Contemporaries as well as historians disagree about the truthfulness of the Velazquez story. If they are to base their judgment on the information that can be confirmed we still do not come up with an entirely verifiable story. First of all, her book contains very little factual information. True, she put the right generals at the right place in the right battles, but this kind of information was easily accessible. Even the charges that she made concerning corruption and profiteering are not specific. She included no complete names and spoke only in vague generalities. Most of the individuals in her book have only a first or a last name. Even though she married four times, she provided us with the full name of only one of her husbands!

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One of the few times she gave enough information to allow the researcher to check her story is when she claimed to have enlisted in Captain B. Moses’ company of the 21st Louisiana Regiment in order to escape from New Orleans after her arrest. This is the only time in her military career that she mentioned serving as something other than an ‘independent’ who served on her/his own authority and paid most of her own expenses. The National Archives shows no record of such an enlistment. And Dr. Arthur W. Bergeron, Jr., of the Archives and Records Service in Baton Rouge has indicated that although Captain B. Moses did command the McClellan Guards of the 21st Louisiana units of the Civil War, Dr. Bergeron also analyzed various references which Madame Velazquez made concerning troops from that state. He found some of her information to be inaccurate. For example, she maintained that the 5th and 8th Louisiana regiments fought at Bull Run. Bergeron points out that the 6th and 8th fought together there. Her assertion about the 5th, which was at the time stationed near Yorktown and Williamsburg, is an obvious error, but the mistake could be attributed to bad memory since she claimed to have written the book without her papers, which had been lost.

Yet her book in some cases contains just enough information to justify Massey’s contention that she could have done some of the things she claimed. Velazquez revealed, for example, that one of the names she used in her espionage activities was ‘Mrs. Williams.’ Massey found evidence that a Mrs. Alice Williams was arrested in Richmond but released after her identity was established and that papers in Richmond lauded her work as a soldier and nurse. Massey also found evidence that a reporter from the New York Herald knew Mrs. Williams as a prisoner in Richmond and wrote about her in an article which appeared in October 1863. We may conclude from this evidence that someone who called herself Alice Williams existed. The War of the Rebellion contains another reference to a Miss Alice Williams ‘who was commissioned in the rebel army as a lieutenant under the name of Buford.’ Such evidence appears to confirm this claim at least, even this documentation is suspect, however. The letter in The War of the Rebellion was written by Sanford Conover, later revealed as a perjurer and forger.

The war memoir written by Madame Velazquez was certainly more bizarre than most, and at times she tended to stretch her credibility by claiming too much. For example, although officials during the Civil War were far more accessible to the general public than is the case today, she maintained that within the span of four years and in the middle of a bloody war she had personal access to such Southern and Northern officials as Leroy P. Walker and Secretary of War Simon Cameron, Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, a host of generals such as Stonewall Jackson, Leonidas Polk, William Hardee, Benjamin Butler, John Winder, James Longstreet, and William Rosecrans, as well as the governors of Ohio and Indiana and financier James Fisk. This, combined with her claimed astonishing ability to travel throughout the North as well as the South with little or no difficulty, using charm and guile as her most effective passport, is incredible.

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