Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  More typical, though, was the story of James and Cora, the couple who corresponded so passionately while gazing at each other’s photographs. “I do earnestly hope,” James wrote in December 1864, “that ere another Christmas shall have come, the longings of this one will have been displaced by full fruition!” Before the next Christmas he was indeed free and traveled to Philadelphia to meet Cora. But after a brief stay, James returned South and married a local woman. The two pen pals never saw each other again. When Cora married, she returned all James’s letters. Then James’s wife gave birth to a daughter, whom he named Cora. “I’d give my right arm,” Joslyn said, “to know the rest of that story.”

  I was curious to hear more of Joslyn’s. I wondered why she and other women I’d met, beginning with Sue Curtis in North Carolina, were so obsessed with the War’s prisoners—a side of the conflict few men seemed passionate about. In fact, given that 400,000 men were captured during the War, almost twice the toll of combat dead, the fate of POWs was arguably the most neglected aspect of the conflict.

  “This may sound sexist,” Joslyn said, “but my theory is that men like the Civil War because it’s an action story, they’re caught up in the battlefield drama. The prisoners are an emotional side of the War. Women are attracted to all that raw feeling, we understand it better, it brings out a mothering instinct.” She fingered the autograph album. “Remember, a lot of these soldiers were still boys, not yet twenty, starving in Northern prison camps, with no idea of when if ever they’d get home. More than anything, these guys desperately needed their mommies.”

  Joslyn’s own love life had imitated her research. A tomboy who liked playing war as a child (“The boys were bullies, so they always played the Yankees”), she’d met her future husband while dating a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute. “My date said he had a roommate with a Civil War musket. That was Rick. I always say I married him for his gun.”

  Actually, they’d fallen in love later, while writing letters during Rick’s air force service. There was another parallel; Rick’s family came from up North. Luckily, he discovered he had a distant forebear who might have fought for the South. “It was almost a criterion of our getting married,” Joslyn said. She’d saved all their letters, but planned to burn them someday. “I don’t want anyone studying us the way I’ve been studying my fellahs.”

  Joslyn gave me a signed copy of the book she’d written about rebel prisoners. It had been published with little fanfare by a small press. “Almost a collector’s item,” she joked. I asked how she felt about laboring in relative obscurity.

  Joslyn pondered this for a moment, squinting through her octagonal glasses. “I take the long view,” she said. “People like me, we’re the keepers of the past, like those monks with their Latin books back in the Dark Ages. Or maybe like the folks in Eastern Europe who kept their real history and religion alive after the Russian Revolution and all the attempts to purge the past. Now that Communism’s gone, the truth is coming out of the archives.”

  I wasn’t sure I caught the analogy. Leningrad seemed a long way from Point Lookout. But not to Joslyn. “To me, Civil War historians—Northern ones at least—are locking away the facts, too,” she said. “So little people like me have to keep the true story alive. That way, when the Revolution ends, and people come looking for the history, we can say, ‘Here it is. We kept it for you.’”

  READING JOSLYN’S BOOK that night at a roadside motel, I better understood what she meant. Prisoners’ love letters didn’t figure much in her book, except to illustrate the horrors of Northern POW camps. This, in turn, was part of a broader mission: to redress the distorted picture most Americans had of Civil War POWs, derived from “myths” about Andersonville and its commander, Henry Wirz. In the view of Joslyn and the Southern historians she cited, rebel prisoners suffered far more than Union ones, and the North was responsible for the misery of both blue and gray inmates because of its cruel policies regarding prisoner exchange.

  Most of this was news to me. Roughly 13,000 prisoners died from starvation and disease at Andersonville, and Henry Wirz went to the gallows as a war criminal, the only man so charged in American history. Refurbishing his reputation, and that of the prison camp he commanded, seemed an exceptionally quixotic mission, notwithstanding the South’s passion for lost causes.

