Haunted by Atrocity

by Cloyd, Benjamin G.

  From 1862 onward, the initial acrimony over the treatment of prisoners exploded into outrage as former captives began publishing accounts of their sufferings. Although the earliest memoirs, such as the Journal of Alfred Ely, which appeared before the Dix-Hill cartel in 1862, contained little resentment toward the Confederacy or Union, they made clear that the life of a prisoner on either side was not an enviable one.57 More importantly, these early testimonials heightened the public visibility of the camps at a time when prison casualties began to rise. By 1863, the publication of prison accounts, diaries, and letters reflected and fed the growing obsession with the prison conditions on both sides.58 Readers in the North, vicariously experiencing the conflict, could not help but feel sorry for Union captain J. J. Geer, who described how he “lay wounded and languishing in the loathsome jails of a merciless enemy.”59 Along with that sympathy a rising fury emerged, both North and South, against the fact that their opponent would not only tolerate but even encourage such brutality.

  The unpublished diaries and letters of the Union and Confederate public, particularly women, reflected the heightening bitterness surrounding the prisons. In addition to the anger, writings from the home front showed that the families of captives suffered as well. An 1864 extract from the diary of Elizabeth Van Lew, of Richmond, depicted the terrible suffering at Belle Isle. “It may be brave to meet death on the battlefield,” wrote Van Lew, “but months and weeks and days of dying, a forgotten, uncared for unit of a mighty nation! Surely this is the test of bravery and patriotism!”60 By the fall of 1864, other writers described the fearful results of that test. Iowa soldier J. B. Ritner, in a letter to his wife, told her, “the most pitiful sight I have seen during the war is that of our soldiers coming back from the southern prisons . . . so wasted away with hunger that they looked like mere skeletons.”61 In November 1864, Jane Stuart Woolsey, a Union nurse, wrote a letter in which she quoted a Surgeon Smith on the condition of the returning Union prison survivors: “They are too low, too utterly wrecked to have hope. . . .These living skeletons and puling idiots are worse than any sight to see on the battlefield.” Woolsey continued, outraged that the prisoners “have been subjected to every cruelty, every infamy of cruelty, we can conceive of.” Although a nurse who witnessed the plight of Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout, Woolsey insisted that she “knew what the contrast is” between the Union and Confederate prison systems.62 Woolsey believed not only that Confederate brutality was intentional but that the Union prison system operated far more humanely.

  Southern women refuted Woolsey’s belief in Union exceptionalism. Of the Yankee treatment of prisoners, Lizzie Hardin stated in her diary that “when men who have been confined in separate prisons, many of them hundreds of miles apart, come home at different times and by different routes, and all agree that they were so badly supplied with food as to be forced to eat rats and dogs, I believe it must be the truth.”63 Sarah Morgan described the pain of hoping for the return of a captured soldier, only to learn of his death in prison. “We have deceived ourselves,” Morgan wrote; “we readily listened to the assertions of our friends that Johnson’s Island was the healthiest place in the world.”64 More fortunate news awaited Floride Clemson, John C. Calhoun’s granddaughter. At the end of the war, she recounted the return of her brother, Calhoun Clemson, from Johnson’s Island. He seemed “graver,” Floride Clemson wrote, and she attributed his somber nature to Calhoun’s experiences as a prisoner. In her diary Clemson claimed that Calhoun said “they retaliated upon him in prison.” Despite the physical suffering, for poor Calhoun “the loss of hope was the most terrible thing.”65 Although both sides remained convinced of the purposeful nature of the suffering, the diaries and letters from the home front clearly demonstrated the poignant toll that the prisons took not only on the captives but also on their families.

