Talk:Sarah Emma Edmonds

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See Wikipedia talk:Edit war for a case study of a ridiculous edit war.

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This article really needs more info. I'm currently working on a history fair project about her, and I've found that there's a lot of info that's not in this article that should be. I've made just about all of the recent edits, including the addition of several new sources. Please, please look into them and add more info to this aticle so it doesn't have to be so bare-bones.69.151.247.125 23:17, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Poor article

It's very badly written. For example what does this mean:

There are also speculations that Edmonds may have deserted because of John Reid having been discharged months earlier. There is proof in his diary that she had mentioned leaving before she had contracted malaria.

There is no further mention of John Reid in the article?? It's either bogus or needs clarification by someone who knows this topic!

This article is unfortunately typical of the combitionation of a little truth and a lot of myth that surrounds the Sarah Emma Edmonds/Franklin Thompson tale.

First, "Nurse and Spy" is a work of fiction and wartime propaganda, and the spy adventures Edmonds wove into the story are demonstrably untrue. Yes, she served in the army; no, she was not a spy. Yes, she enlisted in the 2nd Michigan Infantry as a nurse and mail carrier up to her desertion in April of 1863; no, her gender was not a secret to all the men with whom she served.

The Edmonds spy story myth was solidly addressed in the 1990s in a real, serious and accurate study of Civil War intelligence by Edwin Fischel. He notes that Emma's absurd "report" of a major Confederate report to Gen George McClellan during the Peninsula Campaign was a work of fiction, that no such fort existed; and that there is no record of Franklin Thompson in the extensive intelligence papers and reports that exist for McClellan and Allan Pinkerton during the campaign.

Yet Fischel's research is constantly ignored or played down by writers of popular history. Quoting "Nurse and Spy" regarding Emma's adventures is akin to quoting a Superman comic book.

Emma's subsequent stories of spy and counter-spy in her book are even more ridiculous, and they continue to points in the Civil War AFTER she had really deserted from the army. Please, people, read "Nurse and Spy." It is not biographical at all, though its setting, against the backdrop of the 2nd Michigan's travels with the Army of the Potomac and then in Kentucky and the western theater of the war, is factual. The story itself is 19th century ficition, romantic, sentimental, filled with improbable if not impossible coincidences. It is a work of propanda, the sales of which were used to benefit sick and wounded Unon soldiers.

Again, let me stress: to quote Nurse and Spy as if it was an actual record of Emma Edmonds' experiences in the war is like quoting "The Night Before Christmas" to prove the existance of Santa Claus.

The Jerome Robbins diary at the University of Michigan Bently Library is proof that it took a man assigned to live and work with Franklin Thompson in the regimental hospital a matter of a couple of days to figure out that 'Frank has a secret' and a couple of more to know that Frank was female.

The diary shows fairly conclusively that Frank deserted in April of 1863 after the resignations of her regimental-then-brigade commander, Col. Orlando Poe, and her most recent close friend, Major James Reid of the 79th New York, a brigade officer. If Frank Thompson deserted because of illness, it seems very probable that Robbins would have recorded this. He did not, instead expressing comments on disappoinment, human nature and betrayal.

The Robbins diary makes plain the jealousy Frank felt when Robbins heard from his girlfriend at home, while Robbins was jealous of the attention paid Frank by Major Reid. The diary and letters to Robbins from Emma clearly indicate that Reid also knew her "secret." The diary of another Michigan soldier named Boston in the brigade with the 2nd Michigan makes clear that soldiers in their brigade were openly gossiping and laughing about Frank's desertion and supposed involvement with Reid. Clearly, the fact that Frank was a female WAS NOT A SECRET.

Emma would later claim that A) she had malarial fevers and had to desert rather than risk discovery and B) that she suffered heart, liver and kidney disease and other afflictions as a result of her mule falling on her while carrying mail. This later claim was made late in her life when she asked for an increase in her monthly pension. This was unsuccessful. Her penion records make clear the War Deparment noted there was no medical record from the war about this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Veritas109 (talk • contribs) 17:34, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Pre-war spy?

'Frank Thompson's career took a turn before the war when a Union spy in Richmond, Virginia was discovered and went before a firing squad...'

Presumably, before the war, nobody could be described as a 'Union spy', and there would have been no authority to execute them. Valetude (talk) 18:57, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

The myth of Sarah Emma Edmonds

The story of Sarah Emma Edmonds, the young woman who posed as a man and enlisted in the 2nd Michigan Infantry Regiment under the name Franklin Thompson, is enshrined in popular history and Civil War lore, repeated in classrooms by educators and republished regularly in pop biographies. In numerous books and articles and on scores of web sites, Edmonds is remembered as a heroic soldier for joining the Union Army, and according to her own account, venturing in disguise behind Confederate lines, spying for Union generals.

