Haunted by Atrocity

by Cloyd, Benjamin G.

  The persistence of the small band of Wirz supporters—and the complex meaning(s) of heritage at Andersonville—reveals the ongoing paradox that many contemporary white southerners face as new generations, each more divorced from the actual events, come to terms with the embedded memories of the Civil War and its prisons. Although Andersonville residents like Sheppard continue to defend Wirz’s innocence, the financial interest of the town depends on a muted portrayal of the prison controversy. The resulting presentation of the town’s history is artificial, but understandably so. Today’s Andersonville residents have little or no personal connection to the horrors of 1864 except to recognize that that history represents a viable commercial asset. The community benefits far more from the yearly visits of the tens of thousands of casually interested tourists, many of whom know nothing about what happened at Andersonville Prison and have little personal stake in dwelling on the old wounds, than from the gatherings of the pro-Confederate diehards. For most participants in the Historic Fair, enjoyment of the rustic Civil War town’s appearance is all that matters. While the reputation of Andersonville sparks interest, the design of the town and its annual celebrations acknowledges the controversy but refuses to risk alienating potential visitors. Andersonville thus offers its history on two levels—the general ambiance of the Civil War era, intended to charm the crowds of infrequent tourists, and the opportunity to learn of Wirz’s unjust execution, targeted at southerners more deeply interested in the subject of Civil War prisons. Andersonville introduces many visitors to the controversy over Civil War prisons but, upon arrival, those same tourists encounter an idealized rather than actual history. As the emphasis on general ambiance continues, the influence and numbers of Wirz supporters correspondingly decline. Although a few white southerners cling to the heritage of their Confederate ancestors and make their token appearance to honor Wirz every November, the waning intensity of the devotion suggests that memories of Civil War prisons now provoke mere curiosity instead of inspiring cause.

  Through the formalized nature of their tribute, white Andersonville residents and Wirz defenders also indicate the diluted power of Confederate heritage in the contemporary South. The sense of urgency and the need to protect southern honor that once inspired the pen of Jefferson Davis or even Mildred Rutherford dissipated long ago. Although the declining intensity of the sectional bitterness emerged as a natural consequence of the passage of time, the commercialization of the prison controversy also explains why the pro-Confederate voices of today lack the conviction of the past. While contemporary publications outlining the old southern deflective memory of Civil War prisons still appear, the old goal, to present true history and convert new disciples, has faded. Articles in Blue and Gray and the United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, or in books like Andersonville: The Southern Perspective, seem calculated for a core audience already initiated into the circle of southern apologists.38 Current devotees who remember their Confederate heritage expect a little protest against the injustices of history, not because they still believe that the South will rise at any moment, but because previous generations of white southerners fought the same rhetorical war as well. Flashing the scars of defeat, in contrast to the disappearance of the old northern divisive memory in recent years, keeps a fading identity alive. While northerners, who, as the victors, can afford to relinquish their virtuous memory of the prison controversy, Confederate heritage groups cannot because the stain of defeat, and years of accusations concerning Civil War prisons, still require refutation. As a result, the halfhearted recycling of bitter memories reflects a sense of obligation to the past rather than actual optimism that Wirz or the Confederacy will at this late date find their reputations restored. The personal stake in the past that once infused the Lost Cause with energy has been replaced by attempts to cash in on its corpse. As long as a few white southerners continue to show up in Andersonville each November, subscribe to Civil War magazines, and buy copies of pro-Confederate books, the defense of Wirz and the Confederate prison system will persist—not, as many insist, out of a devotion to history but rather because of the opportunity of profit and the stubbornness of identity that derives from memory.

