As the local white resentment of the Normal School indicated, the emerging importance of Andersonville as an icon of freedom implicitly criticized the southern deflective tradition. The power of the emancipationist legacy provided an unsettling reminder to white southerners that their memories of the past were challenged not only by northerners but by their African American neighbors as well. The intertwined political and racial hostility of Reconstruction manifested itself in the growing tradition of Memorial Day at Andersonville. Yearly commemorations, attended by mostly black audiences, openly revealed the seething racial tensions in the postwar South. A newspaper account, sensationally headlined “White Women with Nigger Beaus,” of the 1870 “Andersonville frolic,” which drew about seven hundred African Americans and “not over half a dozen respectable white persons,” mocked the featured speaker, controversial Republican governor Rufus Bullock, as “His Expressellency.” A bitter scene ensued, according to the writer, as “Mrs. Bullock and company were gallanted around by niggers!!!” Such open defiance of racial propriety unmasked “what Republicanism seeks to accomplish in Georgia.” The black celebration at Andersonville testified to the importance of the emancipationist memory and offered a glimpse of not only an alternative past but perhaps the future for the South. The possibility of social change both profoundly frightened white southerners and encouraged them to cling ever tighter to their idealized recollections of the Civil War and its prisons. Disturbingly, for local whites at least, the popularity of the “disgusting carnival” at Andersonville would continue to grow long after the era of Reconstruction.59
As the contested Memorial Day commemorations at Andersonville showed, throughout Reconstruction, and even by its end, the bitterness of divisive memory endured instead of fading. On January 10, 1876, Maine congressman James Blaine rose to criticize a pending bill that proposed amnesty to the last of the unforgiven Confederates on the grounds that it included Jefferson Davis. Davis, argued Blaine, deserved no amnesty, because “he was the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily, and willfully, of the gigantic murders and crimes at Andersonville.” Reaching back into history for other brutalities, Blaine declared, grandstanding, that not even “the thumb-screws and engines of torture of the Spanish Inquisition begin to compare in atrocity with the hideous crime of Andersonville.”60 The debate over the amnesty bill offered yet another opportunity for northern manipulation of the memory of Civil War prisons in the name of politics as support for Reconstruction faded and Democratic representation in the federal government grew.61 With Wirz and Winder dead, Davis provided the best remaining target for northern politicians determined to associate the Democratic Party with the Confederacy and its horrible prisons. Despite the applause, Blaine soon found himself in a storm of controversy. The first responses came from Representatives Samuel Cox, of New York, and William Kelley, of Pennsylvania. Both regretted that, in the centennial anniversary of the United States, Blaine insisted on reviving the acrimony of the past. Just before adjourning, Benjamin Hill, of Georgia, obtained the floor.
The next day, Hill, speaking with the emotion of over ten years of pent-up frustration, delivered a rebuke not just to Blaine but to the entire North. Hill’s speech ended the Reconstruction years of relative southern public silence over the prison controversy and demonstrated the rising influence of the southern defensive memory of Civil War prisons. Expressing sorrow that Blaine focused attention on the prison feud, Hill declared it his “imperative duty to vindicate the truth of history” and protect the reputation of the Confederacy. “Whatever horrors existed at Andersonville,” Hill continued, “grew out of the necessities of the occasion, which necessities were cast upon the confederacy by the war policy of the other side.” Hill proceeded to ridicule Blaine’s claim “that no confederate prisoner was ever maltreated in the North” and insisted that “the time has passed when the country can accept the impudence of assertion for the force of argument or recklessness of statement for the truth of history.” After rejecting Blaine’s accusations, Hill questioned the constant use of the bloody shirt to attack southern honor. “Is the bosom of the country always to be torn with this miserable sectional debate whenever a presidential election is pending?” Hill asked, especially when “the victory of the North was absolute, and God knows the submission of the South was complete.” But the reality of the political situation in 1876, Hill argued, showed a South “recovered from the humiliation of defeat,” offering “no concession” to those in the North “who seek still to continue strife.”62 Hill’s speech reflected a maturing, if still delicate, confidence in the white South that resulted from the preservation of much of the antebellum social order. By 1876, white southern males managed to regain political control in all but a few southern states, and northern interest in the South’s affairs faded. Despite Reconstruction, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and a tumultuous period of economic and class turmoil within white society, continued southern white dominance over African Americans seemed increasingly possible. Although the amnesty bill went down to defeat, and Jefferson Davis remained unforgiven, the Hill-Blaine debate testified to the South’s determination to protest the selective northern memory of Civil War prisons.