But only a fraction of this story is accurate, and her espionage tales are fiction.

The truth of Edmonds’ story is easily understood if one looks at her actual service record; her pension file; orders that she kept for the rest of her life and transcribed and published; the records of her regiment; and the Civil War diary of her comrade Jerome Robbins and two letters she wrote to him. These show Edmonds did join the 2nd Michigan Infantry Regiment in Detroit, posing as a man; that there were at least two men and probably others who knew Franklin Thompson was a woman, including an officer who was involved in some sort of relationship with her; that she was assigned to work first as a hospital attendant; then as a regimental mail carrier/postmaster and then as her brigade’s mail carrier; and lastly as an orderly to her commanding officer.

Each of these assignments took her out of the day-to-day life in the ranks of her regiment and afforded her more privacy and independence than typical privates had. There is no question that one of them, Lt. James Reid of the 79th New York, had a hand in her assignments and that he knew very well that Frank Thompson was a young woman.

This record is clear that Edmonds did not desert from her regiment because she was ill and would have been discovered had she been examined by doctors, as she would later claim; that shortly after she deserted she wrote her bestselling wartime adventure, Nurse and Spy; and that it became part and parcel of her legend when she emerged publicly in the 1880s to say that she had served as soldier Franklin Thompson, and applied for a pension from the U.S. government.

The evidence of her real story, outlined here, is generally ignored or downplayed by authors and biographers who repeat accounts in her book as though they were factual. But not all. Notable is the study by author and researcher Edwin Fishel, who wrote the standard reference on Civil War military intelligence. After more than three decades of research, he flatly asserted that Edmonds “was never a spy.” Beyond the claims made in her 1864 book, The Female Spy of the Union Army (bettered remembered by the title Nurse and Spy), there is no account, report or evidence from the war indicating her exploits actually happened. Fishel’s papers reflect his study and analysis of thousands of pages of intelligence reports and generals’ papers, fact-checking her book against these primary sources.

Twenty years after she wrote her book, Edmonds admitted after a fashion that her accounts weren’t really what she experienced. “Can that [Nurse and Spy] be regarded as authentic?” an interviewer asked Edmonds in 1883.

“Not strictly so,” Edmonds answered. “Still most of the experiences recorded were either MY own or came under my observation. I would like, however, to write differently of that portion of my life.” That statement is significant, and will be revisited later in this discussion.

Let’s start with her book. Only the most naïve modern reader would believe this farfetched adventure. Today any objective reader will find a heavily religious work of wartime propaganda – a patriotic and romantic melodrama with hair-breadth escapes, stolen secrets, far-fetched coincidences, deathbed salvations and declarations of Christian faith, noble heroes and vile villains – essentially, a mid-19th century adventure novel, woven around actual Civil War events and occurrences, personalities and battles. Edmonds’ narrative generally followed her regiment, first in the Army of the Potomac in 1861 and 1862, and then in the western theater to the fall of Vicksburg – something she says in her book that she witnessed, but one that happened some three months after she deserted from the army.

Remarkably, Edmonds wrote nothing in her book of how she enlisted in the 2nd Michigan posing as a man. That true story was simply not told. Instead, Edmonds set up her narrative with the notion that she is a young woman joining the war effort as an army “field nurse.” Her alias, Franklin Thompson, wasn’t mentioned in these ostensible war experiences, and she made only partial, incomplete references to the identity of her regiment. Thus the story of how Edmonds really managed to serve in the army went untold in her book, and her self-proclaimed adventures had nothing to do with her actual military service. Yet her book has continued to be accepted as if true, despite its huge and numerous fictions, factual problems, and inconsistencies.

How did this happen? While Nurse and Spy wasn’t anything like a realistic account of Edmonds’ service, it was presented as nonfiction when published in 1864. And it was a commercial success, reportedly selling 175,000 copies. It was nearly twenty years later that it publicly emerged an obscure soldier named Franklin Thompson was really a woman who served and deserted from the 2nd Michigan.

Thompson’s real identity, Sarah Emma Edmonds, wasn’t even mentioned when Michigan’s military administrator, Adjutant General John Robertson, included an anecdote about the mysterious female soldier in his 1880 book about the state’s contributions in the Civil War. But Robertson, in describing Frank Thompson, ascribed to her cloak-and-dagger missions of the sort that appeared in Edmonds’ fictional Nurse and Spy. The fact that Michigan’s adjutant general linked soldier Frank Thompson to Civil War espionage has been taken by Edmonds’ supporters as proof that her spy adventures were factual. In truth, Robertson, Michigan’s state military administrator, would have had no direct knowledge of Union military intelligence in Virginia in 1862. But by the time Edmonds deserted in 1863 there were hundreds of Union soldiers who heard the story that Frank Thompson was a woman and at least two of them knew her real identity. One of them, Michigan’s Jerome Robbins, certainly knew that his friend Frank/Emma became a bestselling author after her desertion. A small town physician after the war, Robbins attended numerous regimental reunions as did thousands of other ex-soldiers. That the state’s adjutant general would have heard about this mix of fact and fiction regarding Edmonds’s real service and ostensible espionage is hardly surprising.

