streams to attend to their personal needs. Emma attracted no notice past doing likewise.

When basic preparation was completed, she was assigned to duty as a male person nurse and postman for her brigade.

On July fifteen, 1861, the Second Michigan was ordered to Bull Run, a stream near the vital railhead at Manassas Junction, Virginia, where Confederate troops were known to be converging.

Half-dozen days later, Emma was initiated into the realities of war. Standing shoulder to shoulder in the blue ranks, she withstood the trauma of howling arms shells slicing bloody lanes through meaty masses of men, tossing body parts, viscera, and broken weapons and equipment high in the air.

The battle, which had begun at six in the morning, turned into a disastrous rout for the Union by four in the afternoon, and Emma establish herself pushing through the wreck of the retreating ground forces. At a stone church that had been converted into an emergency field infirmary, she encountered fly-ridden heaps of amputated limbs, mutilated flesh, and dead bodies, and volunteered to tend wounded and dying soldiers.

Afterward she wrote that she had "gone to the war with no other ambition than to nurse the sick and intendance for the wounded. I had inherited from my mother a rare gift of nursing, and when non besides weary or exhausted, in that location was a magnetic power in my hands to soothe the delirium."

In the days following the battle, the beaten remnants of the Marriage army straggled into Washington. With victorious Southern flags fluttering within piece of cake sight, citizens feared imminent invasion and government government contemplated evacuation.

Arriving in the beleaguered city in search of her comrades, Emma visited temporary hospitals, gave care to friends and strangers alike, and penned letters for the many too weak to do information technology for themselves. She wrote that "that extraordinary march from Bull Run, through rain, mud and chagrin, did more toward filling the hospitals than did the battle itself. There are groovy strong men dying all effectually me, and while I write, in that location are three being carried past the window to the dead room."

Inside weeks of the disastrous battle, President Lincoln appointed a new military machine commander, General George B. McClellan, who began whipping the disorganized mobs of soldiers into an army again. As the Northern divisions regained their warlike spirit, Emma found a new conviction. She was appointed postmaster of her brigade and she routinely galloped xl kilometres a day to pick upward and deliver bags of letters and packages. It was unsafe work, and on 1 occasion she rode through papers strewn over the very footing where a young man postman had been ambushed and shot the day before.

Emma successfully soldiered through the great Virginia campaigns of 1862, including the bloodbaths at the battles of 2d Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Antietam, where the Union regiments were savagely raked and winnowed.

When a Union amanuensis was hanged for spying, she volunteered to take his place. Though interviewed by a panel of high-ranking officers for the dangerous piece of work, she nevertheless managed to muffle her true sex. Ever resourceful, she shaved her head, blackened her peel with silver nitrate, donned a plantation suit and a curly black wig, and passed into the Confederate camp at Yorktown equally a slave answering to the name "Cuff."

Mingling with a gang of black labourers, she hauled wheelbarrows of gravel to workers atop an eight-foot wall. The hot, sweaty work caused the silver nitrate to begin to fade. At 1 bespeak, a slave pointed at Emma and exclaimed, "Durned if'n that feller ain't turnin' white." Quick-witted Emma countered, "I've always expected to come up white, my mother's a white adult female."

Afterwards a day of manhandling heavy loads of gravel, Emmas wrists and hands were horribly blistered, but she saved herself past talking some other slave into irresolute jobs with her. For the next two days Emma moved about the campsite as a water bearer, all the time watching, listening, and fifty-fifty managing to make rough sketches of the enemy fortifications.

Overhearing someone loudly haranguing a grouping of soldiers in a familiar voice, she recognized the speaker as a peddler who visited the Union lines once a week to sell newspapers and stationery. He was describing the Northern army camp in detail, using a map displaying its layout and troop dispositions. "He was a blighted homo from that moment," Emma subsequently remembered. "His life was non worth 3 cents."

During the night of the tertiary day, she was surprised to exist handed a musket and told to take a position on the watch line. When an opportune moment arrived. Cuff slipped away in the darkness and, rebel musket in hand, made a safe return to her own headquarters. Assisted by the data provided by Emma, General McClellan bombarded the Confederate fortifications with such accurateness that the rebels were before long forced to abandon them.

On other occasions, Emma slipped across enemy lines as an Irish gaelic immigrant woman and equally a black female slave. In the latter guise, complete with calico bandana, she once concluded upwards cooking rations at Confederate headquarters, inside watching distance of Confederate commander Full general Robert E. Lee.

At the bloody Battle of Antietam, Emma came across a young soldier, severely wounded in the neck and nearly death. Every bit she gave him comfort, the youth confided that he was actually a female person, enlisted as a human being to be near her merely blood brother, who had been killed earlier in the day. To protect the underground according to the youth's dying wish, Emma cached her nearby, "without bury or shroud, only a blanket for a winding sheet" With poetry, she gave expression to the eye-rending experience:

Her race is run. In southern clime, She rests among the brave;
Where perfumed blossoms gently fall, Like tears, around her grave.
No loving friends are near to cry, Or plant bright flowers there;
But hirdlings chant a requiem sweet, And strangers breathe a prayer.
She sleeps in peace; yes sweetly sleeps. Her sorrows are all o'er;
With her the storms of life are past: She's found the heavenly shore.

