Haunted by Atrocity

by Cloyd, Benjamin G.

  During 1861, the small numbers of prisoners taken allowed opposing generals to negotiate limited exchanges while evading the political question of official recognition of the Confederacy. Despite these special exchanges, prisoners accumulated behind enemy lines.5 In December 1861, the United States Congress came under increasing pressure from prisoner families and the press and consented to “inaugurate systemic measures for the exchange of prisoners in the present rebellion,” since “exchange does not involve a recognition of the rebels as a government.”6 The practical impact of the congressional resolution was minimal, although it eased the public demands for the swapping of prisoners. It allowed exchange, but it did nothing to organize the process. Special exchanges continued, according to Hesseltine, as Union commanders still made exchange arrangements “on their own responsibility” rather than as part of a “general system.”7

  Placing the burden of exchange on the shoulders of individual commanders consistently delayed the process by creating a vast amount of paperwork. Preoccupied with preparations for battle, military officers found themselves distracted by requests for mercy forwarded to them from congressmen. Exchanges not only had to be cleared by superiors on both sides but also required investigation to insure that both parties complied with the terms. The resulting bureaucratic headaches increased after General Ulysses Grant’s capture of some 15,000 Confederates at Fort Donelson in February 1862.8 Although the Union enjoyed the upper hand in exchange negotiations since it held the majority of the prisoners, its advantage turned pyrrhic during the spring and summer as the inconvenient pressure of caring for their southern captives intensified. Prisoner exchanges all but ceased as the Confederacy, still seeking acknowledgment of its legitimacy, insisted on the implementation of a formal cartel and refused the Union’s sporadic requests for special exchanges. Renewed public sympathy for faster repatriation also spurred the Lincoln administration to compromise with the Confederacy, which, like the Union, strained to meet the demands of the now thousands of prisoners confined in Richmond. Shiloh and the Peninsular Campaign further burdened both sides with unwanted prisoners, and they returned to the bargaining table.9

  On July 22, 1862, Union general John A. Dix and Confederate general D. H. Hill concluded several days of negotiations with the establishment of the Dix-Hill cartel, an agreement intended to bring efficiency to the practice of exchange. The cartel called for two agents to oversee a streamlined process and established official exchange locations at Dutch Gap, Virginia, on the James River, and at Vicksburg, Mississippi. At these two sites, prisoners would be exchanged according to their rank. Excess captives were to be paroled within ten days of their capture, relieving both sides of the need to imprison solders while they awaited official exchange. The cartel’s intended permanence, based on the mutual agreement that “misunderstanding shall not interrupt the release of prisoners on parole,” implied that exchange would continue on a consistent basis. The wording of the cartel consciously avoided any mention of Confederate sovereignty.10 During the cartel’s operation, the accumulation of prisoners gradually dissipated, although the prisons never fully emptied, and the issue of prisoner exchange appeared resolved. The successful implementation of the cartel represented an exception to the common experience of prisoners during the war. For an all-too-brief period, the harmony of shared political convenience improved conditions for Civil War POWs. New concerns soon emerged, however, to reaffirm the provisional and insincere nature of the Union and Confederacy’s commitment to prisoners of war.

