What we actually know about women who enlisted in disguise

This is a subject where the popular literature and the documentary record have drifted a long way apart, and I want to walk through both, because the real version is more interesting than the inflated one.

The claim you will encounter

Search for women soldiers in the nineteenth century American army and you will find confident assertions that hundreds served in disguise, sometimes four hundred, sometimes more.

Follow that number back. It generally leads to a small number of late nineteenth century compilations, written decades after the events, by authors who were assembling stories rather than verifying them, and to a handful of newspaper items of the period that were frequently entertainment.

That does not mean nobody did it. It means the number is not evidence of anything.

What is properly documented

There are cases with real records behind them, and those are worth knowing individually rather than as a statistic.

Elizabeth Newcom enlisted as Bill Newcom in the Missouri Volunteers in 1847 during the war with Mexico and marched a considerable distance before being discovered and discharged. She later petitioned Congress for pay, and that petition is the documentary trail, which is exactly the kind of source that makes a case solid.

For the Civil War there are several well established cases, including women who were discovered when wounded or ill, and at least one who drew a federal pension after her service became a matter of record.

The pattern in the solid cases is consistent. The documentation exists because something forced the person into an administrative process: a discharge, a medical examination, a pension claim, a court martial. Where no such process occurred, there is no record, which is precisely why counting is impossible.

Why it was possible at all

Modern readers assume a nineteenth century enlistment involved a serious physical examination. Frequently it did not.

Recruiting standards were loose, particularly when units were forming quickly and quotas mattered. Descriptions of the examination in some accounts amount to little more than checking that a man could see, walk and had teeth to tear a cartridge.

Soldiers slept in their clothes, washed rarely and in private where they could, and privacy in camp was a matter of walking away from it. Beardless teenage boys were common enough in the ranks that a young looking soldier attracted no attention.

Why anyone did it

The reasons in the documented cases vary and none of them is romantic in the way the popular versions suggest.

Following a husband or a brother. Pay, which for a poor woman was substantially better than any other work available. Escaping a situation at home. Conviction about the cause, in some cases stated plainly by the person herself.

How to evaluate a claim

Ask what the primary document is. A service record, a pension file, a court martial transcript, a contemporary letter, a regimental order.

Be sceptical of anything first recorded long after the fact, of memoirs written for sale, and of newspaper stories from the period, which printed a great deal of material about disguised women because readers enjoyed it.

Be sceptical of round numbers.

And be careful with the language of the sources themselves. Nineteenth century records describe these people in the terms of their own time, and whether a particular individual was a woman disguised for practical reasons or was living as a man for reasons of their own is frequently not answerable from a discharge paper. Historians disagree about specific cases and the disagreement is genuine rather than political posturing.

Why I still teach it

Because the process of checking a claim is the actual skill, and this is a subject where students arrive already believing something.

Handing a class the four hundred figure and asking them to find where it comes from teaches more about history as a discipline than any amount of explaining would.