William Rosecrans was in a pickle.
In the spring of 1863, the major general, leading the Union’s Army of the Cumberland, was ostensibly the second-most powerful U.S. soldier in the South, behind none other than Ulysses S. Grant. Though his army had occupied Nashville for more than a year, even Old Rosy couldn’t defeat the biological imperative.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Rosecrans commanded tens of thousands of bored and horny soldiers. And because Nashville was a city where working-age men had either fled to Confederate lines or just fled in general, the women of the city had to make ends meet — and many of them turned to the world’s oldest profession, where they could earn an average of $5 a week, nearly triple what they could bring home with “legitimate” work.
With the increased demand, there was increased supply. The 1860 census recorded fewer than 200 prostitutes. By mid-1862, there were 1,500. Most worked along Smokey Row, a stretch of Nashville near the river that had long been the center of the city’s sex industry.
“There was an old saying that no man culd [sic] be a soldier unless he had gone through Smokey Row,” Union Pvt. Benton E. Dubbs wrote. “The street was about three-fourths of a mile long and every house or shanty on both sides was a house of ill fame. Women had no thought of dress or decency. They say Smokey Row killed more soldiers than the war.”
It’s not that Rosecrans had any deep moral objection to his men visiting sex workers. He did, however — like Jim Mattis 150 some-odd years later — have a desire for his men to remain lethal, and the soldiers’ visits to Smokey Row often had a very severe consequence: sexually transmitted disease. In his diary, Gen. Robert Granger, the Union’s main administrative man in Nashville, wrote that he was beset “almost hourly” by surgeons begging him to get rid of “diseased prostitutes.”
STDs could take a man out of fighting shape on their own, and the treatments of the day relied on mercury. It was a classic case of the cure being almost as bad as the disease.
In July 1863, an exasperated Rosecrans ordered his provost, George Spalding, to “without loss of time seize and transport to Louisville all prostitutes found in the city or known to be here.”
Spalding just had to figure out how to execute the order and, coincidentally, met a man named John Newcomb who just so happened to be the owner of the new steamship Idahoe (no, seriously). Much to his chagrin, Newcomb was ordered to steam from Nashville north on his maiden voyage with a cargo of 111 of the most infamous sex workers in the city.
There’s no manifest of the journey extant, so we know very little about who was aboard, except that they were all white women (and represented a paltry percentage of the prostitutes working in any event). As The Nashville Daily Union reported, eliminating white sex workers exclusively just opened up the market for black women to take their place.
“The sudden expatriation of hundreds of vicious white women will only make room for an equal number of negro strumpets,” the paper wrote. “We dare say no city in the country has been more shamefully abused by the conduct of its unchaste females, white and Negro, than has Nashville for the past fifteen or eighteen months.”
After a week, the Idahoe arrived in Louisville, but officials there barred her from docking. So Newcomb tried upriver in Cincinnati, where, again, the ship was banned and forced to dock across the river in Kentucky. After a month on the river, the hungry women — Newcomb was given rations only for the journey to Louisville — got predictably froggy, with brawls and a knife fight breaking out, damaging the Idahoe to the tune of $1,000. Some of the women escaped into Kentucky, but once Newcomb steered the Idahoe back to Nashville, there were still 98 women aboard. Rosecrans and Spalding still hadn’t solved their problem, so they came up with a shockingly progressive solution: licensing and regulation.
Spalding planned to open two hospitals — one for the sex workers and one for the soldiers. To pay for the treatment, the city’s “Public Women” would have to pay $5 for a license allowing them to “practice their profession.” Upon applying, they’d be checked out by a doctor, and those with a clean bill of health would be sent on their way — and have to check in every two weeks for a follow-up. Those who had STDs would be treated for 50 cents. Those caught working unlicensed faced at least a month in the workhouse.
Nearly 400 women were licensed by the end of the Occupation. Hundreds were treated, and rates of infection fell dramatically among Union soldiers. The only major spike in disease came after a surge of re-enlisting soldiers came back to Nashville after furlough, leading Army surgeons to believe they’d contracted the infections while home rather than in Nashville.
The program was a success on numerous fronts. It more or less paid for itself. It kept the Union soldiers in fighting trim (as proven by the rout of December 1864’s Battle of Nashville). Doctors remarked that the women were proud and eager to show off their licenses to potential customers to prove they were disease-free. One doctor said the women were models of “cleanliness and propriety,” and were more than happy to come in for their treatments — before the program, they’d been forced to turn to “quacks and charlatans” for medical care. By the end of 1864, Spalding extended the program to black sex workers, as well. The program was copied in other occupied Southern cities.
In fact, the only person who didn’t seem happy with the whole turn of events was Capt. Newcomb. It took two years and an appeal to the secretary of war for him to be reimbursed, but even that was cold comfort, as he often lamented he could never carry passengers on the Idahoe because of its reputation as the “floating whorehouse.”
With the return of civilian government after Appomattox, Nashville ended the experiment. But in a way, its legacy lives on, proving Spalding’s solution showed a remarkable amount of forethought. Women who work in Nevada’s legal brothels, for example, must have a clean bill of health to be licensed, and must submit to regular STD checks — just as Spalding’s plan suggested.
