Chaddock, Gail. "Honoring American Women of War." Christian Science Monitor (October 20, 1997). < http://csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/durableRedirect.pl?/durable/1997/10/20/feat/feat.1.html>. [6 December 2004].

Walker was able to obtain a commission as a surgeon during the Civil War because, during that time, both the Union and Confederate armies prohibited women from enlisting as soldiers. Like Newcom during the Mexican War, therefore, many women who were determined to serve assumed masculine names and dress. For this reason, historians have been unable to determine exactly how many women served during the war. However, some scholars have estimated that as many as 400 women may have served as soldiers in the Confederate army. For example, in 1888, Mary Livermore, a United States Sanitary Commission worker, wrote then that although she could not vouch for the accuracy of the estimate that almost 400 women soldiers served in the Civil War, she was "convinced that a larger number of women disguised themselves and enlisted in the service, for one cause or other." Livermore continued on about the sort of lives these women must have led as disguised soldiers: "Entrenched in secrecy, and regarded as men, they were sometimes revealed as women, by accident or casualty. Some startling histories of these military women were current in the gossip of army life."

Nonetheless, reports are that by the Civil War as many as 400 women may have followed Newcom's example. One of those women was Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, who became the first, and still only, women to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military honor. Walker never led a conventional life. First, she became a doctor in the period before the American Civil War, when few women were even credentialed in nursing. Sec