The constant repetition of the themes of heroism, escape, and sacrifice by Union veterans, as well as the exclusion of the racial dimension from the prison controversy, was not accidental during the 1880s and 1890s—northern prison survivors wrote and spoke about their terrible experiences in order to better define their legacy. By emphasizing their heroism, the former prisoners hoped to bolster the national sense of respect for their suffering and warn against premature reconciliation with the South. The spellbinding accounts of escape offered testimony to the individual courage and indomitable spirit that the prisoners displayed in the face of adversity and boosted the entertainment value of their stories. Stressing their selfless sacrifices, meanwhile, allowed the prisoners to make their most important appeal to the American public—to remember the incredible human cost of the Civil War and the need for loyal service to the nation. In a time when Republican political dominance seemed increasingly fragile, these men felt a responsibility to revive flagging patriotism. They were gripped by a fear that, should their deeds fade into obscurity, the purpose of the war as they wanted to understand it, as a crusade to save the Union and not a revolution of racial equality, might as well. The feverish intensity with which northern prison survivors sought to ensure their interpretation of Civil War prisons reflected the uncertain direction of the United States in the late nineteenth century. Prison survivors, through their discussion of deliberately chosen concepts, wanted to ensure that a reunified America would retain the proper northern memory of the Civil War as inspiration for its future.
The desire for a proper understanding of the Civil War and its prisons existed in the former Confederate states as well. During the late nineteenth century white southerners constructed the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War, defining the conflict as an honorably contested battle over constitutional principles. Embracing the Lost Cause not only restored a sense of purpose and glory to the South’s defeat but offered “social stability” to a region deeply affected by sweeping changes in race, labor, and industrialization.31 But northern accusations of Confederate atrocities against prisoners challenged the southern understanding of the war and represented a threat to the celebration of the Confederate legacy. Southerners, resenting what they thought was a northern attempt to further dishonor an already defeated opponent, angrily refuted these accusations and strove to legitimize their own defensive counter memory of Civil War prisons.
As in the aftermath of the Hill-Blaine debate in 1876, the Southern Historical Society Papers (SHSP) took the lead in both defending the Confederate prison record and attacking the hypocritical North. The continued intensity of the northern charges, the editors sought to show, represented an effort to obscure the true facts about Civil War prisons. Throughout the late nineteenth century, the SHSP stridently maintained that the suffering of Union prisoners in the Confederacy occurred because of the Union’s own war policies. According to the SHSP, the prison casualties resulted from the combination of the blockade, which denied the Confederacy valuable materials and medicines; Sherman’s campaign, which simultaneously destroyed resources and severed Confederate prisons from their supplying railroad lines; and the failure to exchange, a policy that the SHSP claimed proved both the hypocrisy and the brutality of the Union cause. But it was not enough to prove that the “United States Government alone was responsible,” as the SHSP stated in 1880. Since northern “authorities were responsible for the suffering of prisoners,” the SHSP declared that “Elmira, Rock Island, Point Lookout, &c., are really more in need of ‘defence’ than Andersonville, with all of its admitted horrors.” By vindicating the Confederacy and attacking the Union prison system, the SHSP offered an explanation of the prison atrocities that inverted the northern logic. Stanton and Grant replaced Davis and Wirz in the deliberate mistreatment of Confederate prisoners, while the suffering of prisoners in the South became the regrettable but inevitable consequence of the cruel Union policies. The deflective counter memory of Civil War prisons bolstered by the SHSP both reflected and contributed to the Lost Cause interpretation of the conflict—that the South had nothing to be ashamed of, prison record included, no matter what the Yankees might say.32
The zealous defense of the South undertaken by the SHSP during the late 1870s and 1880s also included publishing the experiences of ex-Confederate prisoners. In 1879 James T. Wells described the “gloom, privation, and starvation” of prison life at Point Lookout, Maryland. But Wells saved special contempt for Major Patterson, the provost-marshal of the prison, whose conscience, Wells stated, “must burn him.” Patterson, claimed Wells, “was the impersonation of cruel malignity, hatred and revenge.” Like his Yankee counterparts, however, Wells also detailed his efforts at escape. A scheme to tunnel out of the prison, a “bold” plan Wells and his fellow prisoners attempted, “required men of courage and determination and courage to undertake it.” Unfortunately for Wells the escape plot failed, but he remained steadfast and loyal despite “the cruelty of the United States officials towards us.” As in northern prison accounts, Wells and other southern prisoners emphasized the excitement of escape and testified that only heroic courage and a willingness to sacrifice their lives for the cause enabled men to survive the daily suffering of the prison experience.33 In 1890, Charles Loehr addressed a meeting of the George E. Pickett Camp Confederate Veterans about his experiences at Point Lookout. Loehr recounted the Union attempts to starve the prisoners and the torture of being “bound and dipped head foremost in a urine barrel” for “trifling” offenses. “Expediency,” claimed Loehr, motivated the Union, in sharp contrast to the Confederacy, which “did what it could for the prisoners that fell into our hands.”34 In an 1898 memoir, George Booth, who served briefly as a prison guard at Salisbury Prison, in North Carolina, testified that the Confederacy endeavored “to better the condition of the miserable men whom the fortunes of war had thrown on our hands.” According to Booth, both the “poor confederates” and the “wretched federals” suffered tremendously because of the Union’s “cruel, very cruel” refusal to exchange. In the end, Booth believed that “no phase of the war” seemed “more dishonoring to the federal arms than the policy they sanctioned . . . regarding prisoners.”35
