Emma Edmonds one of some 400 women
who were Civil War great pretenders

By DRS. JUDY PIERCE, PAMELA JUKES
Western Kentucky University

Emma Edmonds was one of approximately 400 women who succeeded in enlisting in the Union army during the Civil War.

She succeeded while acting as a Union spy – all while impersonating a man.

Born in Novia Scotia, Emma had a very difficult life. Her father greatly resented the fact that she was not born a boy, and thus, treated her badly. Emma did everything she could to prove that she could be a boy. However, her father’s treatment became so abusive that Emma ran away from her home to the United States when she was 16.

She cut her hair, wore men’s clothing and called herself Franklin Thompson. Emma, who obrtained a job selling Bibles, loved her new country and wanted to help defend it when the Civil War began.

Emma was living in Flint, Mich., when President Abraham Lincoln issued the first call for Union enlistments, and she wanted to answer the call. It took four attempts, but, finally, on April 25, 1861, she was sworn in as a male nurse into the 2nd Michigan Volunteer Infantry, who called themselves the “Union Grays.”

After training in Washington, D. C., Emma’s unit was sent south to be part of Gen. George McClellan’s campaign in Virginia. Before any hostilities began, however, an event happened that changed Pvt. Thompson’s life forever - the execution of a Union agent working in Richmond for McClellan. This left a void in McClellan’s intelligence, but he did not want to send his troops forward until he knew what was lying across his path to Yorktown.

As a result, word went out that McClellan was looking for a person to act as a spy prior to the attack on Yorktown. Pvt. Franklin Thompson volunteered for the job. Franklin spent his free time reading and learning about weapons, fortifications, makes of cannons and other projectiles. After a grueling interview by a group of prune-faced officers, Thompson was given the position and advised that he had three days to prepare for the mission.

Emma knew that she had to devise a disguise that would not alert the Confederate soldiers. She knew that slaves were used to do the heavy work such as digging trenches, building roads, and hauling water and wood. She believed that Southerners looked more at the color of the skin rather than the faces of slaves. Therefore, she would disguise herself as a slave.

Assisted by the wife of the chaplain, the only person knowing her true identity, Emma used silver nitrate to darken her skin, donned men’s clothing along with a black woolly minstrel wig, and called herself “Cuff.”  She was not even recognized by the doctor she worked for in the hospital.

Once on the Confederate front, she was assigned to work on the ramparts built by slaves who were sent by their owners to counter McClellan. Her hands were blistered after the first day and she did not know how she was going to learn any information about Confederate plans with her assigned job. But, she convinced a fellow slave to swap jobs with her.

The second day she worked in the kitchen and carried food to the commander and his staff. She learned a great deal about the morale of the troops, the size of the army, the fake cannon called “Quaker guns,” and different gun batteries that were to be used at Yorktown.

On the third day, she was assigned as a Confederate picket, which allowed her to escape and return to the Union lines. She delivered invaluable information to McClellan and returned to duty as a male nurse at the hospital.

During the next year, Emma infiltrated the Confederate lines 10 times. Some of her disguises and characters included a fat Irish peddler woman, a black mammy complete with the black face and bandanna, and, of course, Cuff. On one of her assignments, Emma returned to the Union camp with not only the information, but with a beautiful horse she named Rebel.

At the end of 1862, Company F and Emma were transferred to the Ninth Corps, commanded by Gen. Ambrose Burnside near Louisville. Emma was asked to become a detective on this assignment instead of that as a spy. She assumed the role of a young man with Southern sympathies by the name of Charles Mayberry. Emma ‘s assignment was to identify the leaders of the Southern spy network in Louisville. Once again, Pvt. Thompson succeeded in his mission.

The 2nd Michigan Volunteers and Emma were transferred to the Army of General Grant in preparation for the battle of Vicksburg. After working long hours in the military hospital, she became ill with malaria, but could not admit herself to the hospital because her true identity would be discovered. Emma decided to leave camp for awhile to recover in a private hospital.  Upon arriving in Cairo, Ill., she checked herself into a hospital as a woman for the treatment of malaria. She planned to rejoin her unit after recovering until she read an army bulletin posted in the window of a Cairo newspaper that listed Pvt. Thompson as a deserter.

Emma bought a train ticket to Washington where she worked as a nurse until the end of the war. There would be no more secret missions for Franklin Thompson.

After the war, Emma wrote her memoirs entitled Nurse and Spy in the Union Army.

She gave all of her profits from the book to the U. S. war relief. Once the book was finished, Emma returned to Canada and married Linus Seeyle. They moved back to the United States and settled in Cleveland and later in Texas.

Emma brooded over being branded a Civil War deserter and petitioned the War Department for a review of her case. The case was debated and on March 28, 1884, Emma’s name was cleared.  On July 5 she was granted a pension of $12 per month by a special bill passed by an Act of Congress.

Emma lived her life in LaPorte, Texas, where she died on Sept. 5, 1898. She was buried in the military section of Washington Cemetery in Houston.