The Guide to Getting It On (150 page)

These reports helped fuel the fires that were being stoked by fanatics of the day like John Kellogg and Sylvester Graham, who wrote that more than 40 ounces of blood were lost during each male ejaculation. They believed that this huge depletion of blood led to horrible diseases such as cholera and the plague. In order to save a man from such a terrible fate, they declared that he was to have sex no more than once a month, and that he was to totally abstain from masturbation. This tied in nicely with religious prohibitions against any kind of sexual release that could not result in conception.

Understanding more about this panic helps us see why organizations like the Young Men’s Christian Organization (YMCA) worked so hard in the 1860s and 1870s to pass anti-obscenity laws. These laws targeted any materials that might cause a young man to masturbate. There is a bit of irony in this, as it wasn’t too many years later that if a young man in America wanted to find a place where he could masturbate with other young men, the YMCA was often at the top of his list.

Prohibitions against masturbation in America reached their climax in the second half of the 1800s. People today assume that these prohibitions must have scared young men and women into not masturbating. They also assume that there must have been serious prohibitions against masturbation in America before the 1800s, and that anti-masturbation zealots like Sylvester Graham and John Kellogg were giving voice to long-standing fears. None of these assumptions are true. At best, the bizarre prohibitions made people feel guilt or shame, but they didn’t seem to stop many from masturbating.

Anti-masturbation fanatics like Graham and Kellogg were the first to admit that there was hardly an adolescent boy in America who didn’t masturbate or know about masturbation. While the anti-masturbation fanatics weren’t as concerned about masturbation among girls as among boys, this wasn’t because they thought that girls didn’t suffer horribly from it. It had more to do with their initial focus, which was saving the bodies and souls of white, middle-class Protestant youths who they believed were in grave danger from sexual excess of any kind, including masturbation.

The fires of masturbatory panic struck a chord in the minds of middle-class urban parents. Self-help and advice books were becoming hugely important, and the bogus medical advice of people like Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg may have found an audience among the new middle class who was consuming these books. Of course, these couples didn’t take seriously the prohibitions against intercourse in marriage. The only prohibitions they may have taken seriously regarded their children’s masturbation. And it’s unlikely that children heeded their parents’ concerns about sex any more than today’s children do.

Sex writers today tend to make too much of zealots like Graham and Kellogg. While these men were not without influence, they hardly defined sex or the sexual climate in America during the 1800s.

Sex & The Civil War

The thirty-year span from 1846 to 1876 was one of the bloodiest in our history. It began with America’s war against Mexico and ended with Sitting Bull’s massacre of Custer at Little Big Horn in 1876. In between were Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Vicksberg, Shiloh and Appomattox.

Today, most Americans know about the attacks of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as images on a TV screen or computer monitor. In the 1860s, the Civil War impacted Americans in a much more personal way. Instead of fighting an enemy on foreign soil, we were fighting each other.

Among the nearly 60,000 books that have been written on the Civil War, there is only one currently available whose focus is sex.

Today, when we talk about a woman having access to the military, we mean that she is able to join and rise within the ranks. In the time of the Civil War, having access to the military meant that a woman got to sexually service men in the ranks. And there was no shortage of prostitutes who did just that. There were entire camps of prostitutes who followed the military divisions.

For instance, much has been written about how the word “hooker” may have come from the large camp of prostitutes who General Hooker allowed to be located near his division in Washington, D.C. While General Hooker was known to have had a personal fondness for whores, the slang term of “hooker” predated the Civil War by many years.

An interesting story about prostitutes in the Civil War emerged when the Army ordered 150 whores from Nashville to be placed on board a brand new passenger ship named the
Idahoe.
As was reported in the
Nashville Dispatch
on July 9, 1863: “Yesterday a large number of women of ill fame were transported northward.… Where they are consigned to, we are not advised, but suspect the authorities of the city to which they are landed will feel proud of such an acquisition to their population.”

The city where the women were supposed to be let off was Louisville. The trip should have taken a few days at most. But neither Louisville nor any other ports along the Mississippi would allow the load of whores to come ashore. The
Idahoe
became famous and was called “The Floating Whorehouse.” Its cargo of prostitutes nearly trashed the entire boat. They were finally returned to Nashville in August of 1863.

