Loreta Janeta Velázquez

Loreta Janeta Velázquez

Loreta Janeta Velázquez as herself (right)
and disguised as "Lieutenant Harry Buford" (left)
Nickname(s) Lieutenant Harry Buford
Born June 26, 1842 (1842-06-26)
Havana, Cuba
Died c. 1923 (aged 80–81)
Allegiance  Confederate States of America
Service/branch  Confederate States Army
Years of service 1861–1865
Rank Second Lieutenant
Battles/wars

Loreta Janeta Velázquez (June 26, 1842 – 1923), was a Cuban-born woman who masqueraded as a male Confederate soldier during the American Civil War. After her soldier husband's accidental death, she enlisted in the Confederate States Army in 1861. She then fought at Bull Run, Ball's Bluff and Fort Donelson, but was discharged when her gender was discovered while in New Orleans. Undeterred, she reenlisted and fought at Shiloh, until unmasked once more. She then became a Confederate spy, working in both male and female guises, and as a double agent also reporting to the U.S. Secret Service. She remarried three more times, being widowed in each instance. According to William C Davis, she died in January 1923 under the name Loretta J Beard after many years away from the public eye in a public psychiatric facility, St. Elizabeths Hospital.

The Woman in Battle

Birth and family

Velázquez recorded her adventures in her 600-page book, The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velázquez, Otherwise Known as Lieutenant Harry T Buford, Confederate States Army. The Confederate general Jubal Early refused to accept her memoirs as fact, but recent scholars have verified her claims on the basis of secondary documents, including stories in contemporary newspapers.

Loreta Janeta Velázquez was born in Havana, Cuba, on June 26, 1842, to a wealthy Cuban official and a mother of French and American ancestry. She also used the name Alice Williams. Her father owned plantations. According to her own account, Velázquez was of Castilian descent and related to Cuban governor Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar and artist Diego Velázquez.

Her father was a Spanish government official who owned plantations in Mexico and Cuba. He hated the United States due to having lost an inherited ranch in the Mexican-American War at San Luis Potosi.

Velázquez learned the English language at school in New Orleans in 1849, while living with an aunt.

When fourteen years old, she eloped with a Texas United States Army officer known only as William on April 5, 1856. She initially continued to live with her aunt, but after a quarrel with her she moved in with her husband and lived at various army posts, estranging herself further from her family by converting to Methodism.[1]

American Civil War

At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Velázquez's husband resigned his U.S. commission and joined the Confederate Army. She failed to convince him to let her join him, so she acquired two uniforms, adopted the name Harry T. Buford and moved to Arkansas. There she recruited 236 men in four days, shipped them to Pensacola, Florida and presented them to her husband as her command.[2]

Her husband died in an accident while he was demonstrating the use of weapons to his troops.[2] Velázquez turned her men over to a friend and began to search for more things to do.

She fought in the First Battle of Bull Run. She grew tired of camp life and again donned female garb to go to Washington, D.C., where she spied for the Confederacy. She claimed she met Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Simon Cameron. When she returned to the South, she was assigned to the detective corps. She later left for Tennessee.

In Tennessee, she fought in the siege of Fort Donelson until the surrender. She was wounded in battle, but was not exposed. She fled to New Orleans, where she was arrested, suspected of being a female Union spy in disguise. After she was released, she enlisted to get away from the city.

At Shiloh, she found the battalion she had raised in Arkansas and fought in the battle. As she was burying the dead after a battle, a stray shell wounded her. When the army doctor who examined her discovered she was a woman, she again fled to New Orleans and saw Major General Benjamin F. Butler take command of the city. She gave up her uniform at that point.

Afterwards, in Richmond, Virginia, authorities again hired her as a spy and she began to travel all around the US. At that time, she married a Captain Thomas DeCaulp ; he purportedly died soon after in a Chattanooga hospital. (An officer of that name is known to have survived the war.)

She travelled north where officials hired her to search for herself. In Ohio and Indiana, she tried to organize a rebellion of Confederate prisoners of war.

Travels

After the war, she traveled in Europe as well as in the South. She married a Major Wasson and emigrated with him to Venezuela. When he died in Caracas, she returned to the United States. During her subsequent travels around the U.S., she gave birth to a baby boy and met Brigham Young in Utah. She arrived in Omaha, almost penniless, but charmed General W. S. Harney into giving her blankets and a revolver.[3] Two days after her arrival in the mining area of Nevada, she received a proposal of marriage from a sixty-year-old man,[3] which she refused. After eventually marrying a younger man, whose name is not known, Velázquez soon left Nevada, travelling with her baby.

