If Hesseltine leaned toward the southern interpretation of the prison controversy, one of the main reasons could be found in an article he published in the Journal of Southern History in 1935, titled “The Propaganda Literature of Confederate Prisons.” In it Hesseltine expressed the understandable frustration he felt during his years researching his groundbreaking book as he sorted through the hundreds of memoirs that prisoners published, almost all of whom, he argued, “took up a reminiscent pen” in order “to convince his readers of the essential brutality of his captors.” Hesseltine briefly traced how the Union government publicized the suffering in Confederate prisons during the war as well as how the postwar government continued to publish reports and investigations rehashing the treatment of prisoners into the late 1860s. These actions, Hesseltine argued, inflamed northerners and “made the recounting of atrocity stories an act of high patriotism.” From Reconstruction throughout the late nineteenth century, as Union prisoners leveled exaggerated charges of Confederate brutality in their memoirs, they therefore drew much of their inspiration from official sources and the desire to defend the government, just as they had on the battlefield between 1861 and 1865.38
Since northern voices dominated the debate over the wartime prisons, the focus of Hesseltine’s research on the prison systems and the immediate aftermath of the war naturally led to his somewhat pro-southern interpretation of Civil War prisons. In his attempt at objectivity, Hesseltine over-compensated in an effort to compare more fairly what happened in Andersonville and the other Confederate prisons to Elmira and the Union camps. Although he correctly perceived that the casualties in Union prisons resulted in part from deliberate political choices, his emphasis on the North’s psychological desire for revenge minimized the consistently calculated nature of the Lincoln administration’s policy toward prisoners of war throughout the conflict. The theory of “war psychosis” removed responsibility for the Union’s actions; defined the harsh treatment of prisoners as an unavoidable symptom of the disease of war; avoided the question of racial justice; and minimized the legitimacy of the understandable, if overzealous, northern desire to both celebrate and find meaning in victory. His reliance on the organizational and psychological explanations so common in mid-twentieth-century academia ultimately prevented analysis of the human evil at the core of the prison tragedy. And while Hesseltine did not exonerate the Confederacy, his descriptions of the inept bungling and flagrant negligence that characterized the disorganized Confederate prison system reflected his tendency to accept the southern counter memory of Civil War prisons. Hesseltine factored neither the Confederacy’s brutal no-quarter racism toward African American soldiers nor the Davis administration’s consciously callous treatment of Union captives into his argument. Despite these flaws, Hesseltine’s work represented an important achievement. In sifting through and rejecting much of the old divisive memories, Hesseltine helped shift the terms of debate over Civil War prisons. Neither North nor South, despite all their attempts to do so, could still legitimately contend that their prison record truly improved on their opponent’s.
Between 1930 and 1960, historians, when commenting on the topic of Civil War prisons, based their objective arguments primarily on Hesseltine’s work. Ella Lonn agreed with Hesseltine when she defended Henry Wirz in Foreigners in the Confederacy, published in 1940. Lonn claimed that Wirz, in part because of his Swiss birth, made an easy but undeserved target for the “inflamed war feeling” of the North and that his execution, or “sacrifice,” as she termed it, occurred solely to satisfy northern demands for retribution.39 In a review of Lonn’s book, R. Walter Coakley agreed with her that Wirz was “unjustly cited.”40 Although not exonerating Wirz of all blame, Lonn followed Hesseltine’s lead in arguing that responsibility in the matter of Civil War prisons could not possibly in fairness rest on the shoulders of one particular individual. Another scholar, William Maxwell, pointed out in his 1956 study, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission, that the Sanitary Commission bore some of the responsibility for stirring up northern passion over the prisons with the release of its 1864 report on the “privations and sufferings” taking place in the Confederacy. Maxwell called the report, which attacked southern prisons while absolving northern camps of any wrongdoing, a “diatribe” and a “false position.” The intensity of the war, Maxwell explained, in a statement reminiscent of “war psychosis,” caused the commission to lose “their sense of fairness and objectivity, forgetting the suffering of Confederates in Northern camps.”41 And one of Hesseltine’s own graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, William Fletcher Thompson, declared in his 1959 book, The Image of War, that the “conditions within the prison camps of both belligerents were frightful.”42 The old convictions of singular brutality in the prisons of either the Union or the Confederacy had finally been completely discredited, at least among historians.
Other scholars relied even more closely on Hesseltine’s arguments. One of the foremost chroniclers of the Reconstruction-era bloody-shirt phenomenon, Reinhard Luthin, adopted Hesseltine’s psychological vocabulary when he declared in 1960 that the goal of northern Republicans after the Civil War was to keep “the war psychosis alive.” Republicans succeeded at this, in part, Luthin believed, because of the efforts of such men as James G. Blaine, who in 1876 famously “delivered an incredibly foul verbal attack” on the subject of Jefferson Davis’s responsibility for the horrors of Anderson-ville.43 Public reminders of Andersonville and other Confederate prisons cemented northern popular support for the Republican Party, Luthin suggested, and helped preserve the unity of the wartime period. The work of another scholar, Frank Byrne, also revealed the debt that historians owed to Hesseltine. In his 1958 article, “Libby Prison: A Study in Emotions,” Byrne explored the implications of Hesseltine’s “war psychosis” theory. Byrne concluded that, during the war, the raw emotions stirred up by the Richmond prison resulted from the “interaction of the guards’ fear and the prisoners’ hate.” Libby Prison became, at its core, “a cauldron of emotions,” and the intensity of feeling, as Hesseltine and Luthin suggested, would continue to linger long after 1865 in the form of “war psychosis.”44 By 1960 then, among professional historians, Hesseltine’s psychological theory of “war psychosis” had met with widespread acceptance, as had his objective insistence that the tragedy of Civil War prisons resulted from the actions of both the Union and Confederacy. Importantly, Hesseltine’s example also started to inspire those outside the circle of professional historians.
