“Intolerable Evil”
Brigadier Rufus King, commanding Division, of Major General Irvin McDowell’s First Corps, of McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, on April 7, 1862, at Bristoe, Virginia, thirty miles southeast of Washington , issued General Orders no.36,”numerous complaints have reached division headquarters this morning of depredations upon peaceable and unoffending citizens by some of the troops in this command. The evil has grown to be intolerable. (9)
“Rape and other Crimes”
On May 16, 1862, Colonel Hermann Haupt at Potomac Creek, near Aquia Creek Station, north west Virginia, sent a dispatch to McDowell, “Guerillas are forming in various parts of the country, provoked by rape and other crimes committed by Union men. Cases have occurred in this vicinity recently of an aggravated character. (10
On the same date, McDowell, Department of the Rappahannock, opposite Fredericksburg, Virginia, threatened in General Orders no.12, “Some of the few men among us who are evilly disposed have attempted the commission of a crime which will justly draw upon the troops universal condemnation. The punishment for rape will be death, and any violence offered a female, white or colored, with the intent… to commit rape will be considered as one and punished accordingly. (11)
“Ravages”
Later in a Court of Inquiry into charges against McDowell, in Washington, during testimony of Brigadier general Hermann Haupt about events while he was charge of rebuilding the Aquia and Fredericksburg Railroad from the Potomac to Falmouth. McDowell questioned him, “what acts of violence on the women of the country came to your knowledge near Fredericksburg?” (12)
Haupt answered:
I reported one case, which occurred within three miles of Potomac Bridge. A rape upon the daughter of a farmer who had tended me material assistance in searching for timber…I inquired of the parents in regards to the facts, and found that the act had been perpetrated by one of the numerous stragglers who were continually passing through the country… and from those ravages not a single farm-house in the vicinity of the road was exempt when guarded, and not always even then. (13)
Source: Thomas Bland Keys, The Uncivil War: Union Army and Navy Excesses in the Official Records, pp. 18-19.
(9) OR, vol. XII, pt.III:54.
(10) Ibid., 196.
(11) OR, ser. II, vol. III: 545.
(12) OR, vol. XII, pt. I: 78.
(13) Ibid.