America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Confederate and Union troops sometimes established winter quarters near each other, adhering to a gentleman’s agreement not to fight during this season of renewal. On one cold, clear night, Union troops camped in Tennessee lifted their spirits and voices in patriotic song, accompanied by regimental bands. Bands on the Confederate side of the river struck up competing songs. Before long “Yankee Doodle” battled with “Dixie,” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” answered “Hail, Columbia.” As the evening wound down and the campfires glowed to embers, the Union bands played “Home, Sweet Home.” The Rebels joined in, and the bitter enemies raised their voices into the star-splashed sky till they were one.2

  Some fortunate soldiers obtained furloughs during the winter hiatus. Henry Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts enjoyed a two-week leave over Christmas. Images of a cozy holiday season abounded in the North, reflecting the good news from the front. Thomas Nast, the Union’s most popular cartoonist, debuted the jolly figure of Santa Claus in the pages of Harper’s Weekly. His drawing “Merry Christmas” depicted a wife welcoming home her soldier-husband for a brief visit. The children are excited to see their father, especially as he is bearing gifts. The hearth burns brightly, and the home exudes a happy middle-class prosperity. The poignancy of the drawing lay in the realization to all who viewed it that the joy would be temporary. And so was Abbott’s visit. Upon leaving, he “broke down and wept like a child.” It was the last time Abbott would ever see his family. He was killed four months later.3

  The longing for peace mixed with a resolve to fight until the war’s objectives were achieved. The protection of home and family continued to motivate the Confederate soldier. Federal soldiers persisted for the cause of the Union, and many embraced the idea of freedom as well. Home and family also motivated the Federals, though usually framed by the notion that saving the Union would secure both. All agreed that the war was transformative. New York private John Foote wrote, “By war, God is regenerating this Nation.”4

  God hovered over winter quarters as He had over the battlefield. By early 1864, however, the religious meaning of the war was more complex for soldiers on both sides. Skepticism about God’s role, if indeed He had a role, had grown since First Bull Run. Nearly three years of battle and blood led to deeper soul-searching. A wave of religious revivals swept over Confederate camps that winter. Military reverses and mounting casualties drove the Rebels to interpret events within the context of their faith. If the Confederacy was waging a holy war, why were they losing? The preachers reminded the men that God gave victory to the Chosen People often at the darkest hours and against overwhelming forces. Ministers cited Judges 6:13: “If the Lord be with us, why then is all this befallen us?” The text concerned the story of Gideon, one of the judges of Israel, weak in faith and convinced he is both unworthy and unready to lead his people to certain destruction against a force of overwhelming odds. “Surely I will be with thee,” God assures, “and thou shalt smite the Midianites as one man.” With a force of only three hundred men, Gideon defeats the Midianites, who, in a reassuring coincidence, attacked the Israelites from the north.5

  To ensure victory, ministers stressed, southern soldiers and civilians must live more righteous lives. Their faith must not flag in the face of adversity. Confederate defeats and hard circumstances resulted from both a weakness in faith and a failure to expiate sin. This was a difficult demand for soldiers and families who had already made great sacrifices. Jefferson Davis proclaimed days of fast and humiliation so southerners could atone for their sins and rededicate themselves to their holy war. In his October 1864 fast day proclamation, Davis wrote, “And let us not forget that, while graciously vouchsafing to us His protection, our sins have merited and received grievous chastisement.” Some southerners greeted Davis’s exhortations with cynicism. They wondered how the president’s fast days differed from any other day in the Confederacy late in the war.6

  The mounting carnage turned soldiers and civilians away from theological explanations, if not from their faith. Kate Cumming reported in 1864 that religious revivals in her hometown of Mobile, Alabama, had fallen flat. Sam Watkins mocked the self-righteous preachers who visited the Army of Tennessee in the winter of 1863–64. Clergy commented on the falling away of piety among Confederate soldiers by 1864. The “deep, intense, religious fervor soon changed to indifference; and I certainly saw nothing and heard nothing of an out-door prayer-meeting or a conversion among the cavalry during the last year of the war,” one said. A southern minister lamented, “At the beginning of the war, every soldier had a Testament in his pocket; three years later there was not a half dozen in each regiment.” Did the loss of piety invite God’s wrath, or vice versa?7

