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the floating whorehouse
Civil War 1863
All 111 women aboard the Idahoe had one thing in common: their race. The women heading for points north were all white.
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Almost immediately upon their departure, their black counterparts took their places in the city’s brothels and its alleys, much to the chagrin of the Nashville Daily Union: the trivia poem -mernine a
"The sudden expatriation of hundreds of vicious white women will only make room for an equal number of negro strumpets.
Unless the aggravated curse of lechery as it exists among the negresses of the town is destroyed by rigid military or civil mandates, or the indiscriminate expulsion of the guilty sex, the ejectment of the white class will turn out to have been productive of the sin it was intended to eradicate….
We dare say no city in the country has been more shamefully abused by the conduct of its unchaste females, white and Negro, than has Nashville for the past fifteen or eighteen months."
"a minute with venus, a year with mercury"