Sarah Emma Edmonds

           Born in New Brunswick, Canada, Sarah was the 5th daughter of Issac and Elisabeth Leeper Edmondson. Her father, who had hoped for a loarge famnily of sons to help him farm his land, was bitterly disappointed with all of his female progeny.SWhe tried very hard to be the boy her father wanted, abandonong female attire and becoming an expert equestrian and noted marksman, but she never won the approval of or even a kind word from Isaac, who she dubbed "The Brutal Father".
           She disguised herself as a man at the outbreak of the Civil War and enlisted asa private in Company f, 2nd Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment under the name Frank Thompson. She fought in the battles of 1st Bull Run and Chickahominy. While stationed in Virginia at the beginning of the Peninsular campaign, she volunteered for a mission inside Rebel lines at Yorktown. A phrenological exam by physicians determined her fitness for duty as a spy, but not her sex, and she was selected for the mission.
           She decided to infiltrate the lines dressed as a black man. She bought clothing from a fugitive slave, obtained a wig "of real Negro wool", and colored her head, hands and arms with silver nitrate. She slipped past Rebel pickets at night and the next morning joined slaves that were returning to Yorktown after taking breakfast to the pickets. At Yorktown Edmonds and the slaves were put to work with picks and shovels on fortifications.After a day of hard labor, Edmonds recorded that her hands "were blistered from my wrists to the finger ends". One of the slaves remarked to another, "I'm durned if that feller ain't turnin' white!". Edmonds explained, " I've always expected to come white at some time, my mother's a white woman!"
           That evening, she talked one of the slaves into exchanging duties with her. For the next two hours she carried buckets of water around the camp, a job that enabled her to gather intelligence about the fortification and its armament. She recorded that she even caught a glimpse of Generals Robert. E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnson.
           The evening of the third day inside Rebel lines, Edmonds was sent with her group of slaves to carry supper to the picket lines, where she was surprised to find that some of the pickets were black men. She reported that as she was talking to one of the black pickets, an officer came up, gave her a gun, and ordered her to take the place of a picket wjho had recently been shot. Taking advantage of her position, she slipped away during the night and returned to the Yankee lines with the captured weapon and the gathered information.
           In 1863, in danger of her secret being discovered, she deserted, and moved to Ohio, where she shed her male identity and worked as a nurse in a hospital. She wrote a book, "Nurse and Spy in the Union Army", published in 1865, claiming to have served as a nurse. Sarah eventually married and kept her secret from most until 1882, when she applied for a veteran's pension. Some of her army confidants wrote affidavits confirmi9ng her petition, which Congress thewn granted.
           She was laid to rest in a Grand Army of the Republic cemetery, the only female buried there.