By J. Mark Powell
At first glance, there was nothing unusual about Pvt. Lyons Wakeman. The service record in the National Archives is similar to countless other Civil War soldiers:
Age: 21
Height: 5 feet
Coloring: Fair complected with brown hair and blue eyes.
About as typical as it gets for a soldier of the era. With one significant exception. When one of Wakeman’s descendants died in 1976, relatives poking around in the deceased’s attic came upon a stash of old letters. When they read them, the content was not only shocking, but the family tree had to be rewritten as well.
Because Lyons Wakeman was actually Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, a veteran of the Civil War.
She was born to farmer parents in southern New York in 1843. The eldest of nine children, life on an antebellum family farm was anything but easy. Everyone pitched in. The hours were long, and the pay, when there was pay, was lousy. With her parents struggling to make ends meet, Sarah worked as a domestic servant on the side.
Now a teenager, she realized getting married would mean one less mouth to feed at home. However, there was apparently a shortage of prospective suitors. Making matters worse, it seems there was a nasty spat between mom and dad and their oldest daughter.
Sarah did what teens sometimes do. She ran away from home. With very little cash on hand and no means of support as an unskilled single woman with a minimal education, her prospects were bleak.
Desperate times, they say, call for desperate measures. And Sarah was very desperate, indeed.
So, she tried something radical for her time. She put on a pair of pants and a shirt, parted her hair on the side, and changed her first name to Lyons. From that moment on, for the rest of her short life, she passed as a man.
The rift with her parents must have been patched up to a certain extent — not enough to return home, but enough to reassure their fears and keep them updated on her life. Because Sarah wrote frequently and honestly. While she was busy living a lie, she was honest with them.
She worked as a boatman on the Chenango Canal. Then, in August 1862, something intriguing caught her eye. An army recruiting poster offered a $300 bounty (equivalent to nearly $11,000 today) to those who volunteered. It must have seemed like a fortune to her.
And so “Lyons Wakeman” enlisted in Company H, 153rd New York Volunteer Infantry, giving her age as 21, and thus a legal adult. She was given a blue uniform and a rifle and marched off to the front.
The 153rd was first stationed outside Washington, D.C., part of the massive array of troops defending the capital. Army life suited her. “I like to be a soldier very well,” she wrote. Her letters home often contained cash. Maybe it was meant to help the large family make ends meet; perhaps it was an atonement for having run off in a huff; perhaps it was a bit of both.
At one point, she was assigned to help guard Carroll Prison, whose inmates included three women arrested after trying to pass themselves off as men to join the Union army. The irony was not lost on Sarah. Neither was the risk. She knew all too well that if her true gender and identity were discovered, she could wind up behind bars with them.
She never pretended to be anything but Sarah in her letters home, either. Which also carried a risk of exposure if her writing was ever intercepted. (Though back then, there were no censors reading soldiers’ letters.)
Everything changed in February 1864 when the 153rd was ordered to the banks of the Mississippi River in Louisiana. It took part in the disastrous Red River Campaign that spring (which Gen. William T. Sherman called “one damn blunder from beginning to end”).
Sarah fought bravely in the Battle of Pleasant Hill. “I feel thankful to God that He spared my life, and I pray to Him that He will lead me safe through the field of battle and that I may return safe home again.” But it was not to be. Like many Northern soldiers fighting in the hot delta climate, she grew sick, was taken to a military hospital in New Orleans, and died there of disease on June 19, 1864.
She rests today in Chalmette National Cemetery beneath a stone bearing the name she fought under, Lyons Wakeman.
Of the 3.1 million Americans, North and South, who served in that war, it’s believed that up to 1,000 were women posing as men.
Sarah Rosetta Wakeman was one of several who never came back.
Editor’s note: J. Mark Powell is a novelist, former TV journalist and diehard history buff. Have a historical mystery that needs solving? A forgotten moment worth remembering? Send it to him at HolyCow@insidesources.com. Please send your comments to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.
