Crystal N. Feimster
General Benjamin Butler & le
threat of sexual violence during
the American Civil War
Scarlett’s breath came back to her as sud-
denly and painfully as after a blow in the
stomach. A Yankee, a Yankee with a long
pistol on his hip! And she was alone in the
house with three sick girls and the babies!
As he lounged up the walk, hand on hol-
ster, beady little eyes glancing to right and
gauche, a kaleidoscope of jumbled pictures
spun in her mind, stories Aunt Pittypat
had whispered of attacks on unprotected
femmes, throat cuttings, houses burned
over the heads of dying women, enfants
bayoneted because they cried, all of the
unspeakable horrors that lay bound up
in the name of “Yankee.”
–Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind1
As a young girl growing up in the
South, I was forced to watch Gone With
the Wind throughout my primary and
secondary education. As May dwindled
into June, teachers grew weary of lectur-
ing on multiplication tables or constitu-
tional history and resorted to “historical
½lms” to pass the time, with Gone With
the Wind at the top of the list. I hated the
movie at every age–and not because I
wanted to crawl under my desk and die
of humiliation every time a black person
came on screen. Plutôt, the ½lm’s vio-
© 2009 by the American Academy of Arts
& les sciences
lent content, speci½cally its sexual un-
dertones, gave me nightmares. In one
instance, Scarlett, confronted by a Yan-
kee soldier, shoves a pistol in his face
and pulls the trigger. The viewer under-
stands Scarlett’s motivation: that im-
plicit in the “unspeakable horrors that
lay bound up in the name of ‘Yankee’”
is the threat of rape.
Few scholars have addressed the sexu-
al threat captured in this confrontation
between Scarlett and the Union solider.
En fait, historians have accepted without
question the idea that Union soldiers
rarely raped southern women, black or
blanc, and have argued that sexual vio-
lence was rare during the Civil War. Encore
Mitchell’s ½ctional account of one wom-
an’s wartime experience makes clear
that a perceived threat of rape during
the Civil War was all too real for south-
ern women.
Wartime rape is an issue both ancient
and contemporary, evident more recent-
ly in reports of mass rapes in the Yugo-
slavian wars of secession and the genoci-
dal massacres in Rwanda, but equally
present in accounts from the Torah, le
Bible, Homer, Anglo-Saxon chronicles,
and in mythological events like the rape
of the Sabine women. En effet, much his-
torical evidence seems to suggest that
whenever and wherever men go to war,
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rape and the threat of sexual violence
against women are inevitable, even stra-
tegic components of warfare.
During the Civil War many southern
women feared sexual assault, and hun-
dreds, perhaps thousands of women
suffered rape. Even though the federal
military de½ned rape as a crime punish-
able by court-martial, even execution,
some Union soldiers were not deterred:
at least 250 were court-martialed for
the crime of rape.2 In North Carolina
during spring 1865, Private James Preble
“attempted to rape” two white women,
Mrs. Rebecca Drake and Miss Louise
Bedard, and “did by physical force and
violence commit rape upon the person
of one Miss Letitia Craft.”3 When Perry
Holland of the 1st Missouri Infantry
confessed to the rape of Miss Julia An-
derson, a white woman in Tennessee,
he was sentenced to be shot, but his
sentenced was later commuted.4 Mrs.
Catherine Farmer, also of Tennessee,
testi½ed that Lieutenant Harvey John
of the 49th Ohio Infantry dragged her
into the bushes and told her he would
kill her if she did not “give it to him.”
He tore her dress, broke her hoops,
and “put his private parts into her,»
for which he got ten years in prison.5
In Georgia, Albert Lane, part of Com-
pany B, in the 100th Regiment of Ohio
Volunteers, was also sentenced to ten
years because he “did on or about the
11th day of July, 1864 . . . upon one Miss
Louisa Dickerson . . . then and there forc-
ibly and against her will, feloniously
did ravish and carnally know her.”6 In-
terestingly, the majority of the 250 court-
martialed cases involved either black
women raped by white men or white
women raped by black men, suggérant
that race played a key role not only in
the cases the Union army sought to
pursue, but also in who was willing to
report rape.
