Haunted by Atrocity

by Cloyd, Benjamin G.

  In November, the war hero Ulysses S. Grant secured the presidency for the Republican Party. Given Grant’s lack of political experience, the constant emphasis on playing to the patriotism of Republicans proved a sound strategy. That patriotism, of course, rested in part on attacks against anyone with even the slightest connection to the prison atrocities. The Republican victory further confirmed the versatility of memory as a political weapon. Along with blaming Henry Wirz and Jefferson Davis, in 1868, Republicans also held Democrats, North and South, responsible for the suffering at Andersonville and other southern prisons.

  Even after Grant’s election, Republicans continued to harp on the subject of Civil War prisons. In 1869, the House of Representatives published the results of one final investigation into the treatment of Union soldiers in Confederate prisons. “In a national and historical sense, the subject of rebel imprisonment,” stated the committee, required “an enduring record, truthful and authentic, and stamped with the national authority.” The report proceeded to endorse all the accusations of the Civil War and its aftermath, so that “these facts should live in history as the inevitable results of slavery, treason, and rebellion, and as an example to which the eyes of future generations may revert with shame and detestation.” Nearly 270 pages of similar rhetoric seemed designed as much to justify the need for ongoing Republican control of the federal government as to warn posterity about the “unholy ambition” and the barbaric society of the rebel South. Besides officially endorsing the campaign propaganda of the late 1860s, the report served another purpose as well. Acknowledging the “heroism of the thousands of long suffering and martyred soldiers of the republic,” the committee cited the sacrifice of these men “as an enduring example of that chivalric courage which elevates man above the common level of his race.” The House also exonerated the Lincoln administration, as well as the Union military, “from any responsibility for these great sufferings and crimes.”46 With the Union absolved of any potential guilt and respect paid to the dead prisoners, the report accomplished its task of codifying the official Republican stance on the prison controversy. Rejecting even the possibility that the Republican government and military could have done more for the prisoners of both sides, the committee instead denounced the Confederacy as the barbaric product of a debased southern society and lauded the martyred figures of Lincoln and the Union prisoners. In part because of the constant repetition, few, at least in the North, disagreed. Memories of the Civil War remained too vivid to allow a more objective presentation of the events surrounding the prisons. Having won the war, the Republicans continued to press their rhetorical advantage in order to define the memory of the conflict and thus win the peace as well.

  One of the reasons for the ongoing emphasis on remembering the wartime prisons by the Republican Party centered on the involvement of Union veterans through their main postwar organization, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), in mobilizing the Republican constituency. The GAR played several important roles during Reconstruction, with preserving the celebratory meaning of Union victory not least among them. The bitter memories of Civil War prisons influenced the GAR from its beginning, as initiation rites often included symbolic reminders of Union POWs and Andersonville. The need to honor properly the dead victims of Confederate prisons justified, indeed required, political involvement. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, according to historian Stuart McConnell, “the war’s place in the popular estimation as a successful crusade allowed Union veterans to assume the role of savior, and they did not hesitate to do so.” Between holding political offices at the national, state, and city levels and “marshaling the massive ‘soldier vote’ for Lincoln in 1864 and Grant in 1868,” veterans affiliated with the GAR acted as a potent political base for the Republican Party.47 The 1870 speech of General J. P. C. Shanks to the GAR post at Washington, D.C., indicated the continued centrality of the prison issue for the Union veterans and the Republican Party. “It is at the door of the confederate government I lay the charge of wanton and savage cruelty to helpless prisoners of war,” Shanks thundered, before invoking the sympathies of the audience: “I would, if I could, call before your imaginations the gaunt, spectral forms of those thousands of robbed, frozen, starved, beaten, wounded, manacled, dogged, emaciated, neglected, crazed, and murdered men.”48 Shanks’s oration testified to both the enduring power of the vitriol over the treatment of prisoners and the attractiveness of the easy political capital gained from recycling old allegations. The preeminence of Union veterans in the Republican Party, as evidenced by the subsequent elections of Grant, Rutherford Hayes, and James Garfield to the presidency, meant a natural focus on what best qualified them for public office—meritorious service to the Union cause. It also meant that the symbolic issue of Civil War prisons continued to be invoked by Republican politicians whenever convenient. Repetitious mention of the accusations of Confederate atrocity, the celebration of the sacrifice of the Union prisoners’ bravery, and the innocence of the Union government all contributed to a political phenomenon known as “waving the bloody shirt.”49

