Sarah Emma Evelyn
Edmonds was born in December 1841 in New Brunswick, Canada. She received
scant education as a child but she did enjoy reading and was inspired by Fanny
Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain by Maturin Murray Ballou. Sometime
in the 1850’s she ran away from home and was an itinerant Bible salesman,
dressing as a man and going by the name of Frank Thompson, the disguise undoubtedly
inspired by Ballou’s book . She
gradually made her way west and by 1861 was living in Flint, Michigan where,
shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, she enlisted (as Franklin Flint
Thompson) in a volunteer infantry company that became Company F, 2nd
Michigan Infantry. She took part in the
battles of Blackburn’s Ford, the first Bull Run and in the Peninsular campaign
of 1862 and was at Fredericksburg in December where she was an aide to Colonel
Orlando M. Poe. Several times she
undertook intelligence missions behind Confederate lines in various disguises; first
as a male field nurse, then as a black man (skin died with silver nitrate and
using a black wig) named Cuff; an Irish peddler woman named Bridget O’Shea
selling apples and soap, then as a black laundress. Some of these times, places and disguises
have been disputed but most seem historically correct.
Her military career ended when she contracted malaria and
fearing discovery, checked herself into a private hospital to recuperate. With her health restored she discovered that
Franklin Thompson was now listed as a deserter so she turned to work as a nurse
for the U.S. Christian Commission using the name Sarah Edmonds. In 1865 she published a detailed, lurid and
very popular fictional account of her experiences in Nurse and Spy in the Union
Army.
She married in 1867 and began securing affidavits from old
army comrades in order to apply for a veteran’s pension which was granted in
1884 (12 dollars a month) to “Sarah E.E. Seelye (married name) alias Frank F.
Thompson. She was the only woman to be
mustered into the Grand Army of the Republic as a regular member. She was introduced into the Michigan Hall of
Fame in 1992.