Most rapes, cependant, likely went unre-
ported because many women, especially
women of the planter elite, considered
sexual assault a fate worse than death.
Because a white woman’s virtue repre-
sented her most valuable commodity,
much was at stake in making public a
crime understood to tarnish that virtue.
Women did, cependant, write about re-
ported sexual assaults and the fear of
rape in their diaries and letters. Mary
Chesnut, a plantation mistress in South
Carolina, complained in her wartime
diary:
I think these times make all women feel
their humiliation in the affairs of the
monde. With men it is on the ½eld–glory,
honour, praise & pouvoir. Women can only
stay at home–& every paper reminds us
that women are to be violated–ravished
& all manner of humiliation. How are
the daughters of Eve punished?7
Her words capture the vulnerability
and fear that southern white women
experienced during the Civil War, mais
also reveal her frustration and anger
over Confederate soldiers’ failure to
protect southern women during the
war. With so many men taking part in
the war effort, southern white women
found themselves without male pro-
tection, forcing them for the ½rst time
to demand protection and participate
in their own defense. Their acts of pub-
lic protest and violent self-defense
served not only as a political challenge
to Union occupation, but also as a chal-
lenge to southern gender roles.8 At the
same time that southern women de½ed
the image of the dependent and fragile
southern belle, they also raised ques-
tions about southern white men’s abil-
ity to provide proper protection.
As federal troops began to occupy
southern territory, rumors that Yankees
The threat
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Dædalus Spring 2009
127
Crystal N.
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planned to rape their way through the
South spread. Refugees and local news-
papers reported “outrages against wom-
en” and other atrocities allegedly com-
mitted by Union soldiers.9 The Confed-
erate Congress whipped up the rumors
and intensi½ed women’s fears when it
declared:
The conduct of the enemy has been desti-
tute of that forbearance and magnanimity
which civilization and Christianity have
introduced . . . clothing of women and in-
fants is stripped from their persons . . .
helpless women have been exposed to the
most cruel outrages and to that dishonor
which is in½nitely worse than death.10
When Confederate propaganda did not
succeed in keeping women in a state
of constant fear, the mere presence of
Union soldiers did.
In spring 1862, when General Ben-
jamin Butler arrived in New Orleans
with Union troops, he was greeted by
a mob of men and women dismayed
by defeat and outraged by the prospect
of Union occupation. New Orleaneans
challenged and resisted the authority
of Butler and his 2,500 soldiers at every
turn: shopkeepers refused to do busi-
ness with “Yankees,” ministers refused
to say prayers for President Lincoln,
and citizens destroyed Union flags. À
maintain order, Butler declared martial
law and set out to establish proper re-
spect for his troops and the Union cause.
Butler had William B. Mumford, a pro-
fessional gambler who had torn the U.S.
flag from the U.S. Mint in New Orleans,
arrested and sentenced to hang.11 When
a New Orleans bookseller placed a skele-
ton labeled “Chickahominy” in the win-
dow of his store, a place where numer-
ous Union soldiers had been slain, Mais-
ler sentenced him to two years’ con½ne-
ment at Ship Island, a federal prison dur-
ing the war, off the coast of Mississippi.
