Haunted by Atrocity

by Cloyd, Benjamin G.

  If some northerners feared and resented the disappearance of sectional hostility, during the Spanish-American War and its immediate aftermath, southerners eagerly participated and welcomed the conflict as well as McKinley’s declaration that reconciliation was complete. Perhaps naively, southerners assumed that that reconciliation extended to the subject of Civil War prisons and that northerners might finally acknowledge the suffering that occurred in Union prisons during the Civil War. At the 1898 United Confederate Veterans (UCV) convention, Surgeon General C. H. Tebault tested the waters by delivering a defense of the Confederate prisons. He stated that the “responsibility of all this sacrifice of human life . . . rests entirely upon the authorities at Washington.”32 Southerners received an additional morale boost from the publication of Union veteran James Madison Page’s The True Story of Andersonville Prison, portions of which appeared in the Confederate Veteran and southern newspapers. Page’s popularity in the South resulted from his conviction that “prejudice” and “warped” memory fed the northern perception of Wirz as a demon. Page, a prisoner for seven months in Andersonville, explained his motivation for writing his account. “After forty years we can at least afford to tell the truth,” he argued, that “we of the North have been acting unfairly.” “We profess unstinted friendship towards the South,” Page continued, but “we charge the South with all the blame for all the horrors of the Civil War.” Page believed that the time for recrimination was past and that the North, with its hypocritical treatment of the South concerning the memory of Civil War prisons, was only prolonging the bitterness. Southerners delighted in the fact that at least one Yankee finally understood.33

  With their confidence on the rise once again, many southerners focused their energy on the ongoing campaign to care for and mark the graves, particularly those of former prisoners, of Confederates in the North. By 1901, however, their efforts yielded little progress. The report that year of Samuel Lewis, commander of the Charles Broadway Rouss Camp of the UCV, located in Washington, D.C., discussed the painstaking process of disinterring and reburying the remains of 264 Confederates in Arlington cemetery, as well as marking their new graves with marble headstones. Although the process met with McKinley’s approval in 1899, not until 1901 were the necessary funds allocated and the process completed. Even more sobering, from Lewis’s perspective, was the intimidating prospect of dealing with the “28,000 Confederate dead remaining uncared for in the North.” “Attention to the care of these dead,” Lewis argued, “would be productive of much good” and help “remove from discussion a still fruitful source of irritation.”34

  Decorating and restoring the often overlooked graves became a priority for southern memorial organizations like the Confederate Southern Memorial Association and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). These two groups expressed a desire to honor properly these 28,000 southern heroes in a manner reminiscent of the northern monuments built at Andersonville and Salisbury. One small success came in 1899, when the Ladies Memorial Association dedicated a monument in Americus to the 115 Confederate prison guards who died at Andersonville. Their graves had been “neglected” at Andersonville, and in 1880 their bodies had been reinterred in Americus, just a few miles away. The “suitable” monument and the new marble headstones offered a much more fitting tribute.35 But the refurbished Georgia graves offered little solace to southerners still concerned about the thousands of Confederate dead in the North. During the early 1900s, although memorial efforts persisted to decorate graves in Chicago, site of Camp Douglas, and New York, the location of Elmira, the UDC focused much of its attention on Camp Chase, Ohio, where Union veteran and prison historian William Knauss continued to labor for the cause of sectional reconciliation. In the mid-1890s, Knauss undertook the cause of caring for the more than 2,000 Confederate graves because of the “unutterable loneliness and shameful disorder of Camp Chase Cemetery.” Over time his efforts helped lead to the creation of a Columbus chapter of the UDC, and by 1902, the chapter members stood ready to take over the care of the cemetery grounds from Knauss. All that remained were the ceremonies of June 7, 1902, the day that the UDC helped unveil a memorial arch near the entrance of the cemetery. Tellingly, the monument was topped by a statue of a soldier standing at rest, leaning on his rifle—an assertive posture that, like the Andersonville monuments, testified to the southern determination to venerate its own version of prison memory. Financed by Knauss and his friends, the first monument dedicated entirely to Confederate victims of Union prisons bore the simple inscription, “Americans,” a sentiment that seemed appropriate in the new climate of sectional reconciliation. Unlike the unveiling of the Andersonville monuments, however, where the northern delegations enjoyed a warm reception, locals, many of whom resented this challenge to their understanding of the Civil War and its meaning, anonymously threatened to vandalize and even dynamite the monument. Although the ceremonies proceeded without interference, and as Ohio governor Nash declared in his comments, the commemoration confirmed a joyous “epoch of fraternal love and peace,” the promised, though unrealized, violence tarnished the proceedings.36

