Haunted by Atrocity

by Benjamin G. Cloyd

  The fading intensity of the old sectional memories and, tellingly, the public visibility of the black emancipationist legacy were also evident in the nature of the Memorial Day exercises held at Andersonville between 1914 and the 1930s. Although the annual event still consistently attracted crowds of several hundred to a little over a thousand, including a strong African American presence, much of the formerly spontaneous celebration gave way to formalized ritual. By 1924, reports of the event declared that the racial “disorders” that previously turned Memorial Day at Andersonville into a rowdy affair had “entirely disappeared and a public aid of solemnity now surrounds the annual observance.” The “quiet” occasions, stripped of their violence and marked only by the decorum of music, speeches, and monument dedications, showed the remarkable outcome of the turn-of-the-century contest between white northerners, white southerners, and African Americans to remember Civil War prisons. Although the divisive memories of northerners and southerners still grated against each other, at Anderson-ville a compromise between the two visions existed, born out of a shared resistance to the emancipationist tradition. The northern memory dominated the landscape of Andersonville and each Memorial Day gathering in the name of nationalism, but this unwelcome reality was ameliorated for white southerners by their success in using years of military force to restrain the African American celebration.27 The constant presence of African Americans at Andersonville represented a still firm commitment to the emancipationist memory, but the carefully restricted nature of black participation showed how completely whites, North and South, embraced the reassuring social order of Jim Crow-era racism. The vital questions of race, freedom, and equality raised by the Civil War and its prisons were increasingly—and comfortably—ignored.

  The bonds forged by northern and southern whites as they mutually negotiated the remembrance of Andersonville testified to the reality that, by the 1920s and 1930s, the traditionally controversial prison memories, although still framed in terms of argument, no longer threatened entrenched sectional identities. The divisive memories served not to convince Americans that either the Union or Confederacy deserved all the blame for the prison tragedy, but instead catered to older generations who remembered the Civil War as the central event of their childhood or as the source of compelling stories told them by their Confederate or Union grandfathers. Recalling Civil War prisons was a part of reaffirming, for Peterson Cherry and his northern contemporaries, their identity as the saviors of the Union and offered consoling evidence of their important contribution to history as death approached. For Rutherford and her southern supporters, railing against the northern memory of moral confirmation likewise played a part in preserving their identity. Unlike the days of the Blaine-Hill debate, however, or the printed exchange between Davis and Chipman, no one in the North bothered to respond to Rutherford. Even so, the UDC-led campaign to remember retained importance, as it contributed to the white southern Lost Cause orthodoxy and reinforced attitudes of white supremacy. The divisive memories succeeded in muting the African American emancipationist legacy and became entrenched as history, albeit in dualistic form. But that very success came with a hidden cost. With the monuments built, memoirs written, and stories told, the urgency behind the sectional memories began to fade. The combined impact of two important changes ultimately brought an end to the dominance of the old bitter memories of Civil War prisons. As the Civil War, and its prisons, retreated into history, the war became less controversial, ironically because the existence of a defensive southern memory of the prisons had become an accepted tradition in the culture of American reconciliation and at this late date posed no real threat to the entrenched northern interpretation. Many Americans saw little point in contesting the peculiarities of the Civil War—the final outcome of the Union preserved was all that mattered. And when the gruesome brutality of World War I shocked Americans into the modern world, the context of prison suffering changed rapidly, defying the attempts of the old defenders of true history to define the memory of Civil War prisons in shades of black and white at the very moment that those defenders finally exited the stage.

  The changing nature of public interest in the prison controversy did not mean the disappearance of the subject of Civil War prisons—instead it represented a transition that often occurs in the construction of historical memory as events lose the context of their immediate relevance and become the property of those who interpret and adapt them to fit contemporary needs. Although most Americans forgot about or were oblivious to the once emotional prison tragedy, the fading intensity of the selective sectional memories also presented the opportunity for a more critical appraisal. As a result, a new strand of Civil War prison memory emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. American scholars started to revisit the prisons, not to assign blame to the Union or Confederacy, but instead to seek objective understanding of, and perhaps solutions to, the universal problem of how to treat more appropriately future prisoners of war.

