Haunted by Atrocity

by Benjamin G. Cloyd

  The persistent interest in Andersonville, and the tangible harmony displayed at the memorial ceremonies at former Confederate prison sites, reflected the pattern of sectional reconciliation that existed in early 1900s America. It was a trend made possible by several factors. The Spanish-American War and the patriotic fervor it generated healed some of the old wounds of the Civil War. For many Americans, attachment to the divisive memories of the conflict began to fade in an era of optimism. This development explained the celebratory imagery that dominated the northern state monuments erected at Andersonville, many of them topped by statues of soldiers, or, as in the case of Wisconsin, an eagle. National pride overshadowed the need for continued sectional discord. The mutual racism demonstrated by both white northerners and white southerners further confirmed feelings of unity. At the memorial gatherings at Andersonville and Salisbury the racial dimension of the Civil War went unmentioned. Removing race from the memory of Civil War prisons transformed the dead prisoners into martyrs to American nationalism, rather than to racial justice. The redefinition of the conflict as a war fought solely for the cause of nation allowed both North and South to celebrate their heroic participation and affirmed ongoing discrimination toward African Americans. And reconciliation was profitable. The income generated by northerners’ visits to Andersonville and Salisbury convinced otherwise reluctant southerners to bury their lingering resentment out of self-interest. The combination of these impulses inherently challenged the former dominance of the divisive memories of Civil War prisons. For the first time, Andersonville began to take on a unifying role in American culture as a national shrine to an idealized, if undefined, patriotic sacrifice.

  But Andersonville’s transformation to a symbol of national unity remained incomplete and contested during the early 1900s. Despite the seductive attraction of reconciliation, the hardened recollections of the wartime prisons endured. While the ascendant themes of forgiveness and racial solidarity existed at each prison commemoration, an underlying bitterness remained noticeable as well. This pattern resulted from the paradoxical problem that Civil War prisons presented, as did all reminders of the war’s destruction, in the narrative of reconciliation.16 To recall the prisons was to recall not just suffering but deliberately inflicted cruelty. At least in the case of Civil War prisons, the horrific memories, reinforced over decades, would not allow many Americans to forget or forgive the crimes of the past. At the November 17, 1906, dedication of his state’s Andersonville monument, Iowa governor Albert Cummins, even while remarking on the “harmony” of “emotions” of the moment, nevertheless implored the crowd to remember “the unparalled inhumanity” and “cruelty” of Andersonville.17 Another Iowan, Ernest Sherman, who in 1907 published an account summarizing the experience of the Iowa delegation, included a sensationalized history of Andersonville reminiscent of those of the Reconstruction era. During the war, the Confederate authorities, Sherman claimed, openly “boasted” about the brutality of the Georgia stockade.18 Even during the Pennsylvania unveiling, General Harry White, one of the official members of the monument commission, betrayed lingering anger concerning the prisons. White blasted the South for what he termed the “perversion of the actual facts of history” regarding the Civil War and its prisons and warned that the ongoing “disturbances” created by the southern counter memory threatened the “harmonies of the sections.” Although Andersonville survivor Captain William Bricker followed White and declared himself “highly pleased” with the respect paid to the dead prisoners, the atmosphere of sectional reconciliation had been diminished by the defiant persistence of the northern memory of singular virtue.19

