Amy Clarke

[dawna]

In August, 1863, Texas cavalryman Robert Hodges, Jr., wrote a letter to his father in which he describes a scene Turner's Station, Tennessee:

"One of the soldiers directed my attention to a youth apparently about seventeen years of age well dressed with a lieutenant's badge on his collar. I remarked that it was nothing strange. He then told me that the young man was not a man but a female."

That female Lieutenant was Amy Clarke. Amy, from Iuka, Mississippi, enlisted with her husband, Walter, into a cavalry regiment when she was 30 years old. Walter died at Shiloh and Amy left the cavalry shortly thereafter. She then enlisted with the 11th Tennessee Infantry under the name of Richard Anderson. The Dec. 30, 1862 Jackson Mississippian reported that Amy had personally buried her husband on the battlefield, then continued to fight in until she was wounded twice, once in ankle, then in the breast.

At some point, Amy was captured and sent back across the lines in a dress. [Sources differ as to when exactly she was wounded, captured and discovered - either before or during her infantry experience] Clarke made her way back to Braxton Bragg's command. At some point during this time Amy had been given a promotion to Lieutenant. Robert Hodges account to his father is the last record that anyone has, up to this point, about Amy Clarke.