Haunted by Atrocity

by Cloyd, Benjamin G.

  It would facilitate the management of the affairs of prisoners of War, and lead to a more direct responsibility if the commanders of stations where prisoners are held could be placed under the immediate control of the Commissary General of Prisoners. By the interposition of an intermediate commander the responsibility is weakened, and correspondence passing through him is necessarily much delayed, and through frequent change of commanders it is impossible to establish a uniform and permanent system of administration.25

  Hoffman naturally hoped to augment his power over the prison camps, but his letter also underscored the disordered state of affairs he faced and testified to his belief that only the creation of a properly structured bureaucracy (run by him) could adequately organize the chaos. Despite these obstacles, by January 1864 Hoffman succeeded in consolidating the prison bureaucracy through the implementation of an elaborate record-keeping system. Every month, at each camp, detailed rolls of prisoner arrivals, transfers, deaths, and prison expenditures were logged and forwarded to Hoffman’s Washington office for scrutiny. Although not a seamless process, and in sharp contrast to the Confederate camps nominally headed by Winder, Union prisons became better organized during the war. Organization, unfortunately, did not equate to a significant improvement in the quality of prisoner treatment.

  The comparatively superior structure of the Union’s prison bureaucracy was undeniable. Yet it was also undeniable that casualties in Union prisons multiplied throughout the war. As in the Confederacy, the end of exchange meant the burden of thousands of prisoners, which in turn strained the resources and available prison space of the Union. But the established Union prison system, not encumbered by the type of collapse occurring in the South, should have avoided the high casualty rates of its Confederate counterpart. It did not. At Elmira, the New York camp generally considered the worst Union prison, the 24-percent mortality rate rivaled the 29-percent figure compiled at Andersonville, and almost doubled the average casualty rates of all prisoners during the Civil War.26 During the war, 12 percent of Confederates held in Union prison camps died, compared to 15.5 percent of the Union soldiers imprisoned in Confederate prisons. The prevalence of diseases such as smallpox and dysentery, as historian James Gillispie convincingly argues, was the overwhelming (and unavoidable) killer of prisoners, even in the more stable Union prison system.27 The inability to treat such diseases explains much of the suffering in Civil War prisons, but the impersonal nature of the misery inflicted does not excuse or explain the willingness of both sides to abandon prisoners to their fate. The striking consistency of the prison experience in both the Union and Confederacy suggested that disease ravaged the prisoners and mismanagement heightened their anguish. But the existence of these horrors resulted from deliberately cruel choices made during a war defined by callous destruction.

  The prisoners themselves certainly thought so. A sense of fury dominated what Walt Whitman called “the scrawl’d, worn slips of paper” on which Confederate and Union prisoners documented their trials.28 The sentiments scribbled in prison diaries testified to the horrors experienced by Civil War prisoners and represented firsthand attempts not only to understand the existence of such misery but also to determine who bore responsibility for the suffering. Numerous Confederate captives chronicled the hardships they experienced in the North. Captain William Speer, imprisoned at Johnson’s Island, Ohio during 1862, stated that “the horrows of the prison are so grate . . . if everybody could Know & feel as I do I think there would be nomore Jales built.” Only the hope of exchange sustained Speer, who held President Lincoln responsible for the suffering. “I do believe,” Speer announced, “if Abraham Keeps me in here much longer that I will be a good lawyer as to asking questions & finding out the truth of all the reports.”29 Speer’s initial suspicion that something sinister existed in the Union policy toward Confederate captives made him one of the first to blame the Union administration for the harsh prison system. In an 1863 diary entry, Confederate soldier James E. Hall, held at Point Lookout, Maryland, lamented that there was “nothing that a man can eat. The crackers are as hard as flint stone, and full of worms. I don’t believe God ever intended for one man to pen another up and keep him in this manner. We ought to have enough to eat, anyhow.” Hall reserved his hostility for the two men he held responsible for the sad state of affairs at Point Lookout, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. “Dam Old Abe and old Jeff Davis,” he wrote; “dam the day I ‘listed.”30 Hall’s inclusion of Davis as a target of his frustration showed a sophisticated comprehension of the situation—prisoners of war were essentially pawns in the political maneuvering over exchange and as a group susceptible like no other to the bitterness of the increasingly violent conflict. The anger Speer and Hall directed at the two presidents, the personifications of the Union and Confederate governments, reflected a belief that powerful leaders could easily control government and bureaucracy if they so desired. These prisoners thus understood their suffering as caused by heartless, intentional policy choices.

