The Sex Lives of Civil War Soldiers

Seattle's Book Patrol has an interesting book that they've found, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell, by Thomas P. Lowry.

From the piece...

Johnny Reb and Billy Yank had a secret life, one that they and their families tried to hide from posterity and Ken Burns.

They largely succeeded. Most men left no record of their sexual activities, or if they did, their survivors expurgated or expunged the record through destruction; the reality was a bit too seamy for pure sensibilities, legacies needed to be protected. Reports of wild times and venereal disease were not likely to be appreciated by descendants.

Thus the Civil, our most holy, War, ennobled at the time and forevermore as a moral cause by both sides, has been stripped of that most human and earthy dimension and instinct. War is a rite of passage for all young boys and men, and leaving home for the first time, to a large degree innocent and inexperienced, they often become unmoored from traditional, peacetime standards of moral behavior and drift into those of wartime, which is to say, the world turned upside down and violently shaken.

But in a volume that might otherwise be buried deep within the annals of weird books, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War (Stackpole, 1994), Thomas Lowry, M.D., addresses and fills, through diligent, original research that at the time of the book's publication unearthed a wealth of new material, that lacuna in the military record.