  By 1864, in recognition of the emotional attachment to the prisoner controversy, both the Union and Confederate press devoted extensive coverage to the prison camps. The steady publication of articles, pictures, cartoons, prisoner testimony, and even government reports on the problem further inflamed public opinion. In an August 1864 letter to a North Carolina editor, Confederate officer Thomas J. Green, held at Johnson’s Island, called on the newsman to “agitate, agitate, agitate the subject” of the poor conditions of the prison camps and especially the failure to exchange the thousands of suffering captives.66 Green need not have worried that the issue of prisoner treatment and exchange needed more exposure. If he had had access to southern newspapers, he would have been pleased to see that agitation over the treatment of prisoners continued to grow. A few months earlier, a Charleston Mercury editorial denounced the “Northern bastiles where our gallant Confederate soldiers pine in wretchedness, to which death is a relief, and where they are plied with cruelty.”67 A letter to the Macon Daily Telegraph editor, published June 11, 1864, and signed simply “Rebel,” revealed a complete lack of sympathy for the suffering that Yankee prisoners encountered in nearby Andersonville. “Rebel” claimed that he and his fellow Confederate prisoners, who in 1863 experienced the hardships of Camp Douglas, Chicago, endured a mortality rate that “was some 3 1/3 times greater than . . . in the Yankee prison (Andersonville),” and “yet the Yankees said that the ‘prison was too healthy for damned rebels.’”68 Given the destruction the war brought to the Confederacy, especially by late 1864, the plight of Yankee prisoners aroused little sympathy in Dixie. Louis Manigault, the secretary to Major Joseph Jones, a Confederate surgeon sent to inspect Andersonville Prison in the fall of 1864, displayed the cold reality of the situation when he wrote his wife that “I examined about 30 dead Yankees, a fearful sight. They have however caused us such suffering . . . that I feel no pity for them, and behold a dead Yankee in a far different light from a dead Confederate killed in fighting for all that is dear to him.”69 From Manigault’s perspective, imprisoned Union soldiers deserved their fate.

  During the same period, the Union refused to yield the moral high ground in the prisoner debate. The 1864 appearance of composer George Root’s “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!; or, The Prisoner’s Hope,” followed by 1865’s “Starved in Prison,” reminded the northern public of the importance of fighting to save the thousands of Union prisoners who anxiously awaited a return to freedom.70 The popularity of prison-related songs showed that the appeal of the prison controversy to the public’s interest could generate profits as well as patriotism. Root’s success also foreshadowed the flood of documents throughout the last years of the war that blamed the Confederacy for the dying captives. In January 1864, Harper’s Weekly expressed outrage at the way the South continued to mistreat Union prisoners. “They do not massacre their prisoners outright,” the editor admitted, but instead “drag them away to starve in loathsome dungeons.” Refusing to accept the deteriorating conditions encountered in Confederate prisons as an excuse, the author contended, “If the rebels can not treat prisoners honorably they have no right to take them.”71 The writer also mentioned the possibility of retaliation against Confederate captives held in Northern prisons as a means of encouraging the Confederacy to make caring for its prisoners a higher priority. The anger the prisoner issue provoked deepened as, in the absence of exchange, more and more prisoners died over the course of 1864. The press continued to ignite public sentiment. In November 1864, a New York Herald article, titled, “Our Suffering Prisoners,” summarized northern antipathy toward the South. How, it asked, could “a community boasting of Christianity and enlightenment . . . be guilty of so many barbarities as have been perpetuated by the rebels towards their Union prisoners.”72 To supplement the angry editorials, photographs and other illustrations appeared as well.

  Most photographs or cartoons published during the war years depicted the toll that prison life took on the health and strength of young soldiers. In the North, the circulation of the shocking images of emaciated troops, who had been hale and hearty when they left home, often conveyed the harsh reality of prison life bett
er than any article could. Beginning in 1863, a series of illustrations appeared in Harper’s Weekly confirming the rumors of prison evils taking place in the Confederacy. That December, one of the early drawings showed a ragged group of Union prisoners at Belle Isle, in Richmond. Most of them sat or lay prone on the ground, half naked, without the strength or desire to move. Two other prisoners stood, weakly, clutching each other for support. The gloomy scene revealed a world of brutality and deliberate cruelty as the northern soldiers helplessly awaited their fate. On the front page of the March 5, 1864, edition, a picture of tottering prison escapees, held upright only with the help of Union soldiers, suggested that even these brave, determined individuals—the strongest—barely survived the hell of prison in Dixie. More images in December 1864 and January 1865 followed, focusing northern attention on the pitiful health of the recently exchanged survivors of southern prisons.73