Two months after the controversy over the amnesty bill, a new periodical, the Southern Historical Society Papers, responded to Blaine’s comments and devoted an entire issue, over two hundred pages, to the “Prison Question.” Admitting that Union prisoners experienced some suffering in southern prisons, the editor nevertheless declared the conditions even worse for Confederates held in the North. In a manner reminiscent of the Confederate congressional report of 1865, the testimony of the southern defenders rehashed the South’s counter memory of Civil War prisons. Although the inaccurate claims of higher mortality rates in Union prisons strained credibility, the strident, one-sided portrayal of the issue, intended to protect southern honor, helped cement a sense of solidarity in Dixie over the truth about the prisons. Despite a period of dejection, southerners, the Southern Historical Society Papers made clear, intended to fight the inaccurate northern charges and restore their reputation.63
In 1877, then, the hostility over Civil War prisons remained as strong as ever. The enduring passion behind the distorted memories of Civil War prisons must be understood in its context—Reconstruction was, at its core, an era defined by the search for new identities to replace those destroyed by the conflict. The ongoing anger over the prisons served as a verbal battlefield, a rhetorical framework, as African Americans, northerners, and white southerners fought to define their postwar goals and collective identities. Increasingly ignored by the North and consistently scorned by white southerners, African Americans remained steadfast in celebrating their unique memory of Civil War prisons as symbols of freedom during Reconstruction. But the forward-looking interpretation of African Americans prompted a dismissive response from whites of both sections, who not only clung to traditional attitudes of white supremacy but remained transfixed by the seeming impossibility of reconciling with the villainous enemy of the past.
The most vociferous recollections of Civil War prisons came from northerners, who justified the long, costly process of Reconstruction by “waving the bloody shirt,” asserting their virtue, and reminding themselves of the South’s barbarity toward prisoners during the war. The bitter rhetoric fostered a sense of obligation, based on appeals to the moral superiority of the North, which augmented support for the idea that the sacrifice made by the dead Union prisoners demanded that northerners complete the task of Reconstruction and support the patriotic party of Lincoln. Although these impulses were understandable, the irony of the northern memory of Civil War prisons was that it contributed to a series of contradictions that undermined much of the positive gain from the triumph. In celebrating the virtue of victory, northerners abandoned the cause of racial justice—emancipation as an accomplished fact was sufficient evidence of moral superiority—and ignored the injustices of Union prisons. The refusal to acknowl
edge the evils of the Union prison system was not a coincidence. As their memories hardened into gospel truth, righteous northerners, convinced by their own propaganda, refused to admit any wrongdoing. And the constant use of the prison controversy as a weapon against a series of convenient political targets had ramifications—it incited a sanctimonious indignation that precluded any meaningful sense of reconciliation in a nation that had suffered greatly in order to be preserved.