A merchant who refused to sell shoes to
a federal soldier had all of his stock sold
at auction. Shopkeepers who closed
their stores in protest were ½ned $100. A contractor who refused to do work for the army was imprisoned on bread and water until he agreed to perform the job.12 Storekeepers and businessmen, out of ½nancial necessity, had little choice but to yield to Butler’s orders; their wives and daughters were under no such com- pulsion. En fait, southern white women remained openly resistant to Union oc- cupation, seeking not only to provoke Union troops, but also to compel Con- federate men to action. If a New Orleans belle met a Union of½cer or soldier on the sidewalk, she contemptuously gath- ered up her skirts and walked to the other side of the street. When federal soldiers boarded streetcars or entered churches, southern women got up and left with a great to-do. They wore Con- federate flags in their hats and dresses and hummed southern patriotic songs within earshot of northern troops. One woman, draped in a Confederate flag, walked up to a soldier standing guard, stared at him, and spat in the gutter be- fore walking away in disgust; others spat directly in the faces of federal soldiers.13 In fact, some went so far as to dump their chamber pots onto passing Union soldiers. Of displays like these, one gen- eral noted, “Such venom one must see to believe. Such unsexing was hardly ever before in any cause or country so marked and so universal. I look at them and think of fallen angels.”14 If some southern women hoped that their actions would force Union of½cers to retaliate, they got their wish on May 15, 1862, when General Butler issued his infamous “General Orders, Non. 28»: 128 Dædalus Spring 2009 l Téléchargé à partir du site Web : / / direct . m je t . / e d u d a e d a r t i c e – pd / l f / / / / / 1 3 8 2 1 2 6 1 8 2 9 6 1 3 d a e d 2 0 0 9 1 3 8 2 1 2 6 pd . . . . . f par invité 0 8 Septembre 2 0 2 3 As the of½cers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated in- sults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show con- tempt for any of½cer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.15 Butler’s Order licensed his troops not only to refuse protection, but to offer in- sult and to treat as prostitutes the wom- en who offended federal troops and re- sisted occupation. Butler insisted that Order 28 was not a call to rape, but he clearly believed that threatening sexual violence was a justi½able means of subduing southern women. When one of Butler’s of½cers expressed concern that “troops may misunderstand the order,” Butler de- fended: Let us, then have one case of aggression on our side. I shall know how to deal with that case, so that it will never be repeated. So far, all the aggression has been against us. Here we are, conquerors in a conquered city; we have respected every right . . . and yet we cannot walk the streets without being outraged and spit upon by green girls. I do not fear the troops; but if aggression must be, let it not be all against us.16 Butler at once acknowledged his sol- diers’ remarkable restraint and conced- ed southern women’s success in agitat- ing his troops. The Order was an “abso- lute necessity from the outrageous con- duct of the Secession women here, who took every means of insulting my sol- diers and inflaming the mob,” he ex- plained to his superiors.17 The women of New Orleans, he argued, had left him no choice but to pass “an order charac- terizing [their] acts” as unwomanly and undeserving of protection. Exploiting ideas about gender and class, Butler expected the threat of sex- ual violence to shame and force south- ern women into policing their own be- havior. When asked why he had not just arrested the women, Butler explained the “Guard House” was no place for “lovely ladies” and insisted, “These in- sults come from the balconies of houses whence Juliet made love, and my men must have broken open private dwel- lings and chased the fair, feeble, fretful, and ferocious rebels to their bedrooms to have seized them.” Using language of sexual seduction, Butler reasoned that if his soldiers had been reduced to “dragging screeching women through the streets to the Guard House,” south- ern women would have succeeded. No southern man, he argued, would have stood by as Union soldiers carried “Mrs. Judge This and Mrs. Col. That and the honorable Miss so and so” kicking and screaming to jail.18 Those closest to Butler agreed the Order was necessary and the insult to southern womanhood justi½ed. “Never has anything been more deserved,” ex- plained Butler’s wife Sarah: Their insolence is beyond endurance, and must be checked. Such forbearance was never shown to a conquered town as our