Blood and Daring (17 page)

With some minor changes, Seward’s report became the official American dispatch to London. He later asked to read Lincoln’s argument, but the president admitted that he had struggled with it and in the end found it impossible to finish.
¹⁰⁹
He complimented Seward on his handling of the crisis and on the document he had constructed. The man who had for so long seemed to be itching for war ended up providing the graceful instrument through which two great powers could save face and withdraw from the abyss with honour intact and Canada saved.

Seward’s offer arrived in London on January 8. Until that point Palmerston had still been sure that war with America was a real possibilitty and preparations had been continuing.
¹¹⁰
Palmerston took the offer to cabinet and the American terms were accepted. With that, the hollering for war subsided; at least to the level tolerated before the
Trent
had been boarded.

The British warship
Rinaldo
took Mason, Slidell and their secretaries first to Halifax and then to London. With their arrival, the British troops that had remained at their Canadian posts were finally allowed leaves. Men of the voluntary militia who had remained to bolster their units’ strength were finally told to return to their jobs, classrooms and farms.

Lincoln, meanwhile, made it clear that the British insults he had heard and the strategic military plans he had entertained were not forgotten. In an interview with newspaperman Horace Peters, the president said: “It was a pretty bitter pill to swallow but I contented myself with believing that England’s triumph in the matter would be short-lived, and that after ending our war successfully we would be so powerful that we could call her to account for all the embarrassments she had inflicted upon
US.”
¹¹¹
It was an ominous statement, especially when matched with Lincoln’s comment about fighting one war at a time and his vague threats to Galt.

While war had been avoided, there was still danger ahead. Southern resentment of Canada had grown with the Underground Railroad. The tepid support for the Union, and then the
Trent
crisis had increased anti-Canadian sentiment in the North. Seward and Sumner still believed that all of North America should be American, and Lincoln’s “one war at a time” comment was both a momentary salve and a thinly disguised warning.

The threat of an American invasion of Canada may have ended for the moment, but the Civil War and Canada’s role in it had just begun. Having narrowly escaped the ravages of a war for British North America, most Canadians and Maritimers hoped for a return to relative peace. But others had something far different in mind. Thousands joined others who had already left, and headed south to fight both for the Union and for the Confederacy.

3
 
SARAH EMMA EDMONDS:
DONNING THE BLUE AND GREY

A
N ARMY ON THE MOVE
is a magnificent and horrible beast. It eats and drinks and defecates and fornicates. It can manoeuvre with poise and precision or lumber clumsily within a fog of contradictory information, cross purposes and logistical chaos. The beast is both hunter and hunted, existing to kill while offering itself up to be slain.

In July 1861, the beast that was the Union’s Army of the Potomac rose from crowded camps around Washington and slowly moved south and west toward the town of Manassas, Virginia. The Civil War’s first major battle, called Bull Run in the North and Canada, was nigh. The march was confusing from the start, with stragglers falling behind and others losing their units while searching for food or water. Many suffering from mumps, measles, typhoid fever and dysentery had left their cots to join the march. The troops were joyous about finally going into battle—a battle most, including those who watched as they picnicked on the hillside near the capital, believed would be the first and last big
fight of the war. Songs filled the air, and “On to Richmond” was chanted again and again.

Among the untested army’s numbers was a young nurse named Franklin Thompson of the 2nd Michigan Volunteer Regiment’s F Company. There was more to Thompson’s story than met the eye, for he was actually a woman named Sarah Emma Edmonds. She was one of a great number of women who served in the Civil War and one of about 550 who did so disguised as men.
¹
Like men, women served for their own reasons but most were moved by a patriotic devotion to the cause, honour, duty, personal ambition, a yearning for adventure, or the chance to make a little money.
²
Women served as cooks, couriers, flag bearers, nurses, spies and soldiers. As many as 60 women were killed in battle and buried as women, but the number who met their death with their male disguises undiscovered is unknown.
³

Edmonds also concealed the fact that was that she was from New Brunswick. She was born Sarah Emma Edmondson in December 1841, into a large farming family in Magaguadavic, near Fredericton. The youngest of six children, she worked long hours with her four sisters on the farm, and her only brother, an epileptic, did what he could. Like many farm girls of her time, she dressed in what was traditionally men’s clothing, grew used to hard labour and was adept with firearms and horses. Her mother, Elizabeth, taught her the secrets of home remedies and she became quite skilled at tending illness and injury. Her father, Isaac, was an angry, embittered man who made life miserable for his children.

When Edmonds was seventeen, her father told her that she was to be married to a man nearly twice her age, whom she had never met. With her mother’s help, she fled. She assumed the name Emma Edmonds. Edmonds demonstrated her ability to be independent and self-sustaining, belying her age and the stereotypes attached to women of her time, by securing work first in a hat shop and then in a millinery in a small town ninety miles east of Fredericton.

