Sarah Emma Edmonds: Private Franklin Thompson, Deserter Poster and Pension

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Look at this wanted poster in your mind's eye for a second. Just imagine staring at a piece of paper nailed to a wall.

SPEAKER_2 (0:06)

Right.

SPEAKER_1 (0:07)

You see your own name in bold letters, and it's declaring you a military deserter facing execution. But imagine that the name on that poster is completely made up.

SPEAKER_2 (0:18)

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_1 (0:19)

Yeah, it's this alias you've lived under for years.

You are a decorated combat soldier. You've survived some of the absolute bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. And you did all of it while secretly being a woman.

SPEAKER_2 (0:32)

It's an incredible image, right?

SPEAKER_1 (0:34)

You faked your entire identity just to be allowed to fight for your country. And now the very army that you bled for is hunting down a ghost.

SPEAKER_2 (0:44)

I mean, the whole premise sounds entirely fabricated. It's like a hope novel protagonist that someone just pieced together from three different genres, you know?

SPEAKER_1 (0:52)

Exactly.

SPEAKER_2 (0:52)

Because you have the farm girl fleeing an abusive home, the fearless combat veteran, and then this master of disguise. But we are actually looking at the documented life of Sarah Emma Edmonds today. She was a Canadian-born woman who lived, fought, and basically thrived as a man named Franklin Thompson.

SPEAKER_1 (1:10)

And that's exactly why we're doing this deep dive today.

We have a rather tricky mission for this one. We need to untangle the verifiable, boots-on-the-ground facts of Sarah's incredible life from the highly sensationalized fiction of her own best-selling memoirs.

SPEAKER_2 (1:25)

Which is no small task.

SPEAKER_1 (1:27)

No, not at all. Because when your subject's entire life, from their name to their gender, was built on a literal disguise, the historical paper trail becomes incredibly murky.

But I'm struggling to understand something right out of the gate here.

SPEAKER_2 (1:41)

Sure, what's that?

SPEAKER_1 (1:42)

Well, you don't just wake up one day and decide to erase yourself. To figure out why someone would go to such dangerous extremes to hide their identity in a war zone, we really have to look at the circumstances she was running away from in the first place, right?

SPEAKER_2 (1:55)

We do. We really have to go back to December 1841 This is in New Brunswick, which was a British colony at the time. Okay. Sarah was the youngest child growing up on a farm near the main border, and her early home life was characterized by some pretty deep trauma. How so? Her father was very abusive. He harbored this volatile resentment over the fact that she wasn't a boy. In his eyes, a farm required male labor.

And to compound all of the family's difficulties, her brother Thomas suffered from what they called fits back then.

SPEAKER_1 (2:24)

Fits? Like seizures?

SPEAKER_2 (2:26)

Yeah. Historical analysis suggests it was very likely epilepsy.

SPEAKER_1 (2:29)

Ah, gotcha. And some of our sources claim that her father actually forced her to dress as a boy while she was growing up, just to work the fields.

SPEAKER_2 (2:37)

Right, which is a massive detail.

SPEAKER_1 (2:39)

It is, and it brings up a really confusing psychological detail for me. If her father was so violently abusive about wanting a boy, why would she adopt the very identity of the thing her abuser wanted?

SPEAKER_2 (2:52)

That's a great question.

SPEAKER_1 (2:53)

I mean, wouldn't she want to run as far away from masculinity as possible?

SPEAKER_2 (2:57)

It seems totally counterintuitive until you look at it purely through the lens of survival. Because she didn't just adopt his identity, she weaponized his demands.

SPEAKER_1 (3:06)

Weaponized how?

SPEAKER_2 (3:07)

Well, by forcing her into male clothing early on, her father inadvertently handed her the very tools that she would use to escape his control later. She learned the mechanics of masculinity.

SPEAKER_1 (3:18)

Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_2 (3:19)

She became intimately familiar with how boys moved, how they took up space, how they spoke, and crucially how society treated them so differently than girls.

SPEAKER_1 (3:27)

Wow. So she basically got a master class in societal camouflage.

SPEAKER_2 (3:32)

Exactly.

SPEAKER_1 (3:33)

And she puts that camouflage to the ultimate test at age 15, right? Because with the help of her mother, who was also desperate to protect her from an arranged marriage, Sarah just flees.

SPEAKER_2 (3:44)

Yeah. She gets out of there.

SPEAKER_1 (3:45)

She initially tries to hide by starting a millinery shop with a friend under the name Edmonds. But her father actually tracks her down.

SPEAKER_2 (3:52)

Which is terrifying.

SPEAKER_1 (3:54)

Seriously. So she has to flee again. And this is when she commits fully to the disguise. She becomes Franklin Thompson just across the border into the United States safely.