  On the surface, the 1902 dedication of the Camp Chase monument represented the positive post-1898 culmination of reconciliation and provided an example of cooperation between North and South. But it also reinforced the growing suspicions of many southerners that perhaps the process of reconciliation, particularly in reference to the memory of Civil War prisons, remained tantalizingly close but impossible. Although the 1906 Foraker Act required the War Department to shoulder the burden of caring for the graves of dead Confederate prisoners in the North—and by 1914 a handful of government-sponsored monuments at Union prison sites such as Alton, Point Lookout, Elmira, and Fort Delaware had been erected—the national government demonstrated only a cursory interest in memorializing these locations. The plaques at the base of the monument shafts honoring the dead Confederate captives at Alton and Fort Delaware were identical—only the numbers of the dead prisoners of war, “whose graves cannot now be individually identified,” were changed.37 These halfhearted efforts in honor of their dead only inflamed the passions of southern memorial groups like the UDC. Reconciliation promised forgiveness to the South, but as southerners examined the enduring northern attitude of superiority on the subject of prisons after 1898, they increasingly remembered that, according to their memory of Civil War prisons, they had done nothing to be forgiven for, or at least nothing that the North had not also done to them. From the perspective of southern defenders, if either section owed an apology over Civil War prisons, it was the North to the South for the decades of unfair accusations. At the very least, to confirm the sincerity of northern claims of reconciliation, northerners needed to stop denigrating the Confederate prison record and protesting Union innocence in the treatment of Civil War prisoners. Southerners, after all, peacefully and openly welcomed Union veterans to Andersonville and Salisbury year after year and listened to magnanimous Yankees forgive them for their sins. When an occasional southern-sponsored monument to Confederate prisoners was built, however, as at Camp Chase, northerners threatened violence. As a result of this clear disparity in the competing memories of Civil War prisons, where the North erected monument after monument, emphasizing the singular brutality of the Confederate prison system, while only a few generic memorials and thousands of dilapidated graves testified to the South’s inability to convince northerners of their part in the tragedy, southerners realized that the offer of sectional reconciliation came with an increasingly apparent catch. To further the process of reconciliation, the South needed to accept the northern interpretation of Civil War prisons. For many southerners, the northern acceptance of much of the Lost Cause mythology and Jim Crow segregation by the early 1900s made it easier to accept blame for the prison controversy, especially when, as in the case of Thomasville and Americus, their communities benefited financially from the attention. Other southerners, meanwhile, remained dedicated to the fight for “true history.”r />
  Ever since the late 1860s and 1870s, when Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, and Benjamin Hill defended the Confederacy’s prison system, many southerners steadfastly refused to accept the northern memory of Civil War prisons. Even at the turn of the century, the campaign to clear the record about the wartime prisons continued as an important part of a larger effort to resist what southerners thought was no less than the rewriting of history by the North in an effort to permanently humiliate the South. In November 1899, a Confederate Veteran article, “School Histories in the South,” republished the report of Hunter McGuire of the Grand Camp Confederate Veterans. In his statement, McGuire avowed that the South faced an insidious threat from “false teachings” of history. Southerners were either being “misled” or else were “foolishly” ignoring “the principles and convictions of the past.” “We are enlisted,” McGuire implored his fellow southerners, “against an invasion organized and vigorously prosecuted.”38 For McGuire, reconciliation on northern terms threatened to obliterate the true meaning of the war. Winning the war alone would never satisfy the Yankees, who persisted in denigrating southerners and reminding them of their treachery.

  In response, southerners continued to construct their own alternative version of history based on the deflective counter memory of Civil War prisons. In 1899, the Southern History Association republished an article from the mid-1890s by Adolphus Mangum describing Salisbury Prison, which, after Andersonville, represented one of the worst Confederate prisons. A resident of Salisbury for part of the war, Mangum felt inspired to write about the prison, and the efforts made there to care for the Union prisoners, primarily because of two questions: “Why, then, all this unrelenting bitterness—this bloodthirsty, inexorable vengefulness towards the South,” and “where is the apology for the barbarities and murders of Northern prisons?” “Impartial history,” Mangum concluded, “will show that in the article of prisons,” the South “‘was more sinned against than sinning.’”39 The challenge raised by McGuire and Mangum of exonerating the South through history did not go unheeded. Throughout the early 1900s, the Confederate Veteran and Southern Historical Society Papers continued their long-running campaign of opposition to the northern perspective on the wartime prisons.40

  Southern survivors of northern prisons also produced more accounts of their suffering throughout this period as well—memoirs that still displayed a deep-rooted anger at the northern public’s insistence of the superiority of Union prisons.41 In his 1904 book, John King, motivated by the northern “spirit of enmity,” confessed that he lacked the ability to properly depict his experiences at Camp Chase. “I have no words at my command,” he stated, “with which to describe the horrors of the Yankee prison at Camp Chase. One would have to follow ‘Dante’ in his descent to Hell, and in his wanderings among its inmates, to find an approach to it.”42 Like Sturgis, King and his fellow chroniclers of prison life in the North felt compelled to write even after all these years because they shared the same goals, if opposing viewpoints, and similar tales of suffering. As death approached, the need to clarify the “true history” of their prison experience, their sacrifice to the failed cause of nation, became paramount. Leaving behind a published record that contradicted northern memory allowed former prisoners to preserve their identity as heroes of the Confederacy and remind their fellow southerners to take pride in their defensive memory of Civil War prisons.