When her father discovered her whereabouts, she fled again. This time she was assisted by a young man named Linus Seelye, who lent her some of his clothes and helped disguise her as a man to avoid detection
and ease her travel. Edmonds settled in Saint John. She purchased more men’s clothing, cut her hair, applied dye to her face and hands to darken her complexion, and even had a mole surgically removed from her left cheek. She became Franklin Thompson.

Secure within her new identity, Edmonds found work as an itinerant Bible salesman and moved from town to town and farm to farm. After about a year, in 1860, Edmonds was swindled out of her savings. The brave and desperate nineteen-year-old gathered her last five dollars and moved to the United States to start again. She later claimed to have been motivated to emigrate not just for work but for educational opportunities. Her church pastor had written her a letter of introduction that noted a desire to do missionary work.

Edmonds answered an advertisement for a Boston publisher for “young men willing to hustle.” She was hired immediately and found a home in Hartford, Connecticut, where she was soon back to selling Bibles. With a fifty-dollar advance in her pocket and a heavy valise across her back, she was moved to her company’s base in Halifax. Her disguise had become so effective that during a short visit home she even briefly fooled her mother and sisters.

In November 1860, she heard of opportunities in the west and took a similar job in Flint, Michigan. In the spring of 1861, as Edmonds was waiting for a train, she heard shouts from a
New York Herald
newsboy announcing that Fort Sumter had fallen and that Lincoln had called for 75,000 troops. She could have easily returned home and avoided the war, but instead decided to enlist.

Edmonds was moved by a desire to fight for the country she had adopted as her home. She later wrote of the war as, “a just cause—the cause of our country that we love; that we shrink from no sacrifice of money, time or life in order to maintain and perpetuate the beautiful Government that our fathers bequeathed to us.”
⁴
She also wrote: “It was not my intention, or desire, to seek my own personal ease and comfort while so much sorrow and distress filled the land. But the great question to be decided was, what can I do? What part am I to act in this great drama?”
⁵

She appeared at the 2nd Michigan Volunteers’ recruiting station in Detroit as Franklin Thompson. At five foot six, she was about the same height as the average soldier. She easily passed the medical examination, which consisted only of checking her sight and hearing, and making sure she had a trigger finger and at least two good teeth to rip open powder cartridges.
⁶
On May 25, 1861, after telling the recruiter of her skills with basic medical procedures, she became F Company’s Field Nurse.
^*

At the outset of the war, nursing was just being accepted as a profession for women. Only a few years before, in the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale had organized women to work as nurses in British field hospitals. Americans Clara Barton and Dorothea Dix would help to build the profession but, at that point, the dominant opinion in the United States was that women should not be exposed to the blood and gore of battle or be in such close contact with men. This sort of work was considered unbecoming of women and beyond their physical and emotional abilities.
⁷
Consequently, in the early months of the war, male nurses such as Thompson were seen as preferable to women.

After two months of training, the 1,013-strong Michigan regiment was sent to Washington under the leadership of Colonel Israel B. Richardson. One day Edmonds stood proudly at attention with her compatriots and was inspected by President Lincoln himself. More training followed but it was ad hoc at best, as few knew what to expect or how to really prepare. With the call to march to Manassas, preparations ended.

The Michigan 2nd was ordered to protect a possible retreat route. Edmonds helped ready a field hospital in a small stone church. That night, she and the other nurses listened to young soldiers singing inspirational
songs and offering mournful prayers. Many tear-spattered letters were written and left with her and the other nurses.

Through the early morning mists, Union general Irvin McDowell ordered his three divisions forward. Edmonds stood on a hill watching and hoping for the best, with medical supplies in haversacks slung over both shoulders. Within minutes, a Confederate artillery shell tore into a young soldier standing not far away. She ran to him and found a wheezing wound in his chest and his face a bloody pulp. There was nothing to be done but make the dying boy comfortable.

Wounded men quickly began to fill the church. A doctor sent her to the rear for more bandages and brandy, and while she was gone the battle turned in the Confederates’ favour. Edmonds returned to find dead and dying strewn everywhere. She and others moved up among the thundering din, whizzing minié balls and black smoke to rescue bloodied and dismembered young men all moaning for water and their mothers.

Then came the unorganized, unauthorized, mad retreat. As men and riderless horses ran by, Edmonds hurried back to the field hospital and found a scene from hell. The pretty little church, once so clean and organized, was piled with wounded. Blood smeared the walls and pooled on the floor. Amputated arms and legs were stacked haphazardly outside along one wall and uncovered dead were laid out along another. Edmonds stitched and bandaged and held men down as doctors sawed mangled limbs. Soldiers were comforted as they breathed their last. Edmonds helped one dying young man cut a lock of his hair and placed it in a packet to be mailed home to his mother.

With the Union army having abandoned the field, and the early evening casting eerie shadows over the day’s sad and tragic remains, Edmonds and other medical staff needed to flee or risk capture. They placed water within reach of as many wounded men as possible and ran. Edmonds soon lost her compatriots in the darkness. She stealthily wove her way around Confederate pickets until finally relocating her regiment in Washington. The next day found her in one of the city’s many makeshift hospitals tending the sick, wounded, and exhausted.