She was an ordinary American girl of no great promise or lineage. Born into a middle-class family on Christmas Day 1844, the daughter of an army general.
She was raised with a love of horses, and adventure. Her father had always wanted a boy, and brought her up in that fashion, giving her freedom to explore the countryside of Vermont on her own, to ride horses bareback and to enjoy the great outdoors. Her name was Agnes LeClerc Joy, and she would grow up to be a fearless equestrian, a circus performer at 17, and, even more unlikely, would marry a Prussian nobleman, Felix Salm Salm, and become the first American princess.
She was described by contemporaries as red-headed, feisty, and self-willed. Many women, including Mary Todd Lincoln, would later call her shameless. When the teenager married her husband, who fell in love with her while visiting a circus in the States, she persuaded him to join the Union Army. An experienced soldier he ended up a captain and she accompanied him to the front as an army nurse. She was by all accounts passionate and dedicated to saving lives. During the terrible Battle of Antietam in 1862, she even demanded her husband’s white shirt as he rested after a cavalry attack, so that she could tear it up and use it for bandages for bleeding soldiers.
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