  During the early 1900s, southern prison survivors like John King were well reinforced in the battle for history. A combination of southern voices, male and female, sons and daughters, joined in protest against the northern memory. The reclamation of history, from the southern perspective, continued to drive memorial organizations. The 1904 History of the Confederated Memorial Associations of the South declared that the chief purpose of these Southern women centered on the “sacred duty,” the “determined effort to perpetuate in history the testimony of the broken hearted women and maimed heroes of ‘61–65.” And, like Sturgis, a sense of urgency infused the organization and the discharge of its duty “before the march of time decimates our rapidly thinning ranks.”43 In 1905, the solidarity of the UCV, UDC, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Ladies’ Memorial Associations as “guardians” of “vital Confederate historical interests” was “gratefully” acknowledged at the annual report of the historical committee at the UCV convention. The “extreme vigilance in guarding our posterity against error,” stated committee chairman Clement Evans, protected southern “intelligence, patriotism, courage, and honor.”44 With their very identity at stake these southern organizations promised to hold firm against the Yankee appropriation of their history.

  By 1905, the United Daughters of the Confederacy possessed a reputation as one of the most “zealous” of the memorial organizations in the South and as vigorous defenders of the historical memory of the Confederacy.45 At the annual UDC convention in San Francisco that year, the president of the Georgia Division, Sarah Hull, unable to personally attend the “far-off” proceedings, instead sent a report updating the progress of the ninety-one Georgia chapters to the gathering. After some discussion of fund raising, scholarships, and memorial events, all part of “fulfilling” the “sacred duty we owe to our great dead,” Hull concluded her statement:

  There is one memorial work to which we wish it were in our power to direct the attention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. This is the erection of a monument at Andersonville. We have nothing there to refute the lies and slanders proclaimed in marble on all sides, nothing to bear witness to the Truth, and to the brave testimony of Wirtz and the men who died with him. What greater work is there for us, when the monument to our President is completed, than to turn our attention to this, and so proclaim to the world in the simple, straightforward language of Truth, which needs no adornment, the facts of that prison at Andersonville. Awful they were, we know, but no more so than the prisons in which our own men were held; and we had this palliation: Our government did the best it could, and the prisoners fared as well as our soldiers in the field. Truly the work will never end, Daughters of the South, and the more we do the more we find to do, as is always the case in life.

  Following Hull’s announcement, the convention listened to the report of Mary Young, historian of the Savannah chapter. Since the northern monuments at Andersonville “inscribed a false presentation of Wirtz,” duty called the UDC to right the injustice committed against southern honor and proper history. She suggested that a national fund-raising campaign commence, with the goal “to erect a suitable memorial to his memory,” including “a lasting record of his murder under false charges.”46 So began the most heated battle over the memory of Civil War prisons since the Hill-Blaine debate of the 1870s.

  During the fund-raising and planning stages for the Wirz monument, southern memorial organizations lined up in support of the UDC’s proposal. The April 1906 Confederate Veteran publicized the initial campaign, announced the formation of three UDC subcommittees—“Selection of Site,” “Inscriptions,” and “Design”—and solicited “liberal” donations from loyal southerners willing to support the project.47 That same year, R. A. Brock, editor of the Southern Historical Society Papers, expressed his excitement about the monument, stating that “it is gratifying to be informed that the cruel stigma may be removed from the memory of Henry Wirz.”48 By November 1907 the UDC commissioned C. J. Clark of the Americus-based Clark Monumental Works to build “the handsome marble shaft.”49 No doubt the fine craftsmanship Clark exhibited in building several of the Andersonville and Salisbury monuments contributed to his obtaining the Wirz monument contract. The nearly thirty-foot-tall obelisk, when completed, seemed destined for either Americus or, as originally conceived, the Andersonville prison grounds as a “rebuttal to the State monuments” located at the prison and cemetery.”50 As news of the Wirz monument reached the North, however, controversy flared.

  On January 28, 1908, the editor of the Americus Times-Recorder announced that the UDC’s propo
sed tribute to Wirz had “kicked up” a “storm of indignation” in the ranks of that “fanatical element of south haters,” the Grand Army of the Republic. Instead of placing the monument in the town of Andersonville—itself a compromise location since the Women’s Relief Corps and the national government had no intention of allowing the Wirz monument anywhere on the Andersonville prison grounds or national cemetery—the editor suggested that in order to calm the “tempest,” the town of Americus would accept the monument, further preventing any estrangement between “the two sections.”51 Many southerners recognized that perhaps the monument would cause less controversy if located away from Andersonville. A former member of the Georgia UDC, E. F. Andrews, wrote her friend, a Mr. Oglesby, in April 1907 and acknowledged that even though she was no longer part of the organization, she hoped “that the kind-hearted women of Georgia will place their monument either on Wirz’s grave, or in some Georgia town where it will stand a chance of being treated with respect.”52 The debate over where to build the memorial grew throughout 1908, and members of the UDC, motivated by what the Times-Recorder called “strenuous objection in all parts of the state towards putting the monument at Andersonville,” considered placing the monument at several locations, including Richmond, Virginia, as well as Macon, Americus, and Andersonville.53 By December 8, 1908, the monument appeared headed to Richmond to stand “in close proximity to the graves of the Davis family,” and the Times-Recorder declared in exhaustion that the “vexed question has been settled at last.”54