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Article Excerpt
Scarlett's breath came back to her as suddenly 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 holster, beady little eyes glancing to right and left, a kaleidoscope of jumbled pictures spun in her mind, stories Aunt Pittypat had whispered of attacks on unprotected women, throat cuttings, houses burned over the heads of dying women, children bayoneted because they cried, all of the unspeakable horrors that lay bound up in the name of "Yankee."
- Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1)
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 lecturing on multiplication tables or constitutional history and resorted to "historical films" 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. Rather, the film's violent content, specifically its sexual undertones, gave me nightmares. In one instance, Scarlett, confronted by a Yankee soldier, shoves a pistol in his face and pulls the trigger. The viewer understands Scarlett's motivation: that implicit in the "unspeakable horrors that lay bound up in the name of 'Yankee'" is the threat of rape.
Few scholars have addressed the sexual threat captured in this confrontation between Scarlett and the Union solider. In fact, historians have accepted without question the idea that Union soldiers rarely raped southern women, black or white, and have argued that sexual violence was rare during the Civil War. Yet Mitchell's fictional account of one woman's wartime experience makes clear that a perceived threat of rape during the Civil War was all too real for southern women.
Wartime rape is an issue both ancient and contemporary, evident more recently in reports of mass rapes in the Yugoslavian wars of secession and the genocidal massacres in Rwanda, but equally present in accounts from the Torah, the Bible, Homer, Anglo-Saxon chronicles, and in mythological events like the rape of the Sabine women. Indeed, much historical evidence seems to suggest that whenever and wherever men go to war, rape and the threat of sexual violence against women are inevitable, even strategic components of warfare.
During the Civil War many southern women feared sexual assault, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of women suffered rape. Even though the federal military defined rape as a crime punishable 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 Anderson, a white woman in Tennessee, he was sentenced to be shot, but his sentenced was later commuted. (4) Mrs. Catherine Farmer, also of Tennessee, testified 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 Company 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 forcibly and against her will, feloniously did ravish and carnally know her." (6) Interestingly, the majority of the 250 court-martialed cases involved either black women raped by white men or white women raped by black men, suggesting 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, however, likely went unreported because many women, especially women of the planter elite, considered sexual assault a fate worse than death. Because a white woman's virtue represented her most valuable commodity, much was at stake in making public a crime understood...
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