Unfortunately for history, Robertson published that anecdote about Frank Thompson in his book, and helped to create and “verify” a Civil War myth. Two years after the story of that female soldier and spy appeared in Robertson’s Michigan in the War, Edmonds, now a wife and mother in Kansas with the last name Seelye, came forward to say she had been Frank Thompson. This was a sensation when it appeared in newspapers in 1883.

Soon after Edmonds was approved for a pension and her desertion record removed through acts of Congress, based on the enthusiastic statements of several former comrades. These men stated that they didn’t know Frank Thompson was a woman, while Edmonds herself said that she had to desert from her regiment in April, 1863 because she was sick and would have been discovered had she been examined by doctors.

This claim – that she had to desert rather than risk a medical exam, like her secret service adventures – wasn’t true. But it was not challenged by anyone who knew the real story, and thus it became part of the heroic Frank Thompson-Emma Edmonds story. The mixing of these elements – Edmonds’ real but essentially untold experience of serving as a soldier, revealed in the 1880s; her best-selling wartime book with its espionage tales; and questionable claims in her later pension applications – combined to form a legendary story that continues to flourish.

THE EVIDENCE

Consider the notion in most pop histories and biographies that Edmonds went undiscovered while she posed as male soldier, that no one knew her secret. This was not true, as evidenced by the Civil War diary kept by one of Edmonds’ comrades, as well as letters she wrote to this man during the war. These showed the “secret” that Frank Thompson was a woman was not a secret to him, and there was also indications that others knew. When she deserted, soldiers were actually laughing and gossiping about Frank, the girl mail carrier.

“Though never frankly asserted by her, it will be understood that my friend Frank is a female….” wrote Jerome Robbins, a religious and literate young soldier in the 2nd Michigan, shortly after he was assigned to work in the regimental hospital with Thompson in the fall of 1861. Robbins used the pronouns “her” and “she” when recording the truth, but then switched back to referring to Frank as if male, sometimes underlining pronouns “he,” “his,” and “him,” knowing that Frank was a woman but going along with the charade in case someone read his diary.

Then there were Edmonds’ own words. Three months before she deserted from her regiment in Kentucky, she wrote Robbins a letter late in 1862 which she signed “Your loving friend Emma.” This letter, a kind of “if only we had met under different circumstances” missive, showed that Edmonds had been smitten with Robbins and had long since stopped pretending about her gender to him.

Going back to the fall of 1861, Robbins’ diary showed they were close, sharing discussions of their Christian faith, going for walks and attending prayer meetings. But theirs was a rocky friendship (or relationship), and at times they weren’t speaking; they could be comically jealous of each other. When Robbins received letters from a young woman in Michigan (or when he wrote back to her), he recorded that his friend Frank was unhappy. Late in 1862 on into early 1863, after Robbins was away for his regiment for months, his diary showed that Frank had become close to an officer, James Reid of the 79th New York, a regiment in the same brigade as the 2nd Michigan. Robbins was sometimes perturbed at the attention paid to his friend, describing Frank as Reid’s “pet.”

Lt. Reid, like Robbins, was a significant figure in the real Edmonds story, and evidence shows he also knew the truth. Reid served as a staff officer in the brigade commanded by Col. Orlando Poe of the 2nd Michigan. These two men were close to Edmonds; Reid shared a tent with her. As her last superior officers, Poe and Reid had assigned her to be the brigade postmaster and orderly serving Poe. But both officers resigned their commissions for different reasons, with Poe departing their encampment at Lebanon, Kentucky on April 10 or 11, 1863. Reid left ten days later.

Robbins’ diary shows that a few days after Poe left, with Reid’s departure imminent, his friend Frank/Emma no longer had the freedom and access to brigade headquarters she enjoyed previously. He noted that Thompson was stopped by a sentry – something that had not happened when Poe was in command. When she appealed to another colonel about her treatment, she was denied. With Poe and Reid no longer in charge, Edmonds, in the guise of Frank Thompson, faced the prospect of going back to the ranks. By the time Robbins recorded this incident, Edmonds had already deserted, just two or three days before Reid left camp.

Robbins expressed disgust after Edmonds deserted. He noted that “Lieut. Reid, Frank’s particular friend,” boarded a train on April 20. Edmonds had been missing for about three days, and now Robbins learned from the departing Reid it was true that “Frank has deserted for which I do not blame him. His was a strange history.” In the sentences that followed, Robbins complained about Frank’s “ingratitude” and that “he [Emma/Frank] was the last I deemed capable of the petty baseness which was betrayed by his friend R[eid] at the last minute.” Robbins didn’t say what Edmonds’ “petty baseness” was, but he felt betrayed. “I am excited to pity that poor humanity can be so weak as to repay kindness, interest, and the warmest sympathy with deception, almost every petty attribute of a selfish heart,” he complained.