  In 1924, Major Herbert Fooks, a retired U.S. Army officer turned civilian lawyer, wrote Prisoners of War, a comparative examination of how prisoners of war fared in captivity from as far back as Philip of Macedon and the Punic Wars of Rome (not well) through the end of World War I (somewhat better). But while Fooks briefly touched on the treatment of prisoners of war throughout history, he devoted most of his attention to the Civil War and World War I. He found that Civil War prisons “were poorly organized” compared to World War I prison camps and that “an extreme scarcity of food” plagued Civil War prisoners, in contrast to the more “fortunate” World War I captives. Fooks also noted an unfortunate similarity between the two conflicts; some prisoners in both wars suffered from maltreatment. Fooks admitted that because of the “civil strife” between 1861 and 1865, “the exact truth” of what happened at places like Andersonville remained somewhat clouded by “unpleasant memories, passions, and prejudices.” Nevertheless, he believed that what was now paramount was “determining the basic cause of these inhumanities.” Both sides, according to Fooks, simply fell victim to “the harsh customs of previous wars.” After exonerating the “humane” behavior of the United States toward German prisoners during World War I, however, Fooks overlooked his prior statements about the obscuring potential of emotion and denounced the German treatment of captives as “frightful.” While Fooks’s objectivity in making that statement may be questioned, ascertaining the degree of German guilt for various atrocities matters less than the fact that he refrained from rehashing the old accusations as he discussed the prison camps of the Civil War. For Fooks, distinguishing between the Civil War prison systems of the North and South was less important than learning from the mistakes made by both sides. His argument emphasized that the traditional sectional perception of either the Union or the Confederacy as representative of aberrant brutality toward prisoners no longer made as much sense when one considered the actions of the Germans during World War I.28

  Another benefit of examining the prisons of past wars in a comparative manner appeared as Fooks assessed each conflict on its own merits, stripping each event (World War I excepted) of the bitterness endemic to the discussions of the past. When viewing the overall pattern of treatment of prisoners of war throughout history, Fooks concluded that there was reason for optimism. The days of killing or enslaving prisoners seemed safely in the past; “great progress has been made.” Here Fooks revealed that despite that progress, the recent experiences of the Civil War and World War I showed that a “great task” remained—to ensure that future generations of prisoners fared better, so “that the lives of all those who have suffered and died to bring about these results shall not have been sacrificed in vain.” Civil War prisoners, according to Fooks, did not sacrifice their lives to a sectional or racial cause, but instead for the greater good of their fellow POWs. In the end he declared, in a touching if somewhat naive statement, that only when all nations “bear in mind the golden rule,” a paradoxical concept during times of war, will prisoners of war finally rece
ive the fair treatment they deserve. No matter how unrealistic the use of the golden rule might be as a protective shield against atrocities toward captives, Fooks’s book heralded a new era of Civil War prison memory. Instead of adding to the vilification provoked by Civil War prisons in the past, Fooks recognized that, in the aftermath of World War I and its own controversy over prisoners of war, perhaps the old story of Civil War prisons contained some lesson about how to solve the enduring challenge of how to improve ourselves as captors and captives. It was a lesson especially needed in a modern world.29

  Like Major Fooks, William Hesseltine had World War I in his thoughts as he approached the issue of Civil War prisons. He realized that the reappearance of such horrors begged impartial investigation. As the first and, until recently, the only work by a professional historian to analyze thoroughly the topic of Civil War prisons, Hesseltine’s landmark 1930 work, Civil War Prisons: A Subject in War Psychology, represented an inconsistent but significant challenge to the power of divisive memory. From the opening page, Hesseltine, born in Virginia but professionally trained at Ohio State University, assured readers of his objectivity. “The hatreds of those war times have been cooled,” he stated, and the war finally “may be dealt with in a more proper perspective.”30 According to his peers, Hesseltine succeeded in his attempt to handle the volatile subject delicately; reviewers hailed the “judicial spirit” and “cool detachment” of the “critical study.”31 Drawing primarily on evidence from The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies as well as the scores of published prison accounts, Hesseltine reduced the overall controversy over Civil War prisons into individual pieces, including the issue of prisoner exchange, conditions in the prison systems on both sides, and the heated emotions generated by the suffering. He then, at least to his own satisfaction, systematically and dispassionately explained the reasons behind the tragedy of the Civil War prison camps.