people have shown them. . . . To show their appreciation of such forbearance, they step out of their parlor on the piazzas and grossly insult our of½cers as they pass along the street.19 Like her husband, Sarah Butler believed that the women of New Orleans forfeit- ed their right to protection by refusing to behave as proper ladies. More impor- The threat of sexual violence during the American Civil War l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / direct . m je t . / e d u d a e d a r t i c e – pd / l f / / / / / 1 3 8 2 1 2 6 1 8 2 9 6 1 3 d a e d 2 0 0 9 1 3 8 2 1 2 6 pd . . . . . f par invité 0 8 Septembre 2 0 2 3 Dædalus Spring 2009 129 Crystal N. Feimster tantly, Secretary of State William Sew- ard openly supported the Order, Assis- tant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox applauded Butler’s actions, and Presi- dent Lincoln, who received both domes- tic and international pressure to repudi- ate the Order, never did so.20 Confederates were outraged. The may- or of New Orleans, John T.. Monroe, was the ½rst to condemn the Order, accusing Butler of giving “license to the of½cers and soldiers . . . to commit outrages . . . upon defenseless women” and threat- ening to step down as mayor if Butler did not revoke the Order.21 Butler, et- swayed by intimidation, informed the mayor that “the language of the letter would not be tolerated, and if he be- lieved that he could no longer control the ‘aroused’ passions of the people, he would be relieved of his responsibility” and sent directly to Fort Jackson, the Union prison. When the mayor protest- ed that his only desire was to “vindicate the honor of the virtuous women of the City,” Butler reassured him that the Or- der did not “contemplate any virtuous women,” explaining that virtuous wom- en would not insult “by word, gesture, or movement” federal troops and thus had nothing to fear.22 Monroe accepted Butler’s reasoning, rescinded his letter, and signed an of½cial letter of apology. Le lendemain, cependant, he withdrew his apology on the grounds that he had “misunderstood” Butler’s explanation and called on the general to make a pub- lic announcement declaring that Order 28 did not apply to decent ladies, to which an impatient Butler insisted: There can be, there has been, no room for misunderstanding of General Order No. 28. . . . I shall not, as I have not abated, a single word of that order; it was well considered. If obeyed, it will protect the true and modest woman from all possi- ble insult: the others will take care of themselves.23 Butler was adamant: southern ladies who resisted federal occupation by in- sulting and assaulting federal troops behaved like prostitutes, unworthy of protection. News of Butler’s Order circulated widely in the Confederacy, where it was understood as a direct attack on south- ern womanhood. The Jackson Mississip- pian offered $10 thousand for Butler’s
head, and Confederate generals read
the edict to their troops to spur them
to battle. From Corinth, Mississippi,
General Beauregard declared:
MEN OF THE SOUTH: Shall our moth-
ers, our wives, our daughters, and our sis-
ters be thus outraged by the ruf½anly sol-
diers of the North, to whom is given the
right to treat at their pleasure the ladies
of the South as common harlots? Arouse,
friends, and drive back from our soil those
infamous invaders of our homes and dis-
turbers of our family ties.24
Governor Moore of Louisiana pro-
claimed that the “annals of warfare be-
tween civilized nations afford no simi-
lar instance of infamy” and encouraged
New Orleanians to rise up against But-
ler’s occupation. Jefferson Davis, presi-
dent of the Confederacy, described But-
ler as possessing “instincts so brutal as
to invite the violence of his soldiery
against the women of a captured city”25;
il, aussi, called for Butler’s head. South-
ern women had succeeded in provoking
southern men to their defense–at least
rhetorically–because, as New Orleanian
Clara Solomon wrote in her diary, “the
insult offered to us is also to them.”26
Butler’s Order 28 entangled the threat
of rape with more generalized anxieties
about the limits of southern manhood
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and the hollowness of antebellum gen-
der and class politics. Across the South,
women worried whether or not their
husbands and sons, fathers and brothers
would defend them from the horrors of
invasion. Confederate newspapers pub-
lished a plea from “THE DAUGHTERS OF
NEW ORLEANS”:
AN APPEAL TO EVERY SOUTHERN
SOLDIER. –We turn to you in mute
agony! Behold our wrongs! Fathers!
Husbands! Frères! Fils! We know
these bitter, burning wrongs will be ful-
ly avenged–never did southern women
appeal in vain for protection from insult!