  As the war entered 1863, both sides grew dissatisfied with the exchange cartel. Two issues in particular destroyed the supposedly permanent exchange process. A debate arose over the validity and terms of paroles issued to thousands of prisoners. Both the Union and the Confederacy struggled with the assimilation of paroled troops into their armies. Many soldiers resisted a return to the line of fire, insisting that their paroles exempted them from service until their exchange became official. Neither the armies of the North nor, even more critically, those of the South, however, could afford to lose the services of these men indefinitely. Instead of going home to await their official exchange, paroled soldiers were sent by their respective armies to parole camps. Although these bases effectively kept paroled soldiers in the service so that when officially exchanged these troops could return to the front lines, the existence of parole camps also created problems. The camps not only occupied valuable space that could have been used for housing actual prisoners, but they also further strained the resources of the Union and Confederacy. Paroled soldiers required an expensive investment in food and supplies while they awaited official exchange and a return to active duty. Both sides also increasingly found that soldiers happily turned capture and parole to their advantage as a risky but viable method of escaping the front lines. Immediate parole on the battlefield became an especially attractive option for many commanders, as it placed the burden of caring for POWs back on the other side.11 The issue came to a head in September 1863, when Robert Ould, the Confederate commissioner of exchange, declared the paroled prisoners from Vicksburg exchanged in an attempt to bolster western Confederate forces while also relieving the pressure of sustaining idle troops. The Union indignantly denounced the exchange as invalid, and once again the swapping of prisoners slowed to a crawl.12 Given the escalating costs and demands of the war by 1863, it is understandable, while not commendable, that both the Union and Confederacy valued financial gain and military expediency more than prisoners’ lives. For those captives still awaiting exchange, however, these policy choices ensured a period of indefinite suffering.

  A second issue, one inseparable from the larger cause and theme of the Civil War, also contributed to the destruction of the supposedly permanent exchange process in 1863. Slavery, or more precisely, the steps taken by the Lincoln administration to destroy the institution, also affected the fate of prisoners of war. Even as Lincoln considered the ramifications of emancipation during the second half of 1862, the Union began to organize regiments of African American soldiers. By the end of the war, nearly 200,000 black troops, most former slaves, served in the armed forces of the North. Their commitment changed the nature of the war. The Confederacy, outraged by the Union’s affront to white supremacy and the encouragement of slave resistance, increasingly adopted a “black flag” policy toward these African American troops. Perhaps no other aspect of the war reveals the reprehensible nature of Confederate racism more than these repeated slaughters. The “black flag” meant that when units of different races clashed, both sides soon learned to expect a fight to the death. No-quarter combat, most famously symbolized by the Confederate massacre of black soldiers at Fort Pillow in 1864, eliminated surrender as an option for African Americans in battle.13 Should a black soldier be fortunate enough to survive capture without being massacred, the official Confederate policy toward captured African American soldiers denied them the status of a POW, including the right of exchange, and insisted that they be executed or returned to slavery. It remains unclear how many African Americans suffered one of these fates. Relatively few black captives, perhaps no more than 1,200, ever made it to a Confederate prison camp.14 As the experience of “the Negro Squad,” a group of African American prisoners at Andersonville, attests, once imprisoned, white and black captives underwent a further difference in treatment with the coercion of blacks into labor around the prison grounds.15 An irony existed in the conjoined issues of race and the tragedy of Civil War prisons. Although few African Americans experienced the inside of a Confederate prison, Civil War prisons were, in part, symbols of emancipation. What is clear is that, given the hazards African Americans faced in their service to the Union, their loyal devotion should be seen as all the more impressive.

  Until mid-1863, the effect of the status of African American soldiers on the exchange cartel was less controversial than the parole issue, since black units rarely received the opportunity to fight and thus the Confederacy captured relatively few black troops.
But by September 1863, the Union, buoyed by the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, hardened its stance and demanded the exchange of black soldiers on identical terms with that of white prisoners. This position reflected the recent changes in the Union’s moral justification for the war and the emerging centrality of the cause of racial equality. For this logical yet unprecedented commitment to protecting the status of African American POWs, the Lincoln administration deserves considerable credit, although its motives were not entirely altruistic. The policy placed the Confederacy on the defensive, by now a familiar posture, and the Davis regime refused to budge. The Confederacy insisted that the process of exchange exclude not only African American prisoners but also captured white officers of black regiments, whom the Davis administration reserved the right to try on charges of inciting slave rebellion.16 The linking of exchanging prisoners with the fundamental questions of slavery and racial equality meant, according to Robert Garlick Hill Kean, a Confederate War department official, that “the question has no solution.”17 Cessation of the cartel followed, as by the end of 1863 both the Union and Confederacy refused to engage in exchange. This “misunderstanding,” despite the promise of the Dix-Hill cartel, could reach resolution only through the conclusion of the war itself. Once again, the future became tenuous for thousands of prisoners of war as the larger causes and meanings of the conflict overshadowed concerns about the impact on their lives.

