On many levels, the National POW museum qualified as a triumph for the National Park Service. Attendance at the park dipped to 129,316 in 1993, but by 1998, thanks to the interest in the museum, it nearly doubled, to 221,546. Although attendance slid until 2001, when 162,416 made their way to Andersonville, the events of September 11 prompted 190,001 visitors in 2002.40 The comforting interpretation of atrocity as meaningful was lucrative as well as inspiring. The heightened volume of tourists translated into brisk sales of postcards, t-shirts, children’s guides, Andersonville books, and prisoner narratives at the museum gift shop. To the delight of Lewis Easterlin and Peggy Sheppard, many also crossed Highway 49 to see the quaint little town of Andersonville. At the park, an ongoing effort to record the oral histories of American POWs reflected the continued dedication of the NPS to preserving and interpreting the universal story of prisoners of war.41 Currently in the works, as part of the centennial celebration of the NPS in 2016, is the preparation, again based on the partnership between the NPS, Friends of Andersonville, and AXPOW, of a traveling exhibit, “Echoes of Captivity: A Moving Tribute to the American Prisoner of War Experience.”42 In this context the word moving has two meanings—not only will the display traverse the country but it will no doubt emphasize the emotional patriotism central to the interpretation of the National POW Museum. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt might well have had the example of Andersonville National Historic Site in mind when he wrote in 2000, “the task of history is never done.” We “make our future better,” he declared, “by understanding the past.”43
The transformation of Andersonville from symbol of sectional division to a monument to American patriotism thus will continue for the foreseeable future. It is the logical consequence of our accepting the objective memory of Civil War prisons. And it is in part a positive development. The popularity of the universalist approach taken at Andersonville National Historic Site and the National POW Museum offers compelling evidence that, at long last, the sectional wounds of the Civil War prison tragedy can be considered almost fully healed. Reconciliation—except perhaps to the UDC and a few other dissenters—seems essentially complete, although the scars will never fade.
But our contemporary memories of Civil War prisons also remain, sadly, unsatisfactory at best and misleading at worst. On the question of determining responsibility for the suffering of Civil War prisoners, Andersonville National Historic Site provided only an ambiguous response to the old debate. Although the juxtaposition of the national cemetery and stockade grounds with the context of the larger story of prisoners of war defused to some extent the traditional memories, it did so in large part by ignoring the critical realization that each war, no matter what general characteristics it shared with wars of other generations, also possessed unique qualities. Andersonville’s individual history became dangerously irrelevant in this repackaged presentation. The National POW Museum’s idealized interpretation of the experience of prisoners of war as a celebration of patriotism confuses the contemporary American memory of Civil War prisons in several important ways.
First, taking the long view of prisoners of war subtly excuses the suffering that transpires in each particular conflict. Each war requires that these patriotic martyrs endure hell as a sacrifice for an indefinite, but clearly precious, freedom. Instead of lamenting atrocity we rejoice in its ritualistic embrace. Since prisoners of war fare badly in all wars, low expectations for our standards of behavior in current and future conflicts remain acceptable.
Another obfuscation results from the fact that, in the Civil War, Americans committed these atrocities against each other. By conflating all modern wars, the NPS again excuses, or at least distracts attention from, the tortured morality of the deliberate nature of the policy choices made by, and thus the responsibility shared for, the Union and Confederacy in the tragedy of Civil War prisons. Although the ideal of freedom permeates Andersonville today, it has been stripped of its emancipationist connotations and thus, ironically, its essential meaning. Compelled by the desire for a larger narrative, Americans, through the selective nature of memory, celebrate an ahistorical, but emotionally powerful, spirit of American freedom. It is convenient (and profitable) to do so, but in a world where prison atrocities, along with racial inequalities, remain prevalent, it is also disingenuous.
In its enthusiasm for the patriotic memory of prisoners of war, the National POW Museum raises one additional point of concern—that in the attempt to find meaning in the brutality of the past, too much importance is placed on the shared sacrifice of all American POWs. Instead of expressing regret or fear about the terrible nature of war, the emphasis on sacrifice actually suggests that the experience of prisoners of war, and even war itself, serves as an opportunity to celebrate liberty and the price we are willing to pay for it. The NPS’s presentation of war as positive and meaningful provides a troubling contrast to past scholarship on Civil War prisons and shows how, in the wrong hands, an objective memory that equalizes blame and deemphasizes consequence can become little more than propaganda. When Hesseltine and other scholars looked at the context of how prisoners fared in all modern wars, they did so in an attempt to show the pervasive evil of war, with the hopes of avoiding future horrors. Although perhaps naive, that goal should remain an aspiration, and, in its current incarnation, intentionally or not, the National POW Museum minimizes that important quest. That the NPS’s agenda of promoting patriotism trumps the need for examining the nuances of morality reveals the danger of relying on government-sponsored history for our memories. At just over a decade old, the National POW Museum’s impact on the memory of Civil War prisons remains uncertain. Given the current political climate of hyperpatriotism, the national park today exists as a lesson to the public about the important values of sacrifice and service in the face of terrible adversity, a message that resonates in a time of fear. But this interpretation too will change over time, because if any fundamental lesson of Andersonville exists, it is that people will see in its questions what they want to see.
