Harriet Wood Biography

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Harriet Wood

Harriet Wood was a Union Spy in the civil war. Wood was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on June 10, 1833. However, she was raised in Michigan. Her family had moved soon after she was born (Pauline Cushman Biography.com, 2016). When Wood turned 17, she ran away from home. She became an actress in New York and changed her name to Pauline Cushman. Soon after this, Cushman moved to New Orleans, where she got an acting job. In New Orleans, Cushman met and married a man from Ohio, named Charles Dickinson. After this, the couple moved to Ohio and started a family. Dickinson enrolled as a musician in the 41st Ohio Infantry at Cleveland, but became sick and eventually died in 1862. Cushman left her children, with Dickinson’s sister and …show more content…
On one occasion, Cushman discovered that an old woman that tended to injured Union soldiers had been secretly poisoning the wounded. The Union ensured this older woman did not receive any more injured soldiers, and was eventually arrested (Conliffe, 2017). Pauline eventually began working for a Theater in Nashville, Tennessee, where she was able to spy on the Confederate army from the inside. It was here that a secret meeting was held with a Union officer. She was told she was to go to various parties and visit different military camps to meet with Southern soldiers (Conliffe, 2017). During these events, she was told to gather information using her memory and would bring back the intelligence verbally to Union officers (Pauline Cushman Biography.com, 2016). She was told not to deliberately look for information, but to keep note of anything she did here in her mind. However, she once made the mistake of creating drawings and taking notes of Confederate plans to bring back to the Union. When she was suspected of spying and was caught, her drawings were found in her shoes. She was sentenced to hang. It is not sure whether she became sick or faked it, but her supposed illness caused her hanging to be repeatedly postponed (Pauline Cushman Biography.com, 2016). However, the Union and Confederate armies were battling nearby, and the Confederate army eventually fled, leaving Cushman with a local doctor. She was awarded the honorary rank and title of Major of Cavalry for her services of the Union army by General Gordon Granger and James A. Garfield, the future president of the U.S. (Fitzpatrick,
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