ebooks Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. by Harry C. Payne in History

Description

A Cuban woman who moved to New Orleans in the 1850s and eloped with her American lover; Loreta Janeta Velazquez fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy as the cross-dressing Harry T. Buford. As Buford; she single-handedly organized an Arkansas regiment; participated in the historic battles of Bull Run; Balls Bluff; Fort Donelson; and Shiloh; romanced men and women; and eventually decided that spying as a woman better suited her Confederate cause than fighting as a man. In the North; she posed as a double agent and worked to traffic information; drugs; and counterfeit bills to support the Confederate cause. She was even hired by the Yankee secret service to find "the woman . . . traveling and figuring as a Confederate agent"—Velazquez herself.Originally published in 1876 as The Woman in Battle; this Civil War narrative offers Velazquez’s seemingly impossible autobiographical account; as well as a new critical introduction and glossary by Jesse Alemán. Scholars are divided between those who read the book as a generally honest autobiography and those who read it as mostly fiction. According to Alemán’s critical introduction; the book also reads as pulp fiction; spy memoir; seduction narrative; travel literature; and historical account; while it mirrors the literary conventions of other first-person female accounts of cross-dressing published in the United States during wartime; dating back to the Revolutionary War. Whatever the facts are; this is an authentic Civil War narrative; Alemán concludes; that recounts how war disrupts normal gender roles; redefines national borders; and challenges the definition of identity.