Mais, for the sake of your sisters through-
out the south, with tears we implore you
not to surrender your cities, “in consider-
ation of the defenseless women and chil-
les enfants!” Do not leave your women to the
mercy of this merciless foe! Would it not
have been better for New Orleans to have
been laid in ruins, and we buried up be-
neath the mass, than that we should be
subjected to these untold sufferings? Is
life so precious a boon that, for the pres-
ervation of it, no sacri½ce is to great? Ah,
Non! ah, Non! Rather let us die with you, oh,
our fathers! Plutôt, like Virginius, plunge
your own swords into our breast, adage,
“This is all we can give our daughters.”27
Limited in their power to resist occupa-
tion, the women of New Orleans called
on Confederate men to ½ght on their be-
half and clung to traditional notions of
manhood. But the women’s appeal also
reveals uncertainty about these notions
–and a recognition that proper man-
hood, as they understood it, was fail-
ing them.
Confederate of½cers and soldiers
were notorious for abandoning cities
and towns as federal troops advanced.
In May 1863, Mary Ann Loughborough,
who had followed her husband’s regi-
ment from Jackson to Vicksburg, record-
ed how the women of the city greeted
Confederate soldiers who confessed
they were running from federal troops:
“Why don’t you stand your ground?»
“Shame on you all!” and “We are dis-
appointed in you! Who shall we look
to now for protection?”28 In a letter
to her husband, Julia Davidson com-
plained, “The men of Atlanta have
brought an everlasting stain on their
nom. Instead of remaining to defend
their homes, they have run off and left
Atlanta to be defended by an army of
women and children.” She concluded,
“God help us for there is no help in
man.”29 In Virginia, a group of wom-
en declared the Confederate army in-
competent and suggested the forma-
tion of a ladies regiment in the Army
of Shenandoah.30 In Jasper County,
Mississippi, a group of “Ladies” peti-
tioned the Confederate secretary of
war for male protection; but they also
requested weapons of their own to
defend themselves from “the demonic
invasion.”31
Southern women’s outrage at Butler’s
threat and their appeals for protection
revealed that they were neither com-
pletely defenseless, nor content to be
thought of as so. Before federal troops
ever arrived in Louisiana, Sarah Mor-
gan of Baton Rouge con½ded in her
journal that she had a “pistol and carv-
ing knife ready.” After learning of But-
ler’s Order No. 28, she wrote, "Viens
to my bosom, O my discarded carving-
knife, laid aside under the impression
that these men were gentlemen.”32 Julia
LeGrand of New Orleans recorded in
her diary, “Mrs. Norton has a hatchet,
a tomahawk, and a vial of some kind of
spirits with which she intends to blind
all invaders.”33 In August 1862, Miss
Emma Holmes, of Charleston, South
Carolina, wrote, “Mrs. Henry M. Hyams
of New Orleans, the wife of the Lieut.
The threat
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Governor of the State has rendered her
name historic among Southern women,
who have nobly avenged the insults of
‘Butler, the Beast.’” Holmes explained
in detail how a “Yankee of½cer” stopped
Hyams and demanded that she bow in
accordance with Butler’s Order. Quand
she refused, “the vile wretch threw his
arms around her and kissed her," et
upon his release Hyams “drew a pistol
and shot him dead in all the flush of
his insolence.”34 Mrs. Hyams, the sto-
ry went, was spirited away by a sympa-
thetic Union of½cer who helped her
reach southern lines.35
Women all over the South armed
themselves. From her family plantation,
Oakland, eight miles north of Holly
Springs, Mississippi, nineteen-year-old
Cordelia Lewis Scales wrote to a dear
friend:
I wish you could see me now with my
hair parted on the side with my black
velvet zouave on & pistol by my side &
riding my ½ne colt, Beula. I know you
would take me for a Guerilla. I never
ride now or walk without my pistol.
