The Sexuality of Civil War Historiography: How Two Versions of Homosexuality Make Meaning of the War

Abstract

The central scene in James K. Hosmer’s 1865 novel The Thinking Bayonet takes place in a Confederate prison camp. Two men, a Union solder and a Confederate soldier, say farewell: “Hands for a moment on one another’s shoulders; bearded faces, damp with the rain now falling, coming together under the dark in a kiss.” At a college in Massachusetts, the pair had been intimates who, as a classmate wrote, “have a love for one another, almost surpassing the love of women.” They broke up over the issue of slavery, when the Southerner returned to his family’s slave plantation in Louisiana and the Northerner became involved in Massachusetts abolitionism. The Southerner enlisted in the Confederate army, declaring, “I hate the North . . . and yet the only man I ever loved was a Northerner.” Coincidentally overhearing this declaration, the Northerner resolved to fight his onetime friend, “I say it while I love him.”1 The prison kiss is their last. The novel ends with the Southerner, his Confederacy, and their romantic friendship all dead, deaths necessary both for national reunion and the Northerner’s eventual heterosexual marriage. Hosmer, a Harvard graduate who served as an infantryman in the Union campaign for the southern Mississippi River, framed the crisis in his novel within the broad “we are not enemies but friends” framework of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address: “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”2 Hosmer’s novel did so by narrating the war