Joshua Chamberlain After the Civil War

 

In the spring of 1865, Union hero Joshua LawrenceChamberlain, the "Lion of Little Round Top," mustered out. His bayonet charge at Gettysburg had etched him into legend, but a wound suffered at Petersburg in 1864 , a Minié ball that shattered his pelvis, left him in chronic agony.

Returning to Maine, Chamberlain's entered politics. Elected governor in 1866, he served four one-year terms, championing veterans' aid, education reform, and Black civil rights amid Ku Klux Klan threats. A moderate Republican, he navigated partisan strife, finally earning the Medal of Honor in 1893 for his actions at Gettysburg.

Chamberlain’s marriage was complex and sometimes strained.  Modern biographers often describe their relationship as: deeply loving but mismatched, shaped by 19th‑century expectations of gender, duty, and sacrifice, and a casualty of war, in its own way. 

In 1871, Chamberlain became president of Bowdoin College where he had once been a professor of rhetoric and oratory.  There, the former professor modernized curricula, boosted enrollment, and fostered intellectual rigor.  In 1880, Chamberlain commanded the militia to restore order during a disputed Maine election.

In 1898, Chamberlain at the age of 70, volunteered to command US Army forces in the Spanish American War. He was passed over due to health issues.

He died in 1914 at the age of eighty-five.  His memoirs The Passing of the Armies were published posthumously in 1915.

History's Ten Worst Generals

Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Civil War

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The Puritans and Sex

Sex was essential to the Puritan’s notion of a healthy marriage.  Refusal to engage in sexual relations with one’s spouse could lead to a disciplinary hearing at the local church or judicial prosecution. James Mattock was excommunicated by the Boston congregation in 1640 for having, among other things, “denied conjugal fellowship unto his wife for the space of two years together.” John Williams of Plymouth Colony was summoned to court for “refusing to perform marriage duty towards (his wife) according to the law of God and man.”

The Puritans believed that both sexes should experience “delight” during sexual intercourse. According to the medical and marital advice literature of the time, procreation could not occur without female orgasm, which required that the woman become sexually aroused.  A popular marital guide of the time admonished men that,  “When the husband cometh into the wife’s chamber he must entertain her with all kind of dalliance, wanton behavior, and allurements to venery.” New England courts upheld the view that women had a right to expect “content and satisfaction” in bed; he who failed to provide it was judged “deficient in performing the duty of a husband.” Colonial Americans generally wore their shirts and shifts or more during sex. Full nudity was uncommon until much after the colonial period.

In New England, where the Puritans had defined marriage as a civil contract, secular law had provided for divorce as early as the seventeenth century.  Marriages could be ended if either party failed to meet the obligations of the contract.  Adultery, impotence, desertion, or conviction for serious crimes were all grounds for divorce.  Additionally, wives could obtain a divorce on the grounds of non-support.

Male inability to provide sexual satisfaction initially constituted grounds for divorce in New England. New Haven’s divorce statute described marital sex as “due benevolence.” It allowed a wife to divorce her husband if he proved unable “to perform or afford the same,” regardless of whether she was “fit to bear children.” A man who proved incapable of providing “that corporal communion which is reciprocally due between husband and wife” was considered nothing more than a “pretended husband.” Abstention from marital sex, wrote Edward Taylor, “denies all relief in wedlock unto human necessity” and would tempt those who lacked “the gift of continency” to engage in illicit unions. Conjugal intercourse, then, constituted a bulwark against sexual sin and chaos.

Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800

A brief look at love, sex, and marriage in colonial America and the early republic.

Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Civil War

A brief look at love, sex, and marriage in the Civil War. The book covers courtship, marriage, birth control and pregnancy, divorce, slavery and the impact of the war on social customs.

Pet Supplies

The Civil War "Marrying Craze"

The Civil War Wedding

Esther Alden expressed the attitude of many young women in the South as the war progressed, “One looks at a man so differently when you think he may be killed tomorrow. Men whom up to this time I had thought dull and commonplace . . . seemed charming.” The famous diarist, Mary Chestnut of South Carolina, was appalled when she saw women of her own class flirting openly with strangers in public.  The diaries of hundreds of women of the time attest to the “marrying craze” sweeping the South.  “Every girl in Richmond is engaged or about to be”, wrote Phoebe Pember Yates in February 1864.  Fear of spinsterhood and natural desire heightened by the immediacy of war led to many unconventional matches, many reflecting the truth of a phrase common to the time, “The blockade don’t keep out babies.”  