Edmonds would later claim in alternate pension applications that, first, she was very sick, and second, physically injured at the time of her desertion. While Robbins recorded Frank had been sick early in April, his bitter description of her desertion two weeks later says nothing about illness or incapacity, but something much more personal, and that involved James Reid.

Rumors quickly circulated in their brigade about Frank Thompson and Reid and Poe, harsh but humorous to the soldiers. “We are having quite a time at the expense of our brigade postmaster,” wrote William Boston, a soldier in the 20th Michigan. “He turns out to be a girl, and has deserted when his lover, Inspector Read [sic] and General Poe resigned.” Though Boston got Thompson’s last name wrong, he was clearly referring to Emma Edmonds. Boston’s commander, Col. Byron Cutcheon, would later, as a member of Congress, shepherd through laws to grant Edmonds a pension. But he made clear that by December 1862, soldiers “suspected and discussed in the brigade that Frank Thompson was a girl.” This was four months before her desertion.

There were more words from Edmonds disproving her later desertion story. In a letter to Robbins about three weeks after she left the army, she indicated she had traveled from her regiment’s camp in Kentucky to Sandusky, Ohio, and then to Washington, where she visited wounded soldiers; she told Robbins she was about to leave for New York and considering joining a foreign mission. This was not a woman who was so ill or crippled by injury that she would have been discovered had she stayed in the army. Edmonds was making rigorous travels, visiting wounded men, and well enough to consider missionary work.

Edmonds had also remained heard from James Reid, who obviously knew how to reach her after they had both left the army. “He says he wants me to come & visit his wife who is very anxious to meet me,” Edmonds continued in what may be one of oddest comments in the surviving record of her Civil War experience. By this point in May, 1863, Edmonds had resumed her female identity and befriended a young woman, “Lizzie H.” from Ohio, whose brother was in the hospital at Alexandria, Va. Still, Edmonds wanted to know about the conversation Robbins and Reid had about her before Reid left the army: “Reid seems to think that you are the only friend I have in camp,” she wrote. “It may be so but I had hoped that I had one or two more at least. I think I am more fortunate in making friends now than when you knew me.” Edmonds noted that it was pleasant to once again have a female friend.

What should be made of Edmonds’ comments? Of her own seemingly sarcastic remark to Robbins that she had more “friends” in the army than just him? Consider that two decades later, when Edmonds applied for a pension, several former comrades spoke of their regard and fondness for Frank Thompson, and what a faithful soldier Frank had been. A woman who identified herself as Mrs. D. McConkey, supporting Edmonds’ claim in the 1890s, told of dealing with Edmonds in Oberlin, Ohio, in both her male and female guises in 1863. McConkey indicated that Edmonds was outgoing and personable, quickly befriending the local family of “Miss H.,” and traveling with her to Washington to see her brother in the hospital, just as Edmonds’ letter of May 1863 indicated.

It seems obvious that Edmonds had more than “one or two more (friends)” during her time in the army. She proved affable, persuasive and impressive both as Thompson and as herself. Was her comment to Robbins really about the number of her friends in the regiment, or about those with whom she had shared her secret? While we can’t know, it is nonetheless true that at the point Edmonds deserted, scores if not hundreds of soldiers in their brigade were talking about her, according to William Boston. Her “secret” was out, the subject of soldiers’ gossip.

Late in her life, when Edmonds Seelye (her married name) sought an increase in the pension granted her by the U.S. Congress, she asked former comrade R.H. Halstead to revise the affidavit he’d given on her behalf, instructing him to say “with a clear conscience” that he hadn’t known Thompson’s real gender during the war. “Just after the statement ‘she was my bunkmate a considerable portion of the time’ please just add – But I never knew that she was a woman,” she directed Halstead. Having this specific language in a similar statement from a former commander, Orlando Poe, was critical, she wrote, in her being given a pension.

One of Edmonds’ last army assignments, according to Poe and Jerome Robbins, was that she also served the colonel as an orderly – a soldier attending a commanding officer as a kind of servant/runner. Yet Poe, like other supporters, insisted he hadn’t known Thompson was female, though adding that, in retrospect, he should have recognized that this was the case. Historian Betty Fladeland, who examined the Edmonds story in the 1960s, thought the truthfulness of these men’s statements was very much in question, and that they were supporting an old friend’s pension request as a favor, understanding that Edmonds couldn’t get the stipend without their help, and not being able to admit publicly that they knew or suspected Thompson was a woman.