  When illustrations of Union prisons occasionally appeared, as in the April 15, 1865, issue of Harper’s Weekly, they depicted a much more benign existence. A panoramic drawing of Elmira Prison, in New York, complete with an American flag waving in the breeze, presented a stark contrast to the claustrophobic, graphic images that northern artists offered of the suffering individuals in the South. When a picture focused on Confederate prisoners, as in one rendering of Fort Lafayette, in New York, they sat peacefully inside a comfortable barracks room reading and playing games.74 The much cozier image fit the popular opinion in the North, fed by the press, that Confederate prisoners lived in luxury while their counterparts starved and died.75 The sharp contrast indicated the deepening fury of the Civil War. It also showed a stubborn refusal in the North, fueled by the influence of such propaganda, to confront the reality of the evil done in the name of its cause. The anger over the seemingly singularly brutal treatment of northern soldiers in southern prisons, fed by the constant publication of charges and images of atrocity, increased the bitterness and sense of moral outrage that fueled the destruction of the Confederacy during the latter stages of the war.

  A dualistic, highly partisan perception of Civil War prisons thus emerged during the conflict. Both the citizens and press of the Union and Confederacy embraced a one-sided presentation of the prison controversy that prejudiced public discussion of the tragic conditions. In an environment of heightened patriotism, the desire to believe the best about your country—and by extension yourself—encouraged then, as now, a tendency to focus on the behavior of the opponent rather than self-scrutiny.76 The illusory nature of the public’s understanding, in contrast to the more balanced reality described by the prisoners themselves, revealed another aspect of the Civil War’s destructive essence—the reality of the war and the justifications of its purpose became indistinguishable. The irony of the accusations hurled by both sides against each other was that instead of ameliorating the suffering of prisoners, it fostered an environment in which the expectation of mistreatment grew, which made the worsening conditions of the prisons a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  The vitriolic reaction to the prison tragedy by private citizens requires context, however. As in response to the exchange question, both the Union and Confederate governments manipulated the emotional issue of Civil War prisons for political gain during the last two years of the war. In May 1864, the U.S. House of Representatives released a report, complete with images of emaciated captives, detailing the brutal treatment Union prisoners experienced in the Confederacy. “The evidence proves,” asserted the House, “a determination on the part of the rebel authorities, deliberately and persistently practiced,” to “subject” soldiers to “a system of treatment” so horrible that the survivors “present literally the appearance of living skeletons . . . maimed for life.”77 Similar conclusions appeared in a subsequent publication by the United States Sanitary Commission, which not only attacked the Confederate prison system but praised the humane Union prison facilities.78 Seizing the opportunity to fan the flames of patriotism and vindicate the superior morality of the northern cause, the Union government publicized its officially sanctioned version of the truth about Civil War prisons. The connection between the distortions of Union propaganda, the northern press, and the beliefs of devoted northerners like Jane Wool-sey is unmistakable.

  It was also calculated. The sweeping denunciations of the Confederacy by the Union certainly rang hollow with the men unfortunate enough to find themselves in the prisons so often discussed in the newspapers back home. Union prisoners wondered why the government, despite its haste to blame the Confederacy for the deplorable circumstances imposed on northern captives, seemed unwilling to take action on behalf of the Federals suffering in southern prisons. In August 1864, a small group of Andersonville prisoners, temporarily released by the Confederate authorities, arrived in Washington, D.C., to inform the government of the terrible conditions and casualties that the soldiers experienced in the Georgia prison camp. “One of the sad effects . . . of this terrible war,” the preamble to the prisoners’ presentation stated, “has been to deaden our sympathies. . . . Does the misfortune of being taken prisoner make us less the object of interest and value to our Government?”79 The answer to the Andersonville captives’ question depended on perspective. Although Union prisoners felt abandoned by their government, which consistently demonstrated indifference toward the problems experienced by prisoners of war, they possessed immense “value” to the Union war cause. Unfortunately for Union prisoners, the Lincoln administration calculated their “value” differently. The reality of the prisoners’ worth was shown by the actions of General Sherman, who, as he marched through Georgia, made no serious effort to free the Andersonville prisoners.80 Sherman’s actions confirmed the absence of humanitarian morality, except when convenient, in the Union war effort. The propaganda “value” of northern captives as martyrs, accompanied by a barrage of inflammatory rhetoric and images, outweighed the “value” of their lives.

