Rosetta Wakeman
At the age of 19, she went to the nearest large city, Binghamton, looking for work. She was hired as a boatman on a coal barge. She sent a large portion of her earnings to her family. Army recruiters assumed she was a male and asked her to join the 153rd Regiment of New York Volunteers. When she learned that she would receive a $152 bounty just for enlisting, her mind was quickly made up.
She used the name “Lyons Wakeman,” and claimed to be 21 years old. The description on her enlistment papers said that she was five feet tall, fair-skinned, with blue eyes. The regiment was sent to Washington D. C., where they remained for nine months, defending our nation’s capital. In her letters home, Rosetta bragged, “I can drill as good as any man in my regiment.”
In February 1864, her unit was sent to Louisiana to take part in General Banks’ Red River Campaign. Rosetta experienced battle up close for the first time in April 1864 at Pleasant Hill, Louisiana. The Unionists repelled a Confederate attack, but soon had to retreat. She wrote, “There was a heavy cannonading all day and a sharp firing of infantry. I was under fire about four hours and laid on the field of battle all night.”
Drinking water became scarce, and the soldiers drank from streams that were poisoned the rotting flesh of dead animals. The connection between contamination and infection wasn’t understood at that time. The Union soldiers fell sick and died by the thousands.
Rosetta wrote of the deceased on the battlefield, “sometimes in heaps and in rows…with distorted features, among mangled and dead horses, trampled in mud, and thrown in all conceivable sorts of places.” And, to me, the most disturbing, “You can distinctly hear, over the whole field, the hum and hissing of decomposition.”
Rosetta didn’t write only of the war. In her letters, she expressed her strong religious faith, the pride she felt at being a good soldier, and her strong desire to be financially self-sufficient, a dream that was shared by many nineteenth-century women. She was outspoken, independent, and hoped to buy a farm of her own after the war.
But, during this time, Rosetta began to express the fear that she wouldn’t survive the war. In one letter, she wrote, “If it is God’s will for me to fall in the field of battle, it is my will to go and never return home.”
She was admitted to the regimental hospital on May 3, 1864, and was transferred to a Federal hospital in New Orleans two weeks later. The trip south was fraught with problems. By the time she reached her destination, she was in the acute phase of dysentery. She died on June 19, 1864. If the nurses or doctors there discovered her true gender, they didn’t report it. She was buried in New Orleans. Her headstone reads “Pvt. Lyons Wakeman.” I wonder how many others like her were buried as men?
Rosetta’s letters were discovered by a relative in the attic of the farmhouse where she grew up. They were published in 1994 by editor, Lauren Cook Burgess. The book is still available at several online bookstores.
As an interesting side note, after the National Park Service discovered that Ms. Burgess was a woman, they wouldn’t allow her to participant in their Civil War reenactments any longer. She vowed to find proof that women had served as soldiers during the Civil War. The resulting publicity caught the attention of the great-granddaughter of Rosetta’s sister.
I’m thankful that they didn’t destroy her letters and deprive us of this resource. But it saddened me to learn that she received no aid or support from her family, that they were actually ashamed of her. I know that’s a symptom of the times, but it upsets me anyway.
I marvel at these women who fought in the Civil War. It couldn’t have been easy. If they had a husband or boyfriend to enlist with, that probably helped. To enlist all alone as Rosetta Wakeman did, to constantly fear detection, which would mean an immediate discharge from the army, or worse—they were also heroes!
Copyright © 2006 Maggie MacLean
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