White southerners, initially relatively timid in mentioning their memories of the prison controversy and drowned out by the volume of northern intensity, over time rejoined the debate, albeit for different reasons. The frustration with the overbearing reminders of northern virtue encouraged southern apologists to mythologize the Confederate treatment of prisoners. Forced onto the defensive by the relentless northern accusations, southerners could not pretend—as did many in the North—that the atrocities committed in Confederate prisons did not occur. But they could, and did, attempt to deflect the barrage of criticism. The deflective memory constructed by southerners blamed the Union government and war policies for the suffering and claimed that Confederate soldiers experienced far worse treatment in northern camps. With home rule all but established, and in a period of growing national support for the Democratic Party, southerners like Benjamin Hill enjoyed a renewed sense of confidence as they began to refute vigorously the northern charges. But for white southerners the wartime prisons raised even deeper emotions. The war, and the crushing nature of the defeat, shook southern faith in their society at the same time that the North attacked southern honor over prisons like Andersonville. While the North, in the revelry of victory, could overlook its flawed treatment of prisoners, the South, during the late 1860s and early 1870s, remained exceedingly conscious of the aspersions cast on its honor. The rejuvenation of the southern defensive memory of Civil War prisons by 1876 thus served a multitude of needs for white southerners. As a component of the emerging Lost Cause, defiance of the northern prison interpretation justified the honorable nature of the Confederate war effort, commemorated the sacrifice made by Confederate victims of Union prisons, and demonstrated a sense of renewed optimism that the days of southern penance might soon end. The construction of this more comfortable past was not harmless. The deflective southern prison memory also encouraged resistance to racial equality by challenging, and ultimately rejecting, the legitimacy of the African American emancipationist remembrance of the prison tragedy.
Despite the divergent nature of the competing memories of Civil War prisons, these visions all shared a common durability rooted in and bound to the need for self-definition in postwar America. But beyond the need for identity, the intense emotions stirred up by Civil War prisons, still vivid more than a decade after the fighting, testified to the shocking human cost of the war and the desire to find meaning in the suffering. Beginning with the Wirz trial and continuing throughout the recriminations of Reconstruction, the prison controversy received so much attention in part because of the opportunity of political and financial gain, but mostly because Americans remained unsettled by the scale of the tragedy. Even the war itself possessed identifiable, if controversial, origins. The 56,000 prison deaths, however, represented the apex of the Civil War’s vicious nature and, at the time, made the most sense if understood as the brutality of a one-sided savagery. The existence of these Manichean, divisive memories created a deeply felt, if false, understanding of Civil War prisons that, throughout Reconstruction, obstructed the process of reconciliation and minimized the issue of African American equality. The possibility that the truth lay somewhere in between these divisive memories would have to wait for future generations even more bitterly schooled in the realities of modern war.
3
“This Nation Cannot Afford to Forget”
CONTESTING THE MEMORY OF SUFFERING, 1877–1898
In the period between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the onset of the Spanish-American War in 1898, despite the passage of time, the contested memories of Civil War prisons remained highly controversial. The dispute over the treatment of Civil War POWs continued—amid the larger national concern with the American future—as a transformative modernity redefined the United States as a country and society.1 In the uncertain environment of the last decades of the nineteenth century, the legacy of the Civil War reassured Americans that the country had survived far worse. Americans took comfort and inspiration from the character and fortitude displayed by their forebears in the Civil War, including the sacrifice of those who suffered in enemy prisons. Honoring that sacrifice became paramount in these turbulent decades as Americans sought to make sense of their present. Testimonials to the dead Civil War prisoners represented the effort, made by northerners and southerners alike, to use their deaths to justify and garner support for the creation of an America worthy of these heroes.