  From the perspective of the Lincoln administration, the end of the cartel made sense for an additional reason, one even more pragmatic than the protection of the rights of African American soldiers. By late 1863 recognition grew that exchanging soldiers with the manpower-starved Confederacy hurt the Union war effort by returning seasoned soldiers to southern armies. Put bluntly, exchange favored the shrinking Confederacy by prolonging its ability to wage war. Thus it was no coincidence that, in December 1863, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton appointed a new commissioner of exchange, General Benjamin Butler. At the time, “Beast” Butler, vilified for his behavior in New Orleans earlier in the war, was perhaps the most detested Union figure in the Confederacy. Although Butler personally desired a resumption of the cartel process, the appointment of someone with his reputation signaled the Union’s willingness to forgo exchange. The South interpreted Butler’s selection as an affront, and in defense of their honor, many Confederate exchange officers refused to deal with Butler, thus eliminating any chance of compromise.18 A few months later, General Grant summarized the feeling of the Union brass: “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.” The Union officially remained open to exchange, as long as the Confederacy included African-American soldiers, but leaders like Grant recognized that the North benefited from the absence of a working exchange policy. “We have got to fight,” Grant observed, “until the military power of the South is exhausted, and if we release or exchange prisoners captured it simply becomes a war of extermination.”19

  Not intended for public consumption, Grant’s comments reflected the moral inconsistency of the Union concerning prisoner exchange. The admirable decision to insist on proper treatment of African American prisoners by the Confederacy loses some of its luster when placed in the context of the manipulative appointment of Butler as well as when appreciating the more tangible military rewards that motivated Union leaders. Suspicion persists that under different circumstances the principle of racial equality might have well been abandoned had it not been so convenient. Only in early 1865, with the outcome essentially certain, did the crumbling Confederacy consent to an inclusive policy of exchange with the Union, and the prisons emptied as the war concluded. The turbulent process of negotiating the exchange of prisoners of war reveals an unflattering truth about the destructive character of the Civil War. Victory in the all-consuming struggle resulted in part from the prioritization of some lives over others. Consistently, and consciously, the leaders of both the Union and Confederacy emphasized the demands of the war effort over humanitarian principle. The troubling nature of that choice only deepens with the recognition that war leaders on both sides knew about the brutal conditions endured by captured soldiers, especially by the latter stages of the war. The grim statistics—30,000 Union prisoners perished in Confederate prisons, while 26,000 Confederates died in Union prisons—testifies to a shared failure of both the Union and Confederacy to care appropriately for prisoners of war.

  Although the reasons for the disaster varied on each side, in both cases the appalling mortality resulted in part from the ineffective organization of the respective prison systems. From the outset of the war, the Confederacy channeled most of its prisoners through Richmond, a natural focal point given the strategic importance of northern Virginia. Although sizable prisons eventually existed in additional locations, among them Florence and Columbia, South Carolina, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Salisbury, North Carolina, until the breakdown of the cartel in 1863 the vast majority of the Union prisoners remained in the Richmond area awaiting exchange. The actions of the Davis administration indicated that oversight of the prisons ranked as a low priority. Rather than appoint a specific officer to oversee the captives, in the summer of 1861, the Confederacy placed the prisoners under the jurisdiction of Brigadier General John Winder, the provost marshal general of Richmond. Although his father, General William Henry Winder, negotiated an exchange cartel with the British during the War of 1812, John Winder possessed no particular experience with, or talent for, prison management. By 1862, Winder’s responsibilities in Richmond included everything from returning deserters to discharging unfit soldiers. These duties prevented him from concentrating his attention on the needs of the growing numbers of Union prisoners.20 Eight thousand captives at the two main Richmond prisons—Libby Prison, where Union officers were housed, and Belle Isle, for Union enlistees—faced increasingly dire conditions before the implementation of the Dix-Hill cartel effectively relieved the overcrowding during the summer of 1862.

