MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The focus of this presentation is on the life, death and—especially—the epitaph of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, 1843-1864, who served in disguise as a combat infantryman in the 153rd New York Volunteer Infantry under the name Lyons Wakeman during the American Civil War and whose remains are interred at Chalmette National Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Although some 400 young women are known to have served in disguise among the three million service men of the American Civil War, few wrote letters, and only one woman’s collection of such letters—Wakeman’s—is known to exist. Wakeman’s letters were published only in 1994, by Lauren Cooke Burgess, 130 years after Wakeman’s death in Louisiana in 1864, at the age of twenty-one, during the Red River campaign in Louisiana. The Civil War has garnered more attention from U. S. American historians than any other subject. The resulting literature is formidable in its depth and breadth. But it is still too complex and intimate an era and experience to fully encompass. I will contend that the impact of the war on individuals is understood best in narratives of ordinary women and men who confronted the extraordinary paradoxes of their time but whose deeds are aggregated beyond individual recognition by the sweep of events and grand strategy and mere pathos.
This presentation will present one pertinent example. Wakeman served in a cause whose reverberations continue to this day, but in a striking way, a recognition of the silence she left with her life, epitaph and letters is an appropriate way to come to terms with the common soldier’s life.
In this presentation, I will demonstrate that in the letters and uniquely enigmatic epitaph of Sara Rosetta Wakeman—Lyons Wakeman 4066—is a glimpse of a life whose mystery, complexity, and ardor mark her as a woman who is a distinctive, un-self-consciously iconoclastic character in the history of the United States.