I Shall Be Near to You(94)

I don’t regret not for one day the things we done together or having you by my side but that I put you in Harm’s Way by being here. Even more than our Farm, I want for you to have a Long and Happy Life. If it is not God’s Will for us to share this life more than we already done, when I am gone you should go Home and be Safe. I will wait for you in Heaven and Look on you and see the Life you make and be happy for it.


I Shall be Near to You, Always, Your Husband,

Jeremiah Wakefield





AUTHOR’S NOTE


There was a real Rosetta who fought in the Civil War, though not in the 97th New York State Volunteers. That regiment did, however, see action at the battles of Second Manassas, South Mountain, and Antietam, all battles at which women soldiers disguised as men are known to have participated, including one woman who fought at Antietam during the second trimester of her pregnancy. And though this novel focuses on the Union side, there were women who fought for the Confederacy as well.

Studying the photograph of her in uniform, it is hard to imagine the real Rosetta, Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, as anything other than a soldier. As a private in the 153rd New York State Volunteers, she performed guard duty at Old Capitol and Carroll Prisons where she guarded two female Rebel spies and a Major in the Union Army who was discovered to be a woman. She saw combat during the Red River campaign in Spring 1864, contracted dysentery, and died on June 19, 1864. Buried as Lyons Wakeman in New Orleans, her true identity remained a secret until her family came forward with her letters, which were published in Lauren Cook Burgess’s An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman alias Pvt. Lyons Wakeman, 153rd New York State Volunteers, 1862–1864.

The fictional Rosetta is greatly informed by the feisty and strong-willed voice that shines through Wakeman’s letters home. The questions her letters raised and yet never answered were the seed for this novel: How did Rosetta conceal her identity for so long? What did her family think of what she had done? What was she apologizing for in her letters home? Why did she get into a fistfight with a fellow soldier? What was it like, being a woman hidden among men? How did she feel guarding women imprisoned for what she herself was doing? Did she tell anyone her real identity? This book is my attempt to imagine the answers to those questions.

Though my primary inspiration was Rosetta Wakeman, Sarah Emma Edmonds’s Memoirs of a Soldier, Nurse and Spy: A Woman’s Adventures in the Union Army, provided a valuable firsthand look at the experiences of a woman in the ranks, as did the story of Jennie Hodgers, who after the war lived as a man for most of her life. Indeed, the fictional Rosetta’s experience as a soldier is an amalgamation of the experiences of the more than two hundred women who are known to have enlisted, and whose record of service is much more thoroughly catalogued and articulated in Deanne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook’s They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War. Just as the fictional Rosetta followed Jeremiah into the Army, many women joined up to be with fiancés, husbands, brothers, fathers. Not only did these women manage to pass the Army’s physical exam (often just a handshake), some of these women even managed to conceal their identity until the very moment they delivered their babies in the ranks, a fact that seems unthinkable to us now, but perhaps is more understandable during a time when seeing a woman in pants was a rarity and gender roles were more strictly delineated.

Women served their country in various capacities, not only on the home front but also as spies, nurses, doctors, sutlers, “Daughters of the Regiment,” laundresses, and prostitutes. Mrs. Rose O’Neal Greenhow (aka Rebel Rose) was in fact incarcerated for being a Confederate spy at the Old Capitol Prison until May 31, 1862, and Clara Barton did indeed serve as a battlefield nurse at Antietam until she collapsed of exhaustion, but they and other historical figures who appear in the novel are entirely fictional creations. All names, characters, places, dates, and geographical descriptions are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

I have attempted to render life during this time period and soldiers’ experiences of battle as accurately as possible, consulting soldiers’ and civilians’ letters for details, especially those collected in Robert E. Bonner’s The Soldier’s Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War and Emmy E. Werner’s Reluctant Witnesses: Children’s Voices from the Civil War. Other works that were extremely useful were William P. Craighill’s The 1862 Army Officer’s Handbook and Howard S. Russell’s A Long Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England. I also strived to portray the movements of the 97th New York State Volunteers faithfully, relying on John J. Hennessy’s Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas, Stephen W. Sears’s Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam, Vincent J. Esposito’s The West Point Atlas of War: The Civil War, and my own experience marching the ground Rosetta would have covered as a member of that regiment at both Bull Run and Antietam. I pored over the many battlefield photographs taken by Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and also the more current ones in William Fassanito’s Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day. That said, in many places the activities and surroundings of the 97th New York State Volunteers have been condensed, combined, or created out of whole cloth, all in service to the story.

Which is to say, though inspired by real people and events, this book is entirely a work of fiction.