Sassy Civil War Heroines

After our last meet-up, Caroline and I decided that we needed to do that kind of thing more often, so we decided to have one during the Olustee Festival, which I mentioned in Caroline's birthday post.  This will be a Lolita meet-up, and I left Caroline to figure out the theme because she's really good at it (waaaay better than I am).  Caroline's idea is that our outfits should be inspired by female civil war heroes.  Inspired is the key word there so we'll have a lot of room for creativity.  When I went searching for my heroine, I found so many interesting and inspiring ladies that it was hard to choose.  I narrowed it down to these top three.


1) Kate Warne

Kate Warne was the first woman that stood out to me.  She worked for the Pinkerton Agency as the first female detective in the United States.  She was so very mysterious and went by so many different names that no one is sure what her real name was.  Before the war she helped to foil an attempted assassination of president-elect Abraham Lincoln.  During the Civil War she did intelligence work for the Union, going where men usually couldn't.  She continued to work as a detective after the war.



This is believed to be the only photograph of Kate Warne, who is supposedly the person leaning on the pole (disguised, obviously).



2) Martha Coston

I was also intrigued by Martha Coston.  She wasn't actually very involved with the Civil War, but her invention was.  Martha married a promising inventor when she was only a teenager.  Sadly, her husband's work killed him, and she was left alone with four children at the age of 21.  Not long after that her mother and one of her children died, and her husband's money ran out.  Desperate, she looked through her husband's plans to see if she could find an invention to sell.  All she could find was a meager set of plans for night signals to be used at sea.  Despite barely anything to go on, Martha decided to work at making the signals.  It took her years, and a ton of failures, before a final product was tested by the Navy.  And it worked!  She received a patent for her signals and the Navy began using them just after the beginning of the Civil War to help blockade southern ports.

Martha Coston

3) Sarah Emma Edmonds

The last woman who caught my eye is Sarah Emma Edmonds.  She was originally from Canada, but she ran away from home to get out of an arranged marriage her abusive father was forcing her into.  She came to the United States and settled in Michigan, but when the Civil War broke out she disguised herself as a man, called herself Franklin Flint Thompson, and enlisted in the Union army.  While in the military Sarah first served as a male field nurse, then later became a spy.  She was a master of disguise, able to become any character she wanted, black or white, male or female.  Her career came to an end when she contracted Malaria.  She didn't want to be discovered as a woman so she left the military and went to a private hospital.  She planned on returning but her alter ego was seen as a deserter, so she remained Sarah and became a female nurse.  She later wrote about her exploits in her book Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, and her story has been retold in several works of fiction, such as Ann Rinaldi's Girl in Blue.


Sarah Emma Edmonds posing as Franklin Thompson.



All of these ladies are awesome because they defied the social norms of their times and helped to defend their country.  Which one will I choose?  Regardless, it will be an honor to have any of these ladies as my inspiration.





Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Warne
https://noticingbones.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/kate-warne/
http://www.americancivilwarstory.com/martha-coston.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Emma_Edmonds
http://www.fold3.com/page/778_female_civil_war_soldiers_spies/stories/#2327/