  The 1872 reelection of Grant once again demonstrated the durable power of the memory of Civil War prisons to inspire righteousness in the North. On September 21, 1872, a Thomas Nast cartoon in Harper’s Weekly conjured up the old animosity over the conditions at Andersonville. Presidential candidate Horace Greeley, a Democrat, stood, with hand outstretched to the South, while below him lay the vast stockade of Andersonville, filled with graves. Nast juxtaposed Greeley’s quote “Let us clasp hands over the bloodiest chasm” with a sign featuring a skull and crossbones that stated “Andersonville Prison. Who Ever Entered Here Left Hope Behind.”50 Nast’s setting proved telling. Instead of a battlefield such as Gettysburg or Antietam, two of the bloodiest battles of the war, Nast chose Andersonville to represent “the bloodiest chasm” of the Civil War. That choice mirrored the popular northern perception of Andersonville as a terrible anomaly, the result of demonic, deliberate cruelty. In a political culture still inflamed by the paradoxical need to both celebrate and hate, Nast expertly conveyed the message that a full reconciliation with the South was impossible and ultimately undesirable at this time, given the horrors experienced at Andersonville. To forestall that reconciliation, northerners needed to continue to vote Republican until the southern penance of Reconstruction was deemed complete. Undeniably effective as a practical political tactic, the persistent use of a one-sided memory of Civil War prisons, with its emphasis on the evils of the Confederacy and the purity of the Union, benefited Republican politicians in another, less tangible way—it enabled northerners to forget the similar experiences Confederate prisoners endured in the North.

  Southerners, meanwhile, as the critics of the Wirz trial and survivors of Union prison camps indicated, remembered quite clearly, if more quietly, the sacrifices made in Union prison camps. Besides these few strident voices, however, in the immediate aftermath of the war many southerners suffered the accusations of the North in silence. The humiliation of defeat, augmented by the constant northern recitation of the memory of Confederate prison abuses, at first drowned out the southern voices who protested the North’s selective recollection of Civil War prisons. Southern defenders of the Confederate prison record remained relatively quiet because the South, at least in the short term, wanted to move on. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, southerners faced the daunting task of putting their society back together, and the turmoil surrounding the process of first presidential Reconstruction and then congressional Reconstruction prevented debate with the North. “Reestablishing a normal life,” according to scholar Gaines Foster, “left little time for dwelling excessively on the past and its pains” and “discouraged public lamentations.” Despite Dixie’s silence during Reconstruction, the South’s “need to repeat their assertions of righteousness, honor, and manhood,” and this “defensiveness toward northerners” foreshadowed an outpouring of southern frustration over the northern interpretation of Civil War prisons.51 A fe
w undaunted Southerners, however, began to frame the arguments that soon evolved into the standard defense of the Confederate prison record—a counter memory that defensively denied the validity of the northern accusations and deflected questions of responsibility for the prison suffering back toward the North.

  Writing from a jail cell in 1865, former Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens echoed the Confederate congressional report on the problem of prisoner treatment, declaring that the harsh conditions in the Confederate camps resulted from “unavoidable necessity” rather than from “inhumanity of treatment.” Since everyone in the Confederacy suffered from the lack of resources, Stephens opined, from the Confederate army to civilians, Yankee prisoners naturally endured the same hardships. Stephens suggested that in light of the quickly deteriorating state of affairs in the Confederacy by 1864, northerners prone to conspiracy theories about deliberate atrocities overlooked the obvious supply problems that plagued the entire Confederacy, not just Union prisoners. Despite the Confederacy’s shortcomings, Stephens continued, “Confederates escaping from Camp Chase and other Northern prisons” found “their treatment in these places to be as bad as any now described in exaggerated statements going the rounds about barbarities at Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle Isle, and Libby.” Stephens concluded that “there were barbarities . . . and atrocities on both sides,” and that therefore, neither section should boast too much about their prison record.52 Ex-Confederate president Jefferson Davis expressed sentiments similar to those of Stephens, according to the account published by the physician John Craven, who treated him during his imprisonment after the war. Craven summarized Davis’s belief that Confederate officers cared for their prisoners “the best they could,” but because “non-exchange” was “the policy adopted by the Federal Government,” the Union abandoned its prisoners to their fate in the resource-starved South.53

  In 1867, Louis Schade, one of Wirz’s defense attorneys, stated that the question of responsibility for the dead prisoners “has not fully been settled.” Like Stephens, Schade pointed out that given the collapse of Confederate infrastructure due to the Union naval blockade and the destruction of southern railroads and property, providing food and medicine for prisoners proved difficult, if not impossible. Schade insisted that “the Confederate authorities, aware of their inability to maintain their prisoners . . . urgently requested that prisoners should be exchanged,” but to no avail. Not content merely to refute northern accusations, Schade asked, “Has the North treated her Southern prisoners so that she should lift up her hands and cry ‘anathema’ over the South?” Denouncing the North’s “fearful record,” which, according to the 1866 report of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, consisted of an estimated 26,436 southern deaths in Union prisons, Schade pointed out how curious it seemed that “over 26,000 prisoners” perished “in the midst of plenty!” Using Stanton’s figures, which claimed that 22, 576 Union prisoners died in Confederate prison camps, approximately 4,000 fewer casualties than in the North, Schade wondered why northerners continued to adamantly attack southerners over the treatment of prisoners, especially when one considered the supplies available to prisoners in the Union but not to those in the Confederacy. After not so subtly suggesting that if either section deserved to be accused of atrocities committed against prisoners of war, perhaps it was the North rather than the South, Schade reminded readers that “puritanical hypocrisy, self-adulation and self-glorification will not save those enemies of liberty from their just punishment.”54 In the emotionally charged climate of the late 1860s, the arguments of Stephens and Schade reassured southerners of their brave and honorable conduct during the war. No one in the North took them seriously.

