Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  32. Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States during the Great Rebellion, 2nd ed. (Washington, 1865), 420.

  worked well enough to empty the prisons except for captives too sick or wounded to travel.33

  But two matters brought exchanges to a halt during 1863. First was the northern response to the southern threat to reenslave or execute captured black soldiers and their officers. When the Confederate Congress in May 1863 authorized this policy, which Jefferson Davis had announced four months earlier, the Union War Department suspended the cartel in order to hold southern prisoners as hostages against fulfillment of the threat. A trickle of informal exchanges continued, but the big battles in the second half of 1863 soon filled makeshift prisons with thousands of men. Grant averted an even greater problem by paroling the 30,000 Vicksburg captives; Banks followed suit with the 7,000 captured at Port Hudson. But the South's handling of these parolees provoked a second and clinching breakdown in exchange negotiations. Alleging technical irregularities in their paroles, the Confederacy arbitrarily declared many of them exchanged (without any real exchange taking place) and returned them to duty. Grant was outraged when the Union army recaptured some of these men at Chattanooga.34

  Attempts to renew the cartel foundered on the southern refusal to treat freedmen soldiers as prisoners of war or to admit culpability in the case of the Vicksburg parolees. "The enlistment of our slaves is a barbarity," declared the head of the Confederate Bureau of War. "No people . . . could tolerate . . . the use of savages [against them]. . . . We cannot on any principle allow that our property can acquire adverse rights by virtue of a theft of it." By the end of 1863 the Confederacy expressed a willingness to exchange black captives whom it considered to have been legally free when they enlisted.35 But the South would "die in the last ditch," said the Confederate exchange commissioner, before "giving up the right to send slaves back to slavery as property recaptured." Very well, responded Union Secretary of War Stanton. The 26,000 rebel captives in northern prisons could stay there. For the Union government to accede to Confederate conditions would be "a

  33. William B. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (Columbus, Ohio, 1930), chaps. 1–5.

  34. Ibid., 99–113; O.R., Ser. II, Vols. 5 and 6.

  35. Edward Younger, ed., Inside the Confederate Government: The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean (New York, 1957), 92–93; Benjamin F. Butler to Kellogg Carter, Nov. 29, 1863, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library; Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–186; (New York, 1956), 171.

  shameful dishonor. . . . When [the rebels] agree to exchange all alike there will be no difficulty."36 After becoming general in chief, Grant confirmed this hard line. "No distinction whatever will be made in the exchange between white and colored prisoners," he ordered on April 17, 1864. And there must be "released to us a sufficient number of officers and men as were captured and paroled at Vicksburg and Port Hudson. . . . Non-acquiescence by the Confederate authorities in both or either of these propositions will be regarded as a refusal on their part to agree to the further exchange of prisoners."37 Confederate authorities did not acquiesce.

  The South's actual treatment of black prisoners is hard to ascertain. Even the number of Negro captives is unknown, for in refusing to acknowledge them as legitimate prisoners the Confederates kept few records. Many black captives never made it to prison camp. In the spirit of Secretary of War Seddon's early directive that "we ought never to be inconvenienced with such prisoners . . . summary execution must therefore be inflicted on those taken," hundreds were massacred at Fort Pillow, Poison Spring, the Crater, and elsewhere.38 An affidavit by a Union sergeant described what happened after Confederates recaptured Plymouth on the North Carolina coast in April 1864:

  All the negroes found in blue uniform or with any outward marks of a Union soldier upon him was killed—I saw some taken into the woods and hung—Others I saw stripped of all their clothing, and they stood upon the bank of the river with their faces riverwards and then they were shot—Still others were killed by having their brains beaten out by the butt end of the muskets in the hands of the Rebels—

  All were not killed the day of the capture—Those that were not, were placed in a room with their officers, they (the Officers) having previously been dragged through the town with ropes around their necks, where they were kept confined until the following morning when the remainder of the black soldiers were killed.'39

  36. O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 6, pp. 441–42, 647–49, 226.

  37. Ibid., Vol. 7, pp. 62–63.

  38. Ibid., Vol. 4, p. 954, Vol. 7, p. 204.

  39. Benjamin Butler to Ulysses S. Grant, July 12, 1864, enclosing affidavit of Samuel Johnson, Letters Received by General Grant, Records of the Headquarters of the Army, RG 108, National Archives, printed in Berlin, ed., The Black Military Experience, 588–89; also published with standard punctuation in O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 7, pp. 459–60.