WOMEN IN THE 2ND MICHIGAN

Then what was true about Emma Edmonds? It is generally accepted that she was a dramatic and determined young woman of about 20 (but really, perhaps 23 or 24), a New Brunswick native who had been disguising herself as a man, selling books and using the alias Frank Thompson for about four years by the time the Civil War began; that she lived in the Flint area and northern Oakland County as she sold books; that she enlisted at Detroit in Company F of the 2nd Michigan in May of 1861; and that she deserted in 1863.

But a key circumstance for Edmonds in the first months of the war is always unaddressed by her biographers. It has been generally assumed that Edmonds was soldiering in a world of men, where there were no women. What is always neglected in the story of Edmonds’ service is that 20 women joined the 2nd Michigan as volunteer nurses when the war began, though their numbers soon diminished. At a time when it was considered shocking for a young woman to go off and join several hundred men, these volunteers (like Edmonds herself) were throwing off convention, called by patriotism and Christian faith to service and duty.

One of the 2nd Michigan’s nurses, Anna Etheridge, became a national hero during the Civil War, decorated for her dedicated service with Michigan outfits in the Army of the Potomac. Another nurse from the 2nd Michigan, Jane Hinsdale, was credited for bravely walking into Confederate lines, trying to find her soldier-husband after the first Battle of Bull Run. She helped wounded soldiers who had been captured, and reportedly came back to Union lines with information about the strength and disposition of Confederate forces.

Also with the regiment during the early part of the war was the young wife of the 2nd Michigan’s first commander, Col. Israel Richardson, described by one medical officer as strong willed and independent minded while accompanying husband’s regiment early in the war. Edmonds made reference to riding with Mrs. Richardson toward Bull Run in the summer of 1861 in one of her book’s anecdotes that is actually confirmed by another account.

These volunteer nurses and the colonel’s wife were determined women initially serving with Frank Thompson, who spent much of the first year of the war assigned as a nurse (albeit a presumed male nurse) in the regimental hospital. There is no specific record as to how long these women were with the 2nd Michigan, or for their toilet and bathing facilities while encamped near thousands of men, but their privacy would not have been left to chance. Certainly these included covered privies and tents for bathing.

Consider again the postwar statement of Mrs. McConkey, who said she ran the boarding house in Ohio where Frank Thompson landed after deserting in 1863. McConkey, in a statement sent to a Michigan congressman, noted that Edmonds easily switched her hair style and clothing, posing alternately as “cousins” Emma Edmonds and Frank Thompson. McConkey said that Edmonds enjoyed shocking two new friends (in this case, both women) by revealing that young Mr. Frank Thompson was not a man, but Emma in disguise.

Obviously there is no way to know if Edmonds shared the secret of Frank Thompson with the female nurses of the 2nd Michigan during the early months of the war, or if they came to realize that Thompson was a woman. But it is worth noting that it took her new friend Jerome Robbins a matter of days to realize in the fall of 1861 that there was a “mystery” surrounding Frank Thompson, with the secret being discovered or revealed to him within about two weeks. If the women of the 2nd Michigan knew Edmonds’ secret in the first weeks and months of the war, it would have allowed her to hide in plain sight with access to personal privacy while in camp – something that would have otherwise been virtually impossible in a place where bathing for soldiers was communal, in the nearest creek or spring, and where men relieved themselves in “sinks” or slit trenches according to regulations.

A SOLDIER’S RECORD

Other than Jerome Robbins’ diary and the two surviving letters Edmonds wrote him, the most important primary source in the real story of Emma Edmonds is the service of Frank Thompson as preserved in the rolls of the 2nd Michigan’s Company F, and the service record compiled by the War Department. These show that in about a month’s time of the 2nd Michigan arriving in Washington, Thompson was assigned to be a nurse in the regimental hospital. Near the end of her nurse posting, Frank was sent to a general hospital at Georgetown. Frank Thompson’s nurse assignment lasted until mid-February of 1862.

Thompson’s assignment is significant, since those soldiers ordered by their officers to work as nurses and hospital attendants were often those who were themselves convalescents, weak or poor enough examples of soldiers that they were not missed in the ranks. This is a matter of record. Certainly it is possible that Edmonds was assigned to the hospital not because surgeons and officers suspected the youthful soldier was a woman, but because they felt Thompson was too young to be in the ranks, or that “he” was empathetic and better at helping sick men. However it was decided, the order to work as nurse took her out of the ranks and certainly allowed her more privacy than other soldiers had, with late-shift working hours and a degree of separation of the regimental hospital from the rest of camp. Her assignment to a general hospital near Washington late in 1861 into 1862 provided even more privacy and personal freedom.

Thompson was sent back to her company in the 2nd Michigan on Feb. 16, 1862 – no reason was given for the reassignment – and the record reflects the soldier was “absent on duty” for the months of March and April. In March the Army of Potomac shipped out to Virginia’s York-James Peninsula for a new offensive, leading first to the siege of Confederate positions at Yorktown in April and then combat around Richmond.