  Other Confederate prisoners chronicled the litany of suffering. Sergeant Bartlett Yancey Malone, another inhabitant of Point Lookout, described the shooting of a fellow prisoner in the head by a Yankee guard. The captive’s crime, according to Malone, was “peepen threw the cracks of the plan-ken.”31 At Fort Delaware, Private Joseph Purvis denounced this “wretched place” and expressed fear that the smallpox, “Colra,” or yellow fever might catch him as it had many of his companions.32 Robert Bingham, who passed through Fort Norfolk and Fort Delaware before reaching Johnson’s Island, summed up the growing Confederate resentment against their experience in Union prisons. “The Yankee nation is the most infamously mean race that blights God’s green earth,” Bingham declared. Not only was “there no honor, no truth, no faith, no honesty among them,” but Bingham insisted, “they delight to insult and annoy defenseless captives.”33 By the last months of the war, a sense of despondency prevailed. Writing from Elmira, L. Leon described the bustling trade in dead rats among the prisoners along with the “frightful” smallpox outbreak that he claimed killed at least twenty men a day.34 Joseph Kern, at Point Lookout, told the grim tale of one man freezing to death in the early months of 1865 when a tent mate refused to share a blanket with him.35 On January 22, 1865, John Dooley, imprisoned on Johnson’s Island, finally received the news dreamed of for months. Although he rejoiced at the impending exchange, Dooley remained depressed about his surroundings. “There is continual suffering among the prisoners,” he wrote, and “many go to the slop barrels and garbage piles to gather from the refuse a handful of revolting food. Such is the infamous government we have to deal with, and now I do not wonder if we be overcome in the end.”36 Amid the tales of deprivation and illness the diarists perceived a consistent sense, regardless of prison, of conscious Union cruelty that threatened their already precarious survival.

  As strongly as the Confederate prisoners resented their treatment, Union prisoners at least matched, if not surpassed, the southern complaints. Like their Confederate counterparts, Union soldiers alleged intent to their suffering. The 1862 diary of Second Lieutenant Luther Jackson, captured at Shiloh and held in Montgomery, reflected the complexity of the nightmare in which prisoners found themselves ensnared. “This people are so mean in their revenges,” Jackson wrote; “how different from the treatment their prisoners get from us.” Jackson believed in the singular brutality of the Confederacy toward its prisoners. But for all the southern cruelty, it became increasingly difficult for Jackson to justify the innocence of his own government. Less than a month before his death, Jackson declared, “Ah! Uncle Sam! You don’t do right in not having prisoners exchanged sooner.” “If they care so little for us,” he continued, a few days later, “they had better disband their forces.”37 George Comstock, imprisoned at Libby and Belle Isle, acknowledged that “some are cursing the Government for not doing more for us.” Comstock, however, refused to attack the Union administration and remained hopeful despite his deteriorating h
ealth. “It is a stiff battle now against insanity,” he stated during the summer of 1863, “we are so hungry.” He also directed his anger at the Confederate guards, whom he sarcastically referred to as “noble southerners . . . pacing to and fro, and keenly watching for an excuse to shoot.” “It is horrible,” Comstock insisted, days before his exchange, “that men should be treated this way.”38 Captain Samuel Fiske, writing under the pseudonym Dunn Browne, also implicated the corrupt Confederate guards at Libby Prison as the main source of prisoner difficulty. “I have been among Italian brigands, and Greek pirates, and Bedouin Arabs,” he declared, but “for making a clean thing of the robbing business, commend me to the Confederate States of America, so styled. They descend to the minutiae of the profession in a way that should be instructive to all novices in the art.”39 Corporal Newell Burch decried the “awful, awful suffering” in Richmond and described how prisoners died from smallpox only to be replaced by more prisoners.40 Another inhabitant of Belle Isle, J. Osborn Coburn, found the conditions so appalling that he asked his diary, “Why does a just God permit them to continue evil doing?” Treated as a “beast” by the Confederacy, Coburn believed that “a terrible retribution awaited” the South. Although he retained faith in his “benevolent government,” by winter 1863, Coburn’s prospects seemed grim. “We are literally freezing and starving,” he despaired; “surely our country will not permit much longer. We must have something done or all shall perish in a little while.”41 But for all the detailed accounts of the miseries of Belle Isle and other Confederate prisons, the new prison stockade at Anderson-ville in 1864 soon replaced Richmond as the ultimate symbol of southern savagery.