Booth’s 1898 condemnation of the Union as singularly responsible for the failure to exchange echoed a southern vehemence on this particular point that had been building for years. Back in 1878, the SHSP declared that “the sufferings on both sides were due to the failure to carry out the terms of the cartel for the exchange of prisoners, and that for this the Federal authorities (especially Stanton and Grant) were responsible”. Emphasizing the failure of the exchange cartel as a deliberate Union policy choice remained a popular argument for proponents of the southern memory of Civil War prisons for several reasons. The focus on the Union’s intentional manipulation of the status of wartime captives for political reasons deflected attention away from the actuality that the Confederacy’s prison record revealed similar behavior. It also encouraged the southern fantasy that its chivalry during the war succumbed only to the cold reality of northern power—an argument that supported the myth that the Confederacy endeavored to prioritize humane care for its prisoners even during its collapse. Also of note in the southern attack was the omission of the Confederate “black flag” policy as a factor in the end of exchange. The refusal to admit any responsibility for racial atrocities indicated the southern determination to remember the Civil War as a failed revolution to protect white southern rights instead of a successful revolution to recognize African American citizenship. The removal of race as a central factor in the story of the Civil War, and its prisons in particular, fit the needs of a white southern society in the midst of reconstructing an idealized past through the rise of Jim Crow segregation. And finally, southern apologists, perhaps because they were already on the defensive in the battle for memory, seized on the exchange issue, despite the risk of reviving the subject of race, because it exposed an inherent contradiction in the northern memory of the
prison controversy. During the war, the Lincoln administration justified refusal to exchange as an unfortunate but necessary measure to protect the rights of its African American soldiers. But with the end of Reconstruction, and certainly in the following decades, as northerners remembered the prison controversy, they deemphasized the connection between prison suffering and the establishment of African American rights. The northern abandonment of the racial explanation for the breakdown of exchange reflected the growing northern desire to define the Civil War as a war of nationalism instead of racial equality. The northern apathy toward racial concerns dovetailed with—and was encouraged by—an increasingly effective Lost Cause memory in the South that, despite the historical evidence to the contrary, opportunistically manipulated recollections of the conflict. While southerners may not have consciously recognized this particular reason for the effectiveness of this challenge to northern memory, the realization that northerners could or would not respond strongly on issues connected to the racial legacy of the Civil War further encouraged their exploitation. Although cognizant that dispelling the northern memory of prisons might take time, the SHSP publishers felt “assured” that persistent repetition of these southern counterarguments would lead to a memory of the war more favorable to the South than the reality of history had been. “If the present generation is not prepared to do us justice,” the SHSP declared, indicating the depth of its commitment to advocating the southern memory of Civil War prisons, “their children will.”36
By the late 1880s and early 1890s, then, the SHSP’s elaborate defense of the Confederacy’s prison record helped reassure southerners that despite the suffering at Andersonville and other prisons, the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War remained viable and southern honor intact. Another major contributor to the southern defense of the Confederate prison system was the familiar figure of the ex-president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. In 1890 his article “Andersonville and other War-Prisons” appeared, written expressly to “vindicate the conduct of the Confederacy” while enlightening those “who have generally seen but one side of the discussion.” Davis again revived the now standard southern argument that the “cold-blooded insensibility” of the Union war policies and northern “inhumanity,” not the actions of Confederate officers like Henry Wirz, whom Davis vigorously defended, caused the suffering that occurred in Confederate prisons. Davis also wondered why, in the end, if the Confederacy was so brutal in its treatment of prisoners, the Union prison record so closely mirrored that of its beaten opponent. Davis suggested that the northern “authorities dared not confess to the people of the North the cruelties, privations, and deaths they were mercilessly inflicting on helpless prisoners.” Although Davis expressed his desire to see the prison controversy fade away, he and his fellow southerners did not really want the issue to disappear. The defensive southern counter memory of Civil War prisons served a lasting need in the Lost Cause South. The coaxing and torturing of moral justifications out of memories of the wartime prisons helped inspire a rising southern confidence—a sense that they need not accept a reconciliation dominated by northern memories of the conflict. Until the North recognized and admitted its role in the failure of the Civil War prison systems, or at least refrained from further attacks on southern honor, southerners remained eager and ready to argue the subject.37