Those who choose to believe Edmonds’ espionage adventures note this was the period described in Nurse and Spy that she went on her first mission, disguised as a male slave by darkening her skin with silver nitrate and wearing a theatrical Afro wig. The mysterious detachment of Thompson from duty in the regiment, these writers maintain, is evidence indicative of secret work.

But this is nonsense. In reality, the fact that Thompson was “absent on duty” from her regiment during this time had nothing to do with confidential missions. An order that Edmonds kept for the rest of her life and later transcribed in print showed that Frank Thompson was designated mail carrier for the 2nd Michigan on March 4th, 1862, by Col. Poe, the 2nd Michigan’s second commanding officer. This order came before the Army of the Potomac moved by sea to begin the new offensive, with all the difficulties of establishing new, longer supply and communications lines. Thompson’s posting as mail carrier was recorded again on muster rolls as April, 1862 ended, and would continue into the late fall, eventually evolving into the bigger job of brigade mail carrier and postmaster. The term “absent on duty” in the spring of 1862 simply meant that Edmonds was given a reasonably routine job by her superior officers.

These assignments as mail carrier took Edmonds away from her regiment for a portion of any given week while the army was on the move, since mail carrying required her to ride or accompany wagon trains back and forth from bivouacs at the front to Union supply depots in the rear – a journey that could have taken a day or two each way during the Peninsula Campaign and in northern Virginia and Maryland afterward.

The job of mail carrier, like hospital nurse, was not without danger, but it was safer than being on a skirmish line or in line of battle. Traveling behind the Union front, Edmonds again would have more freedom and privacy away from regimental camp life and duty. It seems she would have reported to regimental command officers. Again, this assignment was not arbitrary, but one that officers picked Frank Thompson to do.

A transcription of an order dated Dec. 5, 1862 from Poe’s brigade showed that Thompson was then assigned to be the brigade’s mail carrier and postmaster, and Robbins’ diary and Poe’s later statements show that Thompson was also serving as his orderly at the battle of Fredericksburg (less than two weeks after the brigade postmaster assignment). But their brigade wasn’t involved in this fighting. Within three months the 2nd Michigan was ultimately moved with its brigade to Kentucky, where Edmonds continued to work as postmaster and where her army service abruptly ended.

NURSE AND SPY?

The biggest myths surrounding Edmonds began with the publication of Nurse and Spy while the war was still raging – that the author, a young woman, first posed as a black youth and then an Irish peddler woman (and other subsequent disguises), going behind Confederate lines, gathering critical intelligence, outwitting Rebel officers, reporting to Gen. McClellan and even besting a guerilla leader in cavalry combat. Of course, at the time the book came out in 1864, Edmonds’ publishers insisted it was true. “The ‘Nurse and Spy’ is simply a record of events which have transpired in the experience and under the observation of one who has been on the field and participated in numerous battles,” her publisher insisted. “…[S]he penetrated the enemy’s line, in various disguises, no less than eleven times.”

Unfortunately for Edmonds’ espionage myth, that statement is belied by the fact that there is not a single mention of either Emma Edwards or Frank Thompson on the roster of spies employed in the spring and summer of 1862 by Union Army secret service chief Allan Pinkerton, or in the papers of McClellan, consummate military engineer, logistician, and administrator who then commanded the Army of the Potomac. This record of Union intelligence, in which the names of secret operatives are given, encompasses not hundreds, but thousands of pages. Fishel, who studied Civil War intelligence for his major book on the topic, rejected the adventures given by Edmonds in Nurse and Spy.

His case against the reality of her spy tales was even longer and stronger than his simple dismissal of Edmonds in his 1996 book. Fishel noted how she claimed to have seen Gen. Robert E. Lee in a Rebel camp (when Lee was actually in Richmond), or that she brought back intelligence about a Confederate fort at Yorktown with 150 artillery pieces (when no such fort existed). Fishel’s list of her fictions went on, but he simply did not have room in his own book to include it all. Fishel noted that Allan Pinkerton wrote his own semi-fictional memoir of his Civil War secret service work long after Nurse and Spy, outlining both real and imaginary operatives and adventures. Frank Thompson was not among them. Like many other “true” autobiographies of alleged Civil War spies, hers was fiction.

Though her biographers have tended to ignore or downplay it, Edmonds herself made what has become known today as a “non-denial denial” about the espionage tales in Nurse and Spy when she had to give a more accurate version of her military career. “I make no statement of any secret services,” she said in a sworn statement as she applied for a pension from the government. “In my mind there is about as much odium attached to the word ‘spy’ as there is to the word ‘deserter.’ There is so much mean deception necessarily practiced by a spy that I much prefer every one [sic] should believe that I never was beyond the enemy’s lines rather than fasten upon me by oath a thing that I despise so much.”

