WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SEXUALLY EXPLICIT MATERIAL. ONE KEY PRIMARY SOURCE IN THIS POST ALSO USES TERMINOLOGY THAT IS CONSIDERED OUTDATED OR INAPPROPRIATE.
Dr. Dixi Crosby (1863)
If you were a surgeon on an enrollment board, charged with the physical examination of draftees, substitutes, and volunteers, how would you react to discovering an intersex person?[i] Such was the question facing Dr. Dixi Crosby, surgeon for the enrollment board in the Third District of New Hampshire in the summer of 1863.
At this point in the post, the reader may reasonably ask how I stumbled upon this encounter. Allow me to provide a circuitous answer. Having obtained a fairly good idea of how the 5th New Hampshire obtained soldiers when voluntary enlistment predominated (fall 1861 to the late summer of 1862), I’ve recently turned my attention to the draft-bounty-substitute regime that became the primary means of raising of troops from the late summer of 1863 onward.
As some of you may know, once the Enrolment Act of 1863 was passed by Congress, all 185 congressional districts in the North obtained an enrollment board headed by a district provost marshal. The enrollment board was charged with the thankless task of compiling a list of all men in the congressional district between the ages of 20 and 45 who were eligible for the draft. This list became the basis for setting the quotas of each town within the district. Among other things, the enrollment board was also responsible for holding the draft, examining draftees and dealing with claims of exemption, disposing of those men who opted for commutation, and processing the huge wave of substitutes that arose in the aftermath of a draft,. The last of these tasks was mammoth since substitution became the primary means of filling the army with recruits. For example, of the 1330 men who entered the ranks of the 5th New Hampshire after August 1863, 1170 were substitutes. What’s interesting about these figures is that they indicate more men joined the regiment under the draft-bounty-substitute regime that emerged under the Enrolment Act than through the voluntary enlistment that was typical of the regiment’s first year (which produced a little under 1200 soldiers).[ii]
A very important member of the enrollment board, second in usefulness only to the district provost marshal, was the surgeon who was responsible for examining the draftees, substitutes, and volunteers who passed through the office. I learned from reading Eugene Murdock’s One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (1971) (still one of the leading works on the subject–I’m now reading James W. Geary’s work on the same subject) that shortly after the war ended, Major Jedediah Hyde Baxter, the Chief Medical Officer of the Provost Marshal’s Bureau, sent a questionnaire to all 185 men who then occupied the post of enrollment board surgeon. He received 100 responses which he included in his Statistics, Medical and Anthropological of the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau (2 vols.) (1875). I was beyond pleased not only to find this book online but also to discover that all three enrollment board surgeons from New Hampshire submitted reports.[iii]
That brings us to Dr. Dixi Crosby (1800-1873) who was the surgeon for the enrollment board in the state’s Third District (New Hampshire then had three congressmen). Since the position did not pay well, the work was arduous, and conscription was widely loathed, enrollment boards often experienced difficulty in attracting highly qualified doctors. The Third District was especially lucky, then, in obtaining Crosby who was one of the most prominent members of the medical community in the Granite State. The son of a doctor himself, Crosby received his degree from the medical school at Dartmouth College in 1824, practicing medicine in Gilmanton (with his father) and Laconia for a number of years before returning to Dartmouth to become the chair of surgery in 1838. Only three years later, he was appointed to the surgical professorship at Dartmouth. In additional to surgery, he developed an expertise in obstetrics as well as in diseases associated with women and children. All the while, he maintained a thriving practice in Hanover. The sources conflict, but it appears that as he got older, these duties all became a bit much for him, and he lectured less frequently on surgery.
