******************** A GROWING DETACHMENT *********************
On the second day at Gettysburg, Union Major General Daniel E. Sickles took a direct hit from a Confederate shell. Within thirty minutes, a surgeon had finished amputating his mangled leg.
Sickles loudly demanded that it be preserved in alcohol, but he soon tired of it and donated it to the U.S. Army Medical Museum. Tradition says he visited his leg several times during the postwar years, but never remained with it more than a few minutes.
******************* MOTHER OF NECESSITY ***********************
Many profound long-range changes were brought about as the result of the Civil War, with one such belonging to the field of medicine. For generations, it had been taken for granted that military nurses would be male members of fighting forces. This was about to change -- forever.
Dorothea Dix arrived at the White House with a plan and a mission. Presidential secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay recorded their satisfaction at "the arrival of Miss Dix, who comes to offer herself and an army of nurses to the government gratuitously for hospital service." On June 10, 1861, she received a parchment unlike any ever before issued; for the first time the nation had a superintendent of U.S. Army nurses who was female.
Most veterans of military medicine reacted indignantly to Mother Dix's appointment. There were no general hospitals, but some of the larger installations had post hospitals. At Leavenworth, Kansas, there were accommodations for only twenty men.
Even after twenty-four members of the medical corps resigned to join the Confederacy, the U.S. Army still boasted a complement of twenty-seven surgeons and sixty-two assistant surgeons. With military units due to serve only ninety days, many could not understand what had influenced U.S. Secretary of War Simon Cameron to establish a corps of female nurses.
That question became moot as the first Federal casualties reached Washington from the Manassas battlefield. Before the terrible carnage of the war ended, changing attitudes guaranteed that women would be welcomed to the nursing vocation.
Shortages of manpower opened other doors for women as well. A few bold spirits with good penmanship won early appointments as clerks in the U.S. Treasury Department. Soon women began to appear in the Patent Office and even in the U.S. War Department.
By early 1865, tens of thousands of women were government employees. Large corporations were beginning, grudgingly, to open their doors to a few women considered to be exceptionally capable. More than all other factors combied, the Civil War served as the foundation upon which the modern women's movement was erected.
************** CROSS-DRESSING IN THE CIVIL WAR ****************
Throughout the war, men and women of the North and of the South played ludicrous or thrilling roles in disguise. In St. Louis, Captain Nathaniel Lyon wanted a firsthand look at a nearby Southern military camp. On May 9, 1861, the veteran U.S. Army officer turned into "old Mrs. Alexander, a society matron who liked to wear bombazine and a heavy black veil." Sometimes described as having disguised himself as a farm woman, Lyon did pose as a woman of wealth. He probably borrowed the clothes from the mother-in-law of Representative Francis P. Blair, Jr.
Regardless of where he secured his elaborate dress and bonnet, the disguised Lyon climbed into a carriage with a black driver. Since the real Mrs. Alexander was well known for her eccentricities, the officer made a leisurely tour of Camp Jackson without incident.
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According to the Memphis Appeal, a Confederate scouting party led by a Colonel Looney left Chattanooga, Tennessee in late November 1861. "They captured fourteen horses, and took one hundred Lincoln men prisoners," the newspaper reported. A Unionist ruffian known only as Holloway "managed to make his escape by clothing himself in female attire."
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In divided Kentucky, guerrilla bands flourished. One of them was led by prosperous but tiny Marcellus J. Clarke. According to the Louisville Courier, he was frequently disguised as Sue Mundy and continued a double life until March 15, 1865. As he swung from a gallows after a hasty "citizens' trial," there was no doubt that the guerrilla leader was male.
Recent studies indicate that tales about Sue Mundy's exploits were greatly exaggerated by reporters for the Louisville Daily Journal. Even if that is the case, few men were as successful as Clarke had been in maintaining a long-time pretense at being an attractive woman.
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Captain Frank H. Mason of the Twelfth Ohio Volunteer Cavalry was a member of the force that captured men who had fought under Confederate Major General Joseph Wheeler. Near Atlanta, following Johnston's surrender in North Carolina, Wheeler and his raiders were surrounded and trapped.
Because a captured slave in the group wore the uniform of a Confederate major general, a Federal officer became suspicious. Soon he discovered that Wheeler had exchanged clothing with his valet in a futile attempt to be identified as a contraband. After his disguise had been exposed, Wheeler was sent to Fort Warren as a prisoner of war.
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At least one man who served a brief term as an irregular soldier did not gain any fame until after the fighting had ceased. Small of stature and having little or no beard, smooth-skinned young Jesse James sometimes disguised himself as a woman to scout Federal positions.
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Private Benjamin F. Stringfellow of the Fourth Virginia Cavalry had light-colored hair and weighed less than a hundred pounds. To Captain John F. Lay, that seemed to make him an ideal candidate for the risky job of spying.
Properly dressed, he was described by admiring comrades as "making a really attractive girl." Mincing slightly as he walked, Stringfellow went into Federal-occupied Arlington, Virginia, several times. The information he gathered is said to have proved especially useful to Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard.
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The Confederates who made the northernmost raid of the war knew that they were risking their lives. Preparing to rob the banks of Saint Albans, Vermont, Private William Teavis decided to don women's clothing. Some of his comrades jeered at his lack of courage, but Teavis was the only raider to get through the North without being detected.
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A caper in disguise for Colonel Richard Thomas of the Virginia Volunteers began in June 1862, when a plan was made to seize the USS Pawnee. The warship's armament made conventional capture impossible. Thomas therefore decided to seize a small steamer, the St. Nicholas, with the hope that he might approach his target without raising an alarm.
Captain George N. Hollins of the Confederate navy, dressed as a woman companion, went along as chief aide to Thomas. Other volunteers were dressed as workmen. Concealing their weapons in tool boxes, these "laboring men" went aboard the St. Nicholas at three or four different points.
When the little steamer reached Point Lookout, Maryland, a woman in a hoop skirt came aboard and registered herself as "a French lady named Zarvona." Officers of the steamer were honored to have aboard so exotic a passenger and expressed disappointment when she said she must go to her cabin and rest.
Soon after "Zarvona" went below, a Confederate Zouave wearing a brace of pistols climbed on deck. His men pulled out their weapons and took over the ship with little or no resistance. Learning that the Pawnee was not at her customary berth, the seized vessel was taken up the Rappahannock River toward Fredericksburg and transformed into the CSS Rappahannock.
Leading only four men from the CSS Rappahannock, "Zarvona" soon boarded a larger passenger steamer where "she" was quickly recognized. By the time a company of Federal infantry had swarmed aboard, the French "lady" had seemed to vanish. After a ninety-minute search, however, "she" was found curled up in a bureau drawer. Once flushed from hiding, the "lady" was revealed to be Thomas.
So much publicity followed this incident that the man who had posed an exotic French woman was for a time the most celebrated prisoner in Federal captivity.
