Bump. Many on the other side are of the opinion that the account must use the word "rape", or else it must have been tiddly-winks they were playing.
When "Beast" Butler ordered that the ladies of New Orleans showed contempt for yankees that she was to be 'treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation', he meant to treat them as prostitutes, without recourse to legal remedies for their rape.
The article went on to describe what had happened: "In an instant the cabin was filled, a light was struck, and as the man was no where to be seen, a purpose more fiendish than that which had induced them to enter the dwelling, took possession of the marauders. The girl was at once seized, and with violence, alike criminal and brutal, they [nine of the eleven] accomplished their fiendish purposes, one after another, in the presence of the father and the mother."
The word rape was never used in the article, which appeared in the Picayune on March 3, 1864.
We have been told of successful outrages of this unmentionable character being practiced on women dwelling in the suburbs. Many are understood to have taken place in remote country settlements, and two cases are described where young negresses were brutally forced by the wretches and afterwards murdered -- one of them being thrust, when half dead, head down, into a mud puddle, and there held until she was suffocated. ... Regiments, in successive relays, subjected scores of these poor women [rb: black women in this case] to the torture of their embraces ...