  Although horrifying accounts of prisons such as Libby, Macon, and Columbia chronicled the suffering encountered there by Union prisoners during the last months of the war, from 1864 on Andersonville represented the nadir of the Confederate treatment of their captives.42 As Lieutenant Thomas Galwey noted in his diary, the prospect of ending up at Andersonville held such terror that it “nerved many a man to one more effort to escape capture.”43 Despite their best efforts, however, well over 40,000 men found themselves crammed into the Georgia prison during its existence. There, according to Private John Sawyer Patch, “one could see sights & sounds that would make his blood run cold.”44 Sergeant Henry W. Tisdale described the chaos during the summer months, when Andersonville’s population peaked. “The prison is one mess of human beings,” he wrote, and the disorganization and overcrowding manifested itself in the pollution of the stream, the lone source of drinking water, with human excrement. The water, Tisdale noted, “is never cleaned up and is a good deal of the time one seething mass of maggots.”45 According to Private Charlie Mosher, “the fleas, lice and maggots are holding high carnival in here.” Mosher related the appearance of 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.”46 Given these circumstances it is possible to wonder not why 13,000 prisoners died at Andersonville, but how the others did not.

  Many Andersonville diarists spent their time puzzling over who exactly bore the responsibility for their grim situation. Sergeant Charles Ross suspected that the deteriorating conditions, particularly the disease and absence of food, were not accidental. The Confederacy, he thought, intended “to starve us clear down to skeletons and then kill us outright.”47 Charles Lee, like Coburn at Belle Isle, mused that “it does seem as though the curse of God would rest upon a Government which treats their prisoners in this way.”48 Mosher blamed the brutality on the commonly vilified Captain Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville Prison, and the Confederate guards. The use of dogs to capture Union escapees particularly galled Mosher. To him the practice indicted not just Wirz, but southern society as a whole. Mosher bitterly wrote, “It must have taken years of education for men who claim to be civilized and Christianized to have reached this high state of trying to capture prisoners of war with blood hounds. None but a slaveholding people could or would do such things.”49 Although Wirz proved a popular target for Union criticism, many diarists reserved their venom for other Confederate officials. Francis Shaw referred to himself and his fellow prisoners as the unwilling “subjects of Old Jeff,” yet another indication that captives associated their suffering with policy choices, in this case, made by Davis.50