On March 20, 1863, Emma was transferred to Louisville, Kentucky. Bearded every bit a young Kentucky lad, she went spying again. Arriving at an outlying village, she institute a wedding in progress. The bridegroom was a helm of insubordinate cavalry on the lookout for likely recruits. Stopping to ask for a bite to eat, Emma was noticed past the captain and found herself conscripted into a unit of measurement of mounted rebel troops.

Next day, outfitted as a Confederate trooper, she rode out to engage the Yankees. "I did not despair," Emma afterwards wrote, "but trusted in Providence and my own ingenuity to escape from this dilemma."

Encountering a detachment of Union cavalry, a fight bankrupt out. In the melee, Emma contrived for her horse to become unmanageable and appear to accidentally send her beyond Union lines. Luckily, in one case across, she was recognized and protected.

Returning to the fight, Emma was spotted by the captain who had forced her into insubordinate service. Enraged and determined to skewer her on the point of his sabre, he charged, but to receive the contents of Emma'due south pistol in his face up. "This human activity made me the eye of attention," Emma recalled. "Every rebel seemed determined to take the pleasance of killing me first. I escaped without receiving a scratch, merely my horse was badly cutting across the neck with a sabre."

Although commended for her performance, Emma was barred from spying in the area again lest she exist recognized and hanged from the nearest tree. She observed, "Not having whatever detail fancy for such an exalted position, I turned my attention to more quiet and less dangerous duties."

However, Emma had one more mission to perform before retiring from espionage—to aid break up a Confederate spy band operating out of Spousal relationship-occupied Louisville. Passing herself off as "Charles Mayberry," she got herself a menial job with a local merchant of rabidly outspoken southern views.

Over a number of weeks, Emma gained the merchant's trust and feigned an involvement in enlisting in the Confederate service. The merchant obligingly introduced her to a Confederate agent who in turn told her nigh a sutler spying for the S while selling supplies to Union soldiers, and about a second southern agent who came and went as a photographer selling pictures to Union generals.

With Emma's data, the Louisville spy band was duly put out of business. Afterwards, in 1863, while posted to a military machine infirmary near Vicksburg, Mississippi, Emma contracted malaria. Unable to acknowledge herself for handling for fear of betraying her true sex, she travelled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she put on a clothes and checked into a hospital.

Cured and on her way back to her unit a few weeks later on, Emma was shocked to come across an army message posted in the window of a paper office that listed her nom de guerre, Frank Thompson, as a deserter. The offence was punishable by death.

With her military career finished, Emma used the last of her funds to become by train to Washington where, as Sarah Edmonds, she worked as a nurse for the United states of america Christian Sanitary Commission until the end of the state of war. In 1865, Emma recorded her ceremonious war experiences in a memoir titled Nurse and Spy in the Union Army: Comprising the Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps and Battlefields. It became a bestseller, and Emma donated all of her royalty earnings to the U.Due south. State of war Relief Fund.

Homesick for Canada, she returned for a visit, accompanied past Linus Seelye, a fellow New Brunswicker whom she'd met and fallen in dearest with while nursing in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1864. She and Linus were married in 1867 and raised three sons, one of whom enlisted in the U.Southward. Army "but like Mama did."

In 1883, Emma visited Flint, Michigan, and looked up an old army pal, Damon Stewart. Finding him behind a desk-bound in his dry goods store, Emma asked if he might know the present whereabouts of Frank Thompson.

Damon asked, "Are you his female parent?"

"No, I'k not his mother," Emma answered.

"His sister, perhaps?" Damon ventured.

Emma took a pencil from Damon's hand and wrote, "Exist quiet. I am Frank Thompson!"

"What did I exercise adjacent?" Damon later recalled to a Flint paper reporter. "Sat down. I think, wilted." Of Emma, he said, "She was as tranquil and cocky-possessed equally ever my fiddling friend Frank had been."

When questioned most ever having suspected Frank Thompson'due south real sex activity, Damon answered, "Never! We jested about the ridiculous piddling boots and chosen Frank our 'piddling woman,' but he took it all in good part."

Conveying the brand of deserter had never settled well with Emma. On her behalf, Damon contacted other men of the onetime Second Michigan, told them that Frank Thompson had turned up, and that Frank was a adult female named Emma Seelye. He asked them to join a writing campaign to seek recognition of Emma'south war service. With the added support of former officers and other prominent men who'd known and served with her, a sizable petition was assembled and submitted to the U.S. War Section.

Past a special human activity of the Congress, passed on July 5, 1884, Emma Edmonds was granted an honourable discharge from the United States Ground forces "for her sacrifice in the line of duty, her first-class record equally a soldier, her unblemished character, and disabilities incurred in the service." She as well received a modest greenbacks bonus and a veteran's pension of twelve dollars a month.

After residing in various U.Southward. states, Emma and Linus finally settled in La Porte, Texas. There, by virtue of her discharge and veteran's pension, she was duly accepted every bit a total member of the G Army of the Democracy, the Union army veterans' organization. She is the only woman always to exist and so honoured.

