Haunted by Atrocity

by Cloyd, Benjamin G.

  Despite the clear emphasis of Governor Vandiver and the state officials in charge of the centennial on the importance of tourism and souvenir sales, some Georgians feared that their efforts were not enough to take full advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cash in on the Civil War. In an April 1960 editorial in the Atlanta Constitution, Cooper Smith worried that Georgia trailed her fellow southern states, particularly Virginia, in the preparations for the upcoming centennial. “Georgia has on the national dunce cap again,” Smith wrote, referring to the perceived slow development of the plans for the centennial celebration. “Will somebody tell me,” he asked, “why this state always has to bring up the cow’s tail?”13 Although his concerns accurately reflected the bottom line mentality with which many Georgians approached the centennial, Smith’s worries proved groundless. On February 23, 1964, John Pennington, born and raised five miles from the town of Andersonville, acknowledged that, even though Anderson-ville remained “a monument to an unhappy fragment of our national past,” the Civil War Centennial “has called new attention to it.” “Twenty years ago,” Pennington argued, Andersonville “had faded almost from memory.” Thanks to the centennial, and Kantor’s novel before it, even the prison’s location “off the beaten path” could not stop the “thousands of tourists” who “manage to find it yearly.”14 The successful incorporation of Andersonville into the centennial celebration as both educational subject and tourist attraction indicated that, while its infamy persisted, the site also piqued a profitable curiosity about the difficult memory of Civil War prisons.

  Although Andersonville found itself the best situated to play a central role in the Civil War Centennial commemorations, other Civil War prison sites also served as locations for anniversary celebrations. On Memorial Day, 1961, the town of Elmira, where the most notorious of the Union prison camps once stood, hosted a New York Civil War Centennial Commission function with the dual purpose of “honoring the dead of all wars” and uniting America against “the communist menace.” Again the backdrop of the Cold War and the need to maintain patriotic solidarity against the Soviet threat provided strong incentive for Americans to celebrate the Civil War as the story of how sectional division became national unity. In keeping with that message, one member of the New York commission, Wilbur Glover, gave a speech in which he offered the standard objective consensus memory of Civil War prisons. “In this year of 1961, we realize that savage as the war became, later accounts have exaggerated the cruelties somewhat.” But today, “we recognize that Northern prisons—as well as Southern—left much to be desired.”15 Tributes to prisoners also extended beyond the actual prison sites of Andersonville and Elmira. In late 1963, the Centennial Center in Richmond, Virginia, opened an exhibit titled “The Civil War Prisoner,” which featured some of the remains of the well-traveled Libby Prison and artwork depicting “the capture and treatment of prisoners,” “prison life,” “prisoner exchange,” and “retaliation and atrocity.”16 The theme of nationalistic unity dominated the Andersonville, Elmira, and Richmond centennial activities and showed how thoroughly the objective memory of the once divisive subject of Civil War prisons had been reinforced by the environment of Cold War patriotism.

  Along with the increasing visits to the actual prison sites, the centennial also inspired a surge in the number of publications devoted to the subject of Civil War prisons. People who could not travel to Andersonville or other prison locations could at least read about what took place there. Between 1961 and 1965, books about Civil War prisons generally took one of two forms: official state centennial commission–sponsored histories of the war, including prisons, or new editions of previously printed or unpublished prisoner accounts.17 Both sources confirmed the dominance of the objective memory of the prisons, and the ready availability of these volumes testified to the centennial’s ability to generate interest in Civil War prisons among the general public. And the success of the magazine Civil War Times Illustrated (CWTI), which made its debut in 1962 and remains in publication today, proved that stories about the Civil War, and prisoners of war in particular, still captivated and entertained audiences. From its inception, CWTI frequently ran excerpts of primary source material recorded by Union and Confederate soldiers. Previously unpublished prisoner accounts consistently appeared in the magazine over the years, beginning with the April 1962 debut issue’s inclusion of “The Amazing Story of Pvt. Joe Shewmon,” an article that recounted the horrors of Andersonville.18 With an incredible variety of unpublished prison sources to choose from, the current editors of the magazine continue to print prison materials to satisfy the continued fascination of contemporary readers, a practice supplemented by occasional articles about the various prison camps.19