Love, Sex and Marriage in Victorian Times

Queen Victoria reigned over the British Empire, the largest and most diverse empire the world has ever known, from 1837-1901, and gave her name to the age. Among other things the Victorian Age has become known for its sexual prudery. In many things, including social customs, the United States mirrored what was happening across the sea in Britain. Women were allotted a subsidiary role, with patience and self-sacrifice the prime feminine virtues. Motherhood was idealized, alongside virginal innocence. The ideal of purity in sexual behavior became sacrosanct, at least in public

Love,Sex and Marriage in Victorian America

We think we know the Victorians, but do we? The same passions, strengths and weaknesses that exist now, existed then, but people organized themselves very differently.

Margaret Sanger on Preventing a Permanent Criminal Underclass

In her book, The Pivot of Civilization, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood offered this prescription for eliminating the permanent criminal underclass:

There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great problem of the feeble-minded. That is, as the best authorities are agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile. "We protect the members of a weak strain," says Davenport, "up to the period of reproduction, and then let them free upon the community, and encourage them to leave a large progeny of `feeble-minded': which in turn, protected from mortality and carefully nurtured up to the reproductive period, are again set free to reproduce, and so the stupid work goes on of preserving and increasing our socially unfit strains."

The philosophy of Birth Control points out that as long as civilized communities encourage unrestrained fecundity in the "normal" members of the population—always of course under the cloak of decency and morality—and penalize every attempt to introduce the principle of discrimination and responsibility in parenthood, they will be faced with the ever-increasing problem of feeble-mindedness, that fertile parent of degeneracy, crime, and pauperism. Small as the percentage of the imbecile and half-witted may seem in comparison with the normal members of the community, it should always be remembered that feeble-mindedness is not an unrelated expression of modern civilization. Its roots strike deep into the social fabric. Modern studies indicate that insanity, epilepsy, criminality, prostitution, pauperism, and mental defect, are all organically bound up together and that the least intelligent and the thoroughly degenerate classes in every community are the most prolific. Feeble-mindedness in one generation becomes pauperism or insanity in the next. There is every indication that feeble-mindedness in its protean forms is on the increase, that it has leaped the barriers, and that there is truly, as some of the scientific eugenists have pointed out, a feeble-minded peril to future generations—unless the feeble-minded are prevented from reproducing their kind. To meet this emergency is the immediate and peremptory duty of every State and of all communities. 

Love, Sex and Marriage in VictorianAmerica

We think we know the Victorians, but do we? The same passions, strengths and weaknesses that exist now, existed then, but people organized themselves very differently.

Free Love in Victorian Times

Victoria Woodhull

"High priestess of Free Love"

In the state of New York, the Oneida Community, founded in 1848, described marriage as, “contrary to natural liberty....a cruel and oppressive method of uniting the sexes.” This group practiced a form of community marriage where each woman was married to every man and each man to every woman. The Oneida Community “[rejects] conventional marriage both as a form of legalism from which Christians should be free and as a selfish institution in which men exerted rights of ownership over women”. The movement’s founder, John Humphrey Noyes coined the term “free love” and found scriptural justification for the concept: “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30). The Oneida Community lived together as a single large group and shared parental responsibilities.

The concept of “free love” blossomed outside of the Oneida Community. Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president (1872), was called “the high priestess of free love”. In 1871, Woodhull wrote:

“Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing less!”

Woodhull received fewer than sixteen thousand votes nationwide. Most Americans rejected alternative forms of marriage and pressured young people to marry conventionally. A man's credit rating depended in part on whether or not he was conventionally married and had children.

Link to: Love, Sex, and Marriage in Victorian America

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The Social Purity Movement and Family Planning

Link to: Love, Sex and Marriage in Victorian America

By the 1870s, couples in all classes were choosing to limit and plan family size “by a variety of methods within a culture of abstinence”. “Considerate” husbands, who did not insist on intercourse, were admired, not least because of the high mortality rate among pregnant women. It was perhaps a good thing that husbands had decided to privately abstain from sex, since by the mid 1870’s the United States government had invaded every bedroom in the nation. In the 1870’s a “social purity movement”, spurred on by evangelical Protestant moral reformers launched a crusade against vice, including contraception, which was considered to “lead to lewd, immoral behavior and promote promiscuity”. It is not surprising that such a movement arose. The industrialization that swept America during and after the Civil War ushered in morality problems such as widespread prostitution. As urbanization flourished so did prostitution. The majority of prostitutes were young, illiterate, and poor. Higher wages for less work appealed to many young women. With little in the way of birth control, frequent pregnancies occurred among prostitutes. Since being pregnant would put them out of work, abortion became the alternative for the tens of thousands of prostitutes in America’s teeming cities. The moral laxness sweeping much of America began to impact public opinion. Social purity advocates proclaimed, “Social crimes like infanticide, that were once placed on the same level as murder, are now not only looked upon with complacency... but are defended on principle by certain theorists.”


