Female Rebels: How to Manage Them

This entry comes from the Louisville Journal (date not indicated),  as found in The Rebellion Record:  A Diary of American Events, Volume II, 1862 edited by Frank Moore.

The Louisville Courier is very pathetic in speaking of a little paragraph of ours, wherein we stated that crinoline contains many a contraband article, and advised the detectives to be on the look-out. Sturdy patriotism, however, is getting to be proof against sickly pathos. It is notorious that hundreds, if not thousands of pistols, have been smuggled under the cover of crinoline into the Southern Confederacy, for the killing of citizens of the United States, and the thing should be stopped. Our neighbor appears to think that the only way to prevent contrabands from being smuggled under ladies' dresses, is to employ the great "he creatures" to search the blushing innocents. He is a greenhorn. Doesn't he know with what delicacy, and yet how effectively, these things are managed in foreign ports? If a woman, carrying under her dress deadly weapons to be used by rebels against our people, blushes at being examined in a private room by another woman, let her blush. Better that her blood should mount to her face, than that the blood of our countrymen should be shed through her crime. Smuggling pistols under female hoops is not a legitimate mode of hooping barrels.

"The Augusta" from the Peterson Magazine December 1861, from  NYPL Digital Gallery