Over three million young men left home, shouldered rifles, and set
about killing one another in the 1860s. Behind, they left wives and
sweethearts. The 50,000 books about the war have told us in
meticulous detail about the strategy, tactics, weapons, uniforms,
canteens, famous generals, religious beliefs, personality quirks,
fortifications, battles, sieges, gunboats, medical care, and
recruiting policies. The causes of the war have been endlessly
analyzed. The surviving veterans wrote hundreds of memoirs,
sometimes inflating their own heroism and importance. What rarely
appears in this literature is any mention of sex, in spite of most
soldiers being in their early twenties, a time of manly vigor. The
late 19th century brought the ascendancy of Victorian prudishness
and hypocrisy. The Comstock laws sent men to prison for mailing
contraceptive advice. Just advice Whatever willingness there might
have been to reveal wartime hanky-panky evaporated in the tenor of
the time and the admiring gaze of the veteran's growing
grandchildren. The following scene would be unimaginable: the old
veteran sits by the stove in the country store. His long white
beard covers his tattered vest. A faded medal graces his chest. On
the floor are the shavings from his most recent whittling. A tiny
child pipes up: "Tell us about the war, grandpa." "Well, Jimmy,
there was this pretty little whore in Memphis." Never happen.
Material collected twenty years ago resulted in the author's 1994
book, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell - Sex in the Civil War,
which presented everything that was then known on the subject.
There had been no previous book on Civil War sex. Since then, the
author and his wife, Beverly, have read over 90,000 court-martials
and countless letters and diary entries. What emerges is that
sexual activity was far more common and public than our previous
research or any memoir had ever revealed. The records come from
literally every corner of the country: Key West, Washington
Territory, Los Angeles, and Maine. The malfeasants are both
officers and enlisted men. The victims range from six-year girls to
sixty-year old grandmothers. The soldiers carried with them lewd
books and obscene photos. Even more striking is the universality of
houses of prostitution. Every village and every city neighborhood
has at least one such-and everybody knew it. They knew the
addresses of the houses. They knew the names of the madams and the
names of many of the "girls." Most of the witnesses for the trials
had visited the houses, for the usual reasons. The military police
tramped through the houses, looking for deserters. Rape, thought to
be rare during the war, was not that rare. An unexpected finding
was that Union soldiers, who were supposedly freeing the slaves,
were quick to rape black women. An even more surprising finding was
that the Confederate army had a policy of not prosecuting rapists,
whether the victim was black or white. The inventor of the Graham
cracker had, in 1834, written a book claiming that masturbation
caused severe illness, even death. This idea had taken root in the
medical profession and many army doctors testified that a defendant
was not guilty because of "insanity from self-abuse." The Union
army's largest hospital listed dozens men, dead from
"masturbation." The famous ship Monitor had a thick iron turret. In
other such ships, the sound-proof turret proved a convenient place
for old sailors to rape young boys. A Union cavalry colonel was
tried for sexually assaulted both men and women. Evidence for Civil
War homosexuality was unknown until now. Even more astonishing
stories appear in the records: sex with horses, sheep, even with
chickens and turkeys. There are records of obscene tattoos, foul
cursing by Winfield Scott Hancock, black and white mistresses of
Confederate generals, even many records of "fornication and
bastardy" in the little village of Gettysburg. Ads for abortion
clinics appeared on the front pages of newspaper
General
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