  While the ambiguities caused by the clash of competing memories were on display at the memorial gatherings at Confederate prisons, there was less uncertainty in the prison memoirs of Union veterans during and after the turn of the twentieth century.20 Many northern prison survivors, such as Private William Allen of the 17th Iowa Volunteer Infantry, showed little desire to abandon their hardened views of Civil War prisons. Allen repeatedly referred to Henry Wirz as a “demon” throughout his 1899 account of life in Andersonville prison.21 In 1904 John Worrell Northrop, veteran of the 76th New York Infantry, recalled the “horrors of prison life” and the “barbarity of the treatment” experienced in Confederate prisons, which he described as “dark and loathsome spots.”22 Others were slightly more sensitive. At times northern prison survivors expressed, as in a 1910 address by John Read, member of the Loyal Legion, a “hesitation” about discussing the prison subject, which he referred to as “that dark episode.” Despite his concerns, however, Read continued, hoping that the “desire in the hearts of all for reconciliation” would overcome the “harsh feeling of criticism.” As he concluded, Read declared that “the lack of shelter” in Confederate prisons “cannot be understood or explained,” a statement reminiscent of the old accusations of deliberate Confederate cruelty toward the Union prisoners. These potentially inflammatory statements, he attested, were necessary to “preserve the memory of the brave men who died for the honor of their country.” By faithfully recounting the old tragedies, in this case to an audience of fellow veterans, Read and other prison survivors attempted to fulfill an obligation to celebrate the history of the Civil War and the successful quest for Union and also to recognize the memory of their fallen comrades whose sacrifices enabled victory. Although aware that this duty would jeopardize the process of reconciliation by freshly recounting the sins of the South, Read, along with many in the North, could not let the “memory be unspoken.”23

  By the twentieth century, then, in the minds of the remaining prison survivors in the North, there was a feeling that, before they died, they owed it to the memory of the thousands of dead Union prisoners to continue to pay homage to the heroism, bravery, and sacrifice of those who survived the ordeal as well as those who did not. In 1902, Ezra Ripple, Andersonville survivor, best summarized this sentiment as he began the tale of his prison experiences. He reminded his readers of the “suffering,” the “great mortality,” and the “horrors of the Southern prisons” and apologized, because “the subject is not a pleasant or attractive one.” “We would all sooner listen,” he acknowledged, “to a description of a grand battle where all the bravery and dash of trained soldiers in assault and defense is portrayed in the most vivid and glowing colors than to a tale which has little in it but that which is revolting, sickening and sorrowful.” The reason Ripple subjected his audience to this depressing account, he claimed, was that it was “necessary to the preservation of the true history of those times.”24 Victory in the war itself, while satisfying, would not suffice. Before they disappeared completely, the Northern prison survivors intended to win not only the war but the battle for posterity and the historical record. They naturally and understandably feared that if the orthodox memory of their suffering faded, it threatened to diminish the value of their experiences, their service, and their lives. Too many soldiers lay in the cemeteries of Andersonville and other southern prisons to allow Americans to forget. And so, as the remaining northern prison survivors entered the twilight of their lives they realized that while the Civil War officially ended in 1865, in the 1900s the fight to remember the conflict, prisons included, continued and would still persist long after they died.

  If the growing obsession with history and memory by Union survivors of Confederate prisons motivated men like Ripple to share their perspective, it also revealed an irony about the nature of “true history.” By 1902, when Ripple wrote, or 1912, when the account of George Putnam was published, decades had passed since the actual events described took place. Putnam openly avowed that, since “forty-eight years have elapsed,” he could not “undertake to say that my memory can be trusted for all of the details or incidents.” Putnam did pledge that his account had been composed in “good faith.”25 Ripple, meanwhile, boasted that he wrote his account from “a retentive memory on which the events had been indelibly impressed,” though he confessed to reading “many o
ther accounts of prison life.” Although he insisted on the veracity of his memoir, in the end he argued that what was really important about his book was its message. “If you appreciate the sacrifice,” he implored, “teach your boys and girls their duty in preserving to posterity this Union for which their lives were so freely given.”26 In appealing to his readers’ patriotism, Ripple revealed the concerns of the aging prison survivors as to how Civil War prisons would continue to be remembered. Ripple and his comrades intended to remain heroes in the history of the Civil War, and that status demanded constant vigilance against southern heresy. By the early 1900s, prison chronicles no longer focused solely on the selective memories of the past, although the authors rarely missed an opportunity to rehash the old belief that southerners deliberately imposed cruel treatment on Yankee prisoners. Instead writers of the accounts, like Ripple, revised their presentations and cloaked their arguments in the guise of reconciliation and patriotism in the hope that the accumulation of subjective memories would eventually gain acceptance as objective history and cement the permanent recognition of the heroic sacrifice made by Union prisoners.

