Haunted by Atrocity

by Cloyd, Benjamin G.

  Although emotional, Andersonville was carefully calculated to resonate with a contemporary audience. Kantor, who visited the concentration camp at Buchenwald near the close of World War II, approached the topic of Andersonville and atrocity in general with the recent shock of the Holocaust at the forefront of his thoughts. The telling of the story of Anderson-ville represented an opportunity for Kantor to use the setting of the Civil War, according to scholar Jeff” Smithpeters, “to sift mid-20th century discourses into a more digestible substance.” The Holocaust made Anderson-ville more accessible to the public by providing a natural frame of reference. The power of Kantor’s novel derived in part from the natural connections readers made between the images of German concentration camps and the descriptions of emaciated Union prisoners. Kantor counted on evoking the Holocaust, not to further denounce the Germans, but instead to facilitate American comprehension of the universal nature of atrocity. A pragmatic sense of, and support for, the contemporary politics of anti-Communist consensus motivated Kantor to encourage forgiveness for and understanding of the Germans, who by the 1950s had been transformed from enemy to Cold War ally. Andersonville thus became Kantor’s subject because he wanted to establish “that a real concentration camp and a semblance of a Holocaust had happened in America.”51 Kantor intended for the emotions stirred by recalling Andersonville to serve the needs of present Americans for a narrative of Civil War prison suffering as a source of unity, rather than as a reopening of the scars of the bitter memories of the past.

  Despite the strong influence of the Holocaust and Cold War politics on the novel, at the core of Andersonville lay Kantor’s self-described mission of recreating “an accurate history of the Andersonville prison.” Although the inhabitants of the town of Andersonville were fictitious, as were many of the prisoners, Kantor prided himself on creating “portraits” of the Confederate prison officials and some of the prisoners who actually suffered in the stockade.52 But suffering belonged not solely to the thousands of Yankees prisoners—Kantor also presented a moving portrayal of how the war slowly destroyed the town of Andersonville and degraded the Confederate officials and guards in charge of the madness taking place inside the stockade. Kantor implied that, the long decades of divisive memories notwithstanding, neither the Confederacy nor the Union alone deserved excoriation on the specific issues of exchange or treatment of prisoners, but instead both sides together merited universal condemnation for allowing such a tragedy. The horrors of modern war overwhelmed Union and Confederate characters alike, in keeping with the now orthodox objective understanding of Civil War prisons, and the clear influence of the recent scholarship on the wartime prisons on Kantor’s work did not go unnoticed. The eminent historian Henry Steele Commager proclaimed the novel “the greatest of our Civil War novels” and praised it for creating a sense of how the prison “submerges” all involved, whether prisoner, guard, or observer “in a common humanity or inhumanity.”53 Lawrence Thompson, another scholar, complimented Kantor for achieving “Olympian objectivity” toward “human beings caught in the maelstrom of war.” While “no student of Civil War history need be told that Buchenwald and Belsen would have had no special horrors for anyone lucky enough to have survived the pest-ridden valley at Anderson Station in central Georgia,” Thompson declared, the sublime nature of Kantor’s achievement could be attributed to the author’s desire “to find out what made Wirz and millions of his contemporaries behave as they did.”54 For readers like Commager and Thompson, the merit of Kantor’s novel was not its entertainment value, but the sincerity with which it recognized and meditated on the urgent need to better understand the nature of wartime atrocity.

  From a purely literary standpoint, Kantor’s novel qualified as a thorough success. Not only was the book widely acclaimed and selected as the New York Times November 1955 book-of-the-month; it won Kantor the Pulitzer Prize, no doubt in part because of its timely and undeniable emotional appeal. Kantor’s vision of Andersonville showed how barbaric supposedly civilized people become when officials and guards forget their shared humanity with their prisoners, when captives prey upon each other, when bureaucracy pushes paper instead of solves problems, and when the local townspeople do nothing to ameliorate the suffering. The power of this insight derived from the heightened awareness of the repetitious pattern of atrocity in the modern era, of the persistence of apathy, blind obedience, and misguided patriotism, and the role these human failings played in history from the prisons of the Civil War to the concentration camps of the Holocaust. Although Andersonville pinned responsibility for the suffering on all involved, as did Hesseltine, because Kantor was a novelist and not a historian, he also took certain liberties in the interest of a good story. And every story involving good and evil needs a villain.

