Haunted by Atrocity

by Cloyd, Benjamin G.

  “Camp of Rebel Prisoners at Elmira, New York,” from Harper’s Weekly, April 15, 1865.

  “Prison in Casemate No. 2, Fort Lafayette, New York Harbor,” from Harper’s Weekly, April 15, 1865.

  “Living Skeletons,” from the House Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War’s 1864 report, Returned Prisoners.

  “Andersonville Prison Scenes, Illustrating Captain Wirz,” from Harper’s Weekly, September 16, 1865.

  The Execution of Henry Wirz, November 10, 1865. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  “The Political Andersonville,” from Harper’s Weekly, October 24, 1868.

  “Let Us Clasp Hands Over the Bloody Chasm,” by Thomas Nast, from Harper’s Weekly, September 21, 1872.

  Memorial Day at Andersonville, 1897.

  Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection, sum152.

  The New Jersey monument to its Andersonville dead, dedicated 1898. Photograph by author.

  Andersonville National Cemetery, circa 1910.

  Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection, sum152.

  The entrance to “Andersonville Prison Park,” circa 1905.

  Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection, sum102.

  The monument to the Confederate prison dead at Camp Chase, Ohio, dedicated 1902. Courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society.

  The Wirz monument, located in the town square of Andersonville, dedicated 1909.

  Courtesy of Charles W. Plant.

  The Georgia monument at Andersonville, sculpted by William Thompson, dedicated 1973. Photograph courtesy of the National Park Service.

  African American Girl Scouts decorate graves at Andersonville National Cemetery

  in preparation for Memorial Day, 1976.

  Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection, sum119.

  The National POW Museum, opened 1998.

  Photograph courtesy of the National Park Service.

  The current interpretive landscape of Andersonville National Historic Site, which

  includes state monuments, the reconstructed prison stockade,

  and the National POW Museum.

  Photograph courtesy of the National Park Service.

  5

  “A More Proper Perspective”

  OBJECTIVITY IN THE SHADOW OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY WAR, 1914–1960

  By 1914, fifty years separated the Civil War generation, most of them long since gone to their graves, from the terrible suffering experienced in the war’s prisons. Despite the passage of time and veterans alike, the memories of those horrors still evoked powerful emotions, as the controversy over the Wirz monument made apparent. But with the onset of the shocking carnage of World War I, the even greater devastation of World War II, and the uneasy brinkmanship of the early Cold War, many Americans gained new perspective as they remembered Civil War prisons. Instead of overt sectional bias determining where the blame or guilt should fall for the 56,000 dead Civil War prisoners, the generations in the midst of learning anew man’s destructive capabilities increasingly began to look beyond the passions stirred up as they reminisced about the Civil War. The flood of prison accounts rehashing the old sectional memories slowed to a trickle and then all but stopped, replaced by the appearance of objective attempts to reassess the treatment of Civil War captives. The diminishing intensity of the divisive memories of Civil War prisons was a positive sign that heralded a potential end to the lingering animosity between North and South over the persistent controversy. But the news was not all good. It also testified to the critical but depressing realization that, when interpreted in the harsh new light of the wars of the early and mid-twentieth century, the prison experience of the Civil War did not represent a break from the past but perhaps instead the origins of a grim pattern. An understanding emerged that suggested places like Andersonville or Elmira were not isolated examples of unparalleled human cruelty but were, when compared to the Nazi concentration camps or Japanese internment camps of the 1940s, similar symptoms of the cost of modern war.

