Pauline Cushman: The Actress Who Spied for the Union and Faked Illness

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Pauline Cushman was born Harriet Wood in New Orleans in 1833 to a Spanish merchant father and a French mother, and grew up at a family trading post in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After her 1862 stage debut in Louisville, Kentucky, two Confederate sympathizers paid her to toast Jefferson Davis in public. She did, was fired by her theater company, and used the resulting reputation as cover while offering her services to the Union Army. This episode follows how she befriended Confederate officers and smuggled battle plans and drawings out of enemy territory hidden in her shoes.

Cushman was wounded twice and caught twice in 1863. The second time she was brought before General Braxton Bragg, tried, and sentenced to hang. Already ill, she exaggerated her symptoms, the execution was postponed, and retreating Confederates left her behind when Union troops advanced. James A. Garfield gave her a brevet rank of major and Lincoln made her an honorary major. She lectured on her exploits and worked with P.T. Barnum, but her later years brought the deaths of children, a failed marriage, poverty, and a $12 monthly pension drawn from her first husband's service.

Her reputation was built on a publicly staged toast to Jefferson Davis that got her fired.
She sometimes crossed enemy territory dressed in a man's uniform.
Ferdinand Sarmiento wrote an embellished biography of her based on her notes.
Her adopted daughter Emma died in Arizona in 1888 at age six, and she separated from Jere Fryer in 1890.
She died in San Francisco in December 1893 and was buried with military honors at the Presidio, under a stone reading Union Spy.

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