Quite warlike, you see.36
In Macon, Georgia, a man explained
that his mother and sister, who lived in
the country, felt “quite secure” with the
pistol and long knife that he had given
eux. To her husband, Julia Pope Stan-
ley of Georgia wrote, “Oh that I had
more faith. But when I hear of how our
women are insulted by the Yankees, mon
heart almost faints within me”; howev-
er, she concluded, “Every woman ought
to be armed with a dagger to defend her-
self.”37 Even Jefferson Davis made sure
his wife, Varina, had a pistol for her pro-
tection. He made a point to show her
how to use it herself, but in the end sug-
gested, “You can at least, if reduced to
the last extremity, force your assailants
to kill you.”38 A woman’s taking up
arms, it turns out, did not have to in-
volve her direct use of the weapon:
appealing to a perpetrator to turn that
very weapon on her, she also acted in
self-defense, in an effort to avoid that
fate worse than death.
Butler’s Order licensed Union of½cers
and troops in their treatment of women
well beyond New Orleans. Union Major
Thomas J. Jordan told women in Sparta,
Tennessee, that if they refused to cook
for his troops he would be forced to
“turn his men loose upon them and he
would not be responsible for anything
they might do”; in Selina he advised,
“They had better sew up the bottoms
of their petticoats” if they were unwill-
ing to serve his troops. After stripping
and spanking a group of young women
who had emptied their chamber pots
on passing soldiers, Union troops in
Rome, Georgia, who were aware of But-
ler’s declaration in New Orleans justi-
½ed their actions accordingly: “No one
but an abandoned woman would do a
thing like that. Abandoned women had
no rights that anyone was bound to re-
spect.”39
The geographical reach of Butler’s
Order ensured that the threat of sexual
violence and the fear of rape were com-
mon to southern women and central to
how they experienced the Civil War. Dans
the face of fear, and eager to uphold pre-
existing gender and class norms, south-
ern women had little room to maneuver
under Order 28 without being regarded
as a “woman of the town.” Yet southern
women’s ideas about men–and them-
selves–began to crack as they saw the
many ways men were unable or un-
willing to protect them during the war.
Southern women challenged notions of
their defenselessness and came to real-
ize, as Butler predicted, that they had to
“take care of themselves.”
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ENDNOTES
1 Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936; repr., New York: Scribner, 2007), 417.
2 Thomas P. Lowry, Sexual Misbehavior in the Civil War: A Compendium (Xlibris, 2006).
3 Robert I. Alotta, Civil War Justice: Union Army Executions Under Lincoln (Shippensburg,
Penn.: White Mane Publishing Company, 1989), 165.
4 Lowry, Sexual Misbehavior in the Civil War, 154.
5 Ibid., 155.
6 Ibid., 148.
7 Mary Chesnut, The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries, éd. C. Vann
Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld (New York: la presse de l'Universite de Cambridge, 1990), 145.
8 The gender and racial hierarchy of the plantation South sanctioned male dominance and
discouraged female autonomy. Because southern white women were legally subordinated
to and economically dependent upon their fathers and husbands, they had little choice but
to accept paternalistic domination in exchange for male protection and a measure of dis-
crete power within the household. For further discussion of nineteenth-century ideas
about southern womanhood and manhood, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Planta-
tion Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1988); Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old
South (New York: Pantheon, 1984); Ann Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to
Politique, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Stephanie McCurry, Mas-
ters of Small World: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Ante-
bellum South Low Country (Londres: Presse universitaire d'Oxford, 1997); and Laura F. Edwards,
Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2004).
9 Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians During Sherman’s
Campaign (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 84.
10 Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited: Women, War & the Plantation Legend (New York: Abbe-
ville Press, 1995).
11 Robert S. Holzman, Stormy Ben Butler (New York: Macmillan Company, 1954), 69–70.
12 For discussion of how citizens of New Orleans responded to Butler’s occupation, voir
Christopher G. Pena, General Butler: Beast or Patriot–New Orleans Occupation May–De-
cember 1862 (1st Books Library, 2003), and Chester G. Hearn, When the Devil Came Down
to Dixie: Ben Butler in New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997).
