Haunted by Atrocity

by Cloyd, Benjamin G.

  One week later, the Times-Recorder reported that some “dissatisfied” Georgia members of the UDC requested a “reconsideration” of the “decision to remove the monument from Georgia soil” and announced a new convention, scheduled for March 1909, at which a final decision on the location of the Wirz monument would be reached.55 On March 18, 1909, after a vote of 125 for Andersonville, 65 for Macon, and 5 for Americus, the Times-Recorder announced, with resigned relief, that “Andersonville was selected as the site for the famous Wirz monument.” The resolution of the controversy ended “the discussion that has been raging for four years,” although the construction and unveiling of the monument still remained.56

  Although many residents of Andersonville approved of the town’s designation as the permanent home of the Wirz memorial, they also harbored concerns about the impact of the monument on local race relations. The simmering tension and violent outbreaks that had marked past Memorial Day gatherings persisted into the early 1900s. Sensational descriptions of the controversial gatherings overshadowed the local newspaper’s coverage of the speeches and decorative rituals. Four African American deaths were reported at the annual ceremonies between 1898 and 1900 despite the attendance of the Americus Light Infantry. This military presence was deemed necessary by local whites, since for “the unbleached brother,” “Andersonville Day” represented “Christmas, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July boiled down into one. For weeks past he has whetted his razor and hoarded his pennies for this occasion of superlative and inexpressible ecstasy when he can fill his tank with red coffin paint and shoot craps and dance all day.” Whites celebrated the effectiveness of the military crackdown, which in 1900 led to eleven black arrests and “had the effect of making the unruly ones walk a chalk mark all day.”57

  The repetitive scenes of black violence certainly offended white residents of Andersonville, who complained that the “riot, bloodshed, murder and gambling” were “a disgrace for the state and those participating.” So frustrated were white Georgians by the uncontrollable nature of the African American celebration that they openly wished that blacks would cease such improper behavior and instead placidly conform to the northern memory of Andersonville as a shrine to patriotic sacrifice. The 1901 newspaper report of the festivities lamented that many African Americans ignored the “impressive occasion” of the official proceedings, which in the early 1900s included musical performances, prayers, speeches, and annual readings of the Gettysburg Address as highlights of the day’s activities. “He never goes there,” the article scolded, “but in the thick woods nearby they dance, gamble and fight to their heart’s content.” Although white southerners remained defiant in their challenge to the northern prison memory, they clearly preferred the decorum of the Grand Army of the Republic to the disorder of African American crowds. African Americans, meanwhile, continued to dispute the dominant white sectional memories and instead transformed “Andersonville Day” into a vibrant reminder of the emancipationist tradition.58

  As the campaign to build the Wirz monument accelerated, Anderson-ville residents recognized the need to impose stricter controls on the black celebration of Memorial Day. According to town historian Peggy Sheppard, “many letters” warned the UDC that “thousands of Northerners and Southern Negroes assembled in Andersonville every May” for Memorial Day exercises.59 Thus it was no coincidence that by 1906 several years of military presence began to disperse the formerly unruly African American throngs. Attendance began to drop with the “muzzling” of the “negro excursion,” and in 1906 the Americus Times-Recorder’s description of the commemoration announced what was, from the white southern perspective, good news. One headline celebrated that “No Murder is done by Zulus on Trip,” while another noted that the gathering featured the “Smallest Crowd in a Decade.” By 1914, crowds that had once numbered in the tens of thousands dwindled to no more than a few thousand. Although blacks still outnumbered whites, “very good order was maintained and there was not rioting or murderous assaults among the negro excursionists as disgraced the occasion in other years.” This “muzzling” clearly reflected the desire of white southerners to reclaim Andersonville as an integral piece of their identity.60 The persistent interpretation of Andersonville as a symbol of nation and/or freedom by northern whites and African Americans caused resentment among white southerners who disdained the inherent challenge to their understanding of the war’s meaning. The palpable contempt for these geographical and racial outsiders dominated these letters to the UDC and influenced the newspaper coverage of the proceedings. Sensationalized descriptions of the ceremonies as chaotic, violent scenes of “rampant” intoxication led to fears that these people were capable of “desecrating the monument.”61 These worried admissions represented the recognition among white southerners of the enduring presence of the emancipationist memory of the Civil War. Controlling the Memorial Day events and establishing a monument to Wirz was more than just a rebuttal to the North—it marked another episode in the ongoing contest to preserve white supremacy in the postwar South.

