Nashville, Tennessee in the 1860s was a bustling place that held a dirty little secret. Smokey Row. Where the prostitutes lived. In February of 1862 when Major General Willam Rosencranz drove out the Confederates he brought in an army of 30,000 soldiers--and customers. The prostitutes went from 200 to 1,500 nearly overnight.
With more prostitutes came more venereal diseases. Some of them were quite painful. Some of them--like gonorrhea and syphilis were quite deadly. Hundreds of soldiers were coming down with gonorrhea and syphilis and seeking help at the hospital. But the health crisis wasn't enough to stop others from visiting the brothels.
Rosencrantz realized that he had to do something before he lost too many men to hold down the city and lost it to the Confederates. So he sought counsel from his aide Lieutenant Colonol George Spaulding who told him to round up the prostitutes and put them on a ship and sends them away. So he did. He put them on the ship Idaho and told the Captain to drop them off in Louisville, Kentucky.
Soon the ship had returned to Nashville with the prostitutes. Seems that Louisville didn't want them either. So Rosencranz turned once again to Spaulding who came up with an even more daring plan for the prostitutes. He would make them pay a $5 licensing fee and require them to renew it weekly with a health inspection showing that they didn't have any venereal diseases in order to keep working. The money that they collected from the licensing fee went toward building a facility to treat the women when the did get sick with silver nitrate, the prevailing treatment for those diseases at the time, but certainly no cure. When the war ended, so did the legalization of prostitution.
