Abstract
On the morning of August 29, 1861, a captain of the U.S. Infantry decided to take a stroll down Fourth Street, a major thoroughfare of St. Louis, with his new bride on his arm. According to a letter of complaint written that very day to the Provost Marshal, Major McKinistry, the hundreds of citizens who witnessed this act found it “exceedingly disgusting.” It was especially humiliating to the Union men in the crowd. The author of the complaint, who preferred to remain anonymous, suggested that officers or soldiers in the Union forces, like McKinistry himself, must surely be even more concerned by such behavior on the part of a uniformed officer. The alleged bride was, after all, a notorious woman around the town. For years, she had kept a public house in St. Louis and was rumored to have amassed considerable wealth through her “iniquitous” calling. Indeed, it was rumored that the reason why the officer had so besmirched the honor of his uniform was in order to acquire the brothel keepers’ ill-gotten wealth. According to the outraged citizen, “not another man could be found in St. Louis who would be seen with her (publicly) under any circumstances.”1
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Notes
Social histories of Civil War soldiers have focused primarily upon the field and camp experience of soldiers, as in the now classic work of Bell Irvin Wiley, The Common Soldier in the Civil War (New York, Grosset & Dunlap, 1952)
Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York, Viking Press, 1988)
Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the Civil War (New York, Free Press, 1987).
Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri during the Civil War (New York, Oxford University Press, 1989), 193–230
Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993).
Jacqueline Glass Campbell, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2003)
E. Susan Barber, “Depraved and Abandoned Women: Prostitution in Richmond, Virginia, across the Civil War,” in Neither Lady Nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South, Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds. (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 155–173
Catherine Clinton, Public Women and the Confederacy (Milwaukee, Marquette University Press, 1999)
Thomas P. Lowry, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex and the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Stackpole Books, 1994).
On prostitution in antebellum St. Louis, see, Jeffrey S. Adler, “Streetwalkers, Degraded Outcasts, and Good for Nothing Hussies: Women and the Dangerous Class in Antebellum St. Louis” Journal of Social History 25, no. 4, 737–756, 1992.
Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York, W.W Norton, 1992)
Helen Leftkowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth Century America (New York, Knopf, 2002)
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1985)
Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
For a discussion of the general circumstances of St. Louis during the War, see Louis Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence, KS, University Press of Kansas, 2001)
James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764–1980 (St. Louis, Missouri Historical Society Press, 1998, 3rd ed.), 227–271.
While historians have discussed the violation of citizens’ civil liberties during the war at some length, they have given little consideration to this sort of domestic discipline as an integral part of military policy. See Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Mark Neely, The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991)
Phillip Paludin, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1981).
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© 2005 LeeAnn Whites
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Whites, L. (2005). Home Guards and Home Traitors: Loyalty and Prostitution in Civil War St. Louis. In: Gender Matters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05915-4_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05915-4_5
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