Surprisingly enough her social life did not suffer from her dual identity. Proudly she said:

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All these months that, in a guise of a man, I had been breaking young ladies’ hearts by my fascinating figure and manner, my own woman’s heart had an object upon which its affections were bestowed, and I was engaged to be married to a truly noble officer of the Confederate army, who knew me, both as a man and as a woman, but who little suspected that Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, and his intended wife, were one and the same person.

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:

We had not been long engaged before the second lieutenant of the company fell. I immediately stepped into his place, and assumed the command of his men. This action was greeted by a hearty cheer from the entire company, all the veterans of which, knew me, and I took the greeting as an evidence that they were glad to see their original commander with them once more. This cheer from the men was an immense inspiration to me; and the knowledge that not my lover only, but the company which I had myself recruited and thousands of others of the brave boys of our Southern army were watching my actions approvingly, encouraged me to dare everything, and to shrink from nothing to render myself deserving of their praises.

Having fought gallantly the first day, she decided that night to again gather intelligence. Hidden away in the brush she claimed to have spotted General Ulysses S. Grant and to have been close enough to have shot him. But she decided against it. “It was too much like murder,” she said.

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 bought a British passport from an acquaintance and began her second war career as a drug smuggler, blockade runner, and double agent.

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 also claimed to have stolen electrotype impressions of Northern bond and note plates so that the Confederates could make forgeries. During the last months of the war she claimed to have traveled to Ohio, Canada, London, and Paris. She arrived back in New York City the day after Lee’s surrender.

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 to convince her friends that immigration was a mistake.

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 little 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 could 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.” She offered no apologies for her conduct. “I did what I thought to be right,” she said, “and, while anxious for the good opinion of all honorable and right thinking people, a consciousness of the purity of my motives will be an ample protection against the censure of those who may be disposed to be censorious.”

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