I got to talk about Differ We Must in Boise, Idaho recently—both in a high school and before an audience of about 1,000. The Cabin, a fascinating and influential writers’ organization, put me on stage with Nick Kristof of the New York Times.
Differ We Must tells Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who differed with him—different races, genders, classes, backgrounds, and above all ideas; most of the meetings involve a disagreement. It’s gratifying that several reviewers have found something fresh and timely in this approach. I’d like to think it’s also just a wild story on its own terms!
Kristof was particularly struck by a chapter about a woman who appeared in Lincoln’s presidential office in 1864. She claimed to have served as a soldier, at a time when society’s restrictions on women made this almost unimaginable. Even more mind-blowing is that she was not the only woman to do this!
Here’s an excerpt from the chapter on her visit to the White House, where she went seeking Lincoln’s help in collecting her back pay.
She gave her name as Mary Ellen Wise, and said she’d disguised her name, gender, and age to join the Thirty-Fourth Indiana Volunteers. Her story was exceptionally hard to document, but before this meeting she’d been written up in several newspapers, including by reporters who found her in uniform in war zones. Newspapers highlighted her as an example of the phenomenon of women who served.
Donning uniforms as their husbands, brothers, and fathers did, they enlisted to follow friends and relations, escape trouble at home, or serve a cause larger than themselves. Their numbers were impossible to estimate because they served under aliases and because of the obliviousness of men around them. The idea of a woman cutting her hair, wearing pants, and participating in the ultimate male activity of killing was so foreign to the culture that some men didn’t know it when they saw it. One male soldier’s comrade was jokingly dubbed “Our Woman” by the troops, but he didn’t realize she was a woman until later.
Other men were more perceptive, but looked the other way. Authorities around Washington suspected 150 women found in uniform over time had “colluded” with the surgeons who gave them cursory examinations as they enlisted. Some women were aides to officers. It’s hard to imagine how women lived in tents and bathed in streams near thousands of men without being discovered, but people bathed very infrequently.
In Kentucky, a female soldier who went by the pseudonym “Frank” told a reporter she had “discovered a great many females in the army” and helped to bury three of them. In May 1863, Ellie B. Reno was discovered after almost a year in the army, and wrote to Lincoln begging for permission “to remain in that Noble cause which I have sworn to defend.” She was “willing to do any thing to aid and assist the Government” and said she would die for the cause. “I write this to ask you as a Child would ask a Father if I can remain in your Service, being as I have left my own Father and adopted you instead.”
There’s no record that Lincoln replied; he was busy trying to get Black men into the army. But he did see Mary Ellen Wise.
I hope you will read the whole story of how Lincoln helped her, and also tried to help himself. He was, after all, a politician, and in each chapter is trying to gain advantage for his cause—whether he is meeting with the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, or a Supreme Court justice who affirmed the Dred Scott decision, or a political operator whose ethics differed from Lincoln’s own.
In this case Lincoln apparently let the newspapers know of his support for a woman who violated numerous gender barriers and taboos.
Below are links to my book, and also to “An Uncommon Soldier,” a valuable book by Lauren Cook Burgess, which collects the letters of a different woman who served. I recommend it.