  But just as Union prisoners believed that their government would free them, they felt rejected as the months passed without exchange. In the eyes of Amos Stearns, the Union abandoned him to a miserable fate. “Day after day passes,” he worried, “and nothing is done about taking us out of this bull pen. Can it be that our government does not care for men who have served it faithfully for most three years?”51 George Read exclaimed, “If our government allows us to remain here . . . don’t talk to me of patriotism after this,” and he angrily declared that “somebody will, must receive an awful punishment for this. No human thing could be guilty of placing men in such a situation. I trust the ones that are to blame for it will receive a hard and just punishment.”52 Resentment toward the Union’s refusal to exchange showed as well—some prisoners bitterly complained of the injustice imposed on them in order to protect the rights of African Americans. Inhabitants of Andersonville such as Private William Tritt, who focused his anger on “Old Abe and the niggers,” and Private M. J. Umsted, who lamented, “all for the Sons of Africa,” revealed a frequent belief among Union prisoners that the Lincoln administration, not the Confederacy, represented the main obstacle to a resumption of exchange.53 It defied many prisoners’ racial logic and tested their loyalty that, as white men, they should have to endure captivity for the cause of African American freedom. The circulation among Andersonville prisoners of an anonymous poem, “They Have Left Us Here to Die,” aptly reflected the reality that while Union captives hated and blamed their Confederate hosts for their misery, they were not oblivious to the fact that their plight resulted in part from the actions of their own side.54

  As the accounts of atrocity accumulated, they cemented the realization, on both sides, that something terrible occurred in the prisons of the Civil War and thus began the complicated process of interpreting that horror. These early records, written in environments of extreme stress, represented the first efforts to assess responsibility for the suffering. What the diarists revealed was a world of deprivation and cruelty, and they maintained strong but, importantly, distinctly varied opinions about who they felt deserved blame. In the minds of various Civil War captives, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Henry Wirz, prison guards, the government, the Union, the Confederacy, African Americans, and many other agents all merited and received condemnation. Taken in total, the portrayal conveyed in these wartime accounts of the prisoner experience is one of sophistication. The prisoners, while intensely critical of their opposition, did not absolve their particular side or own leaders of responsibility. They recognized their unfortunate role in an increasingly destructive, all-or-nothing struggle and that their fate rested on the resolution of the issues essential to the war itself. Their testimony shows the essential brutality of the Civil War and the willingness of both sides to act with calculation and cruelty. But of course a complete understanding did not exist during the war itself. Prisoners struggled to comprehend their predicament as individuals, and so each emphasized different factors as they constructed their reasons for blame. This lack of consensus on the issue of responsibility set the tone for the prison controversy—from the beginning, discussion of Civil War prisons took place in an environment of recrimination, confusion, and discord.

  As Union and Confederate citizens realized the implications of the prisoner accounts trickling out of the camps, this tragedy within a tragedy inflamed public opinion. The prolonged controversy over the establishment and collapse of the exchange cartel sparked greater resentment against the opposition as both sides complained about the poor treatment of their captured soldiers. As early as December 23, 1861, the New York Herald described the conditi
ons Union prisoners experienced in Richmond as “the most brutal and savage known to modern civilization.” The Herald editor justified his assessment with descriptions of half-naked, starving prisoners. Not only did the captives suffer from a lack of care and medicine, the writer claimed; they also served as targets for the rifle practice of the Confederate guards. Although the accuracy of the Herald’s information may be questioned, the article revealed the anger aroused by the prisoner-of-war issue and its effectiveness as propaganda. By invoking the suffering of prisoners, and at times exaggerating the harsh conditions that they encountered, both sides further stoked already heated emotions. Their antipathy and revulsion for each other proved both intense and durable. Throughout the rest of the war, claims of deliberate atrocity continued to arise as the Union and Confederacy fought, not just to achieve victory, but to establish their moral superiority over their opponent. That desire fueled the Herald editor’s assertion that “the rights of honorable warfare, not to mention those of Christian civilization and tender heartedness, are not . . . regarded” in the Confederacy, as our “brethren of the South act towards their brethren of the North with a barbarity” not witnessed since “ancient times.”55 Not to be outdone, an increasingly outraged Harper’s Weekly described the “revolting” treatment and “sickening inhumanity” of “the filth” and “poison” Union captives endured.56 By characterizing each other as not just un-Christian, but purposefully barbaric, both Union and Confederate citizens interpreted the prisoner-of-war controversy during the conflict as motivation to support the sacrifices of their imprisoned troops and reason to celebrate the relative virtue of their causes.