author
S. Emma E. (Sarah Emma Evelyn) Edmonds
1841–1898
Known for her extraordinary Civil War story, she escaped an arranged marriage, lived under a male identity, and later became one of the best-known women connected to the Union Army. Her life blends courage, reinvention, and a lasting place in American memory.
1 Audiobook
Nurse and Spy in the Union Army The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields
by S. Emma E. (Sarah Emma Evelyn) Edmonds
About the author
Born in New Brunswick in December 1841, Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds left home as a teenager and eventually settled in the United States. During the American Civil War, she is best known for serving with the Union Army under the name Franklin Flint Thompson.
Accounts of her wartime service helped make her famous: she worked as a nurse and messenger, and later wrote about her experiences in a memoir that reached a wide audience. Some parts of her story, especially the more dramatic espionage claims, have been debated by later historians, but her place in Civil War history remains secure.
After the war, she married Linus Seelye and spent her later years in the United States. She was admitted to the Grand Army of the Republic and, near the end of her life, received a U.S. military pension, a rare recognition for a woman veteran of that era.