  By including Civil War prisons in the national story of the larger war, the Civil War Centennial Commissions, on both the national and the state level, encouraged Americans to revisit the controversial issue of the treatment of prisoners as part of a positive celebration rather than as a reason for discord. Although the centennial presentations of Civil War prisons broke no new scholarly ground, the festivities exposed many Americans to the arguments of Hesseltine, Kantor, and Levitt for the first time. In the context of American patriotism and heritage, at the moment when the Cold War threat of communism peaked, the early 1960s, the national commemoration helped the objective memory of Civil War prisons gain further acceptance. Of course, the atmosphere of consensus among white Americans depended, as always before when remembering the prison controversy, on the avoidance of the connection between the fight for racial justice and Civil War prisons. Only when stripped of their accusative power to remind Americans of both their destructive nature and the subsequent failure to honor the full meaning of freedom central to the conflict could Civil War prisons be successfully transformed into profitable symbols of nationalism. Meanwhile, the aggressive marketing tactics of the various centennial commissions in fusing historical interpretation, tourism, souvenirs, and education set a precedent. After 1965, in order to take advantage of the ongoing public interest in the subject of the Civil War and its prisons, efforts to commemorate the sacrifices of the dead prisoners increasingly combined with the industry of tourism. Residents of Andersonville provided the foremost example of the business of remembering Civil War prisons, as the town embraced the commercial strategy of selling its past to a curious public.

  Seeking to capitalize on the positive attention created during the Civil War Centennial, the town of Andersonville, which sits directly across Highway 49 from the national park, started to openly embrace the stigma of its past for the first time since the erection of the Wirz monument in 1909. The appearance of scholar Ovid Futch’s 1968 History of Andersonville Prison, the first objective treatment focused solely on the prison and its infamous past, confirmed that the animosity inspired by the prison was fading.20 But Andersonville’s remarkable transformation really began when the Mullite Company commenced mining operations just outside town that same year. Taking advantage of the rich deposits of bauxite and kaolin, two crucial ingredients in the production of steel, many Andersonville residents took jobs at the plant, and the town’s economy boomed.21 The infusion of mining dollars into Andersonville’s coffers brought with it an important change. The once predominantly agricultural town, despite its small population of approximately 300 inhabitants, started to accumulate disposable income—and at this moment, local Georgians began to plan for an even brighter economic future.

  In the early 1970s, Bobby L. Lowe, the executive director of the Middle Flint Area Planning Commission and resident of nearby Ellaville, Georgia, oversaw a scheme to capitalize on the historical notoriety of Andersonville and in the process boost the economies of the surrounding towns as well. The challenge lay in properly using the potential benefits of Interstate 75, which ushered traffic just to the east of Andersonville and the surrounding region. Lowe believed that in order to lure tourists off the interstate into the “real Georgia,” the communities of southwest Georgia,
the local towns needed to unite their efforts.22 Thus the idea of “The Andersonville Trail” was born—a tourism campaign that cobbled together the historical resources of Americus, Andersonville, and several other Georgia towns. By linking these various historical sites, Lowe hoped to transform a once isolated area into what he in 1976 referred to as “a unique stop for interstate travelers.”23 His decision to center the trail on Andersonville made sense in light of the more positive objective memory of the prison so apparent during the centennial commemorations and the lesson that the shame of the past could yield commercial benefits in the present.