  Despite the negligible impact of their ideas on northern public opinion, these southern defenders succeeded in creating their own deflective memory of Civil War prisons. Their version contained several components that not only excused the Confederacy’s prison record but placed the burden of responsibility for the dead prisoners back on the Union. According to Stephens, Davis, Craven, and Schade, the Confederacy strove to fulfill its obligations to its prisoners even in the midst of total collapse. If the North had fought a more civilized war, refraining from destroying much of the Confederate heartland and preventing the import of medicine and other supplies, then tending to the needs of Union captives would have been far easier. Had the Union at any time acquiesced to the resumption of the exchange cartel the misery of the supposedly intentionally deprived Yankee soldiers would have ended. Finally, even with the concession that Confederate prisons took an incredible toll on Union prisoners, the fact remained that Union prisons killed Confederate captives at similar rates. While northerners scoffed at these arguments and dismissed them as selective, false, and conjectural, southerners clung to these rhetorical positions and began to repeat them, at first weakly, but eventually with growing confidence.

  Like its northern counterpart, the southern memory represented a severe distortion of the truth about Civil War prisons. A clear preference for hypothetical alternatives defined the southern position. Such narratives are not surprising given the grim reality of the outcome of the conflict. As defenders of the Confederacy, through the power of hindsight, reflected on the war, the natural human tendency to revisit mistakes and to ask what if crept in and influenced their arguments. The more troubling aspect of the southern deflective memory lay in its defiant mirroring of the northern stance. The denial of all responsibility for the suffering in Confederate prisons combined with the insistence that the Union instead deserved sole blame not only was untrue but indicated just how deep the wounds inflicted by the Civil War, and constantly reopened, as with the Wirz trial, during Reconstruction, really were. And the telling refusal to accept the legitimacy of African American freedom as both cause and outcome of the conflict, or to own up to the racial brutality that so heavily influenced the prisoner exchange controversy, revealed a white South determined to persist in its traditional racism despite the forced changes of Reconstruction.

  But even as the sectional fight over remembering Civil War prisons intensified, a third strand of memory emerged in the contest. Although white southerners used the debate over the wartime prisons to deflect attention from the lack of racial progress in the South, and northerners preferred to interpret Confederate brutality as confirmation of the virtue behind the Union cause, African Americans defined the memory of Civil War prisons for themselves. According to Blight, a black emancipationist vision of the conflict, focused on the abolition of slavery and consequent celebration of freedom, challenged the white supremacist trend, North and South, of resisting and ignoring the transformational issue of racial equality central to the Civil War.55 For African Americans, the emancipationist war meant a redefinition of Civil War prisons as symbols not of atrocity, but of freedom. Although few black soldiers, no more than 1,200 total, experienced prison camps, the misery experienced within prison walls in the service of human rights, regardless of race, made these locations into places of honor, worthy of commemoration. Despite the small number of black prisoners—and the unpleasant similarity of imprisonment and slavery—the emancipationist memory clearly included Civil War prisons. As throughout the country, African Americans demonstrated a determination to pay respects to these sites of sacrifice as a way to both give thanks for and express their commitment to the cause of equality.56

  Andersonville, in particular, showed the divergent—and controversial—power of the emancipationist tradition. Winslow Homer’s well-known untitled 1866 painting, known variously as At the Cabin Door or Near Andersonville, depicted a female slave peering out from her cabin doorway while in the background Union prisoners of war are marched to Andersonville. The juxtaposition of black slavery with white captivity was intentional—the fight for emancipation and the plight of prisoners at Andersonville became one and the same. Homer’s insightful recognition of the tangible connection between the prisons, abolition, and the uncertainty facing the newly freed slaves remains the mos
t striking emancipationist image of Civil War prisons.57 Such a painting also verified the reality that, alongside the one-sided sectional memories that enraged and frustrated white Americans, African Americans intended to embrace the location of Andersonville with a spirit of optimism about the future possibilities of freedom. No single human endeavor represents faith in progress more than the process of education, and in late October of 1866, a freedman’s school, the American Missionary Normal School, opened in the old hospital buildings of the prison. Although soon displaced from the actual prison grounds, the school remained in existence for decades. During that time, generations of black students began their quest for a better life at the same spot that thousands died to create that opportunity. In its reincarnation as an educational institution supportive of the drive for equality, Andersonville became, fittingly, not just a symbol of emancipation but a tribute to the sacrifice, made willingly or not, by the dead Union soldiers. Although the Normal School’s teachers, both white and black, were “generally shunned” by the white townspeople of Andersonville, a testament to the connection between memory and ongoing racial division, the positive emancipationist interpretation of Andersonville offered hope that the recollection of Civil War prisons might help heal instead of wound.58 Before that could happen, of course, the recriminations would have to cease.