She continued: “It may do in war time, but it is not pleasant to think upon in time of peace.” It’s an incredible statement; Edmonds hadn’t minded identifying herself as a spy while the war was going on, when she had been in her 20s and selling a book in which sensational claims could only help sales. But once it emerged that Edmonds had been soldier Frank Thompson, she could “make no statement of any secret services” because there were none, and no witness or report to support her. As she sought a pension in 1884, she had to distance herself from the fantastic stories in her book. Had she really risked her life as a spy for the U.S., she could have said so; given some detail as to whom she worked with and reported to; and quickly been approved for a pension.

It is important, too, to remember Edmonds’ reason for writing Nurse and Spy, something stated plainly by self and her publisher: Her proceeds from the book’s sales would be donated to benefit sick and wounded Union soldiers. In this she succeeded, with Edmonds’ profit of more than $1,000 going to efforts to help sick and wounded soldiers. Tales of derring-do and combatting enemy spies brought in wide-eyed readers and sales, but didn’t inform the truth. Had she written her real experiences, the officers under whom she served would have found themselves in trouble. That was not her intention.

Another popular story from Nurse and Spy was that Edmonds – somehow – was an orderly for an aggressive and well-liked Union general named Phil Kearny in a fierce battle outside of Richmond on May 31, 1862. This story, though false, provided the title for one of the past popular biographies of Edmonds – She Rode With the Generals. Edmonds wanted the reader to believe that she, the female volunteer nurse narrating the story, was dressed in an army uniform, accompanying Kearny into battle and then racing on horseback, carrying important orders back to bring up reinforcements. Later in her narrative, she said she witnessed Kearny being killed in action while she was on yet another secret mission – another ludicrous if not impossible circumstance.

Years later, as Edmonds sought a pension and had to give that accurate account of her service, she admitted she was ill at the time of the battle of Fair Oaks – not at a general’s side. “I was sick with chills and fever, but worked among the wounded until they were sent away,” she said. Not surprisingly, there is no order or record, not in the Thompson service record, nor in the regimental musters, nor in her own pension claims, of her being assigned to Kearny, a well-known Civil War hero. It’s an example of how Edmonds, in her book, linked herself to a martyred general who was then a household name and hero.

In fact, Anna Etheridge, nurse with the 2nd Michigan and other regiments, was reportedly recognized by Kearny and made a “regimental sergeant” for her dedicated service to wounded soldiers, something that appeared in newspapers of the day. Of course, Kearny didn’t have the legal authority to give a female volunteer nurse any sort of military position or rank, if he actually did so. Chances are good that Etheridge’s “promotion” was strictly camp gossip, a reporter’s invention, or an “honorary” position at best. But Kearny was killed in action in the late summer of 1862, and long since dead when Edmonds’ book came out. Still, it was true Etheridge would in time receive the “Kearny Cross,” a medal made in his honor, awarded to her by another Union general. That raises the question of whether Edmonds incorporated in her book the dramatic experiences of Etheridge and of Jane Hinsdale, who had truly ventured behind Rebel lines.

The factual shortcomings in Nurse and Spy go well beyond Edmonds’ adventures. A careful reading reveals a book filled with remarkable inconsistencies, fictions and errors, whose narrator leaves much unexplained. From an opening scene, Edmonds establishes the pattern that follows – drama and rhetorical flourish trumping reality. She relates that she’s on a train traveling to New England, to her adopted hometown, when the news of the war arrives. Suddenly she is describing an unnamed western village (Flint, Michigan) where she witnesses regiment after volunteer regiment forming, their bayonets gleaming in the sun, and then boarding trains for Washington D.C.

It’s a vivid picture of Northern patriotism and strength, but a product of her imagination. In the opening weeks of the war when Emma joined the 2nd Michigan in Detroit, only one regiment had left the state a few days prior to her own enlistment. Her regiment would leave Detroit about three weeks later. In Flint, where there was no train station and where Edmonds had lived and had friends, only one company, the one she joined, had formed and left for Detroit. This exaggeration is typical of her narrative; Edmonds didn’t let facts get in the way of a stirring tale.

Consider her own frenetic activity in the course of her book, nursing the sick and wounded, foraging in the countryside for food and bandages, trading shots with and wounding a Rebel woman but converting her over to the Union side, taking on secret missions, reporting to Gen. McClellan, escaping across raging battlefields, going back to nursing, carrying important dispatches for generals, and conducting counter-intelligence operations. The war was a rollicking but very proper and Christian adventure in Edmonds’ accounting; Union soldiers are noble souls who do not gamble, swear, drink, suffer bad morale or question the Union cause – things that were routinely expressed and described in soldiers’ letters and diaries, including men in her own company.