  Quickly embracing Lowe’s ideas, the newly prosperous citizens of Andersonville, led by their mayor, Mullite Company executive Lewis Easterlin, developed an all-out marketing strategy in the early 1970s. In 1973, residents of the town formed the Andersonville Guild. The organization intended to turn “back the clock in Andersonville to make the town look much as it did in Civil War days.”24 If tourists traveled off the beaten path to revisit the controversy of the Civil War, Andersonville intended to give them what they expected to see. Flush with mining dollars, the guild put that money to work. Its early activities included moving an old log-cabin church from the outskirts of town into the downtown and installing an old railroad depot as the town’s official information center.25 By 1975, Easterlin and his guild supporters embarked on an even grander plan to increase Andersonville’s tourist appeal with the proposal of the “Andersonville Mall.” At an estimated cost of nearly $250,000, the initiative called for the sweeping redesign of downtown Andersonville. Containing shops, landscaping, and pedestrian walkways, along with ample parking, the mall, according to the town boosters, would entice tourists who visited the actual prison site on the other side of the highway to spend time and dollars in an authentic Civil War–era town.26 The Wirz monument provided the main attraction as the literally central feature of the mall, given its location in the middle of the town square.

  With the reconstruction of the town underway, and the Andersonville Trail drawing curious motorists off the interstate, the residents of Andersonville realized the need for an annual event to increase further the town’s desirability as a tourist destination. In October 1976, the first annual Andersonville Historic Fair drew a crowd to the small village. The festivities included a parade led by Georgia lieutenant governor Zell Miller, who insisted on riding his own horse in the procession, and a performance of Saul Levitt’s The Andersonville Trial, staged across Highway 49 at the national park.27 Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, to the delight of Easterlin and the guild, the fair brought thousands of participants to Andersonville each October. Over time, besides the traditional parade and play, the celebration expanded to include an outdoor flea market, bands, beauty queens, Civil War reenacting, magic shows, clogging, puppet shows, and, in 1985, “a circuit-riding preacher who arrived on horseback.”28 For all the entertainment the visitors enjoyed, however, the real magic trick involved the transformation of Andersonville’s image. Although Easterlin and the Andersonville Guild used the infamy of the town to attract visitors, the general festivities that took place at the historic fair often had little or nothing to do with Andersonville’s history. But as the word spread of the charming hospitality of the town, newspaper and magazine articles appeared praising the town’s attempts “to shed its old image.”29 So thorough was the transformation that, according to one reporter, the “old Andersonville” and its “shackles of shame” had disappeared.30

  The success of the Andersonville Historic Fair, followed by the creation of the Andersonville Antiques Fair each Memorial Day, testified to the profitability of Andersonville’s public relations campaign. And the welcome publicity that accompanied Jimmy Carter’s rise to the presidency of the United States from Plains, Georgia—located, like Andersonville, in Sumter County—only added to the growth of tourism along the Andersonville Trail. All the while, the marketing strategy devised by the Andersonville Guild of presenting their town not as the site of atrocity but instead as simply a Civil War village remained effective. Today, shops, museums, a bed and breakfast, and a restaurant still cater to the tens of thousands of tourists who descend on the community each year. Pens, postcards, pamphlets, and pins are just a few of the various Civil War memorabilia available for purchase at the town’s gift shops. At the entrance to the town, a billboard welcomes visitors to “Andersonville, Civil War Village,” while over in the town square, a short distance from the Wirz monument, sits a covered wagon with an identical message. By camouflaging Andersonville’s specifically notorious past with a general presentation of Civil War period history, the opportune calculations of residents like Peggy Sheppard, Andersonville Guild member, town historian, and author of Andersonville, USA, continue to pay off. “I figured it was better to take advantage of outsiders’ curiosity,” Sheppard explained to one reporter, “than to resent it.”31

  The efforts made by Sheppard and the Andersonville Guild to employ pragmatically Andersonville’s history as heritage were undeniably effective and, based on the financial results, intelligent. But as historian David Lowenthal eloquently argues, heritage can be both “good and evil.”32 The “good” behind Andersonville’s choice to celebrate the entertaining aspects of its past is obvious. “We had to do something or disappear,” Mayor Easterlin explained in 1983; “you’ve got to take what you got and use it. We had history. And if somebody doesn’t preserve history, it’s gone.”33 Any shame connected with the town’s infamous past has nothing to do with the current residents, who do not—and should not be expected to—continuously apologize for the sins committed there during the Civil War. And the use of heritage to inspire new traditions, such as the Andersonville Historic Fair, ensures that the bonds of community remain intact from generation to generation. The ability of heritage to provide a comforting sense of both personal and communal identity explains much of its attraction.

