How Many Women Soldiers Were There? Solving for X.

I address this topic in my book as well as in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section found in the menu at the top of my blog.  But I wanted to expand on it here.   First of all, as a mathematics instructor, I can tell you that you can make numbers say pretty much anything you want.  Trust me.  I have had some rather innovative students, and I have marveled at their creations.  Now, some of them were wrong, but creative nevertheless.

So what do the numbers say regarding women soldiers of the Civil War? 

The most common number I see tossed around today regarding how many there were is 400.  Some even go so far as to say "400 documented cases."   Where does this number come from?  During the rare instance when I see someone actually cite a primary source for this statistic, it is from Mary Livermore, who was a U.S. Sanitary Commission worker and nurse.  Let's take a closer look.  In her memoirs, My Story of the War (1888), she said that, "Some one has stated the number of women soldiers known to the service as little less than four hundred."

Wikipedia

She further stated, "I cannot vouch for the correctness of this estimate."

Notice that she said that 400 was an estimate.  Also note that she said somebody informed her of this statistic. 

She never said who that "some one" was, but it was probably her husband, D.P. Livermore, who was a minister and author who penned a piece entitled, Woman Suffrage Defended by Irrefutable Arguments. In it, he stated that:

Find a Grave

"During our late civil war, it was estimated that more than four hundred women enlisted in the Union army, and that a large number of women fought in the Confederate service."

 

This was published in 1885, three years before Mary's memoirs.  There is no mention where he got the number.  Again, notice that he says this was an estimate and that he claimed that the tally was  actually more than 400, and this referred to women serving in the Federal army alone.

His wife said that the estimate was a little less than 400 but believed this number should be higher.  She stated,

"I am convinced that a larger number of women disguised themselves and enlisted in the service, for one cause or other, than was dreamed of."

So research currently shows that the number 400  came from the Livermores.  And neither of them mentioned how it was derived or who calculated it.   Now you know for the next time you see 400 tossed around in regards to the number of women who served as soldiers during the Civil War.

 

What other primary sources deal with the number of women soldiers of the Civil War?

One newspaper in 1864 reported:

And then this one from 1863 was more vague:

It's impossible to quantify "many instances,"  but you see such observations in period newspapers throughout the war.


What did male soldiers say?

Here are a few examples of what soldiers had to say about how many women served during the Civil War.

An Iowa soldier simply stated that, "Many women served in the Civil War." 

A captain from Ohio recorded in his diary, "Such cases were not infrequent in our army."  He was writing about the horrific death of a woman soldier in battle.

General Philip Sheridan also mentioned the frequency in which women soldiers served - or attempted to. Years after the war, a reporter asked him if he had to deal with any female soldiers.  His reply:

He said "trying," but he knew all too well that there were some who were indeed successful in joining the military.  One of them was serving in his escort company in 1863 when she and another woman soldier got drunk and fell into Stones River during a foraging expedition, leading their comrades to discover their secret in the process of rescuing them.  Sheridan had them arrested and sent to Nashville.  He talks about this incident in his memoirs, and I share the story in my book.

What have modern authors calculated?  

Blanton and Cook were able to document about 250 women soldiers in their 2002 book, They Fought Like Demons.  Four years later, Richard Hall in Women on the Civil War Battlefront claimed that "there were at least a thousand, possibly several thousand, women who served as soldiers in the American Civil War."

In other words, we don't know. And we never will. Why? This number, which we will call "x," is always changing as more research comes to light. I personally have debunked several cases, which decreases x. And I have also uncovered quite a few previously undocumented accounts. This increases x. I have over twenty in my book, and there's more to come. As a matter of fact, I came across two yesterday. And what about those women - disguised as men - who served quietly and were never documented? Because of the subterfuge involved, there are undoubtedly accounts that will never come to light. 


So with x always in a state of flux, it seems folly to go in search of it. We will never find x. (My students would probably laugh if they read that.) 

With that being said, I am attempting to update the count simply because everybody wants to know and probably expects a statistical analysis. But even without calculating anything, we know that there weren't that many women soldiers. They were statistically irrelevant. However, it doesn't matter if there was only one. That one would still deserve to have her story told and her memory honored.  But we do know for a fact that there were more than just one who enlisted. And they did so for the same reasons the men did, served honorably and valiantly as the men did, and gave their lives for the same causes as the men did. So I don't care what anybody's x is (unless you're in my math class).

Until next formation.....rest (after you finish your math homework.)