  Given the rise in northern fortunes, Union soldiers should have thanked God for their success. Bloodshed, however, raised the level of skepticism in federal ranks as it had among Confederates. Ministers, like their counterparts in the South, regretted lapses in piety. Soldiers tossed away Bibles (“bibles and blisters didn’t go well together,” one soldier explained) and showed open disdain for preachers. Theodore Lyman of the Army of the Potomac dismissed a minister he encountered in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864. “He was like all of that class, patriotic and one-sided, attributing to the Southerners every fiendish passion; in support of which he had accumulated all the horrible accounts of treatment of prisoners, slaves, etc., etc., and had worked himself into a great state.” Righteous retribution would have a short season in the remaining year of the war. Soldiers wanted to get the job done and go home.8

  These comments represented less a loss of faith—America was a religious nation—than a belief that God did not have His hand in this bloody war. Rather than the personal, interventionist God of evangelical Christianity, this Supreme Being was more detached and more inscrutable. Soldiers maintained their personal piety even as they grew increasingly skeptical of God’s role in the war. Any soldier who participated in battle and looked out over the field afterward found it difficult to fathom what God had in mind. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it,” General William T. Sherman declared. He advised his men not to look for God on the battlefield. “When preachers clamor … don’t join in, but know that war, like the thunderbolt, follows its own laws, and turns not aside even if the beautiful, the virtuous and charitable stand in its path.”9

  If God was out of it, then what was the purpose of all this misery? Soldiers and their families could not believe they were fighting for nothing. Not after the sacrifices, the deaths, and the pain. Secular meanings—the Union, independence, family, freedom—were lofty enough, even stripped of holy anointment. Yet a weariness had tarnished even these exalted objectives by the winter of 1863–64. A Union general’s wife asked, “What is all this struggling and fighting for? This ruin and death to thousands of families?… What advancement of mankind is to compensate for the present horrible calamities?”10

  If the answers were elusive in the camps, they were even less clear in places where soldiers languished in more horrid conditions. The battle for life over death continued in the hospitals. The contest was more desperate in the military prisons. If it was difficult to imagine a divine presence on the battlefield, it required an immense leap of faith to think of a God who would countenance a Civil War prison.

  A large army lived in prisons. More than 410,000 soldiers (200,000 Union and 210,000 Confederate) spent time as forced guests of the enemy. Of these, 56,000 died, mostly from disease. These deaths accounted for nearly 10 percent of all fatalities during the war. This tragedy, like the war that spawned it, was avoidable. In July 1862, Union General John A. Dix and Confederate General D. H. Hill concluded an agreement to exchange prisoners on a systematic basis. The pact worked well for more than a year until black troops entered the Union ranks. The Davis administration announced that it would not exchange black prisoners of war or their white officers. The Lincoln administration, in turn, declared that it would halt all prisoner exchanges.11

  Union authorities stood
on the high moral ground, but the cessation of exchanges benefited their military operations more than their mortal souls. The Confederacy, strapped for manpower, could ill afford the loss of tens of thousands of soldiers from their ranks. Federal forces, on the other hand, easily replaced those taken prisoner with new recruits. General Grant rationalized the issue, admitting that “it is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them, but it is humanity to those left in our ranks to fight our battles. We have got to fight until the military power of the South is exhausted, and if we release or exchange prisoners captured it simply becomes a war of extermination.”12

  The result of the end of exchange was severe overcrowding, rampant disease, inadequate food and clothing, and sadistic treatment by overworked guards. Given the Union’s greater resources, its prisons should have provided better conditions for their Confederate captives. Neither side, however, was willing to invest beyond the bare minimum in its prison system. The death rates were roughly comparable, with 15.5 percent of Union prisoners in Confederate custody dying and a 12 percent mortality rate among Confederate inmates. No other prison had as high a mortality rate as the notorious Andersonville, where 29 percent of the Union inmates perished. At Elmira, the worst Union facility, the death rate stood at 24 percent.