  As the battle for history continued, on February 1, 1911, Lieutenant Thomas Sturgis, from Massachusetts, delivered a lecture on Civil War prisons to a New York branch of the Loyal Legion. Sturgis possessed a unique set of qualifications on the subject. During 1864, his regiment served as the guard at Camp Morton, a Union prison outside Indianapolis, and later that year, he was captured and imprisoned at Libby Prison in Richmond during the final grueling winter of the war. In his speech, reprinted in augmented form the following year, Sturgis offered insight into the northern perspective on the prison controversy and a sense of how, for many, little had changed after nearly fifty years. Concerning the treatment of the Confederate prisoners at Camp Morton, he insisted that “everything was done to minimize any unsanitary conditions” and that there “was no desire on the part of our men anywhere or at any time wantonly to take a prisoner’s life.” Sturgis concluded that “certainly our Government dealt with its prisoners with conscientious regard for life.” Rebel prisons, such as Libby and Andersonville, however, existed as manifestations of a “spirit of malice or as a vindictive display of power.” A sense of justification and righteousness infused Sturgis’s words as he openly attacked the morality of the South. “We are the living witnesses,” Sturgis declared, “rapidly passing away from this scene.” “Before we go,” he argued, “in the interest of history, in justice to the way our people conducted the war,” in contrast to “the actions of our antagonists,” we must “leave our testimony.”27 This need to testify confirmed the need of the aging survivors to preserve the legacy of the Civil War as they understood it.

  For northern veterans like Sturgis the war always remained the ultimate experience of their lives, the years that defined them and gave meaning to their postwar careers. As they participated in saving the Union, reconstructing the nation, and the decades of growth that saw the United States emerge as a world power, America’s success confirmed the worthiness of their sacrifices at prisons like Libby and Andersonville and reassured them that there was a purpose to the horror, a greater good to emerge from the suffering. That comforting understanding depended, however, on maintaining the traditional memory of Civil War prisons. Union prisons represented good, while Confederate prisons represented evil. The half-century of American progress, in the eyes of Sturgis, Ripple, and other survivors, owed its origins to their heroism in overcoming that evil, and they intended to continue reminding America of their sacrifice.

  Another reason for the strident language of Sturgis and other Union veterans centered on the appearance of a new phenomenon—the first substantial histories of the various Civil War prison camps. The appearance of Clay Holmes’s The Elmira Prison Camp in 1912 raised few eyebrows in the North, as Holmes, an Elmira native and devotee of the northern memory of moral superiority, described one of the worst Union prisons as being a place of “Christian humanity.”28 Likewise, William Knauss’s 1906 The Story of Camp Chase focused not on describing the hardships experienced by Confederate prisoners at Camp Chase, the Ohio prison located near Columbus, but instead on the spirit of reconciliation. Knauss spent many years trying to restore and decorate the graves of the more than 2,000 Confederates who died at the sizeable prison during the war. Despite some resistance that included threats of violence, Knauss persisted in his efforts “with no thought but that of pride and admiration for the great American people, regarding no North or no South, but a land rich in memories of its brave deed.”29 Both volumes were written by locals who defended the conditions of the Union prisons and rejoiced in the national climate of reconciliation after 1898.