  In the case of Andersonville, Kantor had two tailor-made historical figures for the role: John Winder and Henry Wirz. As could be expected, giving the sprawling nature of his achievement, inconsistencies crept into Kantor’s work. Perhaps no aspect of the novel revealed this more than Kantor’s struggle to reconcile the contradictions inherent in his depiction of Winder and Wirz. Both were central figures in the decades of emotional bitterness caused by the contesting memories of Civil War prisons and, even a century later, remained controversial. The problem for Kantor, bent on a message of unity, was how to employ these characters without reopening old wounds. Clearly intrigued by Hesseltine’s concept of “war psychosis,” Kantor chose to depict his villains as psychologically disturbed. Winder was insane with “hatred” for his father, whose failed generalship led to the British capture of Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812. He also seethed with rage against the national government as a “composite demon” because it refused to recognize his military accomplishments and held his father’s failures against him, an injustice that turned Winder’s “blood to black.” “John Winder,” Kantor wrote, “desired that children should be trained to scorn the National government as he scorned it, to loathe the Yankees as he loathed them, to crush all supporters of that Faith as one would snap the shell of a cockroach with his boot sole and feel the shell pop.” This irrational hatred finally led Winder “to kill as many of the prisoners as he could. It was as simple as that.” Wirz, meanwhile, driven crazy by constant pain from a wound at Seven Pines, thinks of the prisoners under his care as animals rather than people. Although, also in keeping with Hesseltine, Kantor infuses Wirz with the organizational desire to bring an “orderly” spirit to the administration of the prison, Wirz’s psychological failings lead him to view the Union captives as “fast-bred rodents.” While Kantor’s novel warns us of the inherent predilection of man for evil, by portraying Winder and Wirz, the two men most directly responsible for the prison, as essentially insane, he dilutes the power of his message. By making the immorality of Winder and Wirz result from their personal demons and individual failings, Kantor undermines his criticism of the capacity of modern government and society for evil and thus mimics the excuse of the old divisive memories of Civil War prisons—that while modern society may allow such horrors it takes inherently depraved men to accomplish them. Kantor also exaggerates Wirz’s tendency to lapse into his native German, punctuating Wirz’s dialogue with “ja,” “nein,” and “ach.” Through the constant German mutterings of the Swiss-born Wirz, Kantor overtly seeks to tie the atrocities of Andersonville with the Holocaust. Although consistent with Kantor’s motivation, his primary concern with contemporary atrocity deflects attention from the fact that while what happened at Andersonville paralleled the descent of German society into brutality, the events of the Civil War resulted from the cracks in our own civilized veneer. The distorted depiction of these two key characters has the important effect of externalizing evil—linking it to the Nazis—thus lessening any specific criticism of American values or society. Given that Kantor wrote in an era of conformity, his avoidance of the issue of specific responsibility for the suffering that occurred in Civil War prisons was unsurprising. Part of the novel
’s appeal lay in its clever manipulation of contemporary fears—Kantor simultaneously decried modern society while subtly pardoning Americans from worrying that such horrors could ever occur here again.55

  Not everyone appreciated Kantor’s effort. Ironically, given how his work anticipated Andersonville, William Hesseltine despised the novel, and in his 1956 essay “Andersonville Revisited” seemed to revel in the opportunity to criticize Kantor. Calling Kantor “uninfluenced” by “critical scholarship,” Hesseltine ridiculed Kantor’s claims of historical accuracy, declaring the book a “perversity” whose “errors and inadequacies should not be allowed to hide behind the literary form in which it appears.” But the most damning aspect of Andersonville, according to Hesseltine, lay in its perpetuation of the old northern memory, the “myth of Andersonville,” instead of endorsing Hesseltine’s objective argument that “it was the war system itself that produced the graves in the Georgia village.”56 Although part of the offense taken by Hesseltine in response to Andersonville contained legitimacy, particularly as it relates to Kantor’s pompous attempt to present a novel as meeting the standards of analytic history, most of Hesseltine’s outrage seemed a product of envy at the attention (and book sales) generated by Kantor’s work. The accusation that Kantor inflamed the memory of northern virtue reflected the fact that Hesseltine always demonstrated a proclivity toward the southern counter memory and minimized the obvious point that Kantor, unlike Hesseltine, was writing about a Confederate prison infamous for its horrors, rather than comparing the prison systems of both Union and Confederacy. As for the charge of ignoring the rising dominance of the objective interpretation of Civil War prisons, Kantor cited Hesseltine’s Civil War Prisons in Andersonville’s bibliography. Petty jealousies aside, the work of both men shared far more in common than Hesseltine cared to admit. Neither succeeded completely in shedding the divisive memories of Civil War prisons even as they claimed objectivity; both agreed that Andersonville, like all wartime prisons, reflected the unsettling, even inevitable, connection between atrocity and modern war.