  Despite the near crisis and the possibility that exchange might fail again at some point, the Davis administration tellingly continued to demonstrate apathy toward the problem of caring for prisoners of war. Because the majority of captives fell under Winder’s jurisdiction and no single commander supervised all Confederate prisons, by default he retained the most authority over the prisons. Yet he found his power challenged by both field commanders and prison officials in other departments of the Confederacy, who often issued orders conflicting with those given by Winder.21 In the absence of coordinated leadership, plans for the construction of additional prison facilities occurred only out of desperation. When the cartel broke down in late 1863, the Richmond prisons once again overflowed. Only then did the Confederacy act, hastily establishing a large stockade at the small railroad depot of Anderson Station, Georgia, and reassigning Winder to its oversight. The reactive pattern of delayed Confederate attention to the obvious need for housing its prisoners began the misery that ultimately resulted in the infamous prison of Andersonville.

  Finally, in late 1864, three years into the conflict, it occurred to the Davis administration that a semblance of bureaucratic organization might reduce the haphazard (mis)functioning of the Confederate prison system. On November 21, Adjutant General Samuel Cooper installed Winder as the first Confederate commissary general of prisoners, a position that unified his authority over all the prisons of the Confederacy. One line in the order confirming Winder’s appointment was especially telling: “Department, army and other commanders are required not to interfere with the prisoners, the prison guard, or the administration of the prisons.”22 Although this was seemingly redundant, the muddled organizational state of Confederate prisons required such a statement. The sad irony of the belated appointment was that the war was almost over and the vast majority of prison deaths had already occurred. Throughout the conflict, a leadership void existed at the top of the Confederate prison system. Without direction, little incentive inspi
red subordinate officers to take responsibility for the deteriorating conditions experienced by Union prisoners. Some sympathy for the Confederacy’s slow reaction to the need for a well-defined prison system is legitimate. The onset of war created a variety of unforeseen challenges besides the problem of housing prisoners, and today’s inseparable combination of central government and bureaucracy did not fully or naturally exist in the Civil War era. But it remains inexcusable, even sinister, that, despite the momentum of the war against it, the Confederacy never bothered to address the exigencies of prisoners of war.

  While it too had flaws, the Union’s prison bureaucracy was much more organized than the Confederacy’s. In October 1861, Secretary of War Simon Cameron recognized the need for a department to handle prisoners of war. Cameron selected Colonel William Hoffman for the task, and Hoffman filled the post of commissary general of prisoners for the duration of the conflict. With authority over all matters pertaining to prisoners, Hoffman quickly issued orders in the hopes of establishing a well-defined prison bureaucracy. He devised a strict accounting system for prisoner transfers, illnesses, and deaths, which would organize the previously chaotic camps. Prisoners would be divided into messes, enabling the government to care more easily for and keep track of them. Under Hoffman’s administrative plan, prisoners were to receive standardized rations and necessary articles of clothing.23

  The establishment of a prison bureaucracy, however, did not translate immediately into efficient management of Union prisons. General Henry Halleck, the Union chief of staff, inexplicably failed to announce Hoffman’s appointment to the army until April 1862. Halleck’s tardiness undermined Hoffman’s ability to organize the scattered camps into a cohesive system at a time when the lack of exchange placed severe demands on Union resources. Although Hoffman planned the construction of a new prison for Confederate officers at Johnson’s Island, located on Lake Erie in Ohio, the design allowed space for only 1,280 men. The camp reached completion in late February 1862, but Grant’s 15,000 Fort Donelson captives immediately placed Johnson’s Island and other existing facilities on the verge of obsolescence. All over the North, Confederate prisoners crowded into what had previously been training camps. The overabundance of captives passed only with the establishment of the exchange cartel that summer. Meanwhile, Hoffman grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of respect for his position.24 On September 19, 1863, he complained to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton about his compromised authority over area commanders, many of whom countermanded his orders: