The Legend of Lucy Brewer, the 'First Female Marine’

The memoir of the woman known as “Lucy Brewer” is either the inspirational story of a woman choosing her own path in a male-dominated world or a cautionary tale about becoming a prostitute or patronizing brothels.

Either way, no one knows if Lucy Brewer ever existed or if she was just made up by a writer looking to get paid.

Brewer was the main character in the 1815 autobiographical book “The Female Marine, or the Adventures of Lucy Brewer.” According to the book, Brewer is a teen in Plymouth, Massachusetts, who falls in love with a boy who quickly gets her pregnant and refuses to marry her.

She soon moves to Boston, a more cosmopolitan location, because we all know what happened to young women who fell out of line in small Massachusetts towns back then.

But Lucy’s baby doesn’t survive childbirth, and despite the warnings she received about the trappings of big-city life, she finds herself “tricked” into becoming a prostitute in a local brothel. After three years of trickery, she is fed up with the “harlotry” of her life and escapes the house of ill repute.

The War of 1812 had just erupted so she quickly finds a Marine Corps uniform, tapes her breasts and butt to hide her shape and joins the Marines.

She takes the name of George Baker, a Marine sharpshooter in the topsails aboard the USS Constitution. With her gender a closely guarded secret, she serves for the duration of the War of 1812, surviving a near drowning and countless battles.

Once back on shore, she collects her wages and returns home to her family farm in Plymouth, leaving the Marine Corps with her dignity intact.

After her return, she marries and becomes a true woman of the early 1800s, living far away from the man’s world of warfare and travel. Instead, she has babies with her husband.

She writes her memoirs in order to dissuade young men from visiting brothels and prostitutes and to keep young women from becoming prostitutes.

While all of this sounds pretty possible, the problem with it is that no one could substantiate if Lucy Brewer actually existed. There are no records of a Lucy Brewer in Plymouth, Massachusetts, or a George Baker who served in the Marine Corps. No one remembers these people, and neither was ever seen in person despite the popularity of the books at the time.

Historians also dispute the idea that a woman could have passed herself off as a male in the Marine Corps of 1812, especially in the cramped quarters of the USS Constitution. The exploits of Brewer/Baker with the Marines appear to be drawn from widely published accounts from Navy captains Isaac Hull, William Bainbridge and Charles Stewart, who all commanded the Constitution during the war.

Maybe the most unbelievable aspect of the story is that a 19-year-old who never had used a firearm could become a sharpshooter so easily on the high seas.

The more likely truth is that “The Female Marine, or the Adventures of Lucy Brewer” was written by a struggling writer at the time, Nathaniel Hill Wright. Wright was looking to capitalize on the popularity of similar stories of women disguising themselves to fight in wars as men.

Making up a story about a woman dressing as a man to fight in an American war was totally unnecessary. A number of women already had fought in combat during battles. Margaret Corbin was wounded in the 1776 Battle of Fort Washington, and Deborah Sampson actually disguised herself as a man to join the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.

Maybe the problem with these examples is that none of these women ever spurned the life of a prostitute to join the Marines. The book is considered a “lively blend of the very best and very worst of the eighteenth century tales of seduction and shame, despair and disillusionment, fact and fabrication.”

It turns out Wright’s primary goal was writing cheap books for cheap thrills and jokes to an audience of soldiers and sailors.

If Wright did pen the story of Lucy Brewer, then he was in luck. It performed just as well as he’d hoped, and it was printed and reprinted more than a dozen times in just a few years. A 1966 edition of the New England Quarterly notes that the book is definitely fiction but has burrowed itself into New England myth and folklore.

Lucy Brewer’s enduring legend earned the story, if not the person, a mention in history, even if both Encyclopedia Britannica and the Marine Corps Museum refuse to acknowledge her existence.

The official, undisputed title of “First Woman Marine” goes to Opha May Johnson, who became a United States Marine on Aug. 13, 1918, while World War I raged in Europe.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.

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