  Even during the final months of the war, as exchange resumed and the prison camps slowly emptied, the excoriation of the Confederacy and its prisons persisted. With victory at hand, northerners continued to equate superiority on the battlefield with moral superiority. On January 29, 1865, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, no stranger to attacking the ethical failings of southern society, gave a speech criticizing the congressionally proposed policy of retaliating against rebel prisoners in response to the brutal treatment accorded to Union prisoners. “We should do nothing by which our country shall forfeit that great place which belongs to it in the vanguard of nations,” Sumner pleaded, even as he admitted that “when we read the stories of their atrocities . . . when the whole scene in all its horror is before us . . . our souls are filled with unutterable anguish.”81 Although Sumner rejected the idea of retaliation in northern prisons, his speech, reprinted and circulated, nevertheless confirmed the guilt of the Confederacy and the innocence of the Union in the debate over responsibility for the prison atrocities.

  Despite Sumner’s magnanimous stance, refusing to trade an eye for an eye in response to the South’s provocation, the Union government’s actions toward captive Confederates demonstrated that, claims of innocence aside, a policy of de facto retaliation already existed. Inspired by the information published in the House of Representatives report concerning the brutal treatment of northern prisoners, during the spring of 1864 Union secretary of war Edwin Stanton approved a series of reductions in the rations given to Confederate prisoners held in the North in order to match those issued to Union prisoners in the South.82 The ruthless nature of Stanton’s reprisal offers further evidence of the destructive scale of the Civil War. Stanton’s policy, although perhaps a response to the racial atrocities of Fort Pillow, was certainly motivated by bitterness and an artificial sense of moral superiority.83 While it gained the Union a small military advantage in terms of cutting costs on prisoner care, it also contributed to the deaths of southern prisoners. The fact that President Lincoln remained silent despite clear knowledge of the impact of th
ese actions also confirmed the brutal pragmatism that defined the Union leadership’s approach to the conflict.84 But the most telling aspect of the policy of retaliation concerns the lack of protest, or even interest, it inspired in the North. Despite all the attention devoted to the inhumanity of the Confederacy, in the last stages of the war northerners displayed a hardened apathy toward the suffering endured by imprisoned Confederates.

  Refusing to accept the Union version of the prisoner-of-war controversy, the Confederacy stuck to its rhetorical guns even as the real ones fell silent. On March 3, 1865, the Davis administration released its own report describing the prison situation. What made the testimony “important,” the Confederate Congressional Committee stated, were the “persistent efforts lately made by the Government of the United States . . . to asperse the honor of the Confederate authorities and to charge them with deliberate and willful cruelty to prisoners of war.” These “efforts,” according to the report, “are designed to inflame the evil passions of the North; to keep up the war spirit among their own people.” Not content with that insight, the committee continued by asserting that “in nearly all the prison stations of the North . . . our men have suffered from insufficient food, and have been subjected to ignominious, cruel, and barbarous practices, of which there is no parallel in anything that has occurred in the South.” As for the collapse of the exchange cartel, the Confederate document acknowledged that “the policy of seducing negro slaves” and “arming” them against the South “gave rise to a few cases in which questions of crime under the internal laws of the Southern States appeared.” Despite the disagreement over the status of African American troops, however, the Congressional Committee declared that that issue “ought never to have interrupted the general exchange.” Unfortunately for the Confederacy, “the fortunes of war threw the larger number” to the Union, which, in keeping with its strategy of attrition against the South, “refused further exchanges.” Therefore, “the responsibility of refusing to exchange prisoners of war rests with the Government of the United States,” and so too did the blame for every resulting “sigh of captivity” and “groan of suffering.”85