ABSTRACT
To a casual observer, the Union prison camp (1862-1865) on Johnson’s Island, Ohio, was a womanless place. Men in butternut or gray uniforms were everywhere, bathing in Lake Erie, perfuming the air with tobacco and sweat, making the air ring with laughter or heated words. Men stood, strode, or sauntered around the dusty prison yard. They slouched against or sat on the prison blocks’ stairs, leaned out of windows, and crowded the rooms of every prison block. Very few women, however, passed through the large wooden gates and into the bullpen of the prison. 1 More than one prisoner of war bemoaned this situation, including Captain T. D. Houston, who kept count of the months since he heard a woman’s voice, and Colonel D. R. Hundley, who considered it inhumane to be “deprived of the gentle companionship and loving smiles of woman.” 2 Houston, Hundley, and others like them strove against this lack by maintaining their correspondence with and evoking the presence of the fair sex through diverse media. Contemporary and postwar documents attest to the POWs’ attempts to imagine women through visual art, the written word, drama, and music.
