Nurse uses stretcher

Though this plaque gets her maiden name wrong, Emma Edmonds is clearly the pride of Houston's Washington Cemetery.

Back from an extended summer vacation from the blog.  While I was gone, the New York Times'  excellent Civil War blog, Disunion, ran a piece by C. Kay Larson about women who served in one capacity or another, frequently disguised as men, during the war.  Larson touches on Sarah Emma Edmonds--subject of our next Civil War Project show, Comrades Mine--who served in the Second Michigan Infantry for two years under the name Franklin Thompson.  She briefly relates a remarkable event from Edmonds's memoir:  on the battlefield at Antietam, the bloodiest battle in American military history, Emma-disguised-as-Franklin comes upon a dying Union soldier who confesses to being a woman in disguise.  Emma tends her for the few moments until her death, and then, in order to preserve the secret for her sister in arms, buries the soldier in an unmarked grave there on the battlefield.

It's a great story.  We had not come across it in our preliminary research before commissioning the play, and Maureen Gallagher, our Comrades Mine playwright, had not mentioned it to me since then.  I emailed the Times piece to Maureen.  She hadn't seen the article, but she knew all about the story.  "Maybe made up.  So I didn't include that event," she emailed back.

As Huckleberry Fin once wrote about what Mr. Mark Twain put into The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "there was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth."  When Emma published her memoir in 1865, she was more concerned with trying to sell copies than with whether Oprah would throw her out of the book club for making stuff up.  Maureen steers me to an Emma biography, The Mysterious Private Thompson by Laura Leedy Gansler.  This is from Gansler:

. . . her story is strangely, and suspiciously, similar in some respects to that of Clara Barton's experience there. . . . After Antietam, as the medics were collecting the wounded from the field, one approached Barton and said that he had found a soldier who refused to be treated by the doctor or any male medic; only a woman would do.  When the soldier was brought in, she confessed to Barton that she was in fact Mary Galloway, a sixteen-year-old girl from nearby Frederick who had fallen in love with a Union officer while his regiment was in Frederick at the beginning of the war.  When the fighting broke out at Antietam Creek, and she learned that his regiment was involved, she disguised herself as a soldier to come look for him.  In Emma's "experience" the female soldier died; in the case of Mary Galloway, Barton coaxed her into allowing the surgeon to operate, saving her life, and she and her lover were ultimately reunited.

Gansler even doubts that Emma was at Antietam at all, though some of Maureen's other research suggests that her regiment was there, but held in reserve, and that Emma--trained as an army nurse--might well have been employed after the battle to help retrieve wounded from the field.

Truth or stretcher, it's not part of Comrades Mine, which begins performances April 12, 2013.