Civil War

Missour Civil War Women

Posted at June 30, 2006 14:05

By Larry Wood

Women in the War Between the States disguised themselves as men and fought alongside them, in addition to their more traditional support roles as nurses, cooks, laundresses, messengers, and spies. And the women who fought in the Civil War played the most prominent roles in Missouri, the border state where sharply divided loyalties fueled a bitter guerrilla conflict, bringing the war home to everyday people and inevitably leading to civilian spying and other covert operations.

According to Elizabeth D. Leonard in her book All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies, an estimated five hundred to one thousand women disguised themselves as men and enlisted in the Union and Confederate armies as combat soldiers. Although not much information is available about these women, historians do have details about a few of them. Of these, three, possibly four, had Missouri connections.

Frances Louisa Clayton enlisted in the Union Army with her husband in the fall of 1861. Although the Claytons were Minnesota residents, they are thought to have served in a Missouri unit, according to DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook’s They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War. Frances was wounded at the Battle of Fort Donelson, Tennessee, in February 1862. After her husband was killed at the Battle of Murfreesborough, Tennessee, in January of 1863, she reportedly stepped over his dead body and resumed fighting when the order was given to charge. She left the service shortly afterward, having done “full duty as a soldier,” according to Blanton and Cook.

Ellen Levasay, a private in the Third Missouri Cavalry in the Confederacy, was among the Southern soldiers who marched out of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 4, 1863, when Confederate forces surren-dered to General Ulysses S. Grant after a six-week siege. She was first sent to the Gratiot Street or the Myrtle Street military prison in St. Louis and later transferred to Camp Morton, Indiana, on August 14, 1863. A soldier named William Levasay, of the same Missouri regiment and presumably a husband, brother, or cousin of Ellen Levasay, arrived at Camp Morton the same day.

Like Frances Clayton and Ellen Levasay, many women who disguised themselves as men and enlisted during the Civil War did so to follow a loved one into battle. Others, like Jane Short, alias Charley Davis, were simply looking for adventure. Jane, who enlisted in a Missouri Union infantry regiment in 1861, later explained she was “pining for the excitement of glorious war.” Despite being injured at the Battle of Shiloh, Tennessee, in April of 1862, Jane was not discovered as a woman until she became ill and was sent to a hospital a few months later. After her discharge, she reenlisted with Lou Morris, another woman, and served until August 1864 when she reportedly grew frightened at the pros-pect of having to face General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Confederate forces, says Richard Hall in his book Patriots in Disguise: Women Warriors of the Civil War. She revealed her identity and also turned Lou in. Both were discharged.

There were other reasons besides love or thirst for adventure that prompted women to enlist in the army during the Civil War. Some were motivated by a sense of patriotism, while others simply joined the army as a way to make a living.

Regardless of their motivation, the women who disguised themselves as men took great pains to avoid detection. Loose-fitting Civil War uniforms facilitated the charade as did the strict gender roles of the time. Anyone who wore pants was automatically assumed to be a man.

Also, many of the women who passed as men had a naturally masculine appearance and bearing. Frances Clayton, for example, was described by Blanton and Cook as a “very tall, masculine-looking woman bronzed by exposure” who readily adopted “manly vices” like drinking and swearing. According to Hall, Jane Short looked like an “unsophisticated country lad of twenty years.” Despite efforts to maintain their disguise, though, most women were eventually detected. For instance, a Private John Williams enlisted in the 17th Missouri Infantry (Union) at St. Louis on October 3, 1861, but was discharged by the end of the month with a notation “proved to be a woman” written on the muster roll. The story of her discovery is unknown, but circumstances such as injury, sickness, menstruation, pregnancy, and being captured often led to disclosure of a woman’s sex.

Women who passed as men and fought in combat accounted for a small fraction that served in the Civil War in one capacity or another. But female spies and informants were particularly common in the state of Missouri.

Mrs. Susan Bond was carried on the Union rolls and paid as a spy for work in the Springfield area during the fall of 1864. In September, when an unnamed female spy, perhaps Mrs. Bond, reported to General John B. Sanborn at Springfield that General Sterling Price’s Confederate army was moving into Missouri from Arkansas, General William Rosecrans, Sanborn’s superior, questioned the woman’s motives. Sanborn replied that “the woman scout has brothers in the rebel army, and she always manages to get the confidence of their officers. She has spied a good deal for us from Neosho and has always been reliable and correct.”

Rather than receiving pay for their work, female scouts and spies often served in an unofficial capacity out of allegiance to one side or the other. Colonel John M. Richardson reported from Cassville in November of 1862, “a loyal woman advised me of the arrival of a small party of rebels on Roaring River.” Richardson immediately sent out a detachment of soldiers who found the rebels at the home of a local resident and attacked the house, killing one man and capturing another.

Because Federal forces occupied Missouri during most of the Civil War, Southern women in the state were even more likely than Union women to execute clandestine operations in support of their particular cause. Such operations included spying and scouting, serving as couriers, harboring and feeding guerrillas, tending the wounded, making cartridges, and other similar activities. In the spring of 1863, the provost-marshal-general at St. Louis sought an arrest order for several prominent and influential Southern women, mainly wives and mothers of Confederate officers, because he suspected them of secretly collecting and distributing rebel mail that incited young men to join the Confederacy and encouraged their friends and relatives already serving in the Southern army.

Some of the more obstinate rebel women flaunted their feelings through impudence and open defiance toward Federal soldiers. For instance, a Union detachment stopped to take breakfast at the home of a Mr. and Mrs. Spencer about ten miles southwest of Warrensburg in July of 1864 and were told by the couple’s four grown daughters that they could not have any bread because the family’s dogs needed it. The women added that “they would feed no Black Republicans; but said they had and would again feed their grub to bushwhackers when they wanted to, and even dared the soldiers to molest a thingabout their premises,” according to a report made by Union Captain William B. Ballew dated July 2, 1864 in the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.

Sallie and Jennie Mayfield, whose brothers were notorious guerrillas in the Vernon County area, even rode with the bushwhackers from time to time. On one such occasion, they were captured and taken to the Gratiot Street prison in St. Louis. They eventually escaped after adamantly refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Union.

Personal acquaintance and friendship sometimes overrode politics, though, even for inveterate rebel women like the Mayfield girls. James B. Pond, a Union officer stationed at Fort Scott, Kansas, recalled a time not long after the Mayfield boys had been killed by a Union scout that one of their sisters warned him of an impending guerrilla attack and thereby saved his life, because he had previously been kind to the girls and had protected their family from an overzealous militia.

Women have generally supported their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons during times of war. They have aided the causes in ways that ranged from carrying arms in battles to spying and the more typical support roles. They cried when their men didn’t come home. Women in the Civil War were no different.

June 2006

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