Human Interest

I have always been interested in the Civil War and most of all the women that took part in this war, so here are some stories of American Women.


When Marian Green's boyfriend enlisted in the 1st Michigan Engineers and Mechanics regiment in fall of 1861, she saw him off to war in December. Unable to bear being away from him, she arranged with a certain surgeon to enlist in a detachment recruited for the regiment and, in summer 1862, joined the regiment along with many other new recruits. (One suspects this sort of "arrangement" may have happened more than once.)

That fall the boyfriend was taken ill and he was sent to hospital. A couple of days later Green showed up at his bedside, remaining for months to nurse him and other patients. She had kept her sex a secret as a soldier in the regiment, but the boy wrote to her parents informing them of her presence and the parents arranged for her return home. Later when a portion of the regiment returned to Detroit for discharge, Marian met her boyfriend there and they were married.

As in the case of Mary and Molly Bell, the officers sometimes knew that one of their soldiers was a woman, but let them continue in service. "Charles H. Williams," a woman whose real name is not known, served three months in Company I of an early Iowa regiment. She was discovered when mustered out with the regiment.

She was described in newspaper reports as having small and rather delicate hands, large and lustrous eyes, and jet black hair. "She was born in Davenport where her mother now resides," the newspaper said. "Capt. Cox learned her sex but allowed her to remain."


Some women went out of the way to practice acting "masculine" in order to conceal their gender. Loreta Janeta Velazquez wore a false mustache and practiced a swagger. She also wore a chain-metal corset-like affair to disguise her form. In her memoirs she reports ruefully that her specially designed outfit kept getting "out of order" and she was frequently stopped and questioned.

Once while in jail in Lynchburg, Virginia, under suspicion of being a woman, she propped her feet up on a windowsill, turned her head and spat just as some unfriendly visitors arrived at her jail cell, in order to convince them she was not a woman.

Mrs. Frances Clayton allegedly served in a Minnesota regiment along with her husband. According to contemporary newspaper reports "the better to conceal her sex, she learned to drink, smoke, chew, and swear with the best, or worst, of the soldiers.