  Throughout the process of turning the proposed Wirz monument into reality, progress, particularly in terms of the selection of the site and the final decision on the inscription, moved slowly. Fears of racial unrest contributed to the delays, but so did the dogged resistance of Union veterans to the very idea of such an affront to the northern memory of Civil War prisons. The Iowa delegation that visited Andersonville in November 1906 demonstrated a keen awareness of and indignation about the growing southern support for the Wirz monument. In his speech at the Iowa dedication, General E. A. Carman praised the women of Georgia, who demonstrated a “womanly tenderness” toward the Union prisoners. The “sympathies” of those women, Carman announced, in a direct attack on the UDC, “will be remembered long after the names of those who seek to erect monuments to the memory of one whose cruelty was a shock to humanity shall have been forgotten.”62 In his summary of the Iowa proceedings, Ernest Sherman expressed his disgust at the actions of Wirz’s defenders. “God grant that the proposition of certain misguided women,” Sherman stated, “to erect a monument to the memory of Captain Wirz, may never be realized. There are some things in this world that are best forgotten. This arch fiend of Andersonville is one of them.”63 By early February 1908, an encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic issued its official response to the Wirz monument. “This insult to the honored dead of the Union should be stopped,” the veterans declared, “if by no higher authority then by the conscience of the Southern women, who would as violently denounce any similar desecration of the memory of their own justly honored heroes.” Any “consummation of this contemplated slur upon the martyred dead,” the outraged northerners resolved, would “disregard” the “truth of history.”64

  Although the salvos of northern vitriol toward the Wirz monument divided the UDC members and delayed the selection of the final site for the shaft, the verbal attacks on southern women only further galvanized the support of the Southern Historical Society and other memorial organizations for the Wirz cause. In 1908, J. R. Gibbons, a soldier in J. E. B. Stuart’s cavalry, wrote in the SHSP that “we will stand many things” in the South, but when northerners say “anything about our women,” it “gets all of the fuz turned the wrong way.” Gibbons declared that, furthermore, “it is a little peculiar that the people of the North can put up their fine monuments in the South, right under our noses, falsifying history, and think it is all right, but the Southern people must say nothing.” Even if the Union veterans abhorred the idea of the Wirz monument, Gibbons pointedly commented, “the ladies of the South are going to erect one, and it will be built just as tall as it will be possible for them to get the money to build it, and they will inscribe upon it the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”65 Throughout 1908, the Confederate Veteran also staunchly supported the Wirz monument, although one editor confessed that “the inscription is anticipated with anxiety.”66 What the final monument would say remained a secret. While
awaiting its appearance, southerners, men and women alike, continued to defend their historical perspective against the northern memory of Civil War prisons and to reject what they perceived to be the insincere promises of reconciliation.67

  On May 12, 1909, the Wirz monument, after surviving the arduous debate about its merits and location, made its public debut in the “historic little town” of Andersonville, a short walk from the prison grounds and cemetery. The Times-Recorder estimated that some 3,000 to 4,000 cheering spectators turned out and without incident enjoyed the “magnificent” occasion. The UDC deserved congratulations, the Americus paper admitted, for “this splendid consummation of their work of love and devotion to the cause which they represent.”68 Unlike the dedication of the northern monuments at Andersonville, however, no mention of forgiveness escaped the lips of the southern presenters. The towering obelisk, placed in the middle of Andersonville’s town square, stood as a symbol of the isolated but unrepentant defiance of the defensive southern memory of Civil War prisons. Continuing the Lost Cause tradition of inverting northern arguments, the monument recast Wirz not as villain but instead as “the victim of a misdirected popular clamor.” According to the southern defenders of history, Wirz, as a Confederate “martyr” and symbol of “humanity,” offered a true contrast to “the North’s terrible policy” and Edwin Stanton’s “cold blooded cruelty.” Another inscription on the finished shaft quoted Jefferson Davis, a constant defender of the Confederate prison system and one of the few Confederate figures vilified even more than Wirz. “When time shall have softened passion and prejudice,” Davis once, either optimistically or naively, stated, “when reason shall have stripped the mask of misrepresentation, then justice, holding even her scales, will require much of past censure and praise to change places.”69 Those scales seemed a little more balanced, at least on that day, for the southerners who witnessed the ceremonies.

  After the unveiling of the Wirz monument, northerners continued to express disgust at the audacity of the UDC and the “misguided” southerners who supported their efforts. Just over a month after the mid-May Andersonville ceremony, the Women’s Relief Corps held its annual convention in Salt Lake City. The Andersonville Prison Board reported that “the beauty” of the park “is grand,” with only “one object to mar” the “view, and that is the monument erected to the infamous, inhuman keeper of this prison.” The members of the WRC openly wished for a “thunderbolt” to “lower the statue with the name ‘Wirz’ chiseled upon it.”70 In 1910, General John Stibbs, the last surviving member of the military commission that tried Wirz, shared his thoughts regarding the Wirz memorial at a speech in Iowa City, Iowa. “After a monument was erected to perpetuate the memory of Wirz and he was proclaimed a martyr who had been unfairly tried and condemned,” Stibbs explained, “I wanted” to “tell, as I alone could tell,” the “unanimous action of the Court in its findings.” Stibbs swore to the impartiality of the Wirz commission and reminded his audience that “there were no dissenting opinions” among its members. As “for myself,” he insisted that “there has been no time during the forty-five years that have intervened since this trial was held when I have felt that I owed an apology to anyone, not even the Almighty, for having voted to hang Henry Wirz by the neck until he was dead.”71 Thomas Sturgis, unsurprisingly, also entered the fray in his 1911 speech, condemning the “personal brutality” of Wirz. “I am led to speak” about Wirz, Sturgis said, “because many of our younger generation are ignorant of the facts, and because the women of Georgia recently erected a statue to him as a martyr.”72 The ongoing northern outrage, inspired by the contradiction between the Wirz monument and their cherished memory of Civil War prisons, reflected the larger concern, particularly among veterans like Stibbs and Sturgis, that if the South won more historical victories by establishing more monuments like that to Wirz, the cause of “true history” faced grave peril.73 Although the immediate urgency of the political uncertainty of the postwar decades now appeared resolved, it remained important to preserve the fading memory of southern evil. Future generations, without the actual presence of the “living witnesses” to remind them, might unknowingly begin to accept the heresies symbolized by the Wirz monument as truth.