And the debate continued. Appalled by Davis’s argument, in 1891, General N. P. Chipman, a central figure in the government’s prosecution and execution of Wirz, published his response, The Horrors of Andersonville Rebel Prison. In this work he promised to refute “fully” Jefferson Davis’s “defiant challenge.” Dismissing the cartel issue as “irrelevant,” which effectively removed racial concerns from his argument, Chipman insisted that the end of exchange “furnishes no justification for unusual cruelty and starvation.” After a lengthy recapitulation of the evidence presented at Wirz’s trial, evidence that Chipman claimed conclusively proved both the brutality of Andersonville and the Confederate government’s knowledge of the events, Chipman summarized why he found Davis’s arguments so offensive. Davis hoped that the bitterness over the prison controversy should fade, but Chipman asserted that “so long as Southern leaders continue to distort history, so long will there rise up defenders of the truth of history.” Instead of doing “a great service had he disproved the alleged complicity of his administration,” Davis “chose to deny the horrors of rebel prisons rather than confess.” Chipman spoke for many in the North who could not understand why southerners persisted in their perceived distortions and who resented the fact that the southern counter memory of Civil War prisons called into question the veracity of the Union government, Union veterans, and the Union cause. The dominant northern interpretation of the conflict, one that morally justified the cause of saving and reuniting America, depended in part on remembering Andersonville and other southern prisons as “unparalleled in the annals of crime.”38
Undeterred by Chipman’s vociferous reaction and the ongoing northern accusations, throughout the 1890s, led by the SHSP, the South continued to defend its honor in the fight to remember Civil War prisons. In response to the Davis-Chipman spat, the SHSP devoted many pages to further discussion of the conditions in Union prisons in articles such as “Horrors of Camp Morton,” “Prison-Pens North,” “Escape of Prisoners from Johnson’s Island,” and “Prison Life at Point Lookout.”39 These articles rehashed the cruelty that Confederate prisoners experienced in the North and extolled the bravery and sacrifices made by the loyal Confederate heroes. But more than anything else they sought, as Thomas Spotswood, author of the Camp Morton piece openly avowed, to refute the accusations of northern memory. “Since our friends on the other side have done so much to show how cruel the South was, and still continue to publish these sad and horrible facts,” Spotswood declared, “it is but fair that we of the South should let the world know that the prison-pens of the North were no whit better than the worst in the South.”40 Although Spotswood and his fellow writers paid lip service to the idea of sectional healing, the persistent enmity provoked by the prison controversy indicated that the South would forget the past—and accept reconciliation—only when the North acknowledged the legitimacy of their claims. Since both sides understood history to be a product of memory, the competition to publicize the divisive memories of Civil War prisons continued to rage, motivated by the certainty that the correct version of history would exonerate either, and only, the North or the South.41
By the 1890s, southern confidence continued to rise as southerners actively sought ways to celebrate their memory of the prison dead while decrying the perceived northern hypocrisy over the prison controversy. While the SHSP led the fight to defend the reputation of the Confederacy’s prisons, the Confederate Veteran spearheaded southern efforts to remember the dead Confederate prisoners, asserting that in regard to the wartime prisons, “history must affix on the United States government its lasting condemnation.”42 As the official voice of the United Confederate Veterans, the publication frequently included prisoner accounts and defenses of southern prisons couched in the same aggrieved terms as the SHSP.43 But the reverent approach of the Veteran and its desire to praise the heroism of the Confederate soldier led naturally to a preoccupation with preserving the tangible evidence of that sacrifice, the graves of the dead prisoners in the North. The decades-old imbalance between the government-sanctioned, officially marked graves of those who died in Confederate prisons and the sporadically tended, shabby burial sites of those who died in Union prisons demanded redress if the South was to protect its memory of Civil War prisons.44 In 1894, the Veteran announced plans to identify and order the graves of the Confederate dead in Indianapolis, which “lie leveled and unmarked.”45 The following year, in Chicago, “our monument” was unveiled on Memorial Day in commemoration of the Confederate dead buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, most of them casualties of the Union prison at Camp Douglas. At the dedication ceremony, Reverend Bolton, a former Union officer, honored “the br
ave men who died in our city, while prisoners of war,” and celebrated those “men who were as true to their convictions, and as loyal to their leaders, as any class of men that ever put on the uniform, listened to the bugle-call, or marched to battle.” Part of the reason for Bolton’s magnanimity toward the Confederate dead, however, lay in his deeper understanding of the war’s meaning: “To-day we stand with comrades at the graves that are not simply houses for the dead, but vaults in which the nation’s power, fame and glory are stored.”46 While Union veterans such as Bolton demonstrated, according to the Veteran, a “soldier respect for soldier that you can not put into words,” true ownership of the monument depended on sectional perspective.47 Many southerners perceived the Chicago monument as evidence that, at long last, the momentum of their contest against northern memories of Civil War prisons was turning in their favor. The form of the striking memorial, well over forty feet tall and capped by a soldier standing aggressively, arms crossed in unrepentant defiance, certainly reflected the increased confidence southerners had in the authenticity of their prison memory. Most northerners, however, saw the monument as confirmation of a reunited Union in which a reconciled South, its heroism recognized and racism forgotten, participated wholeheartedly. The distorted understanding of both sections, provoked by their sectional memories, ensured that while commemorating the Confederate victims of Union prisons seemingly encouraged healing, it was only an illusion. In reality, such ceremonies perpetuated the one-sided nature of the memories of the wartime prisons.
Haunted by Atrocity Page 10