Crosby certainly appears to have been a conscientious doctor. He developed several new noteworthy techniques, including one for dealing with metacarpophalangeal dislocation. He kept up on many of the latest developments in his specialties, traveling to Boston, for example, to learn the most current means of administering chloroform to patients undergoing surgery. He instructed and mentored countless doctors throughout the state, many of whom served as surgeons in New Hampshire regiments during the war (these included John Bucknam who mustered in as the 5th New Hampshire’s first assistant surgeon before earning a promotion to surgeon in 1863). And Crosby was “the cynosure” at meetings of the New Hampshire Medical Society. What more can we say? Well, one of his former students remembered him as ““the commanding figure who dominated New Hampshire surgery for thirty years.”
But what of Crosby the man? The same student remembered Crosby as:
a short, compact, well-dressed man, firm on his feet and rather ponderous in his gait. He had a large head and wore a curly reddish beard, shaggy as if never a comb had touched it, and his hair reached his coat collar behind. His upper lip was clean shaven so that, as he said, no hair should obstruct his voice in his lectures in the medical school. His face had a winning expression and he liked to talk as he walked. The whole effect of his appearance was majestic and impressive.
He was a “straightforward” lecturer who counseled students to “see with your own eyes, feel with your own fingers, use your own judgment and be the disciple of no one man.” Although he had a reputation for having performed more surgeries than anyone else in New Hampshire, “he might be called a careful, rather than a brilliant operator.” The student summed up Crosby “as a genial man, a faithful adviser, and in his prime the leading surgeon in his state.” Even just a brief survey of Crosby’s career indicates he must have taken on the job of enrollment surgeon out of a sense of duty.
Crosby’s report in Statistics, Medical and Anthropological of the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau provides a strong sense of his personality. Yes, there are some assertions that sound strange to our ears. He claimed that the prevalence of typhoid fever in the Connecticut River valley was associated with “very heavy river-fogs” (then again, the miasma theory prevailed in this period.) He also seems to have been particularly exercised by cousin marriage in certain parts of his district because they produced large numbers of “imbeciles” (we must concede here that first-cousin mating does indeed increase the risk that offspring will suffer from developmental disabilities.)[iv] These issues aside, though, one receives from the report the impression of a man with much experience in medicine—and much experience of the world. He appears to have been a man of strong commonsense opinions who had been endowed with much shrewdness.[v]
“The Civil War in America: Claiming Exemption from the Draft in New York,” Illustrated London News (1863): After the Enrolment Act was passed, there was some confusion about whether all men between 20 and 45 in every district should be enrolled for the draft or all able-bodied men between these ages. James B. Fry, the Provost-Marshal-General, eventually decided that all men within this age span should be enrolled. Such a decision made sense; instead of having enrollment officers determining who was able-bodied or not, the enrollment board’s surgeon, who was more properly qualified to assess the physical condition of prospective soldiers, would make the final decision. What this ruling meant in practice, though, was that the surgeon had to undertake a huge number of physical examinations each day to weed out unfit men after they had been drafted (in addition to the enormous burden of examining volunteers and substitutes). This image shows a typical scene at an enrollment board as men await physical examination by the surgeon. Note the huge crowd trying to force its way through the door at right. Men who sought exemption were especially anxious to have their examinations as soon as possible.
It is here that we must advert to the most interesting part of Crosby’s report in Statistics, Medical and Anthropological of the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau. I will let him take it from here:
[In the summer of 1863 during the first draft], a conscript appeared in the office for examination who came as near being a genuine hermaphrodite as any reported case. The man was about thirty years of age, five feet four inches in height, with very little beard, but a luxuriant growth of hair about the pubes. The breasts were largely developed; the hips broad; the hands and feet small. The penis was small, but well developed, and occupying the place of the clitoris. The labia majora were well developed, and the commissure decidedly marked. At the lower portion of each labium a small testicle could be felt, and the cord could be traced to the ring. The vagina was a mere cul de sac of about one inch in depth. The history of the case was curious. Until the age of nineteen he wore the habiliments of the female, and associated only with females, conducting himself, according to his own account, precisely as did Achilles when introduced among the daughters of the Grecian king. At this age, his parents, becoming convinced of their mistake, changed his garments and the family residence at the same time. He has been twice married, but had no issue, notwithstanding both marriages were consummated.”vi]
As a doctor, Crosby treated this case primarily as a medical oddity. Indeed, he framed this incident as if it were somehow related to cousin marriage. The language is clinical and matter-of-fact. The case is not shocking, rather, it is “peculiar.” Although Crosby thought the “history of the case was curious,” his description of it was cursory when compared to his detailed depiction of the unnamed conscript’s genitalia.
