Civil War: Women in Combat

 

Harriet Tubman. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped in 1849 and became the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. During the war, she served the Union as a nurse, scout, and spy in South Carolina. In 1863, she became the first woman to lead a major military raid—the Combahee River Raid—freeing over 700 enslaved people while disrupting Confederate supply lines. Her bravery combined abolitionism with direct combat support, making her a symbol of resistance and freedom.

Sarah Emma Edmonds (Frank Thompson). Edmonds disguised herself as a man named Frank Thompson and enlisted in the Union Army's 2nd Michigan Infantry. She served as a soldier, nurse, and spy in battles including Antietam and Bull Run before illness forced her out. Her story (one of hundreds of documented female soldiers) proved women's physical and mental resilience in combat.

The Confederate Woman: Soldier and Spy

Women Doctors in the Civil War

Civil War: Women in Medicine

 

The American Civil War (1861–1865) shattered traditional gender norms. While men fought on the battlefields, thousands of women served as nurses, spies, scouts, soldiers in disguise, and activists—often at great personal risk. Their efforts saved lives, gathered critical intelligence, challenged slavery, and advanced women's roles in society. Clara Barton later noted that the war advanced women's social position by 50 years.

Clara Barton. Known as the "Angel of the Battlefield," Barton left her job in the U.S. Patent Office to deliver supplies and nurse wounded soldiers at the front lines of battles like Antietam and Fredericksburg. She worked independently of official organizations, often under fire, and later founded the American Red Cross. Her hands-on humanitarian work professionalized battlefield medicine and relief efforts.

Dorothea Dix. A pre-war reformer for the mentally ill, Dix was appointed Superintendent of Union Army Nurses in 1861—the first woman to hold such a high federal post. She recruited and trained thousands of nurses, set strict standards for care, and improved hospital conditions despite resistance from male officials. Her leadership elevated nursing as a respectable profession for women.

Sally Louisa Tompkins. The only woman commissioned as a Captain in the Confederate Army (by Jefferson Davis himself), Tompkins ran Robertson Hospital in Richmond. Her facility had the lowest mortality rate of any hospital in the war due to her strict hygiene and care standards. She treated thousands of soldiers while defying gender barriers in military medicine.

Mary Edwards Walker. One of the few female surgeons in the Union Army, Walker served in field hospitals and as a volunteer surgeon. She often wore men's clothing for practicality and was captured as a spy but released. In 1865, she became the only woman ever awarded the Medal of Honor for her service (later revoked and restored). Her work challenged medical and gender norms.

Susie King Taylor.  A formerly enslaved Black woman who escaped to Union lines, Taylor became the first Black Army nurse. She taught literacy to soldiers in the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (later 33rd U.S. Colored Troops), nursed the wounded, and documented her experiences in a memoir. Her service highlighted African American women's crucial, often overlooked roles in the Union effort.

Women Doctors in the Civil War

Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Civil War

Civil War: Women Spies

 

Rose O'Neal Greenhow A prominent Washington, D.C., socialite and Confederate sympathizer, Greenhow ran a spy ring that gathered intelligence from Union officials. Her reports helped the Confederacy win the First Battle of Bull Run. Imprisoned twice, she continued smuggling information even after exile. Her espionage demonstrated how women could leverage social access for military advantage.

Belle Boyd Nicknamed the "Siren of the Shenandoah," this 17-year-old Virginian became one of the Confederacy's most famous spies. She provided key intelligence to Stonewall Jackson during the Shenandoah Valley Campaign and was arrested multiple times. Her daring operations and charm made her a celebrity on both sides, highlighting women's covert contributions to the Southern cause.

Elizabeth Van Lew A wealthy Unionist in Confederate Richmond, Van Lew operated one of the most effective spy networks of the war. She smuggled information to Union generals (including Grant), aided prisoner escapes from Libby Prison, and even planted a spy in Jefferson Davis's household. Her efforts provided vital intelligence that shortened the war in Virginia.

The Confederate Woman: Soldier and Spy

Women Doctors in the Civil War

General William T. Sherman and the Indian Wars

 

General William TecumsehSherman stands as one of the most polarizing figures in American military history. Celebrated for his ruthless “March to the Sea” during the Civil War, which helped break the Confederacy’s will to fight, Sherman turned his attention westward after 1865. As commanding general of the U.S. Army from 1869 to 1883, he directed the military campaigns that subdued the Plains Indian tribes and opened the American West to railroads, settlers, and mining interests. His application of total-war tactics—destroying an enemy’s resources and capacity to resist—proved as effective against Native Americans as it had against the South. By the time he retired, the once-dominant buffalo-hunting cultures of the Great Plains had been shattered, and thousands of Indigenous people were confined to reservations.