  Despite Hesseltine’s objections, in its timing and complexity Andersonville revealed the degree to which the memory of Civil War prisons had changed by the late 1950s. Ostensibly a novel about the treatment of Civil War prisoners, Kantor’s novel combined numerous perspectives on the prison controversy in that it included but refused to pander to the traditional animosity inherent in the material, nodded to the objective historical interpretations pioneered by Hesseltine, and recast the prison’s history in the context of the Holocaust and the Cold War. The ambition of Andersonville may or may not have reflected Kantor’s goal to become America’s “spokesman,” but it certainly showed the belief that remembering the tragedies of the past provided a means to understand the horrors of the present.57 At its core, Andersonville—in the spirit of Hesseltine, Bonner, and Catton—offered a cautionary tale about the fragile nature of morality, the insidious capacity for evil inherent in humanity, and the need for vigilance against future atrocity. It was a powerful and optimistic message. Despite its eloquence, however, Andersonville also represented the limitations inherent in the objective memory of Civil War prisons. Kantor, like his contemporaries, admitted that evil had been done in the wartime prisons. But the categorizing of that evil as typical of modern war—an intellectual construct motivated by the desire to place Civil War atrocities in the context of the pattern of the recent world wars—created an inherent excuse for the horrors of the Civil War. A new myth about Civil War prisons took the place of the old. The suffering of Civil War prisons was not the result of deliberate cruelty but instead simply happened as a part of the process of war. The passivity of this new perspective had an important consequence. The removal of blame relieved Americans of the moral responsibility to confront the true nature of the evils committed against Civil War prisoners.

  With the celebration of Kantor’s novel in the form of awards, recognition, and publicity, Andersonville garnered prolonged attention across America in 1955. As an unintended consequence, perhaps one appreciated by Hesseltine, the popularity of the novel also generated a new wave of interest in Andersonville and the subject of Civil War prisons. Between 1955 and 1960, academic journals like Civil War History, Nebraska History, and the Alabama Historical Quarterly all published previously unpublished wartime journals or postwar reminiscences of Civil War prisoners.58 In the December 1956 issue of Civil War History, Ovid Futch’s article about the Andersonville raiders, six Union prisoners who terrorized their fellow captives, appeared, followed soon after by Virgil Carrington Jones’s June 1958 piece “Libby Prison Break,” an account of how hundreds of Union prisoners, fifty-nine of whom succeeded, plotted their escape from the notorious prison.59 And as Richard Barksdale Harwell prepared his two volumes, The Confederate Reader and The Union Reader, published respectively in 1957 and 1958, he included the testimony of prisoners from both sections.60 Andersonville seemed to spark a renewed public appetite for the topic of Civil War prisons, although Kantor’s influence was not inevitably positive. In their 1960 textbook The New Nation, 1865–1917, Columbia University historians Dumas Malone and Basil Rauch, in describing how the Wirz trial reflected the bitterness of Reconstruction, utilized the popular psychological interpretation of Wirz and referred to him as “the crazed and cruel Swiss-American who was in charge at Andersonville.”61