Academics today, though, would be fascinated by the socio-cultural dimension of this story. Certainly, there are many unanswered questions here. Why was this intersex person initially clothed as a woman? Why did the parents suddenly realize their “mistake” when their one-time “daughter” turned 19? What did their intersex teenager think about skipping town, changing clothing, and assuming a new, male identity? To what degree did this conscript embrace his identity as a man? And what did this person’s two wives think when their marriages were “consummated”?
We don’t have much to go on. But it’s possible to engage in informed speculation based on what we know about the period. In the mid-nineteenth century, doctors—who reflected the general attitudes of society—believed there were only two sexes, and that everybody fit into one or the other. Indeed, it was in the nineteenth century that surgeons first attempted to perform surgeries on intersex people so that their genitals better matched their identity (an intervention that patients often resented or regretted). One important problem among many was that in these cases, the medical profession could not always agree on what made a man a man and a woman a woman. Sometimes intersex people had the space to decide on their own what to be—that is, if they were not flushed out in public, as some were, and forced to choose from one of two sexes against their will.
It seems significant that the parents concluded their daughter was really a son at 19. I would guess that at this point their teenager began to express a sexual interest in women (more on this point anon). The assumption among most 19th-century Americans was that individuals naturally paired up with the opposite sex. If this ambiguous “girl” was interested in other girls, then she must be a “man,” or so the reasoning must have gone. The sudden change in residence and of “garments” indicates a kind of panic. The parents appear to have been taken by surprise. Perhaps there was some sort of incident.
Crosby appeared to agree with the parents because he refers to their “mistake” in identifying their child as female and because he persisted in describing the conscript as “he.” Crosby’s analogy to Achilles is revealing. It refers to the Greek myth that at the request of the goddess Thetis (who knew Achilles would die if he fought in the Trojan War), King Lycomedes hid the great warrior in his court and disguised him as a woman. Living among the monarch’s daughters in this fashion, Achilles would never be detected—or so the thinking went. When the Trojan War was in the offing, Odysseus and other Greek kings journeyed to Lycomedes’ court to obtain Achilles’ services in the upcoming conflict. They tricked Achilles into revealing himself in the following manner. Odysseus and the others came disguised as peddlers and placed women’s clothes, jewelry, and—significantly—a sword and shield before the various women at court. Achilles instinctively reached for the weapons, thus revealing his identity. In other words, our draftee was a man waiting to be revealed, just like Achilles. But the story is freighted in other ways as well. According to some versions of the myth, while living at Lycomedes’ court, Achilles began an affair with Deidamia, Lycomedes’ daughter, and she had two sons by him. In relating this story, did Crosby seek to indicate that our anonymous conscript, while still identifying as a female at 19, had been caught in a compromising position with a woman?
This is all speculation, of course. It would require a great deal of legwork to get to the bottom of this story and identify this conscript. Crosby’s district included Cheshire, Sullivan, Grafton, and Coos counties—a large area, at least by New Hampshire standards, with over 100,000 people at the time. A cursory Google search produced no hits concerning a publicly identified intersex person living in mid-nineteenth-century western New Hampshire.