During the late nineteenth century, northerners remained dominant in the battle to claim the moral high ground regarding the prisons of the Civil War. Sensing that the uneasiness caused by the memory of Union prisoners’ suffering could still mobilize northern voters, Republican politicians throughout the late 1870s and 1880s continued to emphasize the unique brutality of the Confederate prison system. In 1879, James Garfield, future president of the United States, addressed a reunion of Andersonville survivors. “From Jeff Davis down,” he declared, “it was a part of their policy to make you idiots and skeletons.” That policy, thundered Garfield, “has never had its parallel for atrocity in the civilized world.” As so often before, Garfield connected the brutality of the Confederate prisons to the actions of depraved southern leaders. Garfield also renounced the possibility of reconciliation, suggesting that the individuals responsible for the prison suffering deserved the continued scorn of the North. “We can forgive and forget all other things,” he stated, “before we can forgive and forget this.”2 Republicans recognized that emphasizing their role as the successful prosecutors of the Union war effort attracted the continued favor of voters. In order to maintain the public mandate supporting Republican officeholders, it helped candidates like Garfield to remind their northern constituents of the unspeakable horrors of the southern prison system. As a carryover from Reconstruction-era politics, this tactic made sense given the dominance of the Democratic Party in the South. The choice, as Garfield framed it, lay between the Republican Party of the civilized North and the Democratic Party of the immoral South.
Throughout the 1880s, national politics, and particularly presidential elections, often encouraged a revival of the old Republican bloody-shirt charge that the Democratic Party consisted of treasonous ex-Confederates who refused (as years of violence had shown) to accept the reality of Reconstruction. General William T. Sherman, a Republican political symbol if not an actual politician, as late as 1887, “divided the American people into Republicans and Confederates, and termed the Democratic Party the left flank of the Confederacy.”3 That same year James G. Blaine, the 1884 Republican candidate for president defeated by Democrat Grover Cleveland, published his Political Discussions, a compendium containing what he considered his most important speeches. Among them, Blaine included his 1876 address attacking the idea of extending amnesty to ex-Confederates, particularly Jefferson Davis. Once again northerners read Blaine’s assessment that while “Wirz deserved his death,” it was “weak policy on the part of our government to allow Jefferson Davis to go at large and to hang Wirz.”4 Despite his failed campaign, Blaine remained steadfast in his belief that the prison controversy offered incontrovertible proof of the need for Republican control of the American government. Only Republican administrations could act as a safeguard against the Democratic Party’s allowing the return of ex-Confederates to power.
Although Cleveland’s election to the White House in 1884 and again in 1892 demonstrated the diminishing effectiveness of bloody-shirt politics in general, Republicans nevertheless held fast to their accusations that the Confederacy brutalized its prisoners. The calculated animosity
with which Republicans denounced southerners such as Jefferson Davis and Henry Wirz continued to yield a tangible, if weakened, political dividend. It went over well with the northern public and army veterans, reminding them that the causes for which the war was fought were best served by keeping Republicans in office. By reinforcing the image of the Democratic Party as a sympathetic home to ex-Confederates, the ongoing utilization of prison memories stirred up the fading emotions of the northern voting public and obstructed sentiment for a reconciliation that fully absolved the South of its sins.
Throughout the late nineteenth century, the proliferation of published prisoner narratives by Union soldiers contributed to the politics of sectional bitterness. Capitalizing on the national appetite for reminiscences of the Civil War, numerous prison memoirs appeared in the North in which the animosity over the treatment of prisoners continued unabated. Many historians of Civil War prisons note that the motivation for publishing prison memoirs often derived from the desire to make a profit or to establish a right to a veterans’ pension. These scholars offer persuasive evidence that authors of prison narratives, especially by the 1880s and 1890s, often exaggerated, fabricated, and plagiarized their accounts as they reinvented their experiences to help increase book sales.5 But whatever the questionable motives or veracity of the ex-prisoners, the historical importance of the prison memoirs lies in the widespread acceptance of their stories by the northern public. Hundreds of thousands of readers bought these books because of their dominant narrative—the portrayal of the prison experience as an individual tale of courage appealed to a people still incredulous at the unimaginable scale of impersonal mortality in Civil War prison camps. The prison accounts not only reminded northerners of the Confederate prison atrocities, and in the process encouraged support for the Republican Party, but they also personalized the suffering of Union soldiers in a highly sympathetic manner. Despite their flaws, prison memoirs represented a legitimate search for meaning in the wartime suffering.
Haunted by Atrocity Page 8