  So I abandoned Sherman’s March and headed instead for Andersonville, near Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains in Georgia’s rural southwest. Winding slowly out of upland Georgia and into the fertile prairie beyond, I felt as though I’d been here before. The crops might change, but the roadscape on small highways appeared much the same from southern Virginia to western Arkansas: single-wide trailers with satellite dishes, low brick ranches with home-based businesses (beauty parlor, blade-sharpening, fish taxidermy, towing and recovery), white-frame churches with exclamatory sermon signs (“Presenting Jesus!”), flyspeck settlements—“Welcome to Forkland. Town of Opportunities. Pop 764”—abandoned to time and kudzu vines and men in bib overalls loitering before a faded Gas and Gro (“Tank and Tummy—Fill Em Up”). Then a small town with a stone rebel on the square and a “family restaurant” serving plate lunches of chicken and dumplings, candied yams, turnip greens, pear salad and pecan pie. Then fields and woods again.

  It was foolish to speak of “one South,” just as it was to speak of one North. The former states of the Confederacy encompassed dozens of subcultures, from the Hispanic enclaves of Florida and Texas, to the Cajun country of south Louisiana, to the hardscrabble hills of Appalachia. Still, the geographic kinship between far-flung stretches of the backcountry South offered some clue to the cohesion and resilience the region displayed during the Civil War, and to the South’s cherishing of Confederate memory ever since.

  Nearing Andersonville, I was momentarily blinded by what looked like a snow flurry: bolls of cotton blowing across the road from a just-picked field. This, too, was a reminder of what had once bound the rural South together. Cotton was enjoying a comeback in the South and the crop always came as a small miracle to me. It seemed incredible that these perfect white blobs sprouted straight from nature, and that something so natural could at the same time seem so artificial.

  My rural reverie ended abruptly at the gate to the national park at Andersonville. The entrance road ran straight into a sea of white gravestones packed so closely together that they almost touched, like piano keys. Beneath lay the 13,000 Northern soldiers who died at Andersonville, a toll that roughly equalled the combined Union combat deaths in the War’s five bloodiest battles: Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, Antietam.

  I’d arrived on a quiet weekday and a ranger named Fred Sanchez agreed to show me around. Walking through the cemetery, he pointed out that the headstones marking the camp’s earliest casualties were better spaced than the graves of those who died later. Initially, he explained, prisoners were buried in simple pine coffins. Then, as the death toll mounted, bodies were buried in trenches and covered with pine planks. Before long, even this meager covering was abandoned. “The gravediggers also started burying the corpses on their sides so they could pack more in,” Sanchez said.

  A few graves stood out from the huddled rows of stone. One, inscribed “12196 L.S. Tuttle, Sgt., Me.,” had a marble dove cemented on top, facing north. Tuttle’s widow, or one of his Maine comrades, was believed to have added the dove decades after the War. Six other graves lay to one side of the long tidy ranks. These belonged to the so-called Raiders, camp ruffians who preyed on weaker prisoners. Following a trial in which inmates acted as lawyers and jurors, the Raiders were hanged and buried apart from their fellow prisoners.

  The actual prison site lay a quarter-mile from the graveyard, on what was now an undulating field. It was here, over the course of fourteen months in 1864 and 1865, that Confederate guards herded 41,000 Union prisoners into a log stockade unsheltered from Georgia’s harsh sun and heavy rains. The pen was designed for a third the number of men it eventually enclosed.
This left prisoners in the summer of 1864 with an average of twenty square feet of living space on which to pitch their “shebangs,” A-shaped hovels fashioned from overcoats, blankets and whatever else the prisoners could scrounge.

  Running through the stockade yard was a stream, Andersonville’s only water supply and also the site of the camp’s latrines, called “sinks.” The stream, a branch of the inaptly named Sweetwater Creek, quickly backed up in 1864 and flooded much of the camp. “You can see from wartime photographs that it was basically a swamp crusted with human waste,” Sanchez said. On windy days, the stench carried all the way to Americus, ten miles away. During storms, shebangs toppled and the stockade yard became a slurry of mud, feces and vermin. One survivor wrote: “We had to strain the water through our teeth to keep the maggots out.”