Though several former comrades willingly and emphatically supported Edmonds’ request for a pension, there were, apparently, those who didn’t remember her fondly. Whether there were comrades angry that she had truly deceived them while they were soldiers, or whether disapproving of her book and the heroic status accorded to her, or whether they simply remembered the actual circumstances of Thompson’s service and desertion, it seemed that some comrades (or maybe their wives) reacted negatively when Edmonds first attended a reunion of the 2nd Michigan in Flint in 1884. “I was properly punished for going to the reunion,” she wrote a friend and comrade three months later. “God forgive me for going.” Edmonds said she was proud to have been a member of the regiment, but that she was insulted at the reunion “…I discovered while at Flint that the honor of membership has cost me more than I am willing to pay, that of slurs upon my character.”

Late in her life, Edmonds repeated the notion that she would produce a second memoir, “to write differently about that portion of her life,” meaning her service in the war. She made it clear to the wife of a former comrade, Mrs. Damon Stewart of Flint, that she was writing a new autobiography. Sometime in 1897, Edmonds, now living in Texas, found a publisher in Houston: she had circulars printed up, advertising the story of her “honourable and eventful life,” and calling it “a life that has no parallel in the history of American Womanhood.” The circular told of her heroism in the Civil War, her authorship of Nurse and Spy and her deep patriotism and faith.

But Edmonds’ plans fell through. “You ask when my book will be ready to put on the market,” Edmonds wrote in the summer of 1897, when she said she just turned 60. “I am almost done writing the manuscript but I find the publisher is not in circumstances to publish it without my paying him in advance, which I am not prepared to do.” Edmonds complained that if she published it herself, she would receive ten or 15 cents for every copy sold. “I am not willing to have it published in that way,” she said, “the margin is too small for all the trouble I have had with it.”

Edmonds died just over a year later. Did she “write differently” about her life in the war, as she said she would in 1883 when asked about the veracity of Nurse and Spy? What happened to that second memoir she said she had nearly finished? Did she tell the true story as to how she joined the 2nd Michigan and “successfully” kept her sex a secret, now that the world knew the story, however embellished, of Frank Thompson and Emma Edmonds?

Given the patriotic and religious hyperbole of her 1897 circular for that unproduced memoir – and the fact that a real account of her service would require a personal and revealing explanation of how she hid her gender – the likely answer is no. Even thirty years after the war, it would seem from the advance publicity material about her new memoir that only a sanitized and heroic account would do.

Her one-time friend and comrade, Jerome Robbins, kept two of her letters, though his diary clearly reflects he received more letters from her than this. But he glued together the pages of his journal in which he noted Frank Thompson’s secret, writing instructions on them not to be opened without his permission. It wasn’t until 100 years later this secret was shared with the public in a magazine of Michigan history, exposing the truth behind the myth that had long since grown up around her.

The real story of Edmonds’ service – without the fictions and exaggerations of Nurse and Spy – remains largely untold and unexplained, with the exception of the bare bones of her service record and the Jerome Robbins papers. Even without the unreal spy exploits of Nurse and Spy, a true account of her Civil War service would have been a remarkable memoir. As her friend Jerome Robbins recorded in 1863 the Frank Thompson-Emma Edmonds matter “was a strange history” – one that remains mythologized and misunderstood, but enthusiastically repeated, despite its fictions.

Thank you for your long commentary. There are a number of reputable histories published recently by historians interested in military history and women's history that have tried to separate the dramatic fictions from the reality of her exploits. I have added these titles to the article's reference section. Please consider using them, especially Gansler and Leonard's works, in making improvements to this article. If you need a copy, you can ask your local library to request if for you from the Pritzker Military Museum & Library via interlibrary loan.TeriEmbrey (talk) 15:44, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Factual accuracy

Thanks to the extensive notes above, I've tagged the article with {{Disputed}} until anyone has time to attempt a rewrite. Basie (talk) 00:56, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Behind Rebel Lines

I also note that the book Behind Rebel Lines by Seymour Reit (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1988)(ISBN: 978-0-15-216427-0) begins with the assertion that her story is completely true and the book only takes liberties with some speeches and thoughts for readability. This is quite an assertion.

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Contradiction

...Fanny Campbell and her adventures on a pirate ship during the American Revolution while dressed as a woman. Fanny remained dressed as a man in order to pursue other adventures...

If she 'remained' dressed as a man, then the first statement must be wrong. Valetude (talk) 16:25, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 7 August 2019

Please add to "Further Reading" section this entry:

Gardner, Bonnie Milne. "The Secret War of Emma Edmonds." An original play produced October 2013 at Ohio Wesleyan University. Website: bmgardner.weebly.com. Bmgwriter (talk) 18:18, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

 Not done: "Further reading" should preferably be scholarly material and accessible online or in libraries. You can also not link to your own writings. – Thjarkur (talk) 19:58, 7 August 2019 (UTC)