Legendary Excuses

When I was a kid in Virginia, there was a civil war museum I visited that purported that an ancient bullet had penetrated through one of General Custer’s Union Soldier’s scrotum and then impregnated a Southern Belle.

Years later, I met a Southern Belle from Tennessee and relayed this story to her. She exclaimed that in Nashville there was another Civil War museum that claimed the opposite – that a battlefield bullet pierced through one of Robert E. Lee’s, wounded warriors, thus impregnating a virgin northern woman.

At this point I finally realized that this was probably a battlefield legend and concocted as an excuse for unwanted pregnancies. Perhaps it’s something for Snopes to sniff out after the day comes when DNA evidence can be easily lifted from ancient musket balls.