Civil War’s Unknown Soldiers Bore Names Like Rosetta, Sarah : History: About 400 of the 3 million combatants are known to have been women. Others may be buried under male <i> noms de guerre.</i>

From 1862 to 1864, a Union Army private wrote to kinfolk back home in New York, describing strange Southern lands, drills and duty, loneliness and an itch to go into battle.

“I am well and tough as a bear,” Lyons Wakeman wrote. “I have got so that I can drill just as well as any man there is in my regiment.”

Wakeman died of dysentery after fighting in Louisiana’s Red River Campaign in 1864. The 21-year-old soldier was laid to rest in Chalmette National Cemetery, just one among the 654,000 killed during the four-year Civil War.

Wakeman, though, died harboring a secret guarded with the vigilance of a sentry at post.

Lyons Wakeman was actually Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, who left home at 19 to find the freedom in breeches that she couldn’t in a dress. She cut her hair, bound her breasts, put on a uniform, and in 1862 enlisted in the 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers.

Wakeman wasn’t alone. Of the 3 million Union and Confederate soldiers in the Civil War, about 400 women are known to have posed as men so they could fight.

“Probably many, many more” lie under graves bearing their male aliases, said Lauren Cook Burgess, Civil War historian and editor of “The Uncommon Soldier,” a collection of Wakeman’s letters. “We’ll never know.”

There’s nothing to distinguish Wakeman’s grave from the other 15,000 thick stone markers at the Chalmette cemetery, just outside New Orleans. Her tombstone reads simply, “4066 Lyons Wakeman N.Y.”

It wasn’t so hard for Wakeman to keep her secret while alive, either, historians say.

The urgency for more soldiers meant that physical examinations of new recruits were spotty at best.

Sometimes all that was required of an enlistee was a trigger finger that worked and two opposing teeth strong enough to rip open a Minie ball cartridge.

In her memoir, “Nurse and Spy,” Sarah Emma E. Edwards, who posed as Pvt. Franklin Thompson for the 2nd Michigan Volunteers, described her physical entrance exam as “a firm handshake.”

Also, so many teen-age and pre-adolescent boys fought in uniform that it wasn’t unusual to see a small, smooth-faced soldier with a high voice.

Wakeman often sent money home to Afton, N.Y., to keep the farm going, though her defiance so embarrassed her parents that they told siblings too young to remember her that she was a boy.

“I am enjoying my Self better this summer than I ever did before in this world,” she told them in June of 1863. “. . . I will Dress as I am a mind to for all anyone else (cares), and if they don’t let me Alone, they will be sorry for it.”

A younger sister, born after Wakeman died, found her letters in the attic, along with her ring and a daguerreotype of Wakeman in uniform.

It was the first time Catherine Wakeman realized her “brother” Lyons was a woman, according to her great-great-grandniece, Ruth Goodier, of Chipley, Fla.

“It wasn’t talked about,” Goodier said in an interview. “The younger ones didn’t know about it; it was just not discussed because it was not the kind of thing women did. They sort of brushed it under the carpet.”

Linda Grant de Pauw, president of the Minerva Center on Women in the Military in Pasadena, Md., said, “People said it was disgraceful when the other side did it. But when their girls did it, it was patriotism.”

Goodier told Burgess about her great-great-aunt when she read a newspaper article about the historian’s own gender conflict.

Burgess had been portraying a male soldier in 1989 for a re-enactment of the Battle of Antietam, and was spotted leaving the ladies’ room. Authorities at Antietam National Park in Sharpsburg, Md., told her she couldn’t join any more living histories--because they wanted to preserve the authenticity of the 1862 battle.

“I was taken aback,” Burgess said, explaining that “it was a pretty well-known fact in historian circles” that five women, posing as men, fought at Antietam (two were wounded, one killed). She sued the National Park Service for sexual discrimination, and won.

Rosetta Wakeman’s letters--the most important cache to date on female soldiers in the Civil War--show that she felt a deep responsibility toward her family, particularly helping pay her father’s debts. “I knew that I could help you more to leave home than to stay there with you,” she wrote.

“We speculated in the family about why she did it,” Goodier said. “We decided she did it for the money.”

Economics was only one reason women gave up their identity to enlist, Burgess said.

Like men, “they were patriots, of course. They wanted to strike a blow against the enemy. . . . The third reason is for adventure, to gain a measure of social and legal and economic independence not available to women.”

Others accompanied husbands, lovers or brothers into battle.

Some were discovered when they were treated for illness or wounds; a few became pregnant.

“A corporal was promoted to sergeant for gallant conduct at the battle of Fredericksburgh,” wrote Union Col. Elijah H. C. Cavins, “since which time the sergeant has become the mother of a child.”

Many women kept their disguise successfully throughout the war.

When Albert D. J. Cashier of the 95th Illinois Infantry Regiment was hospitalized long after the war, doctors found that “he” was really Jennie Hodgers.

After her secret was discovered, Hodgers continued to receive a pension and lived out her last years in a soldiers’ home, but the Pension Bureau “made her dress like a woman,” Burgess said. “She wasn’t very happy about it.”

Cashier’s name appears on a monument to the Illinois soldiers who fought at Vicksburg, Miss.

Wakeman got her wish to see battle during the Red River Campaign. She survived its fiercest engagement, the Battle of Pleasant Hill, and marched about 400 miles in Louisiana’s subtropical weather on a meager diet.

Accounts show she equaled--and some might say exceeded--her male counterparts in skill, bravery and toughness.

“I don’t feel afraid to go (into battle),” she wrote in August of 1863. “I don’t believe there are any Rebel’s bullet made for me yet. Nor I don’t care that there is. I am as independent as a hog on the ice. If it is God’s will for me to fall in the field of battle, it is my will to go and never return home. . . .

“Good-by for this time, from yours respectful,

“Miss Rosetta Wakeman.”