Sex and the Civil War

Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality

Judith Giesberg

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469631288
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Civil War soldiers enjoyed unprecedented access to obscene materials of all sorts, including mass-produced erotic fiction, cartes de visite, playing cards, and stereographs. A perfect storm of antebellum legal, technological, and commercial developments, coupled with the concentration of men fed into armies, created a demand for, and a deluge of, pornography in the military camps. Illicit materials entered in haversacks, through the mail, or from sutlers; soldiers found pornography discarded on the ground, and civilians discovered it in abandoned camps. Though few examples survived the war, these materials raised sharp concerns among reformers and lawmakers, who launched campaigns to combat it. By the war's end, a victorious, resurgent American nation-state sought to assert its moral authority by redefining human relations of the most intimate sort, including the regulation of sex and reproduction—most evident in the Comstock laws, a federal law and a series of state measures outlawing pornography, contraception, and abortion. With this book, Judith Giesberg has written the first serious study of the erotica and pornography that nineteenth-century American soldiers read and shared and links them to the postwar reaction to pornography and to debates about the future of sex and marriage.

ONE: LEWD, WICKED, SCANDALOUS

American Pornography Comes of Age

The wartime prohibition against pornography unfolded within a transatlantic context, as policy initiatives and criminal trials in Europe affected and shaped decisions in the United States and vice versa. The first federal attempt to control the trade in illicit publications came in the form of an inauspicious section of the 1842 U.S. customs law that outlawed the importation of these materials. Before 1842, only Vermont had passed an antipornography statute; perhaps this explains Vermont senator Jacob Collamer’s enthusiastic support for the 1865 measure. Associating obscene materials with foreign imports has a particular American ring to it, but the 1842 law also reflected a reality on the ground—there seems to have been no domestically produced pornography until after imports were outlawed.¹ “America has made of late years great progress in the production of books . . . of an improper character,” the enthusiastic bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee noted in his 1877 Index Librorum Prohibitorum, published under the nom de plume Pisanus Fraxi.² The year 1857 proved to be critical in the intercontinental trade in pornography; it was the year that French author Gustave Flaubert was tried and acquitted for his 1856 novel Madame Bovary, Parliament passed Lord Campbell’s Obscene Publications Act, and U.S. lawmakers strengthened the 1842 customs law.³ Britain’s Campbell Act set important precedents. Initiated by antivice organizations whose members referred to obscene publications as a “deadly acid” comparable to “strychnine, or arsenic,” the bill elicited fierce debate among lawmakers over the meaning of the term “obscene.” Declaring classics and other items that might be found in “gentlemen’s” collections off-limits, the Campbell Act defined as obscene materials specifically intended to “corrupt the morals of youth.”⁴ Focused on prosecution at the point of sale, the law exposed the class biases of its authors, “gentlemen” who might be proud collectors of “the classics” but who nonetheless “knew porn when they saw it.” Completing the perfect storm, the word “pornography” appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1842 as one of a number of “lower classes of art” and in 1857 as a “description of prostitutes or of prostitution.”⁵ By the time American lawmakers became concerned about the hazards of pornography during the U.S. Civil War, “a kind of galaxy of the most explicit pornographic writing was already in place in the minds of connoisseurs.”⁶

Policy initiatives were driven by the friction and tension produced by decisions made elsewhere, as Americans and Europeans reacted to legislative efforts overseas. The Brits, for instance, were disgusted when New York customs agents seized and destroyed a catalog produced by the Royal Museum of Naples, pointing out that the American traveler from whom it had been confiscated paid $150–$200 for the item. In the midst of the heated debate over the Campbell Act, American antiporn enthusiasm threatened to blur the line between art and pornography and sully some of what separated a gentleman from the “lower classes.”⁷ Unlike in Britain and France, the inauspicious way in which antipornography measures were passed in the United States—buried in a customs law and tucked between rules for the proper use of the U.S. Mail—suggests that little public conversation accompanied these measures.

Well before Anthony Comstock, there was abundant evidence to suggest that prosecution did little to curtail the trade in obscene publications. In fact, the antebellum trade in pornography was nurtured in an environment of increased surveillance. In the decade before the war, new customs laws and periodic local commitments to stamping out vice helped establish preconditions for a wartime explosion of porn. Much of the antebellum story about porn played out among a group of erotica dealers in New York City.

Beyond this story is an unacknowledged back history involving the publishing activities of abolitionists. While condemning the cruelty of slavery, authors of abolitionist tracts expanded access to a variety of materials that included scenes of sex and violence. Intended to arouse contempt for the abusive and depraved sexual practices of slaveholders, humanitarian reformers were nonetheless acutely aware of how closely the literature they produced aligned with the unchecked urges they condemned, or how their readers might simply be aroused.⁸ Antislavery authors worked consciously to avoid comparisons with pornography, and of course, abolitionist authors were never the subject of local prosecution. (Their sentiments were tapped, as we shall see in later chapters, by antipornography crusaders.) The explicit content of reformers’ tracts and books muddled attempts to build a consensus about what constituted the obscene and, in so doing, helped pave the way for porn’s triumph. This chapter tells both of these stories.