Her last years were plagued with illness—attributed to the extreme conditions and exertions of her state of war years. They were likewise hard financially; sometimes she was nearly destitute.

On the morn of September 5, 1898, Emma'southward dog, Jack, barked an alarm. Emma had succumbed to a stroke. First cached at La Porte, Emma's remains were disinterred and conveyed to nearby Houston in 1901. At that place, amid the rhythmic Memorial 24-hour interval thump of muffled drums, she was buried in the military section of Washington Cemetery—the but female person permitted eternal balance in the Ceremonious War veterans' plot.

In 1988, Emma's courage, daring, and contribution to the Union'southward espionage and military fronts were honoured by her consecration into both the Us Armed services Intelligence Hall of Fame and the State of Michigan Women's Hall of Fame. In her own state, she was elected to New Brunswick's Hall of Fame in 1990.

Although devoted to the crusade of her adopted country; Emma always remained a Canadian—heart and soul. Enjoying an off-duty tour of the Senate chamber while on furlough in Washington during the summertime of 1862, her memoir records that she came upon 2 paintings depicting respectively the surrenders of Lord Cornwallis and General Burgoyne to American forces during the Revolutionary War.

Her Canadian blood ran hot equally she took in the portrayals of Britannia in defeat. "I felt a warm electric current of blood rush to my face every bit I contemplated the humiliating scene—the spirit of Johnny Bull triumphed over my Yankee predilections—and I left the building with feelings of humiliation and disgust."

Today, ane can easily pass through the older section of Houston'south Washington Cemetery and interruption to admire a certain beautiful oak tree without noticing the pocket-size, weathered marker that lies close beneath it. The eroded letters, barely traceable beyond the pitted, limestone surface, herald the life of a heroic Canadian who helped preserve the U.s. and free a people from slavery': Emma East. Seelye, Army Nurse.

Women Soldiers in the Civil War

Why did so many women, up to 250 in the Confederate armies and 400 in the Spousal relationship, disguise themselves as men to fight in the American Civil War?

Women played prominent roles during the war as nurses, cooks, laundresses, and camp followers. Sometimes they even establish it necessary to take up arms and defend themselves when caught in the thick of fighting. All of these roles were accustomed, even honoured, by the soldiers and the public.

The instance was different for those women who disguised themselves as men in order to fight. If discovered at all, they were discharged and presumed to be of questionable moral character. Their bravery in battle was oft forgotten in favour of the sensational story of their cross-dressing. These women were viewed equally aberrations, and nevertheless it is speculated that hundreds served in the war this manner. Clearly this miracle was not and then isolated as is generally assumed.

The image of the woman warrior is non uncommon. Many precedents appear in the myths and histories of diverse cultures throughout fourth dimension. Though the Amazons and Joan of Arc are virtually well known, others be. Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine led a force of women dressed equally men, armed and on horseback, in the Second Crusade of the 12th century. In the eighteenth century a British woman, Mary Read, disguised as a man, served in the infantry and the cavalry in the State of war of the Spanish Succession before becoming a pirate. Deborah Sampson, Margaret Corbin, and Nancy Hart all fought in the American Revolution.

Cross-dressing women warriors also existed in the literature of the era. Maturin Murray Ballou's Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain was published in 1845. The Female Volunteer, published 1851, detailed the exploits of a adult female who fought in the Mexican War. During the Civil War, novels such equally The Lady Lieutenant: The Strange and Thrilling Adventures of Madeline Moore and Dora, The American Amazon were popular.

Though many women joined the state of war endeavor disguised as men for the love of a human, the honey of run a risk, or the love of land, historian Elizabeth Leonard speculates a fourth motivation: money. Records point that a large portion of Civil State of war women were from less affluent backgrounds and may take appreciated the opportunities afforded by fighting the state of war every bit men. Immigrants, working-form women, and subcontract girls—women accepted to hard piece of work—were more apt to sign up to fight than middle-grade women, who opted more often to become nurses.

Why did so many women choose to fight in the Ceremonious War? For the same reasons equally the men—adventure, patriotism, a sense of duty. Some women followed lovers or husbands or brothers; some wanted to escape oppressive and confining domestic situations and ameliorate their circumstances, both socially and financially.

Both Union and Amalgamated armies became increasingly desperate for volunteers as the war progressed, and it is conceivable that some soldiers chose to turn a blind middle to their effeminate comrades. The elementary human activity of cut their hair short and donning pants gave these women a freedom they had never known, a freedom they had simply imagined.

— Sarah Burton

Et cetera

Memoirs of a Soldier, Nurse and Spy: A Woman'south Adventures in the Marriage Army by South. Emma E. Edmonds, introduction by Elizabeth D. Leonard. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois, 1999.

All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil State of war Armies by Elizabeth D. Leonard. Due west.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1999.

Patriots in Disguise: Women Warriors of the Civil War by Richard Hall. Marlowe & Co., New York, 1994.

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Source: https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/women/soldier-girl-the-emma-edmonds-story

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