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.The average soldier did not wish to harm them,some of these women discovered, but instead could be friendly and nothing 52 marri age and courtshipmore than a lonely man in search of conversation.Some soldiers even spareda woman s property from destruction.A Fairfax County, Virginia, womanadmitted that despite expectations that a Union soldier would beat the hullout of us, while his army occupied northern Virginia, on the whole he wascandid and good-natured. Enemy soldiers even became a source of incomefor some civilian women when they were willing to pay for boarding or mealsin the women s homes.64Other Union troops were deemed sympathetic, as were the prisoners ofwar in hospitals who depended on Confederate women to feed them soupand change their bandages.Hospitals offered a unique setting that appealedto a Confederate woman s sense of humanity and Christian duty.65 For someit was a temporary act of charity that would end when the men recovered, butother women may have found the intimate conversation nurtured in a hospitalamenable to romance and even marriage.The Nashville Daily Press noted anumber of such relationships that were rumored to have developed amongvolunteer nurses, patients, and doctors, noting in one 1864 account that theM.D. s seem to make the most headway in marrying the fair daughters ofDixie. The paper speculated that the army physicians status as noncom-batants made them more attractive to women determined to uphold theirConfederate loyalty.66Prisons also provided an insulated setting in which enemy men and womencould interact peacefully.Especially in institutions in St.Louis, Louisville,and Washington, D.C., where numbers of women were incarcerated as po-litical prisoners for their actions on behalf of the Confederacy, prisoners andguards became friendly, even flirtatious, as they shared close quarters formonths at a time.Female prisoners depended on their Union guards to providefood, conversation, and privileges.But these women, who were supposedlythe most rebellious of the rebels, also discovered a political utility in becom-ing extra friendly with Union guards.The Missouri Statesman reported inFebruary 1865, for instance, that women in a Chariton County prison weremarrying their guards to prove their allegiance to the Union and be released.Such marriages exploited popular expectations that women would assume thenational loyalty of their husbands, so to marry a Union man was undoubtedproof of her loyalty, the paper concluded.67 In a more well-known example,accused Confederate spy Belle Boyd became romantically involved with oneof her captors, who subsequently helped her escape and continue her spyingcareer.68 Intersectional romance in these instances was a matter of expediencyfor Confederate women accused of spying or other acts of treason. marri age and courtship 53At least, that is how these romances were characterized in newspaper col-umns.The private papers of individuals involved in prison romances suggestthat their dalliances with the enemy could be more complicated than a simpleassertion of political self-interest.Twenty-five-year-old Antonia Ford, an in-mate of Washington, D.C. s Old Capitol Prison, attributed her romance witha Union guard entirely to the power of love and Destiny. 69 Few of her fellowinmates might have believed her at first, as there was no doubt that Ford wasa staunch Confederate.Her family of prominent merchants in Fairfax CourtHouse, Virginia, was known to be loyal to the Confederacy.Her brother was asoldier in the Confederate army, and Antonia herself had been commissionedas an honorary aide-de-camp by General Jeb Stuart in October 1861.Her sup-port for the South became a concern to Union authorities in March 1863, whenshe was arrested on suspicion of providing key information for a successfulConfederate raid on the Union headquarters at Fairfax Court House earlierthat month
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