One example of the increasing influence of more rigorous scholarship on the subject of Civil War prisons appeared in the work of Richard Hemmerlein, author of the 1934 book Prisons and Prisoners of the Civil War. Although poorly researched compared to Hesseltine’s volume—he did not even acknowledge Hesseltine in his brief bibliography—Hemmerlein’s book took both North and South to task for abandoning “all human consideration” in caring for their prisoners and, like Hesseltine, concluded that both sides deserved their share of blame.45 Hattie Lou Winslow and Joseph R. H. Moore’s 1940 history, Camp Morton, 1861–1865: Indianapolis Prison Camp, was of higher quality. They based their study of Camp Morton on solid documentation and traced the wartime history of the facility from its origins as a recruiting and training ground for Union soldiers to its eventual conversion to a prison camp for Confederate captives. In its conception, the idea of a history of an individual prison broke no new ground. But unlike authors of earlier camp histories, such as Clay Holmes in his 1912 work on Elmira, Winslow and Moore made no apologies about the difficult conditions at Camp Morton and openly discussed the prison’s shortcomings, including the role that the Union government played in the suffering. Many of the deaths of the winter of 1865, they argued, resulted “from the haggling over hospitals and winter quarters” for the prisoners, as poor communications between the officers in charge of the camp and Washington prevented proper preparations.46 Winslow and Moore’s focus on the manag
erial and bureaucratic nature of the problems that led to prisoner misery at Camp Morton once again reflected the growing acceptance of Hesseltine’s organizational explanation for the tragedy of Civil War prisons. The honesty of their assessment led to favorable reviews in both the Journal of Southern History and the American Historical Review. Anyone interested in the subject of “man’s inhumanity to man,” reviewer Edgar Stewart declared, would find Winslow and Moore’s book “well worth the attention.”47
Inspired by Hesseltine’s example, professional and amateur historians alike rejected the old selective memories of Civil War prisons and instead approached this particular example of “man’s inhumanity to man” with the objective goal of more faithfully chronicling and explaining the horrors of Civil War prison camps in terms of scientific theory. The efforts of these scholars, coinciding with the deaths of the fiercest sectional defenders, started the process of reinterpreting Civil War prisons in the context of modern war during the 1920s and 1930s. But the victory for a more objective memory of Civil War prisons soon proved of insufficient satisfaction. The need for a usable past required continued attention. As the 1930s ended with the outbreak of World War II, an even more appalling story of “man’s inhumanity to man” emerged. The context provided by World War II lent a further gravitas to the subject of Civil War prisons. In an overt response to the numbing violence of the fight against fascism in the 1940s, historians began to address the parallels between such atrocities as the Holocaust, the Bataan Death March, and the prisons of the Civil War as common symbols of the destructive capacity of modern war. The dramatic escalation of the scale of atrocity frightened scholars and alleviated any lingering sentiment that the treatment of Civil War prisoners remained an abstract historical problem. Many turned with a new sense of urgency to the story of Civil War prisons in a desperate search for understanding. If the process of atrocity could be explained, then it might be prevented in the future.