If I’m not mistaken, the reason we know so little about this unnamed conscript is because Crosby chose discretion as the better part of valor. Yes, he could not pass up the chance to mention in his report that he had encountered a case of intersexuality, but it stopped there. We ought to contemplate for a moment what Crosby did not do. A different doctor—one who was more ambitious and less scrupulous—could have turned the anonymous draftee into a specimen who was subjected to repeated investigations by the medical community. Another surgeon could have engaged in the public “freakification” of the conscript.[vii] These are the kinds of things that happened to other intersex people in other places during this period. It’s possible, of course, that when I trawl through Record Group 110 (Records of the Provost Marshal’s Bureau) in the National Archives at Washington, DC (or the branch in Waltham, Massachusetts), I might find some documentation that indicates Crosby acted otherwise. But until then, it seems to me that we obtain no better measure of Crosby’s character than by stressing what he refrained from doing in this case.
It almost goes without saying—but I feel compelled to say it—that this incident is relevant to our contemporary debates about sexuality. I don’t have much appetite for engaging in the culture wars that plague public discussion these days, but it is important to recognize—as the medical profession does—that people are not easily divided into two distinct sexes. As Jessica Carducci, Allison Haste, Bryce Longenberger point out in their study of Karl Hohmann, when it comes to the gender and sex binary, “There is a range of difference between individuals in these categories, and there is a range of difference that exists outside them as well—a continuum of human difference that does not fit into two separate boxes.”[viii] And that is an important idea to contemplate as we recollect an enrollment board surgeon’s encounter with an unnamed draftee in the summer of 1863.
[i] According to the Cleveland Clinic, “People who are intersex have reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit into an exclusively male or female (binary) sex classification. Intersex traits might be apparent when a person’s born, but they might not appear until later (during puberty or even adulthood). You may never notice their intersex traits externally and you might only find out about them after a surgery or imaging test.” See https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/16324-intersex
[ii] Much of this information comes from Eugene C. Murdock, One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (Madison, WI: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971) and Augustus D. Ayling, Revised Register of the Soldiers and Sailors of New Hampshire in the War of the Rebellion 1861-1866 (Concord, NH: Ira C. Evans, 1895).
[iii] J. H. Baxter, Statistics, Medical and Anthropological of the Provost-Marshal-General’s Bureau, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875). Google Books has a copy of volume 1, which is where the surgeon’s reports appear, here: https://books.google.com/books?id=_cI_AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
[iv] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3904202/#:~:text=Consanguinity%20is%20a%20well%2Dknown, and%20also%20other%20inherited%20disorders.
[v] For biographical information about Crosby, please consult the following sources: Granville Priest Conn, History of the New Hampshire Surgeons in the War of the Rebellion (Concord, NH: Ira C. Evans, 1906), 421, https://archive.org/details/historyofnewhamp00conn/page/420/mode/2up?q=Dixi+Crosby; Howard Atwood Kelly and Walter L. Burrage, A Cyclopedia of American Medical Biography: Comprising the Lives of Eminent Deceased Physicians and Surgeons from 1610 to 1910, Volume 1 (Baltimore: The Norman, Remington Company, 1920), 261, https://books.google.com/books?id=GPssAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA261#v=onepage&q&f=false; James Grant Wilson, Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography, Volume 2 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1900), 16, https://archive.org/details/appletonscyclopa02wils/page/16/mode/2up?view=theater.
[vi] https://books.google.com/books?id=_cI_AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA185#v=onepage&q&f=false
[vii] The key work on the treatment of intersexuality during this period is Alice Domurat Dreger’s Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Please see the following accessible sources for the ways in which prominent cases of intersex people were handled during this period: file:///H:/My%20Documents/DP5624/5th%20New%20Hampshire%20Research/Secondary%20Research/What%20am%20I%20Intersexuality%20Article%20on%20Karl%20Hohmann.pdf; https://timeline.com/the-tragic-story-of-the-hermaphrodite-who-puzzled-19th-century-france-702050cdd5b8; https://www.press.jhu.edu/newsroom/intersex-people-past-and-present-contemporary-advocacy-historical-context.
[viii] file:///H:/My%20Documents/DP5624/5th%20New%20Hampshire%20Research/Secondary%20Research/What %20am%20I%20Intersexuality%20Article%20on%20Karl%20Hohmann.pdf
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