Aiming to Do Her Part-Mercy Street's Woman Soldier

A new character made an appearance on the latest episode of Mercy Street, a soldier named Private Ames who came in with a sick comrade.  The youngster seemed extra protective and concerned.  As events began to unfold, we learned that Private Ames was a woman soldier disguised as a male.  What gave her away?  The French illustrator said she knew because, as she put it, her adeptness at anatomical drawings allowed her to pick up on the woman soldier's bodily nuances.  As for everybody else.....well, she kind of betrayed herself  with the extreme hand holding and the kissing, which would have NEVER happened in public!!  The real women soldiers were discovered after becoming a casualty, or falling ill, or putting their stockings on in a feminine way, wringing out a dishrag in a feminine manner, sneezing like a girl, wearing clothes that were too big, instinctively trying to catch apples with nonexistent aprons, "giving a woman's squeal," trying to don trousers over the head.  But they were never detected while smooching on a man.  While many women soldiers enlisted to be with a husband or sweetheart, they kept their emotions in check because they were terrified of being discovered, and that was one sure fire way of being outed. Sarah Emma Edmonds, alias "Franklin Thompson" of the 2nd Michigan Infantry, offered perhaps the best illustration of this fear when she wrote that she would rather have been shot dead than to have been discovered and sent away from her regiment like a criminal (Edmondson file, RG 15, National Archives).

The Woman Soldier and the Golden Circle

If you watched the last two episodes of Mercy Street, you saw the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) make an appearance.  This secret organization was formed before the war and sought to extend a slave-based empire to territories that stretched around the Gulf of Mexico, down past Mexico and Central America to parts of South America, hence the circle.  Its membership reached to every state in the Union and purportedly included the likes of Sam Houston, John Wilkes Booth, Jesse James, and William Quantrill.

Rosetta's Real Life "Mercy Street" in New Orleans

http://thecivilwarparlor.tumblr.com/

Continuing with the theme of women soldiers and their hospital experiences, this blog post details that of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, whose story has been highly publicized in books, articles, and blogs since Lauren Cook introduced us to the woman warrior in 1994 through her wartime letters in An Uncommon Soldier.

The 5'0" tall, blue-eyed farm girl was financially driven to enlist in the 153rd New York Infantry on August 30th, 1862.  As a "man," she would make more money than she ever would as a woman.  Rosetta sent a portion of her soldier's pay home to Afton, New York in order to help alleviate the debt her family had accrued.  (Uncommon Soldier, p. 9)

In February, 1864, the 153rd was transferred from Washington D.C to Louisiana where they would participate in Major General Nathanial Banks' Red River Campaign.   During the ill-fated venture, Federal troops experienced bad water, bad food and fatigue from hundreds of miles of hard marching in the burning heat and suffocating humidity of Louisiana's subtropical climate.  The stress of dealing with all of these hardships took its toll as soldiers began to succumb to a variety of diseases.  Private Wakeman was one of them.