  But the final, and perhaps most compelling, reason for the declining support among white southerners for the defense of Wirz and the Confederate prison system hinges on the fact that the traditional sectional memories, at least in the perception of most observers of Civil War prisons, seem increasingly superfluous in light of the ever-growing acceptance of the objective interpretation of the prison controversy. Over the last few decades, an avalanche of printed materials have appeared in response to the challenge of meeting “the need,” in the phrase of historians James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper, Jr., for a deeper understanding of Civil War prisons. Built on the edifice of the objective approach of Hesseltine, these studies collectively reinforce the idea that the story of Civil War prisons was a national tragedy with roots in both the Union and Confederacy and, in the process, drown out the voices of southern protesters.39

  In the early 1960s, two works in particular reinforced the prevailing objective memory of Civil War prisons. The first was the 1961 edition of James G. Randall and David Donald’s The Civil War and Reconstruction. The second was a 1962 issue of Civil War History, guest edited by Hesseltine, devoted entirely to the prison controversy. “The fair-minded observer,” according to Randall and Donald, “will be likely to discountenance any sweeping reproach by one side upon the other.” “Whatever be the message of the dead at Andersonville and Rock Island,” they concluded, “that message is not to be read as a mandate for the perpetuation of sectional blame and censure.”40And while Hesseltine acknowledged “that the custodians were hardly a loveable lot” and deserved the criticism they received, he also declared that the prison controversy revealed “that the atrocities of the prison camps were only phases of the greater atrocity of war itself.”41 The real point of studying Civil War prisons, these scholars concluded, was that it was less critical to measure the exact amounts of sectional responsibility, as had been the goal for so many decades after the war, than to push instead for a recognition of the horrors of modern war to ensure that history would not repeat itself in the future. By 1988, when James M. McPherson published his best-selling Battle Cry of Freedom, the idea that responsibility was even worth arguing seemed increasingly outdated. “The treatment of prisoners during the Civil War,” McPherson stated, “was something that neither side could be proud of.”42 Left unsaid, but strongly implied, was an acceptance that modern war, and not individual human choices and actions, inevitably caused such disasters.

  Other historians, most notably Reid Mitchell, turned to a comparative methodology in their investigation of Civil War prisons with the specific hope of answering the destructive questions posed by modern war. In a 1997 essay published in On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871, Mitchell commented on the inherent difficulty of placing the atrocities of any war in proper perspective. “The relationship of Civil War prisons to the evolution of total war is a historical problem,” Mitchell argued, a conundrum complicated by his belief that “the concept of total war itself is problematic.” After all, he asked, “where do we look for our model of total war?” Identifying the Civil War as a total war and equating Andersonville and Elmira with the Holocaust or the Bataan Death March, in Mitchell’s opinion, “trivializes the horrors that the twentieth century concocted.” Despite the inherent uncertainties and value judgments that inevitably color historical analysis of cruelties committed in any war, one truism, according to Mitchell, remained constant. “Modern wars,” he concluded, “are detestably cruel to prisoners.”43 On that point at least, no matter the difference of opinion as to which historical atrocities represent the nadir of modern civilization, few could disagree.

  Mitchell’s attempt to reconcile the atrocities of Civil War prisons with those committed in World War II followed a tradition that dated
to James Bonner, MacKinlay Kantor, and Saul Levitt. But by the 1970s, the controversy over the Vietnam War and how its prisoners of war fared provided scholars with yet another comparative model. In 1974, the Institute for World Order, an international organization devoted to world peace, released War Criminals, War Victims: Andersonville, Nuremberg, Hiroshima, My Lai. As part of a series of books called “Crises in World Order,” War Criminals, War Victims presented the view that these four symbols of the destructive nature of modern warfare shared common origins. The juxtaposition of these four case studies of atrocity was intentionally calculated to force readers to address what the editors called the “central” question provoked by the recurrence of atrocities with each successive modern war. Their assessment of the relationship between “law,” “morality,” and “individual conscience” and how those abstract concepts applied to the problem of “individual responsibility in time of war” anticipated Mitchell’s findings. The most troubling aspect about the stubborn appearance of atrocities over the course of a century involved humanity’s inability (or unwillingness) to learn from the miseries of past conflicts. When Lieutenant William Calley stated, “I am hopeful that My Lai will bring the meaning of war to the surface not only to our nation but to all nations,” the irony lay in the fact that if the knowledge of the horrors of Andersonville, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima combined failed to drive home “the meaning of war,” discussion of the My Lai massacre had little chance to accomplish that idealistic goal.44

