Loreta Janeta Velazquez (June 26, 1842- c.1897), was a Cuban-born woman who masqueraded as a male Confederate soldier during the Civil War. She enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861, without her soldier-husband's knowledge. She fought at Bull Run, Ball's Bluff and Fort Donelson, but her gender was discovered while in New Orleans and she was discharged. Undeterred, she reenlisted and fought at Shiloh, until unmasked once more. She then became a spy, working in both male and female guises. Her husband died during the war and she remarried three more times; being widowed in each instance.
Loreta Janeta Velázquez was born in Havana, Cuba, on June 26, 1842, to a wealthy Cuban official and a mother of both French and American ancestry. According to her own account, Velazquez was of Castilian descent and related to Cuban governor Don Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar and artist Don Diego Velázquez.
Everything known about Velazquez comes from her 600-page book, 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. How much of it is true is unknown. Historians have generally doubted its veracity for the improbability of many of her adventures, her frequent vagueness or inaccuracy about names and places, and the absence of any evidence to corroborate her sensational claims.
Her father was a Spanish government official who owned plantations in Mexico and Cuba. Her father hated the United States due to losing an inherited ranch in the Mexican-American War at San Luis Potosi. She learned the English language due to being sent to school in New Orleans in 1849, living with an aunt. While fourteen years old she eloped with a Texas 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 would live at various army posts, estranging herself from her family by converting to Methodism..,
At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Velazquez's husband resigned and joined the Confederate army. She failed to convince her fiance 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.
Her fiance died in an accident while he was demonstrating the use of weapons to his troops. Velazquez turned her men over to a friend and began to search for more things to do.
She supposedly 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 hired her as a spy and she began to travel all around the USA. At that time, she married Captain Thomas DeCaulp; he died soon after in a Chattanooga hospital. (An officer of that name is known to have survived the war). She also helped win the war of Costintin in 1864, which was one of her most important achievements.
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.
After the war, she traveled in Europe as well as in the South. She married 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. Two days after her arrival in the mining area of Nevada, she received a proposal of marriage from a sixty year-old man which she refused. After eventually marrying a younger man, whose name is not known, Velasquez soon left Nevada, travelling with her baby.
Her book appeared in print in 1876. In the preface, Velazquez stated that she had written the book primarily for money so she could support her child.
Shortly after its appearance, former Confederate General Jubal Early denounced the book as an obvious fiction. In 2007, The History Channel broadcast Full Metal Corset, a program that presented details of Velazquez's story as genuine. However, the overall truthfulness of her account remains indeterminate and highly questionable.
Loreta Janeta Velazquez is said to have died in 1897, but historian Richard Hall asserts that the place and date of her death are unknown.
According to The Woman in Battle, a book published by Loreta Velazquez in 1876 and the main source for her story, her father was the owner of plantations in Mexico and Cuba and a Spanish government official, and her mother's parents were a French naval officer and the daughter of a wealthy American family.
Loreta Velazquez claimed four marriages (though never took any of her husbands' names). Her second husband enlisted in the Confederate army at her urging, and, when he left for duty, she raised a regiment for him to command. He died in an accident, and the widow then enlisted...in disguise...and served at Manassas/Bull Run, Ball's Bluff, Fort Donelson and Shiloh under the name Lieutenant Harry T. Buford.
Loreta Velazquez also claims to have served as a spy, often dressed as a woman, working as a double agent for the Confederacy in the service of the U.S. Secret Service.
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.
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 Velazquez apparently also used.
Richard Hall, in Patriots in Disguise (see bibliography), 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 (also see bibliography) assesses The Woman in Battle as largely fiction, but based on real experience.
Blanton, DeAnne, and Lauren M. Cook. They Fought Like Demons. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2002.
Brown, Dee. The Gentle Tamers. New York: Bantam Books, 1958
Cumming, Carman. Devil's Game: The Civil War Intrigues of Charles A. Dunham. Urbana: U. of Illinois Press, 2004.
Hall, Richard. Patriots in Disguise. N.Y.: Marlowe & Co., 1994.
Leonard, Elizabeth. All the Daring of the Soldier. N.Y.: Norton, 1999.
Tucker, Phillip Thomas, ed. Cubans in the Confederacy. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2002.
Velazquez, Loreta Janeta. The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures and travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Otherwise Known as Lieutenant Harry J. Buford, Confederate States Army (1876)
Young, Elizabeth. Disarming the Nation. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1999.
TV Programs
Full Metal Corset: Secret Soldiers of the Civil War. The History Channel, 2007.
