Nurse and Spy in the Union Army: The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields

In 1861, a young Canadian woman with a battered past and a borrowed name walked into Union Army recruitment offices four times before they finally accepted her. Sarah Emma Edmonds had fled an abusive father, abandoned her given name, and transformed herself into 'Frank Thompson', a man. Once enlisted as a male nurse in the 2nd Michigan Infantry, she discovered her calling ran deeper than battlefield triage. She would become one of the Civil War's most daring spies, infiltrating Confederate camps in disguise while continuing her work among the wounded. This memoir, published while the war still raged, delivers an unparalleled dual perspective: the gore and grief of hospital tents alongside the pulse-quickening tension of secret missions behind enemy lines. Edmonds writes with an adventurer's verve about a woman who refused the constraints of her era, serving a nation that didn't fully know what it was getting. She survived what killed others. She saw what few women were permitted to see. And she told it all with an honesty that scandalized and inspired a nation at war with itself.