  For historians Eric T. Dean and Robert C. Doyle, Vietnam also served as a lens through which to better understand the nature of the prisoner-of-war experience in all modern wars. Dean’s Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War focused on the effects of combat on soldiers in both wars and argued that Civil War prisoners exhibited similar symptoms to those of Vietnam veterans in their postwar lives.45 Doyle’s Voices from Captivity examined the remarkable consistency of prisoner-of-war accounts regardless of the conflict they described. “Although the technology of warfare has changed,” Doyle pointed out, “the fearful horrors of captivity have not.” The common themes of food, escape, boredom, exchange, or release dominated prisoner narratives regardless of the particular war.46 By echoing Hesseltine’s statement of “the greater atrocity of war itself,” Doyle thus simultaneously confirmed the objective interpretation of Civil War prisons as well as the unsettling suspicions of Dean, Mitchell, and the Institute of World Order that the cycle of atrocity might be endless. Such sentiments made sense in the depressing aftermath of the Vietnam War and showed why an understanding of Civil War prisons remained important—remembering that such atrocities occurred in the Civil War was useful in a time of questioning America’s national character, as the persistence of similar atrocities throughout the twentieth century revealed that our sense of morality had not improved.

  But for all the continued attention paid to Civil War prisons by professional scholars over the last few decades, with objectivity secured and responsibility evenly dispersed, once again the sanitized memories of the wartime prisons surfaced most frequently, and profitably, in popular culture.47 Amateur historians in particular, drawn to the subject by the dramatic tales of suffering, responded to a gap in the historiography of Civil War prisons by publishing histories of the specific events that transpired at almost every individual prison camp during the war. A glance at such titles as Andersonville: The Last Depot and To Die in Chicago shows the purpose of many of these scholars.48 These works were not monolithic in their intent. Some authors, like Michael Horigan, author of Elmira: Death Camp of the North, revived the old southern deflective accusations of deliberate northern cruelty, while Benton McAdams’s Rebels at Rock Island depicted Rock Island, in keeping with the objective tradition, as a place merely typical of the cruelties of war. But the overall trend of these prison histories was clear. The objective removal of responsibility for the suffering exhaustively detailed in these accounts encouraged these repetitive depictions of human misery. A similar motivation appeared in the work of Lonnie Speer, whose 1997 Portals to Hell marked the first attempt at a full overview of Civil War prisons since the 1930s. The reason that so much time passed between Hesseltine’s and Speer’s work manifests itself in how completely Speer accepted his predecessor’s objective interpretation. The singular strength of Speer’s book lay in its attention to detail—whereas Hesseltine’s 1930 Civil War Prisons explained the story of what happened in the prison controversy, Speer provides a summary of each individual prison and what took place inside its walls.49 Although these works together produce a more complete depiction of the Civil War prison experience, their common argument that the fortunes of war doomed Civil War prisoners to their fate solidified the already dominant objective appraisal.

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, some authors make even less of an attempt to hide their hopes of cashing in on the desire to remember Civil War prisons. Books like Best Little Stories from the Civil War, The Amazing Civil War and Blood: Stories of Life and Death from the Civil War contain sensationalistic excerpts of prisoner suffering or great escapes devoid of any historical context.50 Although they offer no interpretation of substance, such opportunism testifies to the ongoing financial profitability of the Civil War legacy. Crass profiteering aside, the booming interest in Civil War prisons among amateur historians also influences contemporary regimental and state histories, as well as more general studies of soldiering during the Civil War.51 The cumulative impact of these efforts to apply the objective memory of Civil War prisons in discussions of individual prisons, prisoners, regiments, states, or Civil War soldiers in general adds an important dimension to the understanding of the subject. As these histories pile up, they represent a growing recognition of the centrality of the prison experience to the overall story of the Civil War and collectively cement the widespread acceptance of the prisons as a product of national rather than sectional responsibility.

