Civil War Surgeon Only Woman in History to Receive the Medal of Honor

"I think part of it was the practicality. And maybe another part of it was a way of her pushing gender equality, saying that men and women should be able to pretty much wear what they wanted to wear without clothing being labeled,” Kaminski said.

While Walker was able to successfully push boundaries with her style of dress and occupation, she was never able to become a commissioned officer within the Army. However, she did secure a paid position as a civilian-contracted assistant surgeon.

In the spring of 1864, Walker was stationed at Lee and Gordon's Mills in Chickamauga, Georgia, an area held by U.S. troops that was very close to Confederate territory.

"She was encouraged to go out and treat southern civilians who hadn't had access to medical care in a long time,” Kaminski said. “She would go out into the countryside, often on her own, knowing how dangerous it was to treat civilians who were in need."

While out on her own she would listen for any information on troop movements and brought the intel back to her commanding officer, who presumably passed it up the chain of command.

During one of her forays into enemy territory, Walker was captured by Confederate soldiers and held as a prisoner of war at a female military prison in Virginia. Her imprisonment caused negative effects on her health, including problems with her eye, which prevented her from continuing to perform surgery after the war ended.

Receiving the military's top honor

Walker and her supporters brought her desire to be a commissioned officer to the attention of President Abraham Lincoln. However, after Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson did not feel that it was in his power to provide her a commission in the military. Instead, he awarded her a Medal of Honor.

"The grounds upon which the Medal of Honor could be awarded were broader than they are today and rather ambiguous in a number of cases,” said Ed Lengel, chief historian for the National Medal of Honor Museum. “It did not necessarily have to be combat service to qualify for the award, i.e., not just wartime service, but service actually under fire. Although, in many cases, Mary Walker came close to that."

After the Civil War, many service members wrote their congressmen stating that they deserved the award, which pushed the military to tighten its eligibility parameters on who could qualify to receive the top military decoration.

"Pressure could be applied within the military to get a medal awarded to them simply by pulling strings. So there were quite a few egregious cases,” said Lengel.

By the beginning of the U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, a review of Medal of Honor awards resulted in 911 individuals being stripped of their award, including Walker. However, she was among the few who refused to return the medal and continued to wear it until her death in 1919.

Behind the scenes, a campaign was launched in the 1920s to get Walker's medal restored. The efforts intensified in the 1970s, including a local campaign in her hometown of Oswego, New York. Eventually, the reinstatement of her medal was supported through a bipartisan effort in Congress and posthumously restored by President Jimmy Carter in 1977.