Loreta Janeta Velazquez Otherwise Known as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford,
Confederate States Army.To My Comrades of the Confederate Armies... "WHO, ALTHOUGH THEY FOUGHT IN A LOSING CAUSE SUCCEEDED BY THEIR VALOR IN WINNING THE ADMIRATION OF THE WORLD, THIS NARRATIVE OF MY ADVENTURES AS A SOLDIER, A SPY, AND SECRET SERVICE AGENT, IS DEDICATED WITH ALL HONOR, RESPECT, AND GOOD WILL" ...Loreta Velazquez In 1876 the American public was introduced to an astonishing and controversial figure by the name of Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez. Like so many others, she wrote a Civil War memoir, The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Otherwise Known as
Lieutenant Harry T. Buford Confederate States Army. Needless to say this was no ordinary war story, for Madame Velazquez claimed to have so fervently supported the Southern cause that she donned the Confederate uniform as Lieutenant Harry Buford and fought at the battles of First Bull Run, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh.Madame Velazquez maintained that she had always wished for the privileges and status granted to men and denied to women. Comparing
herself to Deborah of the Hebrews and Joan of Arc, she explained her desire for martial adventures by asserting the her girlhood was spent "haunted with the idea of being a man." She demonstrated unusual independence for an antebellum adolescent when, at the age of 14, she ran away from her school in New Orleans to marry an American soldier named William. Four years later in 1860 they were in St. Louis mourning the death of their three children. Madame Velazquez was 18.When William's state seceded from the Union, he resigned his commission and joined the Confederate Army. At that point Madame Velazquez again fell victim to her old desire to be a man. Unable to persuade her husband to let her fight in the Confederacy, she simply waited for him to leave, adopted the name Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, was measured for two uniforms by a tailor in Memphis, and proceeded to Arkansas to raise a batallion for the Southern cause.
She claimed that she enrolled 236 men in four days and shipped them to Pensacola, Florida, where she presented them to her
astonished husband as his to command. Unfortunately he was killed a few days later demonstrating a weapon to his troops. The bereaved widow turned the men over to a friend and proceeded to search for
military adventure at the front. Claiming that she was serving the Confederate Army as an independent, she crossed The South from
Virginia to Tennessee searching for an opportunity to display her
military talents.After the First Battle of Bull Run she grew weary of camp life and borrowed female attire from a farmer's wife so that she could go to Washington, DC to gather intelligence for The Southern Cause. She finally returned to the South, where she was
rewarded for her services by being assigned to the detective corps. But again she grew weary of her assignment and left her duties to go fight in Tewnnessee. She arrived in Ft. Donelson just in time to see it surrendered. After Fort Donelson she was forced to face the
possibility that someone would discover her disguise when she was wounded in the foot and examined byan army doctor. Apparently she escaped detection but decided to flee to New Orleans, where ironically she was arrested on suspicion of being a woman in disguise.
And so the charade continued until April 1862 and the Battle of Shiloh, the scene of her greatest military triumph. Here she found the battalion she had raised in Arkansas and joined them for the fight. She was wounded by a shell while burying the dead after the battle, and an Army doctor discovered her identity.
She fled again to New Orleans and was there when Major General
Benjamin F. Butler took command of the city in May 1862. Believing that her military career was at an end because too many people now knew her true identity, she gave up her uniform.
She claimed to have been hired by the authorities in Richmond to serve in the secret service corps and began to travel freely throughout the North as well as the war-torn South, pausing only long enough to marry her beloved, Captain Thomas DeCaulp.
Widowed shortly after the wedding when her new husband died in a
Chattanooga hospital, she traveled north, gained the confidence of Northern officials and was hired by them to search for herself.
During her search she continued to serve the Southern cause by trying to organize a rebellion of Confederate prisoners held in Ohio and Indiana. She spent a number of months after the war traveling through Europe and the South.
She also married for the third time. She and her new husband,
a Major Wasson, left the United States as immigrants to Venezuela. But When her husband died in Caracas, she returned to America. Again she began to travel, this time through the West, stopping long enough in Salt Lake City to have a baby and meet Brigham Young.
In Nevada she claimed to have married again for the fourth time to an unnamed gentleman. Then she was off again.
"With my baby boy in my arms, I started on a long journey through Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, hoping, perhaps, but scarcely expecting, to find the opportunities which I had failed to find in Utah, Nevada and California."
Her story ends at this point. Her final plea was that the public would buy her book so that she can support her child. She was not ashamed
of her behavior and hoped that her conduct would be judged with
"impartiality and candor" and that credit would be given her for "integrity of purpose." "I did what I thought to be right," she said.The historical validity of the Velazquez claims remains to be determined. Historians themselves are divided on the issue. In the end we will probably never know conclusively if Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez was a brave soldier and spy or merely a literary opportunist--or both.
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