  Of all these Andersonville-inspired publications, one of the most important was the 1957 reprinting of This Was Andersonville, by John McElroy, one of the Andersonville prisoners whose work, first printed in 1879, not only contributed to the enduring power of the northern memory of Civil War prisons but also influenced Kantor.62 The new edition contained an introduction by Roy Meredith, who placed McElroy’s incendiary works in the emotional context of Reconstruction and explained that “McElroy was extremely biased” and made “erroneous statements in the heat of anger at his captors.” The real importance of McElroy’s book, as interpreted through the eyes of Meredith seventy-eight years later, came from its relevance as an account of the most “appalling incident during the Civil War, which had no precedent until the Second World War, when the prison camps of Belsen and Dachau and the unforgettable Death March in the Philippines overshadowed anything that had gone on before in warfare.” Meredith finished his introduction by stating the lesson so painfully learned not just at Andersonville, but in the much more recent past. “All that can be said for Andersonville, after almost a century, is that it stands as an indictment against war in all its forms,” Meredith claimed, “and places the Civil War in the category where it belongs, as one of the most terrible wars the world has ever known.”63 Although depressing, the subject of Civil War prisons, if confronted, Meredith hoped, offered a way for Americans not just to reject what happened at Andersonville and in the Holocaust as unacceptable, but to caution future generations to guard against such horrors.

  Besides the thought-provoking questions of morality and responsibility inspired by Kantor’s novel, Andersonville also sparked a revival of interest in the prison site itself. Since the flurry of monument dedications in the early decades of the 1900s, Andersonville had slowly returned to quiet anonymity. On May 28, 1957, an editor for the Atlanta Journal stated that “until the publication of McKinley Kantor’s best-selling novel, ‘Andersonville,’ this peaceful cemetery and prison park was seldom visited by tourists and usually ignored by nearby residents.” With the “throngs” now jumping “by leaps and bounds,” the editor reported, “park employees are bracing themselves for an increasing influx of visitors.”64 A few days later, W. S. Kirkpatrick wrote an article in the Atlanta Constitution declaring that “The Bitterness Is Gone at Andersonville.” According to Kirkpatrick, Kantor deserved credit for providing “evidence to show that Southerners of the 60s were not the beasts the hysteria of the times caused them to be considered in the North.”65 As a result more and more tourists came to Andersonville each year, not to rehash old arguments but simply out of a curiosity to see th
e grounds after reading Kantor’s novel.66

  With traffic through and around the town of Andersonville on the rise, it came to the attention of the Georgia UDC that the old monument to Wirz, which stood “in the midst of a cluttered commercial-garage district, oftimes surrounded by garbage,” badly needed repair.67 In January 1958, the UDC sponsored a resolution in the state House to appropriate Georgia public funds “to clean the stained and corroded statue.” Even fifty years after its construction, controversy over Wirz’s memorial flared quickly. Although the resolution passed, seventy-year-old Representative Ulysses S. Lancaster, a descendant of a Confederate guard at Andersonville and also “a former school-teacher with a knowledge of history,” voted against the measure, stating that “according to what I’ve heard about it we did a lot of the things we’ve accused the Germans of doing.”68 Tellingly, the Georgia legislature never approved the funding. Popular Atlanta Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley, whose remarkable career spanned from World War II until her death in 1999, explained, with her trademark tone of moderation, the core of the controversy to her readers. Although proud of “ouah sacred heritage,” Sibley wrote, given that “latter-day historians” referred to Wirz as the “the Himmler of the Confederacy,” prudence was needed. Criticizing the UDC for having “slipped a sleeper” resolution into the Georgia House, Sibley referred to Kantor’s “weighty” and “well-documented” novel, declaring that “the fact that Yankee prisons were bad too and Confederate soldiers suffered similarly doesn’t excuse in many minds the wanton acts of cruelty attributed to Wirz.” Those acts, she concluded, weren’t “likely to be popular with Georgia legislators of today.”69 Sibley’s reasoned stance—and the reluctance of most Georgians to support the Wirz resolution—would have been inconceivable in the early 1900s but was understandable in the context of the 1950s. Some white Georgians, unnerved by the rising tide of the Civil Rights Movement, preferred to reassure themselves by clamoring for renewed devotion to the heroes of Confederate mythology. But many locals started to realize the potential benefits of abandoning the shrill defense of Wirz and instead displaying a more positive and accommodating attitude toward those interested in remembering the prison controversy. The growing acceptance of the objective theory of Civil War prisons as a mutual rather than sectional failure not only helped restore the reputation of the Confederacy but also brought financial rewards through tourism. For moderate southerners like Sibley, choosing this moment to make a public stand in defense of Wirz, always one of the most controversial figures of the Civil War, made little sense—except to the UDC—because it threatened the profitable goodwill created by Kantor’s novel.