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All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies

Amazon.com Price:  $22.85 (as of 06/05/2019 07:12 PST- Details)

ISBN13: 9780393335477
Condition: New
Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

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The fascinating stories of the women who worked as spies, as daughters of the regiments, or who disguised themselves as male soldiers to play their heroic part in the Civil War.

Historian Elizabeth Leonard has combed archives, memoirs, and histories to unearth the stories of the hidden and forgotten women who risked their lives for the blue or the gray. These women spied for their cause, remained on the front lines as daughters of the regiments, and even dressed as men and enlisted under aliases to take up arms and fight as soldiers. Here are the stories of Belle Boyd, a proud Confederate loyalist and key player in Stonewall Jackson’s struggle to hold the Shenandoah Valley; army woman Annie Etheridge, whose four long years of courageous work on the field earned her a Kearney Cross for bravery; Sarah Emma Edmonds, who enlisted as “Franklin Thompson,” remained with her regiment as a much-respected soldier for two years, fighting at Fredricksburg and somewhere else; and lots of other courageous women.

Leonard investigates why these women chose unconventional how you can lend a hand their cause. In doing so, she gives us a striking portrait of the lives women led in the nineteenth century and of their ability to break through the traditional barriers of Victorian womanhood.
As the American Civil War raged on, Louisiana’s Sarah Morgan complained to her diary, “Oh! if I were only a man. Then I could don the breeches, and slay them with a will!” Though Morgan never did “don the breeches,” in All the Daring of the Soldier, historian Elizabeth D. Leonard reveals that many women did. Leonard recounts the stories of dozens of women who joined the war effort, such as Richard Anderson, a.k.a. Amy Clarke, who fought with her Confederate cavalry regiment at the battle of Shiloh. Other women served as “Daughters of the Regiment,” doing the whole thing from serving as mascots and nurses to bearing regimental colors in battle and even fighting in combat. Still others engaged in espionage, such as Elizabeth Van Lew, who hid at the back of a cultivated persona and the nickname Crazy Bet in order that she could spy for the Union.

Interesting capsule biographies aside, the strength of this book lies in Leonard’s historical analysis. At the same time as many historians (and most Civil War novelists) have assumed that women went to war because they were motivated by love–either of men or their country–Leonard is quick to point out that whereas many women did follow the men they loved, and that others were sincere patriots, many others were motivated by economic need or even the desire for adventure and a much broader range of opportunity than 19th-century society allowed them. Leonard’s thorough research in archives and memoirs adds great detail to these women’s stories and makes All the Daring of the Soldier a very good addition to both the scholarly and general literature on the Civil War. –C.B. Delaney
ISBN13: 9780393335477
Condition: New
Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

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