Two Miserable Presidents by Steve Sheinkin Page A

upstairs, fast asleep.
    Lincoln’s advisors considered this a terrible insult. But Lincoln didn’t take this kind of thing personally. “I will hold McClellan’s horse if he will only bring us success,” he said.
    Stuck in Washington
    W ould Little Mac bring Lincoln success? First he would have to actually leave Washington, which he showed no signs of wanting to do. He kept saying his army needed more training. And he became convinced the Confederates had a much bigger army than he did. They didn’t.
    Another problem was that the spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow was still sneaking intelligence to the Confederate army in Virginia. She regularly got her hands on news from McClellan’s meetings, even copies of his notes.
    Determined to break up her spy ring, government detectives began watching Greenhow’s house day and night. Sometimes the detectives climbed on each other’s shoulders to peek in the window. One
day, on a street near her house, Greenhow noticed she was being followed. She quickly took a piece of paper from her pocket and ate it, destroying a coded message. The men then hurried up to Greenhow, led by a detective named Allan Pinkerton.

    Pinkerton: You’re Mrs. Greenhow?
    Greenhow: Yes. Who are you? What do you want?
    Pinkerton: I’ve come to arrest you.
    Greenhow: I can’t stop you, but if I were in my house I’d have killed one of you before I’d have submitted to this.

    Greenhow was taken to her house and held there under arrest for weeks. Even then, surrounded by guards, she continued sneaking out notes describing McClellan’s plans.
    By October, McClellan’s huge army (which he named the Army of the Potomac) had more than 160,000 men. Still, he wasn’t ready to attack. Mac had boldly vowed to “crush the rebels.” But now winter was coming and it was clear he wasn’t going to do any crushing that year.
    Which gives us time to meet two very unusual soldiers.
    Two Soldiers: Frank and Harry
    F rank Thompson was living in Michigan when the Civil War began. “What can I do?” Thompson wondered. “What part am I to act in this great drama?” Friends marched off to join the Union army. Thompson longed to join them. There was only one difficulty: Frank Thompson was actually a nineteen-year-old woman named Sarah Emma Edmonds.
    Two years earlier, Sarah had been living with her family in Canada. One day her father announced that he had picked out a husband
for her—a much older man she didn’t really like. Sarah dressed up as a man, crossed the border into the United States, and told Americans she was Frank Thompson. Soon she found a job as a traveling book salesman.
    In May 1861 “Frank Thompson” enlisted in the Union army. Doctors were supposed to carefully examine all volunteers, but they usually didn’t bother. One Union soldier described a typical army exam.

    Doctor: You have pretty good health, don’t you?
    Volunteer: Yes.
    Doctor: You look as though you did.

    That was the whole exam. Which explains how Sarah Edmonds became part of the Second Michigan Regiment.
    Others members of the Second Michigan looked at Sarah’s smooth, hairless face and figured they were seeing a young boy who had lied about his age to get into the army—that was pretty common. Soldiers didn’t actually change their clothes very often, which made it easy for Sarah to remain in disguise.
    About five hundred women served as soldiers in the Civil War. Some did it for the excitement, others to escape a bad home life. Some joined for the money—the soldier’s salary of thirteen dollars a month was much more than young women could earn in jobs that were open to them.
    Loreta Janeta Velazquez was one of the women who joined the army in search of adventure. “I was perfectly wild on the subject of war,” she remembered. At age nineteen she decided “to enter the Confederate service as a