  In 1914, however, thanks to Woodrow Wilson’s official policy of neutrality, the growing horrors of war still seemed far away. Both North and South continued the honoring, and in the process defending, their treatment of what had become, in the words of New York’s Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission, the “handful of survivors of the many thousands of their comrades with whom they had shared unutterable privations in the war that saved the Union.”1 Two years later, Minnesota added its monument, a granite pedestal topped with a bronze statue of a Union soldier “of moderate heroic size,” dedicated to the state’s ninety-five Andersonville victims who sacrificed their lives, according to the tribute’s inscription, “in the service of the United States in the war for the preservation of the Union.” Minnesota’s contribution to the collection at Andersonville further cemented the power of the northern memory of Civil War prisons.2 By 1916, the northern transformation of Andersonville’s landscape into a shrine to the virtuous cause of Union included displays from Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and, curiously, Tennessee. Confirming Tennessee’s status as one of the states most divided by the Civil War, in 1915 Grand Army of the Republic veterans from the state dedicated a monument at Andersonville to the 712 Tennesseans who died there. Made of Tennessee marble, the relatively short memorial lacked a statue atop the monument, unlike the more elaborate northern state displays, although a patriotic eagle was carved above the inscription. The monument committee admitted that while the final, “somewhat inartistic” sculpture could not match the beauty of the other more lavishly funded northern monuments, some of which cost $10,000 or $20,000 each to build, it accurately reflected the “rugged loyalty” of the Union men from Tennessee. Despite some embarrassment at raising only $866 for the project, $750 of which went to the construction of the monument, the finished product took its rightful place in Andersonville as a testimonial to the “patriotism of the men.”3 The lack of financial support from many Tennesseans revealed the ongoing division between Union veterans who wanted to preserve their memory of what they felt was unparalleled sacrifice and southerners who remained frustrated with what they felt was unparalleled hypocrisy at the one-sided remembrance of Civil War prisons.

  Although state monuments dominated the Andersonville prison and cemetery grounds, the Women’s Relief Corps continued to play an important role in memorializing the prison site. During the first few decades of the 1900s, the organization dedicated several small monuments at Andersonville, including one in 1915 honoring Clara Barton—with a granite tribute highlighted, appropriately, by a red cross—for her role in organizing the national cemetery and identifying the names of more than 12,000 of the 13,000 dead prisoners.4 Four years earlier, the WRC proudly constructed the “Sun Dial” monument, a bronze sun dial placed atop a polished granite base. The “Sun Dial” display, built to honor the transfer of the Andersonville grounds from the WRC to the national government, commemorated, according to the monument’s inscription, “the patriotic work” done by the WRC “in the preservation and improvement of this historic site.”5 Although the monument was far from modest, such self-congratulation was all but indiscernible amid the larger northern displays that confidently dotted the Andersonville landscape. In 1936, the WRC brought this period of monument construction to a fitting end with the unveiling of the “8 State Monument,” a $500 tribute to the dead from states that had yet to build their own shrines. The monument recognized the nearly 1,500 victims of Andersonville from Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, Vermont, and West Virginia.6 With all the Union states officially represented at Andersonville, the process of honoring the patriotic sacrifice of the prison dead in confirmation of the northern virtuous memory of Civil War prisons finally reached completion. Several decades would pass before new monuments appeared at the Georgia prison site.

  As the fi
nal state monuments went up at Andersonville, the few living Union survivors of Confederate prisons offered their testimony about what they endured in captivity. In 1922, Captain H. M. M. Richards compiled a tribute to one of the last prison survivors, Samuel B. Trafford. One more time the old memory of moral superiority surfaced, as Richards described the “deliberate attempt to starve the prisoners to death” and lamented how Union captives “were driven insane” by the Confederacy’s treatment of them.7 When Peterson Cherry published his 1931 memoir, Prisoner in Blue: Memories of the Civil War after 70 Years, along with his discussion of the “awful confinement,” he included inflammatory drawings of prisoners being attacked by hounds. Cherry’s rehashing of the traditional insults toward the South negated his attempt at magnanimity when he concluded, despite “my being chased by bloodhounds, my capture and terrible mistreatment,” the “Civil War is so far past that, no matter what was done by either side in the heat of conflict, such spiteful letters and acts should stop.”8 Appropriately then, Cherry’s account was one of the last Union prison memoirs that had, since the 1860s, recycled the same arguments of exceptional southern cruelty.9 By the 1930s, with the deaths of all the Union veterans of Confederate prisons, the accusations finally started to diminish. Only a very few edited prisoner accounts appeared in the next few decades as the animosity of northern memory finally began to fade.10