  With the shift in contemporary interest away from exploring the apparently resolved question of responsibility in favor of investigating the daily reality of being imprisoned, Civil War prisoner accounts also returned to the spotlight and the cottage industry of reprinting these memoirs resumed. One critical difference, however, distinguished the volumes of post-1960s prisoner narratives from past editions. When first published between the 1860s and 1930s, the accounts, almost always dominated by divisive memory, represented an obvious attempt to add evidence to one side or the other of the debate over whether the Union or Confederacy bore more responsibility for or committed greater crimes in Civil War prisons. Today, whether in new editions of old accounts or previously unprinted diaries or memoirs, editors now justify the recycling of these arguments with claims of their redeeming educational or entertaining qualities. According to editor Steve Meyer, the 1995 version of Benjamin Booth’s Dark Days of the Rebellion, originally published in 1897, instead of inciting sectional discord, provides a “microcosm of the great conflict which refined and defined our great nation during its trial from 1861 to 1865.”52 Newcomers to the 1998 copy of J. V. Hadley’s Seven Months a Prisoner, which dated to 1898, were encouraged by editor Libbe Hughes to enjoy “a story of imprisonment and escape, adventure and suspense.”53 Through these introductions, editors of prison narratives downplay the sectional hatred inspired by memories of the war and attempt to divorce these accounts from their original, now unseemly theme that Yankees or Rebels intentionally committed atrocities. To appeal to an audience that often views the Civil War as a fascinating story and the Union and Confederacy as quintessential American protagonists, the calculated goal of softening the strident rhetoric of the prison accounts ensures a wider audience. The irony is that the same accusations that once perpetuated sectional division while turning a profit now serve the cause of reconciliation even as the quest to cash in on the prison controversy continues. The popularity of current editions of prison narratives depends more on being a good yarn than a window into the angry emotions stir
red by memories of the real war.

  But as the example of the overt commercialization of the town of Andersonville indicates, history often is not left to historians, either professional or amateur. Contemporary conceptions of Civil War prisons are shaped as much if not more by movies, novels, and even folk rock songs as the industry of American popular culture continues to churn out prison-related products.54 As the 2008 appearance of actor Gene Hackman’s novel Escape from Andersonville reveals, even 150 years after these tragic events it seems that we are no nearer to escaping from the constant presence of Civil War prisons as commodity.55 One of the best examples of the resulting incongruities that occur when history and popular culture collide involved the 1996 TNT movie Andersonville. Intended as homage to the sufferings of the prisoners, Andersonville focused on the deprivation of the Union POWs who maintain an unbroken spirit despite facing constant misery and death. The Wirz depicted in the movie resembles the old caricature, a less-than-human figure ultimately responsible for the thousands of fatalities as he berates helpless prisoners and callously disregards men dying in his stocks. During the final scene, a camera slowly pans backward to reveal the 13,000 white headstones that mark the national cemetery. As the screen fades to black, the final words pronounced the familiar judgment of Wirz: “After the war, Wirz was hanged, the only soldier to be tried and executed for war crimes committed during the civil war.”56 But the central concept behind the movie was not to revive the old demonized image of Wirz. Instead Andersonville, like all forms of popular culture, simply played on the stereotypes available to it—in this case the infamous reputation of Wirz and Andersonville—in order to be easily digested by the public. And while Andersonville remains the only Civil War prison deemed worthy of its own movie, a portrayal of Elmira as “hell” appeared in a brief scene in the 1982 miniseries The Blue and the Gray!57 These visual depictions of Union and Confederate prisoners and the hardships they endured do not, nor do they intend to, challenge the dominance of objective memory. Instead, they exist as products designed to appeal to the timeless desire to reflect on the horrors of war. There is—and always will be—a grim fascination with the misery inflicted by fate on others and not on ourselves. Confirmation of the dread symbolic power that the name of Andersonville still conjures up comes from author Sarah Vowell, who wrote in 2002’s The Partly Cloudy Patriot, “In my self-help universe, when things go wrong I whisper mantras to myself, mantras like ‘Andersonville.’” “‘Andersonville,’” she explained, “is a code word for ‘you could be one of the prisoners of war dying of disease and malnutrition in the worst Confederate prison, so just calm down about the movie you wanted to go to being sold out.’”58 Whether we derive entertainment from the memories of Civil War prisons, or like Vowell, use them to remind ourselves of our good fortune, their relevance compels us to inquire about, and thus consume, those remembrances.