Civil War Rape

   As I mentioned in my Bushwhacker Belles book, during the run-up to the Civil War and during the war's early stages, Southern leaders in Missouri used the threat of Federal soldiers raping Missouri women as one way of arousing sentiment against Union occupation of the state. In reality, rape was relatively rare in Missouri (and elsewhere) during the Civil War, and the rape of white women by Union soldiers was even rarer, since some of the few rapes that did occur were either committed by men other than Union soldiers or were committed against black women (i.e. slaves or servants). By my cursory calculation, Union Provost Marshals Papers mention only ten separate rapes, attempted rapes, or accusations of rape in Missouri during the entire four-year course of the war. Of course, this does not account for rapes that went unreported, as many almost certainly did; still, ten is a pretty low number, especially considering how prevalent murder, robbery, and other crimes were during the war and how disordered society in general was. 

   What historian Michael Fellman called "symbolic rape" (acts such as invading women's homes when no male protector was present, using obscene language in the presence of women, etc.) was much more common than actual rape. It's probably safe to say that, even if rapes were not carried out against Missouri women on a large scale, the threat of rape was an ever-present danger. And the actual rape of white women in Missouri by Federal soldiers was certainly not unheard of. See, for instance, my account of the rape of a woman in Taney County by a Union soldier in 1863. (https://ozarks-history.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-civil-war-rape.html.)
   The rape of white women by men other than Federal soldiers was also not particularly common, but such crimes did, of course, occur. An example was a rape that happened in Bates County, Missouri, in the fall of 1862. In early October, 26-year-old Alexander Belcher and 23-year-old Ryan Tongut, both of Bates County, were charged with sexually assaulting 28-year-old Eliza (aka Louisa) Hedrick. Married and the mother of two or three kids, Eliza was also a resident of Bates County.
   Belcher and Tongut were arrested and taken to the camp of Confederate colonel Warner Lewis at Pleasant Gap in southeast Bates County, where they were given a drumhead court martial, convicted of rape, and sentenced to death on October 9. Rather than carry out the sentence himself, however, Lewis detailed a squad the next day to take the two men to Union authorities at Calhoun with paperwork outlining their crime and stating the verdict of the hasty trial he'd conducted. Although that extemporaneous proceeding had found the pair guilty and sentenced them to death, Lewis recommended that the two men, both of whom were unaffiliated with either the Confederate or the Union army, be turned over to civil authorities for trial.
   Alas, the pair never reached Calhoun. The squad transporting the convicts laid over at Deepwater on the evening of October 10, and during the changing of the guard that night, Belcher and Tongut, who had "worked their fists out of the chains which confined them," sprang up, knocked out the candle lighting the cell, "bursted open the door and made good their escape." A detail was sent out to look for the fugitives, but they were apparently never recaptured.

   Sources: Union Provost Marshals' Papers and US census records