I just watched The History Channel, “Women in War”, focusing on the Civil War. For an hour I watched the exploits of black women, of female spies, of women who went into battle disguised as men. The word `courage’ buckles under the responsibility of capturing some sense of these women’s spirits. I admired them all, but one stood out: the `man’ discovered dead at the stone wall which was the focus of Pickett’s Charge. Her name? To this day no one knows.
My brother Denny, a Civil War buff, responds:
“It was a practice then to rip open the shirts and check the chests of dead soldiers because Confederates and Yankees alike would customarily place Bibles over their hearts; or hang wallets – or their name and hometown on a piece of paper – around their neck. Because of this practice, we know something of the number of anonymous women who went to war disguised as men.
This woman was found at the foot of the stone wall at Pickett’s charge. This means that she was a Southern woman who had volunteered under a man’s name. She had to have volunteered far away from the regiment mustered from her hometown, so she would not be recognized. She died in Pennsylvania and her body was in the hands of the enemy. (Lee pulled the Army of Northern Virginia out of Gettysburg the day after Pickett’s charge.) Even in death, her secrecy is honored.
To understand the courage of a woman ( of anyone!) to charge one of the most tactically impregnable defenses of the Civil War requires of us today more than we can provide the task. As a woman, she had no testosterone, which is known to arouse men to foolhardy levels of bravery. Without getting too romantic about it, this woman stepped forward purely from conviction. That is guts!”
Clearly, Denny admires her as I did.
Civil War combatants knew a smattering of medicine. When shot, they would pull up their shirt to learn their fate. A hole centered in the abdomen or peripheral in the chest meant slow death. Lateral in the abdomen, you might live. Centered in the chest, you didn’t live long enough to gather diagnostic impressions. She must have known she had ended her days.
Did you know that blood has a smell? The warmer it gets, the more it smells. I wonder if this woman died quickly or slowly? Did she watch her own blood-pool spread – a heavy symbol of mortality – and realize that death was nigh? Was the odor of her slowly extinguishing life full in her nostrils? Did she die in pain? Did she long for home, weakly calling the names of those she had left?
Why did she quit her home and her kind; what summoned her to this audacity? Spurned love? The heroic fulfillment of an undeniable secessionist passion? To be in the ranks with her husband, insistent on sharing his fate, whatever that fate might be? Or maybe just a person determined not to live life a woman in those days, subdued and subordinate, refusing to live her whole life with the sound turned off.
Then, as now, life was full of heroes, some lives writ bold – others, lower-case, out of sight and tucked away. It’s easier for us to relate to individuals than a mass, and I cannot free myself of that sensitivity. This woman became an individual for me. Heroine or runaway, I’m sorry she came to the end she did; and I regret she died alone.
by Lucky Garvin