ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 20, 1996 TAG: 9604230012
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHARLESTON, S.C.
SOURCE: Associated Press
The Civil War's most important battle may not have been at Gettysburg, Vicksburg or Bull Run, but in the bedroom.
A researcher says tales of the War Between The States would not be complete without stories about the sex lives of soldiers.
Sexually transmitted diseases were such a big problem, Thomas Lowry says, that the federal government opened a bordello in Nashville and licensed prostitutes.
Lowry offered samples of Civil War sex life like these on Saturday at a Charleston Museum lecture, ``The Blue, the Gray and the Pink - the Sexual Side of the Civil War.''
Diseases cured easily with penicillin today were much more deadly during the Civil War, Lowry said.
Records show that more than 100,000 Union soldiers were diagnosed with gonorrhea and more than 73,000 Union soldiers contracted syphilis during the war. Too few Confederate records exist to tell the Southern side of the story, Lowry said.
Army medical supply catalogs listed glass and metal urethral syringes to treat the diseases. Medicine often involved a preparation of mercury, which also can be fatal, Lowry said.
Reportedly seen scrawled on the wall of a wartime privy: ``A night with Venus; a lifetime with Mercury.''
The official bordellos in Nashville helped cut the disease rate from 35 percent to 5 percent in the area, Lowry said. Prostitutes bought a $5 license to operate and went for weekly medical checkups that cost $1.
``Prostitutes all over the country headed to Nashville after hearing it was a safer place to work,'' Lowry said. ``When the war was over, it was disbanded and we went back to our current system or lack of system.''
Soldiers could also get sexually explicit books and sexual devices through the mail, in plain paper. If intercepted, they were burned.
Wives sent steamy letters to their soldiers, such as this: ``You will find no difficulty in charging my battery except that your ammunition might run out.''
Twenty percent of pregnancies ended in abortion, Lowry said, and the Union held 750 court martial trials in which Union soldiers were accused of rape.
Lowry, a psychiatrist who teaches at the University of California-San Francisco, said he got interested in the subject after reading a book by a Civil War historian who said a book would never be written about sexual exploits of the war.
``I have a stubborn streak, and I said to myself, `Is that so?'
So he did, writing, ``The Story The Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War'' after 10 years of research.
Once, a radio talk show host called him on the carpet about the book, asking why did he not write about the nobler side of the war.
``There are 50,000 books about the noble side of the Civil War by better authors than I,'' Lowry said. ``I think there's room for one of the other side.''
LENGTH: Medium: 61 linesby CNB