Episode Details

Sarah Emma Edmonds was born in December 1841 in New Brunswick, where an abusive father resented that she was not a boy. At 15 she fled an arranged marriage with her mother's help, opened a millinery shop, and when her father tracked her down, became Franklin Thompson, crossing into the United States and selling Bibles door to door from Hartford, Connecticut. Inspired by the novel Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain, she enlisted in the 2nd Michigan Volunteer Infantry in May 1861, passing a physical that checked little beyond teeth and a trigger finger.

As Thompson she served as a field nurse and soldier through First and Second Bull Run, Antietam and Fredericksburg. Her 1864 memoir, later titled Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, sold over 175,000 copies with tales of disguises as an enslaved man named Cuff and an Irish peddler, claims no military record supports. Malaria in 1863 drove her to a private hospital to avoid examination, and she left the hospital to find Frank Thompson listed as a deserter. In the 1880s her old comrades signed affidavits, Congress granted a $12 monthly pension in 1884, and the desertion charge was cleared in 1886.

• Her publisher said she was the best salesman he had seen in 30 years of business.
• She said she became a spy after the death of her friend James Vesey.
• Asked in 1883 whether her book was authentic, she replied, "Not strictly so."
• A fall from a mule while carrying mail before Second Bull Run left her with internal injuries.
• In 1897 she became only the second woman admitted to the Grand Army of the Republic.