The social purity movement successfully pressured Congress into passing the Comstock Act (named after the movement’s leader Anthony Comstock) in 1873. The Comstock Act was a federal law which, among other things, prohibited mailing, “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion”, as well as any form of contraceptive information. Twenty four states passed similar state laws (collectively known as the Comstock Laws), sometimes extending the federal law by outlawing the use of contraceptives, as well as their distribution. The most restrictive state laws of all were in Connecticut. Married couples could be arrested for using birth control in the privacy of their own bedrooms, and subjected to a one-year prison sentence. As late as 1960, thirty states had statutes on the books (inspired by the Comstock Laws) prohibiting or restricting the sale and advertisement of contraceptive devices.

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Love, Sex and Marriage in Victorian America

Queen Victoria reigned over the British Empire, the largest and most diverse empire the world has ever known, from 1837-1901, and gave her name to the age. Among other things the Victorian Age has become known for its sexual prudery. In many things, including social customs, the United States mirrored what was happening across the sea in Britain. Women were allotted a subsidiary role, with patience and self-sacrifice the prime feminine virtues. Motherhood was idealized, alongside virginal innocence. The ideal of purity in sexual behavior became sacrosanct, at least in public.


No one better exemplifies the popular notion of the buttoned up old maid Victorian American prude than purity crusader Carry Nation. Carry Nation is best remembered for crusading against alcohol, but she was also enthusiastically against tobacco, politicians, and sex. She lectured young couples on the evils of buggy riding, she stopped women on the street to warn them against the dangers of seduction, and she wrote a newspaper column whose main theme was the evil of self abuse. After two disastrous marriages, in which her husbands resented her overzealous Christianity and she resented their overzealous embraces, Carry Nation concluded that men were, “…nicotine soaked, beer-besmeared, whiskey-greased, red-eyed devils” and “two-legged animated whiskey flasks.”

  People like Carry Nation have given us a view of Victorian America.  We think we know the Victorians, but do we? The same passions, strengths and weaknesses that exist now, existed then, but people organized themselves very differently.   Read more in:  Love, Sex and Marriage in Victorian America    

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Marriage in Early America

The first permanent English colony in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia on May 14, 1607 by the Virginia Company of London. The party consisted of 104 men who came to America not to settle but to become rich. Within a short time it became apparent to the colony’s sponsors that their great venture in the New World was in danger of being wrecked, “…on the shoals of dissolute, irresponsible, manhood.” It was not until the fall of 1608 that “the first gentlewoman and woman-servant” arrived. The gentlewoman was already married to colonist Thomas Forrest; the servant, Ann Burrus, would soon marry John Laydon, the first marriage to be solemnized in Virginia. More women crossed the Atlantic to Virginia and Maryland in the next several years, but they remained relatively few in number. By 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses, petitioning that wives as well as husbands be eligible for grants of free land, argued that in a new colony, “it is not known whether man or woman be the most necessary.”

The Virginia Company’s London recruiters began searching for women of marriageable age, offering free passage to Virginia and trousseaus for girls of good reputation. New husbands reimbursed the company with 120 pounds of good leaf tobacco when they married. The first shipment of ninety “tobacco brides” arrived in Jamestown in the spring of 1620. The youngest was Jane Dier, aged fifteen. The oldest was Alice Burges, aged twenty-eight.

Some over eager British merchants, hired to provide the colonies with wives simply kidnapped any young woman who came to hand. In October 1618, a warrant was issued for one Owen Evans, who was kidnapping young women from their villages and sending them off to be sold in Virginia as indentured servants. As time went on, most of the single women who came to the Chesapeake Bay colonies voluntarily sold themselves as indentured servants. They re-paid the cost of their passage with a term of four or five years in service. At the end, the women were supposed to receive food, clothing, and tools to give them a start in life, then emerge into a world filled with wife-hungry young men and take their pick.


 

Link to: Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America

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