Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy Quotes

“It is so delightful to be of enough consequence to be arrested,”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“War, like politics, was men’s work, and women were supposed to be among its victims, not its perpetrators. Women’s loyalty was assumed, regarded as a prime attribute of femininity itself,”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“In a late interview, Belle herself characterized her life as if it were one long sin that needed to be confessed—with one pointed exception. “I have lied, sworn, killed (I guess) and I have stolen,” she said. “But . . . I thank God that I can say on my death bed that I am a virtuous woman. . . . Fortune has played me a sad trick by letting me live on and on.”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“After nearly three years of dealing with Winder, throughout all of their delicate negotiations and volatile truces, she finally understood: he recognized her as a true patriot, someone who didn’t want to denigrate the South so much as nudge it back to where it belonged, a citizen stuck in a prodigal country. Because she was a woman—a wealthy, socially prominent woman at that—he tempered his suspicions with decency and Southern manners. He respected her dedication to her cause even as it diverged from his own, and the constant monitoring and attempts at entrapment were merely requirements of his job.”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“There was work for everyone to do, even the women—especially the women. They had to adjust quickly to the sudden absence of fathers and husbands and sons, to the idea that things would never be as they had been. They had no vote, no straightforward access to political discourse, no influence in how the battles were waged. Instead they took control of homes, businesses, plantations.”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“Frank, as he preferred to be called, always believed that God was with him, protecting him even during—perhaps especially during—his transgressions.”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“As one prominent obstetrician put it, “Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen’s hands are clean.”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“Women, it seemed, were capable not only of significant acts of treason, but of executing them more deftly than men.”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“They never found Captain Henry, but Samuel finally got his answer from Belle: Yes, she said, she would be his wife. She believed that God had intended them to “meet and love,” and that He had purposely sent her a Yankee, a Union boy from Brooklyn. “Women,” she reasoned, “can sometimes work wonders; and may not he, who is of Northern
birth, come by degrees to love, for my sake, the ill-used South?”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

“focusing on a Major Dick Long of the 73rd Ohio, who possessed “a killing set of whiskers”
― Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War