  Nothing remained of the original stockade, though a few log walls had been reconstructed by the Park Service. There were also posts delineating the “deadline,” a perimeter inside the stockade that no prisoner could cross without risking gunfire from the guard towers (this was also the origin of the modern newspaper phrase). Other markers showed where prisoners dug molelike holes in a frantic search for clean water, shade, and, in some instances, escape tunnels.

  At its peak squalor, Andersonville claimed the lives of 127 men in a single day. Many died from typhoid or gangrene, others from malnutrition. Vitamin deficiencies caused scurvy and scorbutus, painful diseases that rotted gums, loosened teeth, and ulcerated flesh. A small number of men were shot at the deadline or buried alive when their crude burrows caved in. Seven severely depressed prisoners were listed as having died of “nostalgia.” Sanchez said some despairing prisoners intentionally crossed the deadline, or drank from the toxic swamp surrounding the sinks.

  But the biggest killers by far were diarrhea and dysentery. This was due not only to the camp’s lack of sanitation, but also to rations of rotted meat and coarse grain filled with shredded corncob, which irritated men’s already weak intestines. There was a cruel irony to this. Pointing to several belching smokestacks in the distance, Sanchez said the surrounding landscape was now mined for kaolin, a chalky mineral used to make Kaopectate. “You had thousands of men dying of the runs right on top of one of the world’s richest lodes of anti-diarrhea medicine,” he said.

  Sanchez’s description of the handling of the dead evoked images of a plague-ridden medieval village. Each morning, prisoners hauled comrades who had died in the night to the camp’s South Gate, where lumber wagons collected the corpses, twenty per load. Prisoners paid for the privilege of bringing out the dead, which gave them a few moments to forage for firewood. Prisoners also stripped the dead of clothes to use as patching for their shebangs.

  Near the South Gate, signs now marked the location of vanished prison buildings, including the “Deadhouse” and “Dissecting House.” The camp’s commander, Henry Wirz, ordered doctors to examine corpses to determine what killed them—and to prevent any men from escaping by feigning death. The rebels also assigned most of the burial details and other labor outside the stockade to black prisoners, whose skin color made them more conspicuous in the event of escape. Ironically, this meant that black POWs fared much better than whites. Spending more time outside the fetid prison confines, blacks were able to forage, and also to get exercise and fresh air denied other prisoners.

  As Sanchez grimly detailed all this, we strolled across the stockade yard, now a lush field blooming with goldenrod. Butterflies fluttered in the tall grass. On Civil War battlefields, there were always a few cannons and trenches to summon images of combat and bloodshed. Here, nothing. The only affliction that remained at all palpable was Andersonville’s stifling climate. Even in autumn, the air felt suffocatingly humid, and mushrooms blanketed the boggy earth. The stream running through the camp was a brackish rivulet brimming with mosquitoes and gnats.

  Andersonville differed from battlefields in another essential way. The suffering here was slow, undramatic, inglorious. For Sanchez, who had worked at the park for eighteen years, it was precisely this lack of drama that made Andersonville’s horror so insidious. “We like to focus on the escapes, the shootings at the deadline, the extraordinary moments here,” he said. “But in a way, the Andersonville story is very boring. It’s a personal story of survival. Where will my next meal come from? Where can I find shade? Will my bowels hold out another day?”

  This degrading struggle must have seemed doubly cruel to the battle veterans incarcerated at Andersonville. “Imagine surviving Gettysburg,” Sanchez said, “only to end up here, wasting away from diarrhea.”

  Sanchez left me there to wander around for a while and also to visit a small building just beside the camp site, labeled Prisoner of War Museum. Inside, there was almost nothing of what Sanchez had just told me. Instead, a few items from Andersonville were displayed as part of a broad exhibit on American POWs from the Revolution to the Gulf War.

  A larger museum, at the park entrance, offered videos of former World War II prisoners telling about their wretched treatment by the Germans and Japanese. A short, introductory video on Andersonville—with flabby reenactors farbishly cast as starving prisoners—explained that the South was unprepared for so many POWs, due to the North’s refusal to exchange prisoners midway through the War. A wall exhibit gave the Andersonville tragedy a similar spin, noting that the North “realized it was to their advantage” to end exchanges because the South needed manpower more than the Union. Cited as evidence was a quote from Grant: “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.”