  Letters from POWs on both sides told similar stories. Louis Leon, a Confederate soldier confined at Elmira, wrote of a bustling trade in dead rats to supplement meager rations, and of a “frightful” smallpox epidemic that took away twenty men a day. A Rebel prisoner at Point Lookout, Maryland, documented his food ration consisting of “crackers as hard as flint stone, and full of worms.” He fixed the blame on the respective governments: “Dam Old Abe and old Jeff Davis,” he wrote, “dam the day I ’listed.”13

  George Comstock, a Union soldier held at Belle Isle near Richmond, worried, “It is a stiff battle now against insanity. We are so hungry.” Another resident of Belle Isle, J. Osborn Coburn, wrote in his diary a common question among his comrades: “Why does a just God permit them to continue evil doing? We are literally freezing and starving.… We must have something done or all shall perish in a little while.”14

  Fifty-eight miles below Macon lay the south Georgia town of Anderson. It consisted of five buildings: a church without a steeple, a tiny railroad depot, a shed that served as the county post office, and two dwellings. Nearby a new town took shape, mainly to serve a Confederate prison. Forty buildings rose from the dirt in early 1864, including homes for officers, hospitals, and storehouses. A stockade twelve feet high went up, enclosing a pleasant area of thirty acres covered with trees. The trees soon disappeared; all that remained when the Union prisoners arrived was a large open space with no shelter other than what the inmates could provide for themselves, though abundant pine forests surrounded the camp. Digging holes, erecting shelters from bits of cloth, sticks, and mud, or merely suffering the elements, from the blazing hot Georgia summer sun to the bone-chilling, damp winters, the prisoners, forty thousand in a facility built to hold about ten thousand, did the best they could. The Rebels named this place Andersonville.15

  Inside the stockade, guards set off an area twenty feet from the inner wall. This marked the “dead line,” a common feature in prisons on both sides. If an unfortunate prisoner staggered beyond the boundary, Rebel sentries opened fire. On more than one occasion, the body remained where it fell, devoured by rats, as a warning to any who might contemplate escaping. Any guard who killed a Union prisoner trespassing over or even near the dead line received a two-week furlough.

  A stream ran through the prison, quickly becoming a fetid sewer. The prisoners drew their drinking water from it; they also emptied their bowels into the sluggish channel, having no other choice in the crowded conditions. By the summer of 1864, the stream was a black slash through the sandy dirt of the prison, reeking of excrement and swarming with flies. They would go without water. Those too weak to make it to the dried streambed relieved themselves where they slept. They died covered with grime and filth, emitting an unimaginable stench that was multiplied by the number of fatalities. Private Charles Mosher recalled one unfortunate prisoner “with not only the lice and fleas feeding on him, but out of every aperture of his body the maggots were crawling.”16

  The death rate was so high that summer—one man every eleven minutes on some days—sixteen thousand overall—that Rebel guards relaxed discipline as long as the prisoners avoided the dead line. Frank Bailey of the 6th Pennsylvania Reserves saw comrades dying “like dogs.” Another confided to his diary, “It is plain to me that all will die.” Some soldiers deliberately stepped over the dead line as a quick dispatch from their misery. Rumors circulated that Captain Henry Wirz, the Swiss immigrant who commanded the facility, shot inmates near death to expedite the process and make room for newcomers. Occasionally, the men would catch a glimpse of a wagon parked outside the prison’s main entrance, weighed down with stripped Yankee corpses stacked on top of each other, rigid as logs, and covered with black flies. The wagons carried the bodies to a ditch some distance from the camp, where they were tumbled out and covered with a thin layer of dirt.17