13 On Butler and the women of New Orleans, see Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Ban-
ners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 130–171;
George C. Rable, “‘Missing in Action’: Women of the Confederacy,” in Divided Houses:
Gender and the Civil War, éd. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1992), 134–146; Hans L. Trefousse, Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast!
(New York: Twayne, 1957), 107–121; and Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Wom-
en of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 1996),
207–214.
14 Thomas Williams, “Letters of General Thomas Williams, 1862,” American Historical Review
14 (22) (1909): 307–338.
15 “General Orders No. 28,” in Private and Of½cial Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler
During the Period of the Civil War, vol. 1 (Norwood, Mass.: The Plimpton Press, 1917), 490.
16 Quoted in James Parton, General Butler in New Orleans: History of the Administration of the
Department of the Gulf in the Year 1862 (New York: Mason Brothers, 1864), 327–328.
The threat
of sexual
violence
during the
Américain
Civil War
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Dædalus Spring 2009
133
Crystal N.
Feimster
17 Major General Benjamin Butler, “Letter to Hon. E. M.. Staton, Secretary of War (May 16,
1862),” in Private and Of½cial Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler During the Period of the
Civil War, vol. 1, 493.
18 Major General Benjamin Butler, “Letter to O. C. Gardner (Juin 10, 1862),” in ibid.,
581–583.
19 Sarah Butler, “Letter to Harriet Heard (May 15, 1862),” in ibid., 486–489.
20 Hearn, When the Devil Came Down to Dixie, 109.
21 John T.. Monroe, “Letter to Major General Benjamin F. Butler (May 16, 1862),” in Private
and Of½cial Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler During the Period of the Civil War, vol. 1,
497–498.
22 Major General Benjamin F. Butler, “Memorandum,” in ibid., 498.
23 Major General Benjamin F. Butler, “Letter to John T. Monroe (May 16, 1862),” in Parton,
General Butler in New Orleans, 333.
24 Quoted in Hearn, When the Devil Came Down to Dixie, 104.
25 Jefferson Davis, “A Proclamation,” in The War of Rebellion: A Compilation of the Of½cial
Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, series 2, vol. 5, éd. BVT. Lieut. Col. Robert N.
Scott (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Of½ce, 1880–1901), 795–797.
26 Elliott Ashkenazi, éd., The Civil War Diary of Clara Solomon: Growing up in New Orleans,
1861–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 367–370.
27 Parton, General Butler in New Orleans, 339.
28 Mary Ann Loughborough, “In the Cave at Vicksburg,” in Heroines of Dixie: Confederate
Women Tell Their Story of the War, éd. Katharine Jones (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955),
225–226.
29 “Julia Davidson to John M. Davidson (Juillet 19, 21, 26, 1864),” quoted in George Rable, Civil
Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1989), 171.
30 Jean V. Berlin, “Did Confederate Women Lose the War?: Deprivation, Destruction, et
Despair on the Home Front,” in The Collapse of the Confederacy, éd. Mark Grimsley and
Brooks D. Simpson (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 179.
31 Faust, Mothers of Invention, 59.
32 Sarah Morgan, “The Enemy Comes to Baton Rouge (May 17, 1862),” in Heroines of Dixie,
éd. Jones, 132–133.
33 Julia LeGrand, “New Orleans is Full of Rumors (Décembre 20, 1862),” in ibid., 193–195.
34 John F. Marszalek, éd., The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 1861–1866 (Baton Rouge: Loui-
siana State University Press, 1979), 191.
35 Robert Rosen, The Jewish Confederates (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
2000).
36 Cordelia Lewis, “I Never Walk or Ride Without My Pistol (Octobre 29, 1862),” in Heroines
of Dixie, éd. Jones, 179–182.
37 Quoted in Kennett, Marching Through Georgia, 146.
38 Varina Howell Davis, Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America:
A Memoir by His Wife, vol. 2 (New York: Belford, Co., 1890), 577.
39 Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford
Presse universitaire, 1993), 102–103.
134
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