  Black prisoners who survived the initial rage of their captors sometimes found themselves returned as slaves to their old masters or, occasionally, sold to a new one. While awaiting this fate they were often placed at hard labor on Confederate fortifications. The Mobile Advertiser and Register of October 15, 1864, published a list of 575 black prisoners in that city working as laborers until owners claimed them.40

  What to do about the murder or enslavement of black captives presented the Union government with a dilemma. At first Lincoln threatened an eye-for-an-eye retaliation. "For every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war," he ordered on July 30, 1863, "a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works." But this was easier said than done; as Lincoln himself put it, "the difficulty is not in stating the principle, but in practically applying it."41 After the Fort Pillow massacre the cabinet spent two meetings trying to determine a response. To execute an equal number of rebel prisoners would punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. The government must not undertake such a "barbarous . . . inhuman policy," declared Secretary of the Navy Welles. Lincoln agreed that "blood can not restore blood, and government should not act for revenge." The cabinet decided to retaliate against actual offenders from Forrest's command, if any were captured, and to warn Richmond that a certain number of southern officers in northern prisons would be set apart as hostages against such occurrences in the future.42

  But no record exists that either recommendation was carried out. As Lincoln sadly told Frederick Douglass, "if once begun, there was no telling where [retaliation] would end." Execution of innocent southern prisoners—or even guilty ones—would produce Confederate retaliation against northern prisoners in a never-ending vicious cycle. In the final analysis, concluded the Union exchange commissioner, these cases "can

  40. Walter L. Williams, "Again in Chains: Black Soldiers Suffering in Captivity," Civil War Times Illustrated, 20 (May 1981), 40–43; Cornish, Sable Arm, 177–78. For two directives from Secretary of War Seddon concerning the return of captured blacks to slavery, dated June 3, 1863, and Aug. 31, 1864, see O.R., Ser. II, Vol.5, pp. 966–67, Vol. 7, 703–4.

  41. CWL, VI, 357, VII, 382.

  42. Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York, 1960), II, 24;CWL, VII, 329, 345–46; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), VI, 478–84.

  only be effectually reached by a successful prosecution of the war." After all, "the rebellion exists on a question connected with the right or power of the South to hold the colored race in slavery; and the South will only yield this right under military compulsion." Thus "the loyal people of the United States [must] prosecute this war with all the energy that God has given them."43

  Union field commanders in South Carolina and Virginia carried out the only official retaliation for southern treatment of black prisoners. When Confederates at Charlest
on and near Richmond put captured Negroes to work on fortifications under enemy fire in 1864, northern generals promptly placed an equal number of rebel prisoners at work on Union facilities under fire. This ended the Confederate practice. Some black soldiers did their own retaliating. After Fort Pillow several Negro units vowed to take no prisoners and yelled "Remember Fort Pillow" when they went into action. "The darkies fought ferociously," wrote Captain Charles Francis Adams, Jr., of an attack by a black division against the Petersburg defenses on June 15, 1864. "If they murder prisoners, as I hear they did . . . they can hardly be blamed."44

  Although Union threats of retaliation did little to help ex-slaves captured by Confederates, they appear to have forced southern officials to make a distinction between former slaves and free blacks. "The serious consequences," wrote Secretary of War Seddon to South Carolina's governor, "which might ensue from a rigid enforcement of the act of Congress" (which required all captured blacks to be turned over to states for punishment as insurrectionists) compel us "to make a distinction between negroes so taken who can be recognized or identified as slaves and those who were free inhabitants of the Federal States."45 The South generally treated the latter—along with white officers of black regiments—as prisoners of war. This did not necessarily mean equal treatment. Prison guards singled out black captives for latrine and burial details or other onerous labor. At Libby Prison in Richmond ten white officers and four enlisted men of a black regiment were confined to a small cell next to the kitchen where they subsisted on bread and water

  43. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, rev. ed. (1892; Collier Books reprint, 1962),348–49; O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 6, p. 171.

  44. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Charles Francis Adams, June 19, 1864, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), II, 154.

  45. O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 7, pp. 703–4. See also Howard C. Westwood, "Captive Black Union Soldiers in Charleston—What to Do?" CWH, 28 (1982), 30–31, 38, 41.

  and almost suffocated from cooking smoke. "An open tub," wrote anther prisoner, "was placed in the room for the reception of their excrement, where it was permitted to remain for days before removal." In South Carolina captured black soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts and other northern units were kept in the Charleston jail rather than in a POW camp.46

  They probably fared as well in jail—if not better—as their white fellows in war prisons. The principal issue that aroused northern emotions was not the treatment of black prisoners but of all Union prisoners. As the heavy fighting of 1864 piled up captives in jerry-built prisons, grim stories of disease, starvation, and brutality began to filter northward. The camp at Andersonville in southwest Georgia became representative in northern eyes of southern barbarity. Andersonville prison was built in early 1864 to accommodate captives previously held at Belle Isle on the James River near Richmond, because the proximity of Union forces threatened liberation of these prisoners and the overworked transport system of Virginia could barely feed southern citizens and soldiers, let alone Yankees. A stockade camp of sixteen acres designed for 10,000 prisoners, Andersonville soon became overcrowded with captives from Sherman's army as well from the eastern theater. It was enlarged to twenty-six acres, in which 33,000 men were packed by August 1864—an average of thirty-four square feet per man—without shade in a Deep South summer and with no shelter except what they could rig from sticks, tent flies, blankets, and odd bits of cloth. (By way of comparison, the Union prison camp at Elmira, New York, generally considered the worst northern prison, provided barracks for the maximum of 9,600 captives living inside a forty-acre enclosure—an average of 180 square feet per man.) During some weeks in the summer of 1864 more than a hundred prisoners died every day in Andersonville. Altogether 13,000 of the 45,000 men imprisoned there died of disease, exposure, or malnutrition.47

  Andersonville was the most extreme example of what many northerners regarded as a fiendish plot to murder Yankee prisoners.48 After the

  46. Frank L. Byrne, ed., "A General Behind Bars: Neal Dow in Libby Prison," in William B. Hesseltine, ed., Civil War Prisons (Kent, Ohio, 1962), 77; Williams, "Again in Chains," loc. cit., 41; Westwood, "Captive Black Union Soldiers," loc.cit., 39

  47. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, chap. 7; Ovid L. Futch, History of Andersonville Prison (Gainesville, Fla., 1968); Andersonville (Eastern Acorn Press, n.p., 1983).

