Background: I had a discussion a while back with another man about the Civil War. He claimed that sex trafficking was one of the hidden causes for the Confederate states wanting to keep slavery intact. He also claimed that there were statistics that showed that female slaves around the ages of 9 or 10 were among the most popular to be purchased because it was around the age that the hymen would develop and those slaves would be able to handle being raped. I haven’t found any of these statistics, but I’m genuinely curious about it.

He also claimed that the romanticism of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era has helped cover up a lot of the ugliness that persisted in the Confederate slave states.