Pauline White: Sentenced to Hard Labor

   Nineteen-year-old Pauline White’s first brush with Union authority came in 1863 when she was charged with hurrahing for the Confederacy and was compelled to take an oath of allegiance. It wasn’t until the next year, though, when she broke her oath, that she got into real trouble. She claimed she’d been misled by the “treasonable advice of friends,” but that wasn’t enough to keep Pauline from being one of only a handful of women sent to the Missouri State Penitentiary during the Civil War for their disloyal activities.
   Sarah Pauline White was born in Tennessee in July 1844, the third of nine children of Dr. Terrell C. and Sarah Elizabeth White. The family moved to southeast Missouri in the mid-1850s and settled in rural Greenville, the Wayne County seat, where Dr. White set up his medical practice.
   By the fall of 1863, the Union had solid control of Missouri, but Greenville, like most of the rural areas of the state, still had more than its share of Southern sympathizers. Among them were the White sisters, whose older brother had joined the Confederate Army the previous year. One day in early October 1863, a detail of Union soldiers was marching through Greenville, and a number of onlookers, including Pauline and two of her sisters, had gathered to watch the procession. As the Federal soldiers paraded through the town, Pauline, older sister Eveline, and younger sister Arabella began taunting them and hurrahing for the Confederacy.
   On October 15, Dr. White’s daughters were arrested and sent to Union district headquarters at Pilot Knob. Dr. White made the trip with his daughters, and all four were charged with disloyalty. However, the girls were required only to sign oaths of allegiance and then released, while Dr. White also had to pledge to abstain from alcohol during the rebellion and to give bond.
   Charles Dekalb White, Pauline’s older brother and a sergeant in Confederate colonel Timothy Reeves’s Fifteenth Cavalry, was captured in Ripley County during the so-called Christmas Day Massacre of December 25, 1863, when Reeves’s camp was overrun by Federal soldiers. White was taken to St. Louis, and he died there in the Gratiot Street Prison hospital on January 16, 1864. After word of his death reached the White family in February, Pauline wrote a letter to Drury Poston, a soldier in Reeves’s command, telling of Dekalb’s death.
   The letter made it as far as Cherokee Bay, Arkansas, before it was discovered at a house there and confiscated by a Federal scouting party sent out from Patterson, Missouri. Had Pauline quit writing after informing Poston of her brother’s death, the letter might have been left undisturbed, but she expressed some disloyal sentiments near the end of the missive, such as “Long live the Rebels.”
   Pauline was arrested in late May 1864 and forwarded to St. Louis in early June, charged with violating her oath of allegiance and corresponding with the enemy. She was lodged in the St. Charles Street Prison, which had a reputation for its unsanitary conditions and mistreatment of prisoners. After Pauline clashed with the prison keeper’s wife, she was put on half rations without toilet facilities.
   At her trial by military commission on June 28, 1864, Pauline pleaded guilty to both charges against her except that she had not intended for her letter to Poston “to give aid and comfort to the rebel enemies of the United States,” as specified in the second charge. She was sentenced “to be confined at hard labor…in the Missouri State Penitentiary.” Exactly what constituted hard labor for a female prisoner and why Pauline’s sentence was seemingly harsher than those of other women convicted of similar offenses are unanswered questions.
   Pauline was transferred to the state prison in Jefferson City on August 24, 1864, and kept their ten months, finally gaining her release in June 1865, two months after the war had ended.
   After her release, Pauline made her way back to Greenville, married her older sister’s widower, and became one of the most prominent women in the community. She died in 1936 at the age of ninety-two.
   This post is a very condensed version of a chapter in my book Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri.