I Had Rather Die: Rape in the Civil War, Kim Murphy Coachlight Press, 2014. 180 pp. 8 b/w photographs, bibliographic notes, index,$14.95 (paper),$21.95 (cloth),
Reviewed by Laura Mammina (University of Alabama)
Published on H-CivWar (December, 2014)
Published on H-CivWar (December, 2014)
Review's Text:
Kim Murphy’s I Had Rather Die is
the first book-length project examining sexual violence during the
Civil War. In it she levels some rather damning although not unwarranted
charges against historians who
argue that the conflict was a low-rape war. Murphy persuasively asserts
that focusing on the number of rapes stems from a misguided assumption
that calculations reveal something meaningful about wartime sexual
violence. By reframing rape as a crime of power,
she attempts to sidestep the numbers game in order to expose a seemingly
genteel and restrained Victorian society that in reality provided few
protections for white and black rape victims and often freed convicted
rapists.
Murphy frames her study
by examining the evolution of rape law in early America. Legal
standards, informed by popular conceptions that rape was a detestable
crime but also a charge that was easily made, placed
the burden of proof on the rape victim by requiring her to testify that
she had cried for help, had physically resisted the assault, had not
enjoyed the sexual act, and had notified someone soon after the
encounter. Inability to prove any of these could result
in the charges being dropped or reduced. Murphy notes that for centuries
the American legal system applied these protections only to white women
and that black men received much harsher sentences for the crime of
rape than white men. Even white women found
their trustworthiness questioned during rape trials, as the admission of
character evidence in the nineteenth century allowed courts to judge
the veracity of a woman’s rape claim on her past sexual history. Here
Murphy misses an opportunity to link the admission
of character evidence to emerging nineteenth-century ideas, which, as
Sharon Block argues, held women to be innately virtuous. This meant
that they had a responsibility to control their own passions as well as
men’s base urges. Even so, Murphy does well to
argue that such a high burden of proof for rape might have discouraged
women from charging their assailants.[1]
Antebellum patterns
persisted in wartime courts-martial as racial, class, and gender bias
resulted in light sentences and low rates of conviction. Murphy finds
that black soldiers faced harsher prosecutions for
rape than white soldiers, especially if they raped white women, and yet
the Union army executed few black men for the capital crime of rape.
White soldiers executed for rape were overwhelmingly privates and many
were German or Irish immigrants, while white
officers faced very light punishment when convicted of rape. White and
black soldiers who raped black women were given lighter sentences than
those who raped white women, while soldiers who raped wealthy white
women received the harshest punishments. But no
matter who the victim was, Murphy finds that soldiers accused of rape
often had their sentences reduced or were given pardons unless there was a male witness to the crime.
While Murphy’s evidence
is detailed, she seems more comfortable describing her findings rather
than incorporating them into a more sustained argument. Because of this,
she never fully examines the ways in which
rape highlighted the discrepancy between Victorian morality and
tolerance for male misbehavior or the ways in which rape reinforced or
destabilized social hierarchies. Murphy is also unable to fill a void in
current scholarship by linking her findings to many
excellent recent studies on rape in the United States. It is left to
future scholarship to demonstrate the ways in which wartime rape trials
differed from or conformed to patterns established before and after the
war.
Throughout the book,
Murphy argues that misogyny in the American legal system, not Victorian
restraint, is the reason that relatively few Civil War soldiers faced
court-martial for rape. Frequent accounts of
rape in archival sources as well as the surgeon general’s documented
170,000 cases of gonorrhea and syphilis demonstrate that Civil War
soldiers hardly refrained from sexual encounters whether forced or
consensual. But Murphy succumbs to the same allure of
numbers as the historians she criticizes by insisting that
unsubstantiated reports in newspapers and private papers should be
treated as instances of sexual assault. Instead of using the reports to
examine how fear and perception operated during the war, Murphy
focuses on numbers, undermining her own claims that rape often went
unreported. As Murphy well knows, the crime of rape defies precise
counting especially in the nineteenth century and especially during a
time of war because it is an intimate crime so tied
up in sexuality, and therefore in power, fear, violence, and shame that
the strands become nearly impossible to unravel. While her study tries
to fill the void in scholarship on rape during the Civil War, it never
quite addresses how sexual violence illuminated
relationships of power. It does, however, begin a conversation that is
long overdue.
Full Text Source: H-Net Reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment