Over New Year’s weekend 1862-63, more than 1,600 Union troops were killed in the Battle of Stones River, one of the deadliest battles of the Civil War.
One was a Minnesota farmer named Elmer Clayton. As Clayton fell, a solider named Jack Williams was standing right behind him and witnessed his brutal death up close. “Commanded to move forward,” Williams simply “stepped over his body and carried on fighting.” But deep down, Williams hid a terrible heartbreak.
Williams, you see, was Clayton’s wife. And no, they hadn’t found a loophole making gay marriage legal in the Deep South in 1862.
Instead, she was one of the many women who bravely fought for the their countries posing as men — documented, among other tales of deception, in Ian Graham’s book “Impostors.”
Frances and Elmer Clayton were farmers in Minnesota when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Rather than separate so Elmer could join the fight, they left for Missouri — where no one would know them — together. Elmer signed up as himself, and Frances became Williams.
As Jack Williams, Frances fought in 18 major battles, suffering three injuries along the way. When her beloved husband was killed in front of her, she had no choice but to keep on fighting, lest her secret be exposed. As it happened, she was uncovered soon after anyway. One account says she went public after her husband’s death and was discharged; another has her being injured in the same battle, her secret then revealed during treatment.
Hannah Snell, meanwhile, was an Englishwoman in the mid-1700s who, at 21, married a Dutch sailor who stole his young wife’s money and then abandoned her when she became pregnant.
Determined to confront her errant husband and thinking he might have been involuntarily pressed into service, she “bound her breasts to hide them, dressed in men’s clothing, and set off the find him.”
Snell used the name James Gray to join the 6th Regiment of Foot, which marched for 22 days.
After settling in, “a sergeant tried to pressure Gray into helping him rape a girl, but instead she warned the girl,” Graham writes. “The furious sergeant had her charged with neglect of duty. Her punishment was 600 lashes. She was tied to the gates of the barracks and whipped. After 500 lashes, officers stepped in and ended the punishment.”
Later, she fought in India. Injured in battle, she couldn’t seek out medical help for fear of being discovered, so she “treated her own wounds, including, according to one account, performing surgery to remove a musket ball from her groin.”
After learning her husband’s fate — he had stabbed a man while serving as a Dutch sailor, and was put to death — she revealed herself in a London tavern surrounded by her fellow fighters.
“‘Why, gentlemen, James Gray will cast off his skin like a snake and become a new creature. In a word, gentlemen, I am as much a woman as my mother ever was, and my real name is Hannah Snell.’
“She joked with the man she had often slept next to, ‘Had you known, Master Moody, what you had between the sheets, you would have come to closer quarters!’ ”
Then there’s the case of “The Lieutenant Nun.”
In 1600, a 15-year-old girl named Catalina de Erauso escaped the Spanish convent she had been raised in, cut her hair, and, posing as a boy, found work as a page for the king’s secretary.
At 19, she boarded a ship to South America and became a shopkeeper in Peru. Adopting the name Alonso Diaz Ramirez de Guzman, she became renowned for her skill, fearlessness and, sometimes, recklessness with a sword.
“She seems to have been quick to take offense and reacted violently,” Graham writes. “She was often involved in sword fights, which she invariably won, and then she made for the nearest church to claim sanctuary and avoid arrest.”
De Erauso joined the Army and was assigned to Chile, where she worked at the office of the governor’s secretary — who was, by odd coincidence, her brother, Miguel, who did not recognize her. She had to leave the job when a woman fell in love with her — her brother’s mistress.
At one point, she offered to serve as a second for a fellow soldier in a duel “on a dark, moonless night.”
When the soldier was injured, she stepped in — as per her role — wound up fighting her opponent’s second, and won.
“As the man fell to the ground, he shouted out,” Graham writes. “She thought she recognized his voice. It turned out to be her own brother! Unfortunately, he died.”
Killing her brother did not cause de Erauso to curb her violent ways. But eventually, de Erauso’s luck ran out — about to be killed by soldiers, she confessed to a bishop her true identity.
Returning to Spain in the 1620s, her adventures made her famous, and “she was presented to King Philip IV, who awarded her a military pension for her services to Spain.”
She also met with Pope Urban VIII, who officially allowed her to continue living as a man.
“She was last seen working as a mule-driver in Mexico,” Graham writes, “still with a sword and dagger hanging from her belt . . . just in case.”