Clothes make the man

Melverina Elverina Peppercorn may strike you as a silly name. It may strike you as a name from a silly children’s rhyme. Something by Dr. Suess maybe.

But Melverina Elverina Peppercorn, from the Tennessee mountains, was a very serious soldier in Civil War. She enlisted in in the Confederate Army in December of 1862, alongside her brother Alexander the Great, aka Lexie. (Their mother, I think, was a bit of a poet.) She was 16 when she enlisted, “tall, big-boned,” and what’s more, she could spit a stream of ambeer 10 feet. According to Deanne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook in They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War (Viking Civil War Library, 2003),

When Melverina Peppercorn enlisted in the Confederate army, she could shoot as well as the twin brother she joined with and was ‘strong as a man,’ and no one in her family doubted that she could do the job. [p. 55]

Whatever the Victorian restraints on women of the middle and upper classes, 19^th century farm women were not creatures of the parlor, subject to the vapors. Of course, it probably also helped that she had her brother to run interference for her, bunk with her, help her keep her secret.

Melverina only fought in one major battle. When Lexie was wounded, she went with him to the hospital to nurse him. After he had recovered, the twins wanted to re-enlist but by then the war was almost over.

According to Blanton and Cook, there were something like 250-400 women who fought as men in the Union and Confederate Armies during the Civil War. That number is statistically insignificant but socially it seems too many to be dismissed as some sort of freak or fluke.

These women joined up for reasons as varied as those of men. Some joined out of patriotism. Some wanted to fight to end slavery. Some, like Melverina, didn’t want to let a brother or a husband go alone, didn’t want to be left behind. Some joined because being a soldier seemed better than being a prostitute. Some joined because a soldier’s wages were far above what they could earn as a woman working at what women were allowed to do in those days. Some were already passing as men before war broke out, because men could earn more money than women.

Not all of the women who joined up were working class. Mary Ann Clark, a Hardinsburg, Kentucky woman who joined the army of Braxton Bragg, was middle-class and college educated. As best I can figure it out, she joined the army for the same reason a lot of men have: to get out from under a rotten relationship.

Some women fought while pregnant, one woman was not found out until she gave birth.

Women were found out for a number of reasons besides the obvious one of giving birth. Some, like Melverina, unmasked themselves when their male companions were wounded or left the service for some other reason. Some, like Mary Ann Clark, were found out when they were wounded and/or taken prisoner.

Not a single one of these women soldiers was ever given away because she was unable to fulfill her duties as a soldier. Several were promoted. Mary Ann Clark re-joined Bragg’s army after she was released from prison and was promoted to Lieutenant.