  This was, at best, a selective and misleading version of events. No mention was made of another reason the North halted exchanges: to protest the South’s refusal to trade the growing number of black soldiers in Union ranks. In May 1863, the Confederate Congress declared that the South would re-enslave captured blacks and execute their white officers. Grant, a grim purveyor of war by attrition, no doubt meant what he said. But he made his infamous statement more than a year after prisoner exchanges had already ended.

  This Southernized presentation seemed odd at a park administered by the U.S. government. Nor did the inclusion of POW stories from other wars strike me as altogether benign. Its impact was to dilute the Andersonville tragedy, and also to sugar-coat its message for Americans; after all, the Confederates hadn’t tortured their prisoners like the Japanese and the Viet Cong had. Unmentioned at either museum was what seemed a crucial distinction: Andersonville lay on American soil and saw the death of 13,000 Americans in American custody.

  Heading over to the park office, I shared my reservations with Sanchez and two other rangers. The men shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. “You’re not the first to come out of there pissed off,” Sanchez said. “I’ve had to break up fights in that museum between Northerners and Southerners.”

  Controversy had dogged Andersonville ever since Clara Barton tried to establish it as a shrine to the dead immediately after the War. Southerners fiercely resisted any effort to memorialize the camp, fearing it would be used to demonize the region (or “wave the bloody shirt,” as efforts to exploit sectional passions were known in the late nineteenth century). It wasn’t until 1970 that a compromise was reached; Andersonville would become a national memorial, but only if it commemorated POWs from all American wars.

  Even so, when the park set up its first museum, “we took a lot of flak,” Sanchez said. “Southerners felt we were blaming them for what happened.” The park softened its presentation, and later added the small POW museum I’d visited by the stockade. This had caused a different sort of controversy. One exhibit, which mentioned the large number of American POWs who collaborated with the North Koreans, had to be rewritten after complaints by Korean War veterans.

  A new, much bigger POW museum was about to be built, and this had sparked yet another round of lobbying. An Alabama woman who headed a group called the Confederate POW Society demanded that
half the new exhibits be devoted to Northern prison camps. “She came in here and started ranting about ‘you-all’s government,’ as if the South wasn’t yet part of the nation,” one of the rangers said. The woman had since set up her own Confederate POW museum in the nearby hamlet of Andersonville. She and other diehards also gathered in Andersonville each year on the anniversary of Wirz’s hanging, a week hence, to honor the captain’s memory with song, speeches and prayer.

  When I asked what the ceremony was like, one of the rangers chuckled uneasily. “Very weird,” he said. “I have to live in this community so I shouldn’t say any more.”

  As soon as I left the park and drove across the highway to the small community of Andersonville, I saw why the rangers remained so reticent. Andersonville had become a village-sized apologia for the prison camp that bore its name. The counteroffensive began with a roadside historical marker honoring Wirz, erected by the state of Georgia in 1956. It stated: “Had he been an angel from heaven he could not have changed the pitiful tale of privation and hunger unless he had possessed the power to repeat the miracle of the loaves and fishes.”

  Just beside the railroad tracks, where Union prisoners had disembarked, stood another marker, erected just a year before my arrival. Andersonville, it said, “honors both the memory of the Union soldiers who suffered and Confederate soldiers who did their duty while experiencing illness and death in numbers comparable to their unfortunate prisoners.” This too, I’d later learn, was very misleading.

  A rebuilt train depot beside the tracks had become a museum devoted to local history, and to Wirz, including pictures of the medal of honor awarded him by the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 1981 for “uncommon valor and bravery involving risk of life above and beyond the call of duty in defense of his homeland and its noble ideals.” The SCV had also passed a resolution designating Wirz’s hanging on November 10, 1865, at 10:32 A.M., “the moment of martyrdom,” an occasion for annual remembrance of the “Confederate Hero-Martyr.”