Hooker's Girls
While General Joseph Hooker lacks the historical gravitas of Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman or Philip Sheridan, he has a special place in military lore as the alleged namesake of a term for women of ill repute. The term "hooker" did not originate with Union General Joseph Hooker, but he certainly popularized it during the war. The general made it more popular by throwing parties attended by “fallen doves,” as prostitutes were also known at the time. This became so commonplace with General Hooker that people began referring to the women as Hooker's girls. Rob Dalessandro, of the U.S. Army Center for Military History at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. said. "In fact, a large red-light district in Washington became known as “Hooker’s Division.”
“Additionally, soldiers quickly named the hordes of female camp followers that plied their trade on young and often naive soldiers, ‘Hooker's Legions,’
His men were a rowdy bunch and his headquarters was a den of iniquity. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams, said Hooker's headquarters was:
"a place where no self-respecting man liked to go, and no decent woman could go. It was a combination of barroom and brothel."
Not all of these "girls" were women of ill repute. Women could not enlist in the service, but they could marry a man in the service and enroll with him as a cook or laundress. This allowed them to follow their husbands from battle to battle providing food, clean clothing, companionship, encouragement, and something loosely referred to as "personal services."[1]
These "camp followers" caused several problems with the army. The most notorious area for prostitution was in Tennessee. Before the outbreak of the war, Nashville recorded 207 prostitutes; however, in 1863 reports claimed to have at least 1500 prostitutes. The area where these prostitutes could be found was known as Smokey Row.[2] In an infamous campaign to rid the city of the "public women", Lt. Col. George Spalding loaded the women on to the steamboat Idahoe. The women were sent to Louisville, where they were not allowed off the ship and sent further along to Cincinnati. Many of the women became sick due to lack of food and were forced to turn around and return to Nashville. Once they arrived back in Nashville, Lt. Col. Spaulding created a system of registration similar to European ones. He inadvertently created the first legal system of prostitution.[2] This is the set of regulations he set up:
1.That a license be issued to each prostitute, a record of which shall be kept at this office, together with the number and street of her residence.
2.That one skillful surgeon be appointed as a Board of Examination whose duty it shall be to examine personally every week, each licensed prostitute, giving certificate soundness to those who are healthy and ordering those into hospital those who are in the slightest degree diseased.
3.That a building suitable for a hospital for the invalids be taken for that purpose, and that a weekly tax of fifty cents be levied on each prostitute for the purpose of defraying the expense of said hospital.
4.That all public women found plying their vocation without a license and certificate be at once arrested and incarcerated in the workhouse for a period of not less than thirty days.
This led to many cases of venereal disease. Among white Union soldiers there was a total of 73,382 syphilis cases and 109,397 gonorrhea cases. The total rate of VD among the white Union troops were 82 cases per 1000 men. Union black troops, however, had rates of 34 per 1000 for syphilis and 44 per 1000 for gonorrhea.[3]
Sources:
[1] Texas Bad Girls: Hussie, Harlots and Horse Thieves. pg. 54.
[2] Clinton, Catherine (1999). Public Women and the Confederacy. Marquette University Press. ISBN 0-87462-332-4.
[3] Lowry, Thomas Power (1994). The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War. Stackpole Books. ISBN 0-8117-1515-9.