A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski Page A

with newly invented, more impersonal technologies such as the Gatling gun. The Civil War is the defining moment of the nineteenth century, and indeed of America. It staged on a national scale the ongoing conflict between freedom and enslavement that had wracked individuals, communities, colonies, and states for over three hundred years. It also exposed the underlying racial and gender-related violence that had been intrinsic to those everyday conflicts since the arrival of the first Europeans.
    America was already a devout country—religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, ending in 1840, had won 40 percent of the population over to some form of Christian evangelicalism—and the horrors of the war moved many to embrace their beliefs more deeply. Other Americans began to question traditional ideas about providence, the belief that life is guided by God. This questioning stance, reminiscent of the Deism of the founders and the European Enlightenment, as well as the transcendentalists, was reinforced by advances in the sciences—Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species is the most notable—that were at odds with traditional religious beliefs.
    Defenders of slavery and abolitionists both quoted Bible verses to make their arguments. As early as 1787, British politician and abolitionist William Wilberforce used the Bible to justify his cause. Both sides held considerable sway in a country still in the wave of massive conversions. Beneath the debate lurked the more substantial issue of biblical inerrancy, the belief that the Bible is literally true in every detail. The use of biblical texts to justify the persecution of a class of people within a secular democracy is still with us today, including the justification for legal prohibitions against same-sex sexual behavior, because scriptural rationales and the rhetoric of persecution continually set the terms of national discussions.
    An immediate effect of the Civil War on LGBT lives and history was how it shaped ideas about gender; specifically, what it meant to “be a man.” Historian Drew Faust notes that during the Civil War, manhood was “defined and achieved by killing.” W. E. B. Du Bois noted in his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America :
    How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men. The slave pleaded; he was humble; he protected the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man! 1
    The war was a rite of passage for young white men. Data for the Confederate army are sketchy, but many scholars claim that two million soldiers in the Union army were twenty-one or younger, and one million were eighteen or younger. The intense patriotism on both sides ensured that full gendered citizenship was measured by being an effective soldier, which meant being a ruthless killer. Violence by Confederate soldiers against captured “colored” Union troops was prevalent, as was mutilating the bodies of those who had been killed in action or executed. Brutality was also present in the Union army. On June 21, 1864, General William Sherman wrote to Edwin McMasters Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war: “There is a class of people [in the South] . . . men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”
    The Civil War had deeply affected men’s relationships to one another. Killing now defined a new type of American masculinity, but it also exposed men’s physical and emotional vulnerability. In confronting their own mortality, men could explore, often with one another, new expressions of sexuality. This is seen most clearly in the writings of Walt Whitman. Considered by many to be the most notable nineteenth-century poet of American democracy, Whitman’s poems and letters are a perfect example of affectional and sexual behaviors between men in