  In response to the rhetorical broadsides from the last living Union prisoners, southerners, particularly former prisoners and those affiliated with memorial organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, continued their defense of the southern counter memory of Civil War prisons. The last survivors of Union prisons released accounts such as The Life Record of H. W. Graber, which discussed Graber’s imprisonment at Camp Chase and Fort Delaware in a chapter titled “The Inhumanity of the Federal Government.”11 Graber’s still vibrant anger was not isolated, as the chronic bitterness of the southern deflective memory permeated the 1914 memoir of David E Johnston. Discussing his captivity at Point Lookout, Johnston recounted his amazement at losing nearly forty pounds in just over two months as a prisoner. “Carrying out the ratio,” he stated, “if I had stayed there six months I would have weighed nothing.”12 Like their Union counterparts, Confederate survivors displayed an unswerving commitment to their version of the truth about the wartime prisons until the end.13 And even as they disappeared they left behind fervent devotees to continue the contest.

  After 1914, the loudest defenders of southern innocence in the prison controversy came from the organizations that had spent the previous decades venerating the Lost Cause. Although after 1913 the Southern Historical Society Papers focused on reprinting the proceedings of the Confederate Congress, the Confederate Veteran, until its final issues in the early 1930s, remained steadfastly devoted to the southern memory of Civil War prisons. Within its pages, month after month, articles appeared discussing the prison controversy. Some pieces, like “Seventeen Months in Camp Douglas,” described the “barbarity” of the Chicago prison.14 Periodic discussions of “Treatment of Prisoners of War,” and “Prison Horrors Compared” also indicated an ongoing desire to vindicate the South’s reputation and triumph in the fight to properly remember Civil War prisons.15

  Other defenders of southern honor included stalwart groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and the United Confederate Veterans, who joined the UDC in protecting the South’s good name. During the aftermath of World War I, the SCV published The Gray Book, a “purely defensive” publication designed to fend off the “attacks and untruthful presentations of so-called history.”16 Although The Gray Book reflected the traditional general defensiveness of the South, its publication was also intended as a specific response to the parallel drawn between Wirz and the German atrocities of World War I. As a January 1919 William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine editorial declared, “it is certainly lamentable” that “the case of Major Henry Wirz” and “the execution of this unfortunate officer” were, during World War I, “instanced as a just precedent for the execution of Von Tirpitz and the other detested leaders of Germany.”17 To answer this grievous affront, the third (and longest) chapter of The Gray Book was titled “Treatment of Prisoners in the Confederacy.” Motivated by the comparison of “Confederate treatment of prisoners with Prussian outrages in Belgium and France,” the author of the chapter, Matthew Page Andrews, declared his regret that even now, after a reunited America had fought and won two major wars since the Civil War, the “sweeping condemnation of James G. Blaine,” delivered back in 1876, “is still, in a general way, believed by Americans.”18 That belief remained deeply rooted among many Americans, stated UCV General A. T. Goodwyn in a 1926 speech, because the execution of Captain Wirz “was a smoke screen to divert the attention of the good people of the North from the prisoners-of-war question, as well as to misrepresent the South in its treatment of prisoners.” The northern government used this tactic, Goodwyn argued, because they were “conscious that they themselves were morally responsible for the painful conditions prevailing in prisons.”19 What the North called history Andrews and Goodwyn called conspiracy. Overcoming the distortions of the past and restoring the South’s reputation depended on challenging northern memories of Civil War prisons at every opportunity.

  Of all the defenders of the South after 1914, no one else demonstrated quite the vehemence of Mildred Lewis Rutherford, historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Throughout her career Rutherford used her position to redress supposed historical injustices that she and her supporters felt were damaging to the South. In 1914, Rutherford gave a speech titled “Wrongs of History Righted,” in which she identified glaring historical inaccuracies, ranging from the causes of the Civil War, to the character of the institution of slavery, to Andersonville prison, Henry Wirz, and the “Cruelties in Northern Prisons,” which “we of the South have borne too long and too patiently.” Against the ongoing condemnation of the North and “the falsehoods that have crept in and are still creeping in, “the only chance to combat this “anti-Southern atmosphere,” Rutherford declared, lay in restoring the “truths of history.” This process, she believed, would help preserve a sense of pride and honor in southern memories of the Confederate past.20

