Civil War Museum
The Civil War Museum is open.
The main exhibit area, "The Fiery Trial" is still
under construction
and not currently open to
the public. The Resource Center, "Maple
Leaf"
exhibit, and gift shop are now open.
Only One Woman Awarded Congressional Medal of Honor
Dr.
Mary Edwards Walker
Mary Edwards Walker, one of our nation's 1.745 million women veterans, is the only one to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for her service during the Civil War.
She was born in 1832 in the Town of Oswego, New York into an abolitionist family. In June 1885 Mary, the only woman in her class, joined the tiny number of women doctors in the nation when she graduated from Syracuse Medical College, the nation's first medical school and one which accepted women and men on an equal basis. She graduated at age 21 after three 13-week semesters of medical training, for which she paid $55 each.
In 1856 she married another physician, Albert Miller, wearing trousers and a man's coat and kept her own name. Together they set up a medical practice in Rome, New York, but the public was not ready to accept a woman physician, and their practice floundered. They divorced 13 years later.
When the Civil War broke out, she went to Washington, D.C. and tried to join the Union Army. Denied a commission as a medical officer, she volunteered anyway, serving as an acting assistant surgeon--the first female surgeon in the U.S. Army. As an unpaid volunteer, she worked in the U.S. Patent Office Hospital in Washington, D.C. Later she worked as a field surgeon near the Union front lines for almost two years (including Fredericksburg and in Chattanooga after the Battle of Chickamauga).
In September 1863 Walker was finally appointed assistant surgeon in the Army of the Cumberland. She made herself a slightly modified officer's uniform to wear in response to the demands of traveling with the soldiers and working in field hospitals. She was then appointed assistant surgeon of the 52nd Ohio Infantry. During this assignment it is generally accepted that she also served as a spy. She continually crossed Confederate lines to treat civilians. She was taken prisoner in 1864 by Confederate troops and imprisoned in Richmond, Virginia for four months until she was exchanged, along with two dozen other Union doctors, for 17 Confederate surgeons.
She was released back to the 52nd Ohio as a contract surgeon but spent the rest of the war practicing at a Louisville, Kentucky female prison and an orphans' asylum in Tennessee. She was paid $766.16 for her wartime service. Afterward, she received a monthly pension of $8.50, later raised to $20, but still less than some widows' pensions.
On November 11, 1865 President Andrew Johnson signed a bill to present Dr. Mary Edwards Walker with the Congressional Medal of Honor for Meritorious Service to recognize her contributions to the war effort without awarding her an army commission. She is the only woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor, our country's highest military award. For the full text of her citation go to http://www.history.army.mil/moh.html.
In 1917 her Congressional Medal, along with the medals of 910 others, was taken away when Congress revised the Medal of Honor standards to include only "actual combat with an enemy." She refused to give back her Medal of Honor and wore it every day until her death in 1919. A relative told the New York Times, "Dr. Mary lost the Medal simply because she was a hundred years ahead of her time and no one could stomach it." An Army board reinstated Walker's medal posthumously in 1977, citing her "distinguished gallantry, self-sacrifice, patriotism, dedication and unflinching loyalty to her country, despite the apparent discrimination because of her sex."
After the war, Mary Edwards Walker became a writer and lecturer, touring here and abroad on women's rights, dress reform, health and temperance issues. Tobacco, she said resulted in paralysis and insanity. Women's clothing, she said, was immodest and inconvenient. She was elected president of the National Dress Reform Association in 1866. Walker prided herself for being arrested numerous times for wearing full male dress, including wing collar, bow tie, and top hat. She was also something of an inventor, coming up with the idea of using a return postcard for registered mail. She wrote extensively, including a combination biography and commentary called Hit and a second book, Unmasked, or the Science of Immorality.
Walker died in the Town of Oswego on February 21, 1919.
Thanks to the St. Lawrence County, New York Branch of the American Association of University Women for providing this profile and related photographs.