  The prison shocked visitors, but they rationalized what they saw as the fault of federal authorities. Kate Cumming visited Andersonville during that fatal summer of 1864. She admitted, “My heart sank within me at seeing so many human beings crowded so closely together.” As for culpability, she had no doubts: “O how I thought of him who is the cause of all this woe on his fellow-countrymen—Abraham Lincoln. What kind of a heart can he have, to leave these poor wretches here?… To think of how often we have begged for exchange; but this unfeeling man knows what a terrible punishment it is for our men to be in northern prisons, and how valuable every one of them is to us.… May Heaven help us all! But war is terrible.”18

  The absence of an exchange agreement provided a good cover for both sides to disavow deliberate mistreatment. The situation of prisoners, even prior to the breakdown of exchanges, however, was scarcely better. Neither side was equipped to absorb and maintain the volume of prisoners that the war generated. Franklin Dick, in charge of a Union prison in St. Louis, wrote to his commander in Illinois in November 1862, pleading for relief. “The military prisons here are overcrowded and sickness prevailing amongst the prisoners and is rapidly increasing.” Dick reported that large numbers of sick and dying men lay on the prison floor. He appealed unsuccessfully to the commander to remove a group of prisoners across the river to Illinois.19

  Everyone in the Andersonville stockade knew of Dr. White, the chief surgeon. The smallest wound, a splinter or even a scratched mosquito bite, could lead to gangrene, at which point Dr. White would perform an amputation, sawing off limbs without anesthesia or a shot of whiskey. The lack of fruit and vegetables meant that few prisoners avoided scurvy, a disease that, among other symptoms, resulted in the loss of feeling in the extremities, therefore leaving the sufferer exposed to the threat of gangrene and a visit to Dr. White.

  Captain Wirz either relished torturing the prisoners by withholding food and water or was a victim of ungenerous officers up the line who would not or could not provision the facility properly. The Confederacy could barely feed its own soldiers, let alone a burgeoning prison population. Union authorities believed the worst version of events, and after the war Captain Wirz became the only Rebel officer or official hanged for war crimes. The local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a statue to Captain Wirz in the town of Anderson. The inscription quotes Jefferson Davis: “When time shall have softened passion and prejudice, when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation, then Justice, holding evenly her scales, will require much of past censure and praise to change places.”20

  The prisoners blamed Wirz and the guards for their plight, though often as part of a longer list of guilty parties. Union prisoner Amos Stearns wondered, “Day after day passes, and nothing is done about taking us out of this bull pen. Can it be that our government does not ca
re for men who have served it faithfully for most three years?” Private William Tritt blamed “Old Abe and the niggers” for his plight, as did many other inmates in Confederate prisons who understood that were it not for the impasse over black prisoner exchanges, they would be free. Another captive, Sergeant William Stevens from Vermont, claimed he harbored “abolition principles” prior to his imprisonment, but he knew “that the only reason our Government has for leaving us in such a condition was a miserable quibble, about the ‘exchange’ Negroes.” In truth, there were not many blacks to exchange. Confederates sent relatively few African Americans to prison. Rebel forces typically executed captured black troops or remanded them into slavery. The comments of the Union captives, though, indicated that the emancipationist sentiment even among sympathetic federal troops was fragile.21

  The press on both sides used the prison atrocities as rallying points to continue the war. The southern press, low on newsprint by 1864, and dwindling in circulation as Union forces advanced, could not win this propaganda contest. Northern papers and magazines published shocking pictures of emaciated former inmates with accompanying stories of the horrors of their captivity. Harper’s chronicled the story of Private Jackson Broshers, a twenty-year-old soldier from Indiana incarcerated at Belle Isle until he escaped in March 1864. Broshers stood six feet and one inch tall and weighed 185 pounds upon his capture. After a little over three months at Belle Isle, his weight had dropped to 108 pounds. The writer instructed, “It is not the effect of disease that we see in these pictures; it is the consequence of starvation.… There is no civilized nation in the world with which we could be at war which would suffer the prisoners in its hands to receive such treatment … and the reason is, that none of them are slaveholding nations, for nowhere are human life and human nature so cheap as among those who treat human beings like cattle.”22