Author Finds Strange Bed Fellows in a Peek Beneath Civil War Sheets : Sexuality: Northerners were more sexually active than Southerners, in part because Confederates were on the march while Union soldiers had more time to spend in tents.

WASHINGTON —  Thomas P. Lowry set out to explore more deeply the human side of the Civil War, to take figures remembered in bronze and stone and put more flesh and blood on them. Well, flesh, anyway.

The war, it turns out, was a battle of the blue and the gray and the bawdy.

In his book “The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War,” Lowry leaves no doubt there was plenty of it--tender, inventive, violent, much of it bringing awful disease, the sum of it making more bearable the deprivations of the time.

Now, he says, the “manifold dimensions of love and lust in the Civil War stand revealed for those who care to see them.”

Prostitution was rampant, even licensed by the Union in Memphis, Tenn., and Savannah, Ga., and men went into battle with pocket pornography made to look like Bibles. “Amours with the Nuns” was one hit.

“I tell you,” one private wrote to a buddy about the pleasures of Washington. “Lager Beer and a horse and buggy and, in the evening, Horizontal Refreshments.”

Across the Potomac, a Union soldier found his encampment near Alexandria, Va., a “perfect Sodom” surrounded by bordellos.

Lowry, a UC Berkeley psychiatrist, said the Civil War is “our holy war, our jihad,” a conflict filled with characters bigger than life.

His scholarly work goes beyond that to paint a portrait of a time when men acted like men and so did some women.

New York Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick scandalized many with his female companions dressed and disguised as men. “Charley” was a favorite. Gen. L. G. Estes went from camp to camp with “Frank.”

Then again, men dressed as women for parties. Oblique references to possible homosexual trysts were hard to pin down because cramped soldiers innocently “slept together” a lot.

Northerners appeared more sexually active than Southerners, in part because Confederates were so often on the march while Union soldiers spent more time in tents, Lowry said.

Lowry once read a historian’s remark that the story of Civil War sex would never be told because so many records had been destroyed.

In an age of puritanism when “mania from masturbation” was listed as a cause of death, soldiers’ heirs threw out salacious material or sliced whole passages out of letters with razor blades.

But Lowry plowed through the National Archives, home of steamy correspondence that ended up in dead letter offices of the day, among other official sources.

He choked up a bit when he read aloud from a letter to a Southern soldier from his fiancee, Julia. “My mind dwells on the treasures we will have when you come back,” she wrote sweetly.

He recovered, however, to complete the passage: “I never felt so good as I did the first time we did it on the sofa.”

Sex on the road, meanwhile, could come at a terrible cost.

The surgeon general reported 103,000 cases of gonorrhea and 73,000 cases of syphilis among Union soldiers.

Disease declined when the Union began licensing prostitutes and giving them medical tests.

In Washington, prostitutes overseen by Gen. Joseph Hooker became known as Hooker’s Division, although use of the word “hooker” began earlier with no reference to the general, Lowry said.

Memphis was a “beehive of women of ill fame,” the Daily Bulletin lamented in April, 1863. In Nashville, 111 disruptive prostitutes were forced aboard a steamboat and shipped off to any river port that would take them.

“No commander would let the women ashore,” Lowry said, “but the soldiers would swim out to where they were anchored and climb on board.”

Upset when their customers were forced back, the women trashed the steamer and ended up back in Nashville two months later.