She Rode with the Generals, but her regiment thought she was a man. : The True and Incredible Story of Sarah Emma Seelye, Alias Franklin Thompson

I actually finished this book, which has probably the longest full title of any book I've ever read, over a week ago. I've been too sick since then to properly write about it, which - given the subject matter - is probably case-in-point about how soft we have gone as a people.

So, Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds was the youngest daughter of a real misogynist. God mustn't like misogynists much, or at least not this one, as he had a crop of girls and a single, epileptic son (whom he hated more than the daughters). The long and short is that Miss Edmonds grew up riding, hunting, cording word, and doing all of the other work of a boy, either in a (misguided) attempt to win her father's affection or simply because sons or no, the work still needed doing.

Fast forward until she's 16 and her father wants to marry her off. Sarah runs away from the family farm in New Brunswick, eventually settling in Flint, Michigan. As Franklin Thomson. As author Sylvia Dannett points out, Sarah could not have left home as a single girl and made a go of things on her own in that era. Living as a man was her only option.

When Lincoln calls for volunteers, Franklin enlists with his Flint friends in the Second Michigan. Within the regiment, they laugh at her tiny feet and refer to her alternately as the Beardless Boy and Our Woman, but given that she is the best rider by far, one of the best shooters, and can generally work twice as hard - drilling, marching, chopping firewood, you name - as any other man, no one seriously thinks she is anything other than a man.

Franklin Thompson's Civil War days are awe-inspiring. In addition to serving as a nurse and a postmaster, he is present at many of the major early actions - Bull Run (first and second), Antietam, Seven Days, Fredericksburg - crosses and re-crosses enemy lines as a spy, and serves as an orderly (a role only given to the best riders with the most stamina) to a top general at Fredericksburg. Also, Franklin contracts malaria, suffers fairly massive internal injuries when thrown from a horse, and is never actually hospitalized since that would involve the revelation that Franklin was more Frances than Frank.

When Franklin eventually does desert - due to medical conditions that cannot be treated without real medical care - and melts back into civilian life as Sarah Emma Edmonds, it is as a young lady only three months past her 21st birthday. (So she certainly wouldn't have been laid low by a little bronchitis.) She then goes on to a live several most fascinating decades that see her successfully take on Congress to be awarded a veteran's pension and also be made the only woman member of the GAR.

Edmonds story is humbling, and Dannett does her credit. That said, the full picture of women in the Civil War, as opposed to the biography of one of them women who did so, is best told by De Anne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook in They Fought Like Demons.