She Went to the Field by Bonnie Tsui

Author:Bonnie Tsui
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461748496
Publisher: TwoDot

FRANCES CLAYTON, FLORENA BUDWIN, MARY ANN CLARK, MARY PITMAN, AND OTHER WOMEN SOLDIERS

“Some of the gentler sex who disguised themselves and swapped broomsticks for muskets were able to sustain the deception for amazingly long periods of time.”

—historian Bell Irvin Wiley,

The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union

OF THOSE WOMEN SOLDIERS who masqueraded as men, the paper trails left by Sarah Edmonds, Rosetta Wakeman, and Jennie Hodgers are by far the easiest to follow. Although it’s likely that the precise number of female combatants will never be known, there are snippets—photos, newspapers, letters, and anecdotal evidence—that indicate the existence of many other interesting cases. DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook document three African-American female soldiers in They Fought Like Demons, though details are scant. Countless women, though they may not actually have joined the army to fight, shared the urge to become a soldier and expressed that sentiment in letters and diaries. “If I were only a man,” wrote Sarah Morgan in her well-known Civil War diary. “Then I could don the breeches, and slay them with a will! If some Southern women were in the ranks, they could set the men an example they would not be blush to follow.”

According to many accounts, Frances Clayton (also recorded as Francis Clalin) enlisted in 1861 with her husband, John, at St. Paul, Minnesota. They fought together for the Union in eighteen battles, until she was wounded and John was killed in the battle at Stones River in December 1862. Elizabeth Leonard writes that “Clayton was hospitalized with a bullet in her hip, and an examination led to the discovery of her sex and her eventual discharge.” In a pamphlet used by famous women’s suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt in her efforts to win women the vote, D. R. Livermore wrote this about Clayton: “She was wounded three times while fighting bravely for her country, and was once taken prisoner. Could not such a woman defend her vote?”

Two surviving photographs of Frances Clayton are held by the Trustees of the Boston Public Library. In one she is dressed as a woman, seated and wearing a long gown over a white blouse, her short brown hair carefully arranged in feminine fashion. In the other portrait she is equally convincing in a soldier’s uniform, with her height and lean frame clearly working to her advantage. She was described in several newspaper articles as a tall, masculine-looking woman, proficient in the soldierly arts of drinking, smoking, chewing tobacco, and swearing.

Frances Clayton’s story was the basis of Beth Gilleland’s 1996 play Civil Ceremony, which premiered at the Great American History Theatre in Minneapolis. As reviewed by Michael Tortorello in the City Pages, even while they bore the weighty burden of war, women such as Frances Clayton found a valuable measure of freedom: “War, we learn, is dysentery and high piles of amputated limbs. Incomplete remains and shallow mass graves … . Yet, at the end of the play, Francis [sic] still describes these soldiering days

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