Born in 1820 in Ohio and named after the Shawnee leader Tecumseh—an ironic detail given his later career—Sherman graduated from West Point in 1840. He served in the Mexican-American War, left the army for civilian life, and rejoined at the outbreak of the Civil War. His friendship with Ulysses S. Grant propelled him to prominence. When Grant became president in 1869, Sherman succeeded him as commanding general, overseeing a vast territory between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. With fewer than 25,000 troops scattered across frontier posts, his primary mission was to protect the transcontinental railroad and wagon trails while facilitating white settlement.

Initially, Sherman supported diplomatic efforts. As a member of the Indian Peace Commission, he helped negotiate the Medicine Lodge Treaty (1867) and the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), which established reservations for southern Plains tribes and the Sioux. He also arranged the return of Navajo people from the Bosque Redondo reservation to their homelands in New Mexico. Yet Sherman viewed treaties as temporary measures. When the Medicine Lodge agreements collapsed in 1868 and raids continued, he authorized his subordinate, Major General Philip Sheridan, to launch a winter campaign against the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa. The resulting Battle of the Washita River in November 1868 destroyed a Cheyenne village and set the tone for future operations. Sherman’s strategy was clear: strike when tribes were vulnerable, in winter, when food and mobility were limited.

Sherman’s private correspondence revealed a harsh worldview. After the 1866 Fetterman Massacre, in which 81 soldiers died in an ambush by Sioux warriors, he telegraphed Grant urging “vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” In 1867 he told Grant that the nation would not allow “a few thieving, ragged Indians” to halt railroad progress. He believed Native resistance obstructed civilization and that military force, not negotiation alone, would decide the West’s future. Yet he also criticized corrupt Indian agents and speculators who exploited reservation tribes.

The cornerstone of Sherman’s campaign was economic warfare. He recognized that the buffalo—source of food, clothing, shelter, and spiritual life for Plains Indians—was the foundation of their independence. Rather than ordering soldiers to slaughter herds directly, Sherman encouraged civilian hunters. In an 1868 letter to Sheridan, he suggested inviting “all the sportsmen of England and America” for a “Grand Buffalo hunt” to sweep the herds away. Professional hunters like William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and hide merchants responded enthusiastically. By 1873, vast stretches of the Plains were littered with rotting carcasses. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge described the scene: where “myriads of buffalo” had roamed the year before, now only “a dead, solitary, putrid desert” remained. Congress attempted to protect the herds in 1874, but Sherman helped convince President Grant to pocket-veto the bill. Within a decade, the buffalo were nearly extinct in the wild—fewer than 325 remained by the early 20th century. Without their primary food source, tribes faced starvation or surrender.

Sherman’s oversight extended to major conflicts of the 1870s. He reorganized frontier forts and supported operations during the Modoc War in California and Oregon, the Great Sioux War of 1876 (which included the Battle of the Little Bighorn), and the Nez Perce War. In 1871, after narrowly escaping the Warren Wagon Train raid by Kiowa and Comanche warriors in Texas, he insisted that captured chiefs Satanta and Big Tree be tried for murder in a civilian court—the first such trial of Native leaders in U.S. history. These campaigns, though often led by subordinates like George Custer, Ranald Mackenzie, and Nelson Miles, bore Sherman’s strategic imprint: relentless pursuit, destruction of villages and supplies, and winter attacks that exploited Native vulnerability.

By the late 1870s, the free-roaming warrior societies of the Plains had been broken. The once-mighty Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa were confined to reservations where they depended on government rations. Historian David D. Smits noted that, with their economic base destroyed, Indigenous people had “no choice but to accept a servile fate on a reservation.” Sioux leader Sitting Bull later reflected that “a cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell—a death-wind for my people.” Sherman retired on February 8, 1884, at the mandatory age of 64, having achieved the nation’s goal of securing the West for railroads and settlement.

Sherman’s legacy in the Indian Wars remains contentious. To many 19th-century Americans, he was a pragmatic hero who tamed a “savage” frontier and enabled national expansion. To Native Americans, his policies amounted to cultural destruction. He never uttered the infamous line “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”—that phrase is usually attributed to Sheridan—but his writings and actions reflected a willingness to use extreme measures when resistance persisted. His middle name, drawn from a Shawnee chief who once united tribes against American encroachment, underscored the irony of his career.