  The bitter controversy over the Wirz monument dispelled any illusion of authentic reconciliation between North and South, at least as it pertained to the memory of Civil War prisons. Northerners, incredulous at the perverse dedication of southerners to a wrongheaded understanding of history, revived their old selective memories of the conflict and quickly distanced themselves from the language of reconciliation. Until and unless southerners came to their senses and accepted the terms of northern memory on the subject of Civil War prisons, a full reconciliation would remain impossible. White southerners showed no less determination, however, to uphold their own defensive memory. The pressure created by the combined and competing influences of the black memory of emancipation and northern memory of the righteous cause of Union—demonstrated annually each Memorial Day—only hardened the white southern refusal to compromise an identity long rooted in defiance. Although African Americans vigorously continued their celebration of emancipation, their unique recollection was increasingly driven out of the public realm by open white hostility. Despite the singularity of their divisive memories, however, Americans of both sections shared one commonality. As they continued to search for meaning in the prison tragedy they still required an external explanation of the evils done in Civil War prisons.

  That so many voices on all sides of the controversy concerning the memory of Civil War prisons continued to extol their own virtues and the faults of their former enemies between 1898 and 1914 was ironic, given that from a national perspective, it was truly an era of sectional reconciliation. But the same factors that encouraged national reconciliation continued to promote discord in the specific instance of Civil War prisons. The first trend involved the impending deaths of the Civil War generation in the years immediately following the Spanish-American War. As they passed from the scene, veterans on both sides rejoiced that they lived long enough to witness the incredible emerging power of the United States on the world stage. And as both sides met at battlefield reunions, no one could dispute the intensity and devotion displayed by the North and South. Regardless of side, all congratulated themselves that the martial spirit of their mutual brotherhood remained strong in the current generation of soldiers. But that shared recognition of what it meant to be a soldier only extended to the battlefield. In the prison camps of the Civil War, however, the vast majority of soldiers who endured capture saw only the one terrible half of the equation, the experiences that many could never forgive or forget. Before they died, prison survivors, and those dedicated to their memory, felt a duty to remind future Americans of the horrors of the prison camps, and thus, over and over, they reopened the wounds anew. Their personal resentments inhibited the process of reconciliation. But the once inflammatory memories of Civil War prisons, stripped of their political relevance by the Spanish-American War, no longer excited strong emotions in most Americans. The bitterness that surrounded the divisive memories of the prison controversy limited—but could not prevent—the prevalent trend of celebrating reunion while ignoring the legacy of emancipation.

  The other reason for the lingering hostility over the memory of Civil War prisons during this period comes from the very nature of reconciliation itself. The idea of reconciliation implies a mutual sacrifice, to be made by both aggrieved parties, who admit to their sins and agree to attempt to put the past behind them. But for the prison survivors and those, North and South, who remained emotionally invested in the controversy, reconciliation could become possible only with a complete annihilation of their distinctive memories of the previous forty years. In the North, Union veterans, their health destroyed by their prison experiences, devoted their energies throughout the rest of their lives to denouncing the brutalities of the Confederate prison system, and in the South, Confederate veterans did like
wise against the Union prisons. Having ravaged them physically and mentally, the prison camps of both sides committed a final injustice against these men—defining their identities and hardening the prejudices of memory throughout their final decades. That was why, by 1914, at least for the actual prisoners and those convinced by their arguments, reconciliation on this particular subject remained impossible. Northern overtures of forgiveness came with the condition that the South accept the northern version of memory on the subject of Civil War prisons. When the South, by then accustomed to northern receptiveness to Lost Cause memories of the conflict, rejected these terms, the rhetorical war over memory continued to rage. Not until the unreconciled Civil War prison survivors finally died and Americans discovered anew the horrors of war—and the provocative circumstance that evil was a human affliction, rather than a uniquely Union or Confederate condition—would a sincere reconciliation, and not just a facade, be truly possible.

  “The Prisons at Richmond—Union Troops Prisoners at Belle Isle,” from Harper’s Weekly, December 5, 1863.