Reception of her book

Her book appeared in print in 1876. In the preface, Velázquez stated that she had written the book primarily for money so she could support her child. The veracity of the account was attacked almost immediately, and remains an issue with scholars. Some claim it is probably entirely fiction, others that the details in the text show a familiarity with the times that would be difficult to completely simulate.

Shortly after its appearance, former Confederate General Jubal Early denounced the book as an obvious fiction.[4]

In 2007, The History Channel broadcast Full Metal Corset, a program that presented details of Velázquez's story as genuine. However, the overall truthfulness of her account remains indeterminate and highly questionable.

Career After the War

She became very active in public life and politics, and was particularly involved in grand speculative schemes around mining and railway building, as well as being involved in journalism and writing. Her recent biographer William C Davis suggests that her actions were generally fraudulent and swindles intended to raise money for herself and associates. although such schemes were typical of business practice at that date. Some press accounts were impressed by her vitality and business acumen such as in this 1891 account from the New York Herald reprinted in the Saturday Evening Mail Terre Haute .[5] Here Velazquez was described as "a woman of business, a woman who can "run things like a man".

Death

Loreta Janeta Velázquez is said to have died in 1897, but historian Richard Hall asserts that the place and date of her death are unknown. She lived into the 20th century. Richard Hall, in Patriots in Disguise, takes a hard look at The Woman in Battle and analyzes whether its claims are accurate or fictionalized. Elizabeth Leonard in All the Daring of the Soldier assesses The Woman in Battle as largely fiction, but based on real experience. A newspaper report mentions a Lieutenant Bensford arrested when it was disclosed "he" was actually a woman, and gives her name as Alice Williams, which is a name which Loreta Velázquez apparently also used.

María Aguí Carter directed Rebel, an investigative documentary, examining the story of Loreta Velázquez.[6][7] The film is a detective story exploring Velázquez's claims and the politics involved in erasing her from history.[6] It was produced in 2013 and lasts for 73 minutes.[6]

Revisionist Biography

In October 2016, William C Davis has published a detailed biography of Velazquez Inventing Loreta Velasquez: Confederate Soldier Impersonator, Media Celebrity, and Con Artist based on newspaper and archival research which claims that the whole of The Woman in Battle is fiction. Velasquez was neither Cuban nor a Confederate soldier, but was a thief and prostitute, possibly born in New York and subsequently a swindler and con artist. Velazquez used many aliases and he is uncertain of her actual name, age and place of birth, and thus unable to be certain of her family background or ethnicity. The woman [or women?] he identifies as Velazquez served terms in jail for theft and other petty offenses, and subsequently invented more glamorous origin stories, having learned to lie as he claims whilst working as a prostitute. Davis' work not only views his subject in a negative light but also expresses doubt whether women ever served effectively as military personnel in the Civil War, beyond the specific doubts around Velazquez's service. This is in contradiction of official records that mention female soldiers as themselves or in male aliases such as those pertaining to Sarah Rosetta Wakeman. he provides a definite date for her death as Loretta J Beard January 26 1923 at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane, Washington. In his final chapter Wilson critiques feminist and Hispanic historiographical approaches to Velazquez as well as post modernist literary theory, all of which he says have failed to accurately evaluate Velasquez and have perpetuated her lies to promote their own agenda.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Tucker, Phillip Thomas, ed. (2002) Cubans in the Confederacy. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. pp. 225, 226
  2. 1 2 Eggleston, Larry G. (2003). Women in the Civil War: Extraordinary Stories of Soldiers, Spies, Nurses, Doctors, Crusaders, and Others. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. ISBN 0786414936. pp. 32–33.
  3. 1 2 Brown, Dee (1958). The Gentle Tamers. New York: Bantam Books. p. 200
  4. ↑ Aleman, Jesse (2003). Authenticity, Autobiography, and Identity: the Woman in Battle as a Civil War Narrative. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. pp. ix–x. ISBN 0299194205.
  5. ↑ "Saturday Evening Mail, Volume 21, Number 37,Terre Haute, Vigo County, 7 March 1891". Retrieved 1 October 2016.
  6. 1 2 3 "Celebrate Women's History Month by coming to a free screening of Rebel". National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 26 March 2013.
  7. ↑ Filmmakers Collaborative. "Rebel". Filmmakers Collaborative. Retrieved 26 March 2013.
Bibliography

Books

TV programs

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