Sew Up Your Petticoats

This is a transcript from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be slight differences in wording and content.

ED: One provision of the Lieber code that doesn’t get a lot of attention is its prohibition against sexual assault. The code made it punishable by death. This may have been overlooked, because historians have not tended to see rape as a big problem in the Civil War.

PETER: Current research is challenging this view. It’s becoming more and more clear that there was a culture of rape among both Confederate and Union soldiers. Some of it can be seen through official Army documents. One Union order declared that women in New Orleans would be considered prostitutes if they mouthed off to occupying Union soldiers. Another advised women in Tennessee to sew up the bottoms of their petticoats.

BRIAN: But even there, the picture is incomplete, because the women most affected by those orders tended to be elite whites. And historian Crystal Feimster has found that most sexual violence during the war was committed against poor white women and even more so against black women.

CRYSTAL FEIMSTER: We have overlooked black women, particularly because we’ve been committed to a narrative of the Civil War as a gentleman’s war between brothers. There’s this understanding that the Union, in some ways, was coming down, and they were allies of black folk, which actually wasn’t always the case, particularly for everyday soldiers who saw black slaves as unworthy of freedom, in a sense. And what the Lieber codes do is that it creates a pathway for black women to make claims for legal protection or to seek legal justice when they become victims of sexual assault.

BRIAN: And do you think the authors of the Lieber Codes had this in mind?

CRYSTAL FEIMSTER: I don’t think that when the Lieber Codes were written that they were necessarily thinking about black civilians. But we can’t underestimate what it meant for African Americans. White soldiers understood that prior to the Civil War, black folk couldn’t testify against white people in a court of law. And that didn’t matter if you were in the South or in the North.

And for the first time, you have black women testifying. You have a black mean testifying as witnesses of sexual assault. And so you’ll have a case, and a soldier will say, well, actually, she’s a black person or a mulatto. She can’t testify against me because I’m white.

And the court will adjourn. And you’ll see in the court martial notes– court adjourned to discuss whether witness could testify. They always come back and say, she can testify. She has a right to testify. So this is huge, not just for black women, but black folk, generally.

In these military courts, they get to testify against white people for the first time. And I argue that this is, in many ways, a rehearsal for Reconstruction in the ways that black people began to understand their citizenship and that they have legal rights and what those rights look like. They move through the Freedman’s Bureau during Reconstruction, but they start exercising those rights through the military court.

BRIAN: Crystal Feimster is an historian at Yale.

PETER: It’s time for another break. When we come back, we’ll consider the red line between conventional and unconventional weapons. How did that line get so red, anyway?

BRIAN: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.