  A few years later, in 1921, in her capacity as state historian for the Georgia chapter of the UDC, Rutherford set out specifically on a crusade against the northern memory of Wirz as an inhuman devil. Like Matthew Andrews, Rutherford resented the connection of the Swiss-born Wirz, and therefore the Confederacy, to the German atrocities of World War I. Another factor motivating Rutherford was an incident of vandalism in the town of Andersonville. In May 1919, three American (and presumably Yankee) soldiers painted part of the Wirz monument red, black, and gold—the colors of the German flag.21 Instead of causing people to forget Wirz and his (mis)deeds, World War I created anti-German sentiment and re-ignited the hatred toward the German-speaking Wirz. In an attempt to show the misguided nature of the continued anti-Wirz prejudice, Rutherford wrote a book defending Wirz, Facts and Figures vs. Myths and Misrepresentations: Henry Wirz and Andersonville Prison. Primarily a compendium of excerpts from the trial of Wirz, a discussion of his execution, and a review of the tumultuous process of creating and dedicating the Wirz monument, Rutherford’s book broke little new ground. But Rutherford was more interested in argument, as her concluding question revealed: “Is it any wonder that those boys of the North reading in France such vilification of the South should attempt to desecrate that Wirz monument when they returned to America?” By making the truth “known,” Rutherford hoped to dispel what seemed to her and many southerners an irrational, and at this point in time, unnecessary, prejudice in the North against Wirz.22 Given her obvious prosouthern viewpoint, however, she convinced few not already in the fold.

  Rutherford’s fanatical approach infused the UDC with the most endurance of all the southern memorial organizations on the subject of Civil War prisons. Throughout the
late 1920s and into the decades to come, the UDC continued to maintain the southern counter memory of Civil War prisons. And occasionally, as in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, Gone with the Wind, these arguments still surfaced in mainstream popular culture. Mitchell was not the first famous American author to imbed the sectional memories of Civil War prisons into their fiction. In 1919, Sherwood Anderson began the opening chapter of the powerful Winesburg, Ohio, “The Book of the Grotesque,” by describing an elderly Andersonville survivor still brokenhearted over his brother’s starvation in the prison.23 The power of the image of Andersonville as a symbol of the grotesque resonated with northerners long accustomed to belief in the singular cruelty of the infamous prison. But if “Andersonville was a name that stank in the North,” Mitchell wrote in rebuttal to the memories of northerners like Sherwood Anderson, “so was Rock Island one to bring terror to the heart of any southerner who had relatives imprisoned there.”24 Rutherford herself could not have stated the UDC’s position more succinctly—if Confederate prisons were bad, so too were those of the Union.

  While the prison controversy obviously received only peripheral attention in Mitchell’s sprawling depiction of the destruction wreaked upon the old South, these types of minor successes encouraged the UDC in its devotion to the cause. In 1937, the UDC unveiled a monument to the approximately 3,000 dead Confederate prisoners at Elmira, New York. The Elmira statue was not as openly defiant as previous Confederate prison monuments. The figure of a solemn soldier, hat removed in tribute to his dead prison comrades, was embedded into the front of the monument, rather than the more confident and customary placing of the form atop the memorial. But even the muted nature of the Elmira display still represented the enduring power of the old southern prison memory, and it joined the ranks of existing Confederate monuments at Camp Chase, Johnson’s Island, and Camp Douglas, among others, as the UDC strove to balance history by equaling the amount of bronze, marble, and granite deposited at Andersonville.25 Aside from this symbolic effort, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, as the strongest remaining voice of the pro-Confederate South, the UDC continued to publish articles in its monthly periodical such as “Henry Wirz, the Martyr.”26 But at this late date, with the original and most dedicated generations of Confederates and those devoted to their memory long since dead, the tenacity of the UDC made little impact on the battle for the historical record. Only southerners hypersensitive to the negative perception of the South maintained interest in continuing a listless debate with northerners increasingly oblivious to the fact that a controversy over Civil War prisons even existed.