Conclusion
From almost the outset of the Civil War down to the present, the controversy over the treatment of Civil War prisoners, and particularly the attempt to pinpoint responsibility for their suffering, captivated Americans struggling to understand first the meaning of the Civil War and later the meaning of modern war in general. For several decades, until the horrors of the world wars of the first half of the twentieth century, divisive memories dominated the perception of Civil War prisons. Although all agreed that atrocities had been perpetrated, sharp disagreement persisted as to the source of the prison suffering. Depending on sectional allegiance, the blame for the misery fell either on the ruthless, unfeeling policies of Abraham Lincoln’s Union or the amoral, treasonous nature of Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy. As representatives of the tragedy, individual Civil War officials, most notably Henry Wirz, were condemned as sadistic and demonic. Throughout these years, defenders of the Union and Confederate prison systems recycled the shrill arguments of the war, often for political gain, frequently to avoid the cause abandoned of racial equality, but always to confirm their sense of identity and to justify their understanding of what the Civil War really meant. Although northerners dominated and defined the terms of the debate over Civil War prisons, white southerners succeeded, as part of the Lost Cause mythology, in deflecting much of the enduring northern criticism and in muting the public visibility of African American celebrations of emancipation. The inherent hostility evoked by the competing sectional memories prolonged the intense rhetorical battle to shape the public remembrance of the Civil War and delayed the progression of reconciliation.
Although the old animosities over Civil War prisons faded by the midpoint of the twentieth century, in a curious twist on the process of reconciliation, the bitterness dissipated only as Americans recognized that, in the treatment of their prisoners, both Union and Confederacy deserved a generalized scorn. Reconciliation over the prison controversy became poss
ible in the aftermath of World War I and II for two reasons. The deaths of the last Civil War prisoners and the staunchest sectional defenders coincided with the emergence of a more objective memory of Civil War prisons based on the depressing realization that the committing of atrocities against prisoners occurred, alarmingly, in all modern wars. The history of Civil War prisons became a warning, not of the deficiencies of the North or South, but of the need to be on guard against mankind’s inherent potential for evil. Recasting the public memory of Civil War prisons helped inspire, at least in theory, that necessary vigilance at a time, not coincidentally, when America assumed a leadership role in world affairs. But in its focus on the patterns, and not the particulars, the relativity inherent in the objective memory also seduced Americans into believing that a closer examination of the peculiar immoralities of Civil War prisons was unnecessary. Reassuring memories are always the easiest to accept.
Over the last few decades, the objective redefinition of the Civil War prison legacy produced a curious paradox. Although a few diehards clung (and still cling) to the traditional divisive memories, events such as the Civil War Centennial—motivated by the lure of profit and the desire to celebrate American heritage—cemented the power of the objective prison memory in the American mind. Andersonville and its fellow Civil War prisons, once regarded solely as controversial symbols of sectional atrocity, now stood proudly as symbols of national unity. Andersonville itself was the epicenter of this reinvention, as the recasting of the town of Andersonville as a tourist-friendly Civil War village and the remaking of the old prison grounds and national cemetery into Andersonville National Historic Site revealed. The 1998 opening of the National Prisoner of War Museum further confirmed Andersonville’s new identity as the national memorial ground for all American prisoners of war. The successful fusion of history, commemoration, and tourism at the transformed Andersonville National Historic Site and National POW Museum corresponded to the ongoing desire of Americans to patriotically remember, and admire, the sacrifices of past soldiers. The widespread acceptance of the objective reimagination of the past testifies to the continued—and understandable—American attraction to the comforts of myth. But it must be recognized that that same preference inhibits a candid assessment of the evils committed during the Civil War. It seems that the attraction of the Civil War as a national fairy tale continues to overshadow the need to confront more honestly the tragedies of American history.