  In 1911, however, the first ostensibly national history of Civil War prisons appeared as part of Francis Trevelyan Miller’s The Photographic History of the Civil War in Ten Volumes. The bulk of volume 7, covering prisons and hospitals in the war, came from the pen of Holland Thompson, who originally hailed from North Carolina but at the time held an assistant professorship in history at the College of the City of New York. Over the course of several brief chapters, interspersed with dozens of photographs, Thompson discussed various aspects of the prison controversy, such as the experiences of prisoners on both sides and the question of why the policy of exchange ended, necessitating the creation of prisons like Andersonville. For the first time, pictures of both Union and Confederate prisons and prisoners appeared side by side, and Thompson intentionally juxtaposed the images to support his argument. Thompson suggested that the mortality in “the prisons of the Civil War, North and South,” resulted from the use of “temporary makeshifts, hastily constructed,” that were unfit “for human beings in confinement.” “If judged by standards now generally accepted,” he continued, they “would have been condemned for the lack of the most elementary sanitary requirements.” Thompson concluded that the suffering resulted from an unintentional lack of preparation, and he never discussed the possibility of deliberate cruelty. But his willingness to scrutinize the Union prison system caused consternation to northern readers. Such a position shocked veterans like Sturgis, because Thompson lumped the prisons on both sides together and labeled them as equal examples of inhumanity, so that Elmira and Camp Chase became kin to Andersonville and Salisbury. Sturgis felt betrayed because Thompson had relied on him, along with Read and Putnam, for “courtesies” during the preparation of the manuscript. Thompson even thanked Sturgis in the preface to volume 7.30

  Outraged by the public connection of his name to this distortion of history, Sturgis attacked Thompson in the 1912 printed edition of his 1911 New York speech. While crediting Thompson with an “earnest effort” at impartiality, Sturgis considered it his duty to remind readers of flaws in Thompson’s work. Not only had Thompson been born after the Civil War, and so relied entirely on “second-hand” information, but he was also “a native of North Carolina.” These “insurmountable difficulties,” according to Sturgis, proved that Thompson suffered from “unconscious bias.”31 Only a southerner, Sturgis insinuated, could possibly conclude that the prison systems of the Union and Confederacy shared more similarities than differences. With heretics like Thompson challenging the dominant memory of Civil War prisons, Sturgis and his fellow veterans felt compelled to protest, urgently and vociferously, these perceived injustices and perversions of history. If their message sounded shrill and strident, it was because they knew that they were running out of time “before we go.”

  The defense of “true history” explains in large measure why the familiar tone of animosity persisted among Union veterans, even in the midst of monument dedications devoted to spreading the message of forgiveness about Civil War prisons, and after the healing impact of the Spanish-American War. The paradoxical feelings of the survivors of Confederate prisons testified to the still uncomfortable juxtaposition of the positive story of reconciliation with the ongoing power of divisive memory. Former Union prisoners shared the national excitement over th
e achievements of the United States since 1865 and were proud of their role in winning the war that put America on that path to glory. In that sense men like Read and Ripple recognized that the rancor of the past seemed less important in a more optimistic and forward-looking present. Yet a fear remained that during that rapid march of progress, public remembrance of their part in the Civil War, or even the war itself, might fade into oblivion. As they revisited the hatred inspired by and encountered in the prisons, survivors apologized for disturbing the process of reconciliation. Compelled by the need to preserve their place in history, however, they refused to stop. Even for men accustomed to sacrifice, to allow a sanitization of their past proved more than they could bear.

  The enduring bitterness of former Union prisoners of war also testified to the distinct conflict between the purpose of public and personal memory. From a national perspective, as evidenced by the statements of President McKinley, the Spanish-American War represented confirmation that the United States had fully recovered from the trauma of the Civil War. The monuments built at Andersonville and Salisbury showed that many northerners agreed with McKinley. Thus these monuments provided a final opportunity to acknowledge the sacrifice of the Civil War generation before Americans permanently turned their attention forward to the national future. As individuals, however, former prisoners felt that no statue, ceremony, or statement could suffice to repay their suffering. Only death would end many of the personal grudges of the prison survivors. No matter how much time passed, for many northerners, especially ex-prisoners, the old accusations and sense of outrage at the actions of the Confederacy, particularly regarding the treatment of prisoners, defined the meaning of the war and permeated any attempt at discussion or objective analysis of the issue. Much of the tenacity with which those northerners clung to their antipathy reflected a natural frustration as the construction of public memory, with its positive interpretation of reconciliation, inevitably overpowered the personal memories of those individuals who could never forget the bitter past.