Cross-Dressing Civil War Soldiers?

A. Tholey, [U.S. Army and Cavalry officers in front of the U.S. Capitol Building], 1861-1865, Library of Congress.

On the long march to Pea Ridge in January 1862, Kelso often saw infantrymen straggling from the ranks, looking for food. One day he saw some of them swarm an apple cellar, crowding in so tightly that he worried some might get trampled or suffocate. Backing away from the cellar and rejoining the stragglers on the road, he saw the results of their visits to the nearby houses. One soldier had run his bayonet “through two large middlings of bacon.” Another had “two geese tied together by their necks, slung across his gun.” Others carried turkeys and chickens, or sacks of flour, cornmeal, and dried fruit.1

Some came away with more unusual kinds of plunder: “Of these, one carried a large earthen jar filled with some kind of preserves. From the mouth of this jar, which he carried under his left arm, he constantly kept taking handfuls of preserves and cramming them into his [mouth], daubing a liberal portion of them upon his face. . . . Another carried a large wooden churn full of buttermilk . . . by locking his arms around it and hugging it to his bosom.”

Most bizarre was the plunderer “who cared more for the beautiful than for the useful.” Kelso in his autobiography claimed to have seen this soldier, who “wore, upon the lower part of his body, the immense hoop skirt of some gigantic female; upon his shoulders, a large striped shawl; and, upon his head, a huge, funnel-shaped, straw bonnet, of the style of fifty years ago. Thus attired, this remarkable aesthete marched proudly onward, contemplating his various charms in a large looking-glass which he carried.”

Capewell & Kimmel, “Godey's fashions for December 1861,” Library of Congress.

As unlikely as this may sound, there are other references to soldiers donning bonnets or dresses to mock and insult the women they plundered. The previous summer, a squad of soldiers marching with Lyon emptied a small store, and afterward, according to a soldier’s account published in 1861, could be “seen circulating around the camp—one with a parasol daintily held over his swarthy countenance, another tripping elegantly along with a coquettish ‘flat’ surmounting his unkempt locks, a third lugged a looking glass under his arm, a fourth minced in Broadway style, enveloped in a rotundant hoop skirt, and so on, each of the squad carrying a trophy.”

Another memoir of the march to Arkansas corroborates part of the scene Kelso described. Robert Pinckney Matthews, a private with the Phelps Regiment, wrote years later that he “saw some cavalry, who had confiscated a lot of ladies bonnets from a small store by the road side, riding along with the feminine head gear on their own heads, the ribbons fluttering like streamers in the air. I also saw another carrying a large looking glass and he amused himself, while the thunder of the artillery was shaking the hills, by holding it before the faces of his comrades to let them see how pale they were.”2

Kelso may have embellished his account for comic effect, a narrative turn signaled by his description of the “remarkable aesthete” as “nearly seven feet in height” and by nodding to a “Sut Lovingood” story by the humorist George Washington Harris. Kelso certainly accented the ridiculous as he put his characters in motion at the sound of artillery fire. When “the thunders of heavy cannonading began to reverberate among the hills in our front . . . the whole vast mass of stragglers started forward on a run, all being eager to participate in the opening battle.” Bacon swung on bayonets, geese and chickens flopped back and forth, and the sacks on men’s shoulders bobbed up and down as they ran. “The man with the jar of preserves ran as fast as he could, taking out a handful of preserves, every few jumps, cramming vigorously into his mouth and daubing more liberally upon his face.” The man with the churn of butter-milk ran well, but the “butter-milk splashed up through the dasher hole and around the edge of the lid, and came down in quite a shower upon the face and bosom of our hero, leaving many little lumps of butter entangled in his beard.”3

The soldier in the hoop skirt ran “so fast against the wind [which] made the front part of the skirt come down against his legs, while the stiffness of the hoops and their great size made the back part rise high up and stick far out behind.” This hero held tight to his looking glass and gazed at his reflection as he ran. “He evidently wanted to thoroughly regale his vision upon his own beauty before it was spoiled forever.”

More revealing than Kelso seeing comedy in a scene of plunderers rushing into battle is his choosing, as he wrote in the early 1880s, to describe the cross-dressing soldier as “a kind of Oscar Wilde.” As Kelso wrote this passage, the national press was avidly covering the Irish writer’s American tour, remarking on his flamboyant appearance and “effeminacy.”

Oscar Wilde, c. 1882, Library of Congress. 

For Kelso, the soldier’s cross-dressing was not necessarily a sign of homosexuality, but his narcissistic self-regard was still a queer declension from the standard of true manhood. Perhaps the soldier was not all that different from that parlor lothario with the waxed moustache and silken tongue, Dr. Hovey, who was sitting out the war with designs on Kelso’s wife Susie. . . .4

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1 D mss 4: 341.

2  D mss 4: 341-2; Franc B. Wilkie, The Iowa First: Letters from the War (Dubuque, Iowa: Herald Book and Job Establishment, 1861), 78; Matthews, Souvenir of the Holland Company Home Guards, 45. On Federal soldiers dressing up in women’s clothing to humiliate rebel women, see Lisa Tendrich Frank, “The Union War on Women,” in Brian D. McKnight and Barton A. Meyers, eds., The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 171-91, esp. 179. Blevins, History of the Ozarks, Vol. 2: 122, notes that some Confederate plunderers in 1864 also dressed in “ladies’ hats and wraps.”

3  D mss 4: 342–44. In a passage not quoted, Kelso likens the man running with the butter churn to a character in George Washington Harris, “Parson Bullen’s Lizards,” in Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool.” Warped and Wove for Public Wear (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1867).

4  D mss 4: 342. Kelso, writing in California in the spring of 1882, may have seen articles in the California papers such as “The Latest Pen Portrait of Oscar Wilde,” San Francisco Bulletin (Feb. 21, 1882): 4, reprinted from the New York Herald. Wilde came to California in March: “Oscar Wilde: His First Appearance before a California Audience,” San Francisco Bulletin (March 28, 1882): 2. See also Mary W. Blanchard, “The Soldier and the Aesthete: Homosexuality and Popular Culture in Gilded Age America,” Journal of American Studies 30, no. 1 (April 1996): 25-47.