Born in New Orleans in 1833 and raised in Michigan Pauline became a actress in New York at 17. As the war broke out she decided to use her acting abilities and her southern birth to aide the Union case. She convinced the Provost Marshal in Louisville of her loyalty and was sworn into the Secret Service.

Phoebe Yates Levy Pember, the well-educated daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Charleston SC, was widowed from her Bostonian husband, who died of tuberculosis in July 1861. She returned to her family, who were living in Marietta GA.

Rose O'Neal Greenhow was born in Montgomery County, Maryland in 1817. "Wild Rose", as she was called from a young age, was a leader in Washington society, a passionate secessionist, and one of the most renowned spies in the Civil War.

When the government asked the public to help care for the wounded of First Bull Run, Sally responded by opening a private hospital in a house donated for that purpose by judge John Robertson. Robertson Hospital, subsidized by Tompkins' substantial inheritance, treated 1,333 Confederate soldiers from its opening until the last patients were discharged 13 June 1865.

Sarah Morgan and a family member whom she never met, Mary Chestnut, are the best known female diarists of the war. Morgan’s entries are considered to be far more insightful than those written by others, and the first five and six volumes written during the conflict are the most revealing. She faithfully reported activities of the more common individuals and became an early supporter of women’s rights.

According to George Prentice, a powerful and angry editor of a Louisville KY newspaper, the second in command of a Confederate guerrilla group that stopped a stage and raided a bank in Harrodsburg in October 1864, was woman. Prentice introduced his readers to Miss Sue Mundy, who in Prentice’s words “dressed in male attire, generally sporting a full Confederate uniform. She is possessed of a comely form, is a bold rider and a dashing leader.”

Born at "The Briars," near Natchez, Miss., 7 May 1826. Had Jefferson Davis known at the time of his marriage in 1845 of the future awaiting him as president of a Southern confederacy, he could not have chosen a better wife than Varina Howell. In time she abandoned her Whig convictions, deferred to Davis' politics, and became the guardian of his beleaguered reputation.