Although the currently dominant objective memory of Civil War prisons emphasizes a message of unity instead of division, the transformation of the prison controversy from national scar to usable past remains incomplete. The yearning for an idealized, ahistorical past unfortunately minimizes the most important legacy of Andersonville and Civil War prisons—the issue of responsibility for the humane treatment of POWs. Events of the early twenty-first century have shown that the lessons of the past have yet to inspire any fundamental change in our behavior toward prisoners of war. The outrage over the American torture of Al Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay and Iraqi captives at Abu Ghraib testifies to the enduring importance of the issue of proper treatment of prisoners of war and reminds us that the historical example of Civil War prisons retains its relevance today. Although the Civil War and the war on terror share little in common, the shock and disgust Americans felt when the knowledge of recent atrocities surfaced echoed the emotions of outrage and disbelief felt in the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War when both sides learned about the scale of the suffering endured in captivity. As Americans, we asked ourselves, as our counterparts did in 1865, the old questions of responsibility and meaning, with one difference. Instead of inquiring how this could happen, we wonder how this could happen again. Part of the surprise in learning that our generation can commit similar inhumanities against our fellow human beings came from the shame that we should know better, given our awareness of the mistakes of the Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam, among many others. And yet, generation after generation, the deeply rooted faith in the identity of American exceptionalism persists. Our ability to idealize a carefully constructed past allows us to believe that America still leads the rest of the world down a path of Manifest Destiny to a mythical reality where such horrors no longer hold sway. There are, in short, consequences to the identities and illusions we create and cherish. That we still have the capacity to express disbelief at atrocities committed against prisoners of war after nearly 150 years of frequent brutality speaks to the equal influence of the positive trait of innate human optimism and the more negative human appetite for delusion. It also suggests that because of the fluidity of memory, there are limits on history’s power to change human behavior.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Charles H. Metzger, The Prisoner in the American Revolution (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1971); Larry G. Bowman, Captive Americans: Prisoners during the American Revolution (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976); Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 176–81, 306–7; Charles W. Sanders, Jr., While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 7–24.
2. Edwin G. Burrows, “Patriots or Terrorists? The Lost Story of Revolutionary POWS,” American Heritage 58 (Fall 2008): 57–60.
3. Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Vintage, 1993), xi.
4. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 152. See also Michael G. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1991), 101.
5. Among the growing literature on the memory of the Civil War, these works remain essential: Blight, Race and Reunion; David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Cambridge: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); David R. Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002); Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory; Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
6. Edward F. Roberts, Andersonville Journey (Shippensburg, Pa.: Burd Street, 1998); Douglas G. Gardner, “Andersonville and American Memory: Civil War Prisoners and Narratives of Suffering and Redemption” (Ph.D. diss., Miami University, 1998); Nancy A. Roberts, “The Afterlife of Civil War Prisons and Their Dead” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1996).
CHAPTER ONE
1. Charleston Mercury, June 19, 1861, http://www.accessible.com (accessed February 8, 2003).
2. Eugene M. Thomas, III, “Prisoner of War Exchange during the American Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1976), 3–4. Along with Thomas, for the best discussion of the complexities surrounding the fluctuating process of exchange during the Civil War, see William B. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (1930; repr., Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), chaps. 2, 5, and 10 as well as Charles W. Sanders, Jr., While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), esp. chaps. 5 and 6.
3. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, 6.
4. Sanders, While in the Hands of the Enemy, 112–15.
5. Thomas, “Prisoner of War Exchange,” 46–47.
6. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894–1899), Series II, Vol. III, 157, hereafter referred to as O.R., with all references to Series II unless otherwise noted.
7. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, 17–18.
8. Thomas, “Prisoner of War Exchange,” 59, 87–88.
9. Hesseltine, Civil Wa
r Prisons, 26, 67–68.
10. O.R., Vol. IV, 266–68. The cartel declared that a general-in-chief was worth 60 enlisted men, lieutenant general, 40; major general, 30; brigadier general, 20; colonel, 15; lieutenant colonel, 10; major, 8; captain, 6; lieutenant, 4; second lieutenant, 3; noncommissioned officers, 2.
11. Sanders, While in the Hands of the Enemy, 128–45; Thomas, “Prisoner of War Exchange,” 104–25.
12. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, 103–11.
13. Gregory J. W. Urwin, ed., Black Flag over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004); George S. Burkhardt, Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007); John Cimprich, Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Joseph T. Glaathaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Free Press, 1990), 201–5.
14. Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 1997), 114.
15. William Marvel, Andersonville: The Last Depot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 154–55; Robert Scott Davis, “‘Near Andersonville’: An Historical Note on Civil War Legend and Reality,” Journal of African American History 92 (Winter 2007): 101.
16. Thomas, “Prisoner of War Exchange,” 297–99.
17. Edward Younger, ed., Inside the Confederate Government: The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean (1957; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 102.
18. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, 214.
19. Grant’s statements are quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Ballantine, 1988), 799–800.
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