In December 1854, New York City police arrested Thomas Ormsby and John Atchison for selling obscene books at their shop on Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan in the center of New York’s thriving printing and publishing trade. Seeking an indictment against the men in February, the district attorney described the two as “scandalous and evil disposed persons” who were “devising, contriving and intending the morals of the Youth as well as of other good citizens of the said State to corrupt and to raise and create in their minds, inordinate and lustful desires.”⁹ At their shop, police found “a trunk filled with certain lewd, wicked, scandalous, infamous, and obscene printed books, many in number and of divers titles.” The district attorney read several titles into the proceedings, and several books were produced as evidence. These included The Life and Adventures of Silas Shovewell, The Curtain Drawn Up, or the Education of Laura, and Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The Voluptuary, or Women’s Witchery, a Romance of Passion, however, was “so lewd, wicked and obscene, that the same would be offensive to the court and improper to be placed upon the records thereof.” Concerned not to offend the sensitivities of the court, the district attorney expected them to take his word for it, but in any case, the vivid description of the shop and its contents likely were enough to implicate the two. If not, the district attorney produced a witness, James Twain, who admitted to having purchased from Atchison, at the same address, a book called The Mysteries of Venus, or the Amatory Life and Adventures of Kitty Pry. Under oath, the witness described the book as having “a tendency to demoralize being of a grossly obscene character.”¹⁰ Whether that book, too, was admitted into evidence is unclear, but in any case the jury indicted Atchison for “selling obscene books.”¹¹ What became of Ormsby’s indictment is unclear, but the charges against Atchison were dropped when Mayor Fernando Wood interceded on his behalf, promising that Atchison “will refrain from such practices hereafter and in consideration of his family.”¹²

Three men indicted on similar charges in March were not as fortunate. Terence Morris, Arthur Crown, and John (perhaps Jeremiah) Farrell stood before a grand jury on March 12, and each pleaded guilty. According to the district attorney, Morris and Crown “expos[ed] and offer[ed] for sale and solicit[ed] purchasers for a certain printed book entitled The Secret Habits of the Female Sex, Letters addressed to a mother on the Evils of Solitude and Its Seductive Temptations to Young Girls, containing divers lewd, indecent and filthy pictures.” Even more than the contents of the book, though, the prosecutor found the illustrated advertisements contained in the book to be “scandalous and indecent” and “offensive to the morals of youth and men and women.” To make his point, the district attorney read the titles of the advertised books into the record. They included:

The Musical Student

The Story of a Rake

Adventures of a Bed Stead

Julia, or Where Is the Woman That Wouldn’t

Venus in the Closet

Intrigues of Three Days

Memoirs of an Old Man of Twenty

The Intrigues and Secret Amours of Napoleon

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure on the Singular and Surprising Adventures of Thermidore and Rozette

Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, or the Amours, Intrigues and Adventures of Sir Charles Manly

According to the district attorney, the “lewd, scandalous, and indecent” book that Farrell was caught selling was titled Mysteries of Women, or Guide to the Unwary Containing Advice to Husbands and Wives, regarding the means of making the marriage bed the throne of Venus’ Joys. Like the long list of books named in the previous two indictments that day, Mysteries contained “divers lewd, indecent and filthy pictures” and illustrated advertisements.¹³

All four cases were heard before the 1857 customs law expanded the definition of “obscene materials,” giving local law enforcement officials more leeway to pursue prosecutions against banned imports.¹⁴ The cases emerged instead from local initiatives. Following the election of Democrat Fernando Wood, the new mayor answered critics who charged that he would be soft on crime by ordering the city’s police force “to investigate and report all violations of morals laws.”¹⁵ The cluster of cases brought before grand juries in the late 1850s did little to deter sellers of erotica. In fact, local prosecutions helped to expand the market for and supply of pornography.¹⁶

Although lawmakers were wont to dismiss porn as a foreign import, entrepreneurs in Boston and New York responded to the new customs laws by stepping up domestic production, often by pirating European works but also by encouraging local authors, such as George Thompson, who was one of the period’s most prolific American authors of erotica. Following the pattern set by Europeans, American authors assumed noms de plume; even here they unapologetically copied from one another. For instance, George Thompson’s most evocative moniker was Paul de Kock (fig. 1), the pen name of a French author of popular sensationalist literature. These names served as code for readers, who came to expect particularly racy works from authors such as de Kock.

By the 1860s, several American wholesalers had built a successful network of domestically produced and distributed erotica.¹⁷ In her dissertation on the trade, Elizabeth Haven Hawley identified American imprints for hundreds of erotic books, including Mysteries of Venus, the book John Atchison was charged with selling, and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, and Julia, among others named in the 1855 indictments against Morris, Crown, and Farrell.¹⁸ Covered in cheap yellow paper, American-produced erotic books were printed in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and sold at newsstands, at railroad stations, and along docks.¹⁹ Police might detain Atchison, Ormsby, Morris, Crown, or Farrell, but there were other men ready to take their places while they stood trial.

Indeed, Ormsby, Farrell, and, despite Mayor Wood’s assurances, Atchison were back at work soon after their indictments. By the early 1860s all three were selling their goods in a burgeoning mail order marketplace they helped create. Because of changes in the postal code, after 1851 bound books were admitted into the U.S. Mail, opening up new possibilities for erotica manufacturers and sellers looking to avoid local prosecution at the point of sale and seeking to expand their clientele.²⁰ Entrepreneurs such as Boston’s William Berry and New Yorker George Ackerman were the first to see the possibilities of mail order pornography.²¹ As Donna Dennis has shown, Ackerman launched the first American “fancy paper,” the weekly Venus Miscellany. During 1856–57 the paper enjoyed good circulation, offering subscribers four pages of illustrations, short stories, jokes, advertisements, and letters to the editor. A little less lowbrow, perhaps, than the yellow-covered books hawked on Nassau Street or the flash weeklies of the previous decade, Ackerman’s Venus Miscellany featured letters from middle-class ma...