  But the “evil” must be recognized as well. The selective manipulation of the past, especially in the name of tradition, is, by its nature, exclusionary. The choice to revive the history of the Civil War, even in a generalized form, also indicated that race motivated Andersonville’s transformation—Andersonville’s makeover was in part a response to the social turmoil of the South during the era of the Civil Rights Movement. Despite Andersonville’s small population, its racial diversity—approximately two-thirds white and one-third African American—meant that the reinvention of Andersonville served not only a financial but social purpose. The words and phrases Easterlin used to explain Andersonville’s preservation (“we,” “disappear,” “it’s gone”) also applied to the common human need to protect preferred constructs of identity. Easterlin, Sheppard, and the Anderson-ville Guild members were white, and by taking active roles as town boosters, white Andersonville residents maintained political power and the accustomed social order. Thus, the seductive veneer of Civil War nostalgia not only generated profits but reaffirmed, in subtle but unmistakable terms, the intentional embrace of Confederate heritage as an important Andersonville tradition.

  As a result, Andersonville, the home of the Wirz monument, also served as a central attraction for diehard pro-Confederate supporters of Wirz. The successful rehabilitation of Andersonville’s reputation by the 1970s ironically also helped revive, on a limited scale, the flagging interest of white southerners who clung to the old southern defensive memory of Civil War prisons. Once again Wirz became heralded as a martyr to the Confederate cause. In the late 1970s, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy began co-sponsoring annual November memorial services to commemorate Wirz’s execution in 1865. This phase of devotion to the tattered shreds of Lost Cause mythology, at least pertaining to Wirz and Andersonville, peaked in the mid-1980s. In 1981, the SCV awarded Wirz the Confederate Medal of Honor. And in 1984, a speech praising Wirz—who chose “death over betrayal,” making him a worthy symbol of Confederate heritage—given by Georgia’s former governor Lester Maddox, him
self a symbol of segregation, highlighted the event. The opportunity to confirm southernness by celebrating Wirz attracted white southerners who sought to assert the legitimacy of their heritage in a difficult era of turbulent race relations and political transition. The ritual celebration of Confederate mythology offered a reconfirmation of the traditional racial identities of the past. It was not coincidence that in the same speech in which Maddox, never one to shy away from controversy, portrayed Wirz as a symbol of southern virtue, he also took a thinly veiled shot at African Americans, criticizing welfare recipients as “bums and parasites.”34 Such sentiments were also apparent in the 1985 speech given by Lynn Shaw, the commander-in-chief of the SCV, at the Wirz memorial event. “Southerners today,” Shaw lamented, “have lost sight of the contributions made by Southern men in the founding of our country before and after the War Between the States.”35 At a time when the South received so much negative attention, the positive atmosphere created by the combination of thousands of tourists and the congratulatory press coverage offered hope to Shaw, Maddox, and others that Andersonville, Wirz, and therefore the South as well, need apologize no longer for the southern past. Newspaper accounts of 1980s Wirz memorial ceremonies revealed that these events drew up to 200 attendees and culminated each year with a group of Confederate re-enactors who fired a volley in Wirz’s memory.36 But even the revived interest in the injustice done to Wirz soon declined. By the time Tony Horwitz, whose description of one of these memorial programs appears in Confederates in the Attic, attended the event in the mid-1990s, only forty “neo-Confederates” showed up to protect the “memory of the Confederacy and of hero-martyrs like Henry Wirz.”37