Loreta Janeta Velazquez
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Loreta Janeta Velázquez (1842-1897) was a US woman who, according to her own account, took part in the American Civil War disguised as a male soldier named Harry T. Buford and served the Confederacy as a double agent
Everything we know about Velázquez comes from her memoirs, '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. How much of it is true is unknown. Various historians have doubted its veracity for lack of any concrete evidence.
According to her own account, Velázquez was of Castilian descent and related to Cuban governor Don Diego Velazquez and artist Don Diego Rodriguez Velazquez. Her father was a Spanish government official who owned plantations in Mexico and Cuba. At the age of 14 she was sent to a school in New Orleans but ran away from home and married an American officer named William. They had three children, all of whom died four years later.
At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Velázquez' husband resigned and joined the Confederate army. She had failed to convince her husband 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 husband died in an accident while he was demonstrating use of weapons to his troops. Velázquez 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 carb to go Washington D.C., where she became a spy for the Confederacy. She claimed she had met Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Simon Cameron. When she returned to the South, she was assigned to the detective corps but she later left to Tennessee.
In Tennessee she fought in the siege of Fort Donelson until the surrender. She was wounded in battle but was not exposed, and fled to New Orleans, where she was arrested, suspected of being a Union spy and female in disguise. After she was released, she enlisted to get away from the city.
In Shiloh, she found the battalion she had raised in Arkansas and fought in the Battle of Shiloh. When she was burying the dead after a battle, a stray shell wounded her. When an 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 over the lines. At that time she married captain Thomas DeCaulp; he died soon after in a Chattanooga hospital. (An officer of that same name did survive the war).
She travelled north where northern 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 travelled in Europe as well as in the South. She married Major Wasson and with him emigrated to Venezuela. When this husband died in Caracas, she returned to the United States. During her consequent travels around the U.S. she gave birth to a baby boy and met Brigham Young in Utah. In Nevada she married an unnamed man but soon moved along, travelling with her baby.
Her book appeared in print in 1876. In the afterword of her book she stated that she had written the book so she could support her child.
Loreta Janeta Velázquez died in 1897.
[edit] Books
- Loreta Janeta Velázquez - 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 (1876)
[edit] External links
- Velazques in Documenting American South
- "What part am I to act in this great drama?
- DeAnne Blanton - Women soldiers of the Civil War
- K.G. Schneider - Women soldiers of the Civil War