Love letters between Civil War soldiers and their partners are often poignant reminders that sexual intimacy was seldom forgotten in the face of tragic circumstance:

From a soldier to his wife: “I anticipate unspeakable delight in your embrace and look forward to your voluptuous touch.” In her reply to him, she wrote: “How I long to see you... I’ll drain your coffers dry next Saturday, I assure you.” From the diary of a soldier who had just returned to duty after a short leave with his wife—”We didn’t sleep much last night... The reunion so buoyed up our affections that we had a great deal of loving to do.” From General Weitzel to his lover—“My darling Louisa, I have pinched your picture and it does not holler. I have bitten it and it does not holler. I have kissed it and it does not return my kisses. I have hugged it and it does not return my hug. So just consider yourself pinched, bitten, hugged and kissed.”

One thing we often forget about the Civil War is how the absence of men at home impacted traditional sex roles. This was studied at length during World War II, when Rosie the Riveter ran our heavy industries while men were away at war. It is likely that similar role reversals occurred during the Civil War, impacting how men and women related both at home and in the world of business. These role reversals contributed to the nineteenth century woman’s growing sense of independence.

The Civil War & Proposed Constitutional Amendment

A fascinating by-product of the Civil War was a constitutional amendment that was proposed in 1863. Its wording affirmed “Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, and His Will, revealed in the Holy Scriptures, as of supreme authority.”

You would think that such an amendment would have been a backlash against so much commercial sex in America. However, sexual excess was not the primary motivator. The main reason for the proposed amendment was because politicians feared that God was angry with the Union government, and that’s why the North had been doing so badly in the Civil War.

A number of state governors supported the proposed amendment, and William Strong, the man who headed the organization that spearheaded it, was appointed to the United States Supreme Court. He would be instrumental in helping Anthony Comstock get his anti-sex legislation through Congress.

The Civil War and Rape

War is often associated with an increase in rape. While there were certainly rapes during the Civil War, the numbers were low compared to wars in Europe. Perhaps that’s because the soldiers who committed rapes were often court marshaled and hanged or shot—sometimes the same day they were caught. Perhaps American soldiers had more respect for women than their European counterparts.

The rape victims of both Union and Confederate soldiers tended to be slave women. It is a sad irony that the Union soldiers who were supposed to be liberating slave women were raping some of them. But these women were the property of Southern men, and “destroying” their property may have been a way of humiliating the slave owners. Black women were also thought to have been more sexual than white women.

Slaves and Sex

For slaves, “family” had a different meaning than for most whites. The black family could be forever separated because a master wanted it that way, or because an auctioneer had placed family members in different lots. Black men were not allowed to protect their wives and children.

Sexual relations between white masters and black slave women were frequent. Some of these relationships were tender and caring, while others were rape and exploitation. The resulting mixed-race children drew particularly poor lots in life. Their presence could be a reminder to the white wife of the owner about her husband’s adultery with the slave.

Before the Civil War, it was not unusual for free black women to have long-term relationships with white men. Between 1870 and 1894, it was even legal for white men and black women to marry in Louisiana. But that was an exception. After the Civil War, white America convinced itself that there was an epidemic of black men raping white women. Affairs between white women and black men threatened the social order and were no longer tolerated.

It is a myth to think that the North was any less racist than the South. Few people in the North were willing to tolerate the idea of blacks as neighbors or as lovers, except for visits to black prostitutes. After the Civil War, the few protections that society had afforded blacks all but disappeared.

Prostitution in the 1800s

Here lies Charlotte

She was a harlot

For 15 years she preserved her virginity

A damn good record for this vicinity.

–from the graveyard plaque of a nineteenth century prostitute in Colorado

In the bigger cities of the North, between one-in-ten and one-in-twenty women were at one time working as prostitutes. For most of these women, it was an occasional job. Some would do it exclusively for a couple of years, while others would do it only as the need arose.

Brothels were plentiful, and prostitutes could be found in almost every neighborhood of every city. Prostitutes also worked out of restaurants called Lobster Houses, concert saloons, or dance halls where they might take a trick to an upstairs room for a quick drop of the drawers. Big-city hotels were hubs of whoring, with the finer hotels having separate entrances for “respectable” women so there was no risk they would be confused with the prostitutes.

It was unusual for a man to walk down a street in a big city and not receive offers for sex. The offers came from women who appeared classy and from girls sitting half-naked in open doorways. A man could pick up a woman on the street and have sex in an alley, or he could find a whore working out of a small market, liquor store or cigar store.

If he were in a miner’s town in the West, a man’s only opportunity for sex might be to wait in a long line in front of a tent. This would get him a soggy poke with the area’s only whore—not that his experience would be any worse than if he’d been with a prostitute in New York. Even garrisons on the frontier offered whores along with food and water for your horse. There were also Native American women who danced with more than wolves.