Civil War Dolls Pegged as Smugglers

The Civil War continues to fascinate as its 150th anniversary approaches. The latest story to capture the public fancy is that of a pair of dolls thought to have been vessels for smuggling.

The papier mache dolls, which measure up to 3 feet in length and have been resting quietly at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., have become items of intense speculation in recent days, as recent X-rays have revealed hidden cavities and other hints that medicine was smuggled inside the two wooden girls (called Lucy Ann and Nina) on a ship bound for the American South from Great Britain. The idea would have been to get the medicine inside the dolls past the ever-present Union blockade.

No evidence of what was smuggled has been found, but officials at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center have scanned evidence that something was in this cavities, most prominently evidenced by not only a gash in the head of one dolls but also signs of the dolls' heads being stitched back on the bodies, presumably after the contents were removed.

The two dolls came from two different donors, both of whom insisted that medicine was the substance was smuggled into Confederate hospitals. The most obvious entities would be morphine and quinine, which could be used to malaria and other sources of devastation far behind enemy lines.

Lucy Ann came from an anonymous donor. Nina's donor, however, is known. That would be the children of Gen. James Patton Anderson, the commander of the Tennessee Army of the Confederacy.

Further tests, if ordered, would be forensic in nature, to discover traces of the smuggled contents, whatever they were.