In the end, Sherman’s western campaigns completed the work begun in Georgia: the application of total war to achieve political ends. The railroads he protected crisscrossed the Plains, towns sprang up beside them, and the buffalo were gone. The Indian Wars under his command marked the closing chapter of armed Indigenous resistance on the continent and the triumph of industrial America over the nomadic cultures that had thrived there for centuries. Sherman died in 1891, remembered primarily for the Civil War, yet his quieter, more methodical conquest of the West reshaped the nation just as profoundly.

Arizona Legends and Lore

Twelve Most Notable Civil War Paintings

 

Here are twelve of the most notable and frequently discussed Civil War paintings (primarily from the 1860s–1880s era). They capture battlefield action, camp life, emancipation, human cost, and symbolic landscapes rather than just heroic charges.

Guerrilla Warfare (Picket Duty in Virginia) by Albert Bierstadt (1862). Bierstadt, known for grand landscapes, depicts Union soldiers ambushing Confederates in a lush Virginia setting with a fallen soldier and distant homestead. It highlights the irregular, personal nature of much of the fighting and contrasts serene scenery with sudden violence.

Prisoners from the Front by Winslow Homer (1866). One of Homer's masterpieces and often called one of the most telling paintings of the war. It shows captured Confederate soldiers (a defiant young officer, an older man, and others) confronting a poised Union general in a devastated landscape. Painted post-war but based on Homer's frontline observations, it explores class, defeat, resilience, and reconciliation without glorification.

A Ride for Liberty – The Fugitive Slaves by Eastman Johnson (1862). A powerful, rare depiction of an enslaved Black family galloping toward Union lines at dawn, seeking freedom amid the chaos. Johnson witnessed similar scenes; the painting emphasizes agency and self-liberation rather than passive waiting for emancipation, with the family looking in different directions (future, past, present).

Home, Sweet Home by Winslow Homer (1863). Two Union soldiers in camp pause reflectively by a fire, evoking profound homesickness through simple, intimate details. Homer, who served as an illustrator with the Army of the Potomac, excelled at capturing the quiet emotional toll of war rather than combat spectacle.

Defiance: Inviting a Shot before Petersburg by Winslow Homer (1864). A lone Confederate soldier stands boldly on a parapet, taunting Union lines, while comrades (including a Black musician with a banjo) rest below in the trenches. It conveys raw defiance, boredom, and the surreal mix of danger and routine during the brutal siege of Petersburg.

The Burial of Latané by William D. Washington (1864). A Confederate icon depicting the funeral of the sole casualty from J.E.B. Stuart's 1862 ride around McClellan. Women, children, and enslaved people gather in a pastoral setting for the burial, accompanied by a poem. It became a symbol of Southern chivalry, sacrifice, and loyalist tropes in Lost Cause mythology.

A Coming Storm by Sanford Robinson Gifford (1863). A luminist landscape showing dark clouds gathering over a serene lake and autumnal mountains. Painted during the war (and once owned by Edwin Booth, brother of Lincoln's assassin), it metaphorically captures the nation's gathering crisis and uncertainty, blending beauty with impending doom.

At the Front by George Cochran Lambdin (1866). A contemplative Union officer reflects somberly, conveying the psychological weight and trauma of combat experience. Post-war paintings like this shifted focus from action to the inner costs of service.

The Girl I Left Behind Me by Eastman Johnson (1872). A young woman stands on a promontory, gazing uncertainly as distant clouds (possibly battle smoke) loom. Titled after a popular soldiers' ballad, it poignantly addresses separation, waiting, and the home front's anxiety.

Skirmish in the Wilderness by Winslow Homer (1864). Homer's depiction of chaotic close-quarters fighting in dense woods during the 1864 Overland Campaign. It avoids romantic heroism, emphasizing confusion and the brutal, tangled reality of battle.

Evening Gun, Fort Sumter by Conrad Wise Chapman (1864). Based on Chapman's sketches as a Confederate soldier, this shows the battered fort at twilight after bombardment—the site of the war's first shots. It captures endurance and the war's origins through atmospheric, documentary-style detail.

Grant and His Generals by Ole Peter Hansen Balling (1865). A formal group portrait of Union leaders (including Grant and Sherman) on horseback, symbolizing command, unity, and impending victory as the war wound down. It contrasts with more intimate works by celebrating leadership and resolution.

Women Doctors in the Civil War

The Civil War Wedding