Women in the Military
During the war, she fought in several battles and was wounded twice. She
suffered a sword cut to the head and two musket balls to her thigh. She begged
her comrades to let her die rather than risk being discovered as a woman and
sent home. Instead, they loaded her onto a horse and took her to a hospital. She
allowed the doctor to treat her head wound but hid her leg injury. Sampson dug
one musket ball out of her thigh with her own penknife and sewed up the wound
herself. She couldn’t remove the second one because it was too deep to reach.
The painful injury never healed properly and likely caused her pain the rest of
her short life.
A year and a half into her service, Sampson fell unconscious with a fever.
This time, the doctor discovered the soldier was a woman. General George
Washington, leader of the Continental Army, ordered her to be honorably
discharged in 1783. With the help of her friend Paul Revere, she received a
military pension from the State of Massachusetts.
SARAH ROSETTA WAKEMAN AND THE CIVIL WAR (1861–1865)
By spring 1862, the Civil War between the Union (the North) and the
Confederate States of America (the South) had raged for a year. It didn’t look
as if it would end anytime soon. Nineteen-year-old Sarah Rosetta Wakeman of
Bainbridge, New York, had worked as a coal handler on a small canal boat,
where she passed as a man. When Union army recruiters offered to enlist the
boat workers, Rosetta, as she was called, agreed. The higher pay would help
support her parents and eight siblings.
Wakeman joined the 153rd New York Volunteer Army. Women were not
allowed to join either the Union or the Confederate armies, so Wakeman signed
up as twenty-one-year-old Lyons Wakeman. “I knew that I could help you more
to leave home than to stay there with you,” she wrote to her parents. The Union
army paid Private Wakeman $152 to enlist, more money than a year’s wages for
most young men of the time. During her time in the army, she sent much of her
salary to her parents to help with the family’s expenses.
Rosetta Wakeman was among the nearly 3 million soldiers who fought
in the Civil War. About 620,000 died. As fatalities mounted, military officials
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