Sarah Rosetta Wakemann (alias Private Lyons Wakeman) A Female Civil War Soldier that Fought Disguised as a Man
Because she died while still enlisted, no one in the Union Army knew that she was a woman until long after. Sarah Wakeman served in the 153rd regiment of the New York State Volunteers. Her letters written during her service remained unread for nearly a century because they were stored in the attic of her relatives.
The description on her enlistment papers stated that she was five feet tall, fair-skinned, with blue eyes. Rosetta (as she preferred to be called) enlisted 1862. Like tens of thousands of her “fellow” soldiers, Sarah faithfully performed her duties until she died from chronic diarrhea in the federal army hospital in New Orleans on June 19, 1864. Wakeman was not the only one; thousands of Union soldiers were killed by drinking water contaminated by rotting animals. Buried in Chalmette National Cemetery in Metairie, Louisiana, Rosetta’s grave marker identifies her by alias: “Lyons Wakeman, NY.”
Of the deceased soldiers Rosetta wrote, they lay “sometimes in heaps and in rows… with distorted features, among mangled and dead horses, trampled in mud, and thrown in all conceivable sorts of places. You can distinctly hear, over the whole field, the hum and hissing of decomposition.” The Red River campaign claimed several lives including Wakeman’s.