  48. No other southern prison ever held more than one-quarter as many men as Andersonville

  war a Union military commission tried and executed its commandant, Henry Wirz, for war crimes—the only such trial to result from the Civil War. Whether Wirz was actually guilty of anything worse than bad temper and inefficiency remains controversial today. In any case, he served as a scapegoat for the purported sins of the South. The large genre of prisoner memoirs, which lost nothing in melodramatics with passage of time, kept alive the bitterness for decades after the war. On this matter, at least, the victors wrote the history, for at least five-sixths of the memoirs were written by northerners.49

  During 1864 a crescendo rose in the northern press demanding retribution against rebel prisoners to coerce better treatment of Union captives. "Retaliation is a terrible thing," conceded the New York Times,"but the miseries and pains and the slowly wasting life of our brethren and friends in those horrible prisons is a worse thing. No people or government ought to allow its soldiers to be treated for one day as our men have been treated for the last three years." When a special exchange of sick prisoners in April returned to the North several living skeletons, woodcut copies of their photographs appeared in illustrated papers and produced a tidal wave of rage. What else could one expect of slaveholders "born to tyranny and reared to cruelty?" asked the normally moderate Times.50 The Committee on the Conduct of the War and the U.S. Sanitary Commission each published an account of Confederate prison conditions based on intelligence reports and on interviews with exchanged or escaped prisoners. "The enormity of the crime committed by the rebels," commented Secretary of War Stanton, "cannot but fill with horror the civilized world. . . . There appears to have been a deliberate system of savage and barbarous treatment." An editorial in an Atlanta newspaper during August made its way across the lines and was picked up by the northern press: "During one of the intensely hot days of last week more than 300 sick and wounded Yankees died at's maximum of 33,000 in August 1864. The largest northern prison was at Point Lookout in southern Maryland, which held 20,000 men at one time. Measured by mortality statistics, Andersonville was not the worst southern prison. That dubious distinction belonged to Salisbury, North Carolina, where 34 percent (compared with Andersonville's 29 percent) of the total of 10,321 men incarcerated there died. The highest death rate in a northern prison was 24 percent at Elmira.

  49. Based on a count of the 250 prisoner memoirs listed in the bibliography of Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons.

  50. New York Times, Mar. 31, April 22, 1864, quoted in Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, 194, 195.

  Andersonville. We thank Heaven for such blessings." This was the sort of thing that convinced otherwise sensible northerners that "Jefferson Davis's policy is to starve and freeze and kill off by inches all the prisoners he dares not butcher outright. . . . We cannot retaliate, it is said; but why can we not?"51

  The Union War Department did institute a limited retaliation. In May 1864, Stanton reduced prisoner rations to the same level that the Confederate army issued to its own soldiers. In theory this placed rebel prisoners on the same footing as Yankee prisoners in the South, who in theory received the same rations as Confederate soldiers. But in practice few southern soldiers ever got the official ration by 1864—and Union prisoners inevitably got even less—so most rebel captives in the North probably ate better than they had in their own army. Nevertheless, the reduction of prisoner rations was indicative of a hardening northern attitude. Combined with the huge increase in the number of prisoners during 1864, this produced a deterioration of conditions in north
ern prisons until the suffering, sickness, and death in some of them rivaled that in southern prisons—except Andersonville, which was in a class by itself.52

  This state of affairs produced enormous pressures for a renewal of exchanges. Many inmates at Andersonville and other southern prisons signed petitions to Lincoln asking for renewal, and the Confederates allowed delegations of prisoners to bear these petitions to Washington. Nothing came of them. Entries in prison diaries at Andersonville became increasingly bitter as the summer wore on: "What can the Government be thinking of to let soldiers die in this filthy place?" "Can a government exist and let their men die inch by inch here?" "I do not think that our rulers can be so base to their men." "We are losing all trust in old Abe."53 A spokesman for a group of clergymen and physicians implored Lincoln in September 1864: "For God's sake, interpose! . . . We know you can have them exchanged if you give your attention to it. It is simple murder to neglect it longer." From local Republican leaders came warnings that many good Union men "will work and vote

  51. O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 7, p. 110; Atlanta Intelligencer (published at Macon), Aug. 19,1864, quoted in A. A. Hoehling, ed., Last Train from Atlanta (New York, 1958),330; and in Samuel Carter III, The Siege of Atlanta, 1864 (New York, 1973), 296;Strong, Diary, 494.