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Emma Edmonds in women's clothing Imagine being a spy whose
mission was to go behind enemy lines disguised as a Black man or
an Irish peddler woman to gather information during the American
Civil War. There was such a spy, and it was not a man, or an
American for that matter. The spy's name was Sarah Emma Edmonds,
born in Magaguadavic, New Brunswick in 1841. What is even more
unusual is that her fellow soldiers didn't know that she was a
woman; they all thought her name was Frank Thompson. In 1861,
Sarah had enlisted in the Union Army (in a Michigan volunteer
infantry company), serving as a spy, field nurse, mail carrier
and soldier. When she fell il