In response to this imperative, the most eloquent discussion of the commonalities between the suffering that took place in Civil War prisons and the brutality of Nazi Germany came from the pen of James Bonner, chair of the history department at the Georgia State College for Women. In 1947, Bonner published “War Crimes Trials, 1865–67,” in which he discussed the postwar controversy over the treatment of Jefferson Davis and the trial and execution of Henry Wirz. From the outset, however, Bonner made no effort to disguise his real motivation—the troubling connection between 1865 America and 1940s Germany, and in particular the question of how to accomplish justice in the aftermath of war crimes, whether at Andersonville or Auschwitz. “Thoughtful Americans,” Bonner wrote, “attempting to find a rational submission to the reality of the Nuremberg trial” would unfortunately find little “tranquility of mind” from “our previous experiences with war crimes and atrocities.” Bonner referred to the concept of “war psychosis,” described how it unjustly fueled Wirz’s execution, and raised the fear that history was repeating itself in the Nuremberg trials. The “atrocity stories” of the Civil War, Bonner argued, “bore some of the flavor of Dachau and Belsen,” and Wirz “received more venomous invectives” in 1865 than “Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi Gestapo chief” in the 1940s. Although Bonner agreed with the outcome of the Nuremberg trial, as it sealed the “well-deserved fate” of “a group of evil men,” the self-congratulatory attitude of America and its allies throughout the process troubled him. In assuming that they were somehow incapable of such atrocities, Americans ignored the precedent of Civil War prisons at their peril. “Will history,” Bonner asked, “accept and justify the legality of the war crimes commission, or will future generations associate its proceeding with ex post facto and fait accompli achievements,” and can we ever feel assured “that retributory crimes of vengeance will not be repeated—that two wrongs do not make a right?” Americans needed to remember the painful lessons of Civil War prisons and redouble their efforts for humanity and justice in the future, Bonner suggested, because what happened in Nazi Germany was not so far removed from the barbarities of the Civil War. To Bonner, the Holocaust and Andersonville, although separated by time and space, confirmed the fundamental evil inherent in modern society. The only defense against the shockingly easy acceptance of atrocity, Bonner warned, lay in constant vigilance—repeatedly reminding ourselves to guard against the mistakes of the past.48
The influence of World War II also appeared in the work of one of the most prolific historians of the Civil War, Bruce Catton. Like Bonner, Catton based his interpretation of the story of Civil War prisons in part on Hesseltine’s interpretation that both sides bore responsibility for the disaster. He also held the personal conviction that Andersonville and the other prisons remained relevant to the present as a cautionary tale about the nature of modern war. In a 1959 American Heritage article, Catton enthusiastically reminded his readers that “the passage of the years has at last brought a new perspective.” Andersonville remained “the worst of a large number of war prisons,” but all prisons, North and South, “were almost unbelievably bad.” “The real culprit” for the suffering, Catton declared, was not “Wirz, the luckless scapegoat,” but “war itself.” Catton’s focus on the inherent evil of modern war reflected a sense of weariness with the tragic development of world events. By 1959, the experience of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War convinced Catton and many Americans that, starting with the Civil War, in each and every instance war meant the infliction of unspeakable cruelty, no matter when or where it took place. “If the people of the North in the fall of 1865 had used the language of the late 1940s,” Catton argued, “they would have said that Captain Wirz was a war criminal who had been properly convicted and then had been hanged for atrocious war crimes.” The only difference between 1865 and 1945, then, was that in a nineteenth-century world unfamiliar with the atrocities to come in the twentieth century, Wirz had been demonized and executed as a symbol of everything peculiarly wrong with the South. Given the decades of ongoing bitterness represented in the divisive memories of the prison controversy, Wirz’s death, Catton wrote, “did not help anybody very much.” No one would feel better about the atrocities of 1865, and in turn the atrocities of the 1940s, unless they viewed these horrors with the “proper perspective” of war’s inevitable cruelty.49
Historians, by the nature of their common pursuit to find patterns of meaning in the past, led the search for links between the atrocities of different generations in an effort to better understand the tragedy of Civil War prisons. But, as is often the case, historians did not engage in this quest by themselves, and their voices were overshadowed. By the late 1950s, popular authors, most famously MacKinlay Kantor and Saul Levitt, were already inspired—if such a word could be appropriate—to revisit the story of Civil War prisons. Through the lens of fiction, they sought to come to terms with the awful reality of the present and find some explanation as to why such horrors continued to haunt humanity. The pragmatism inherent in that mission also testified to how the memory of Civil War prisons had changed by the 1950s. For the Civil War generation and their immediate descendants, contesting the prison controversy provided ammunition for the ongoing rhetorical war about the justice of the Union or Confederate cause. Beginning with Fooks and Hesseltine, however, historians and writers, who benefited from emotional distance from the prison tragedy, remembered Civil War prisons not just as historical events, but as a chance to investigate and perhaps even comprehend the contemporary horror of modern war. The influence of this new purpose of memory clearly existed in the work of both Kantor and Levitt. Although they wrote about Andersonville, the constant shadow of the Holocaust throughout their work revealed their desire to make sense of their present.
In 1955, MacKinlay Kantor published his massive novel Andersonville. At the time, the native Iowan had already established a sterling reputation in the literary world based on the merits of his many books, most notably Long Remember, a 1934 retelling of the Battle of Gettysburg that, before
Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, was widely considered the best fictional description of the battle, and Glory for Me, a story of the reintegration of World War II veterans back into American society, which was adapted to the big screen in 1946’s Academy Award-winning The Best Years of Our Lives. But for all his success on these and other projects, Andersonville represented Kantor’s crowning achievement. The idea of a novel about the notorious prison camp first occurred to Kantor in 1930, which, perhaps not coincidently, was the same year Hesseltine published Civil War Prisons. Over the next twenty-five years, in fits and starts, Kantor researched and worked on the manuscript. He finally summoned the will to complete the book after a visit to the Andersonville prison grounds in late 1953. In an October 1955 article written for the New York Times Book Review, Kantor described how at five o’clock in the morning he stood at the site of the old stockade and listened to the ghosts of the thousands of dead Union prisoners. “They had come,” he wrote, “to tell me that there must be no compromise. I had invoked their name and thought for nearly twenty-five years; they were thronging at last to force me to the task. I was crying. I had not cried in many years, but now I was crying.”50 That emotion permeated the 700-plus pages of the finished novel.
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