  Hesseltine began his dissection of the prison controversy by exploring the question of responsibility for the breakdown of the exchange cartel. Had the policy of exchange continued throughout the war, instead of halting in 1863, camps such as Andersonville and Elmira need never have existed, and so Hesseltine spent over a third of the book sorting out how exactly the exchange process came to an end. This required him to engage with the selective perspectives of both sections, and Hesseltine outlined the familiar arguments for his readers. Since the 1860s, northerners insisted that the Confederacy’s refusal to recognize the rights of African American prisoners prompted the Union’s principled stand of not exchanging prisoners with the Confederacy—unless black troops received the same treatment as white Union soldiers. Southerners fired back that the Union government always opposed the cartel because it returned Confederate soldiers to the front lines, obstructing Grant’s strategy of attrition, and that defending the rights of African Americans existed purely as a political smokescreen to distract northern families from the fact that Lincoln and Stanton made conscious decisions to sacrifice their sons in Confederate prisons. On the cartel issue, Hesseltine clearly sided with the southern view, claiming that the Union government waited “until the country showed signs of restlessness” with the lack of exchange to declare the South’s policy toward captured African American soldiers as “reason for the non-exchange of prisoners.” Hesseltine’s discounting of the impact of race on the prison controversy showed just how seductive the conjoined memories of reconciliation and white supremacy remained in 1930.32

  But if Hesseltine favored the traditional southern position on the issue of exchange, he took a different stance on the conditions experienced in the camps of both combatants. Hesseltine believed that one of the major components of the story of Civil War prisons was the scrambling of “both belligerents” to create proper “organization for the care of prisoners of war.” Union and Confederate prisons operated on an impromptu basis throughout the war, he argued, first in 1861 as prisoners began arriving behind the lines, and then all over again in late 1863 and 1864 as the war reached its destructive peak just as the exchange agreement collapsed. Despite the lack of foresight on both sides, Hesseltine credited the Union with executing “definite plans” to organize its “prison system” and acknowledged the structure of “military administration” in the North. Of the Confederate “prison system,” Hesseltine described it as “less worthy” and as “the result of a series of accidents.” Not until “the last months of the war,” far too late to make a difference, did the Confederacy finally establish a proper administrative structure for its prisons. This clear discrepancy, Hesseltine argued, led directly to the terrible suffering in southern prisons, which he detailed in individual chapters on various Confederate camps.33

  In his emphasis on “organization,” “plans,” and “administration,” Hesseltine offered a novel theory about the reason behind the tragedy of Civil War prisons—bureaucratic inefficiency. This approach, once hinted at by former Andersonville prisoners John McElroy and Herman Braun, represented a major break from the divisive memories of the relative guilt or innocence of individuals like Wirz, Davis, and Stanton. Hesseltine suggested that those involved in the contest of vilifying or defending these polarizing figures were caught in a circular and ultimately unanswerable debate. Individuals certainly should and could have done more, Hesseltine believed, but the widespread scale of the suffering testified to the need for a deeper explanation of the “prison system.” Andersonville, as the worst individual prison of the Civil War, provided Hesseltine with his most powerful evidence in support of the organizational explanation. Recounting Andersonville’s origins, Hesseltine described how the “execution of the plan” to construct the Georgia prison suffered from “distance,” “delay,” and a lack of men and supplies. “In the midst of the preparations for equipping the prison,” the Confederate government started shipping prisoners to the site “before the preparations for their reception had been completed.” From Hesseltine’s perspective, prisoners accumulated and died at Andersonville because of poor planning and bureaucratic mismanagement, not inhuman cruelty.34

  Hesseltine’s argument that the Confederate prison system lacked organization compared to the Union’s camps brought him to the final piece of the prison controversy. Why, if the Confederacy was derelict in its duty to Union captives, were the death rates of Confederates in Union prisons comparable? “Polemical” northern writers, Hesseltine claimed, “were faced with a problem when they came to an enumeration of deaths to prove their thesis that the South deliberately murdered prisoners. The numbers given in the official reports were not sufficiently large for those who desired to prove deliberate murder.” As Hesseltine reported, traditional Union estimates placed mortality rates in Union prisons at 12 percent and Confederate prisons at 17 percent. Confederate defenders insisted that the casualty rates stood at 12 percent in Union prisons and only 9 percent in Confederate prisons. Whatever the real figures, however, what struck Hesseltine was that the death rates were markedly similar. Although the similarity between Union and Confederate prison mortality simply confirmed the prevalence of fatal diseases in all Civil War prisons, Hesseltine remained unsatisfied. His finding undermined the validity of the organizational explanation given his demonstration of the superiority of the Northern “prison system.” Hesseltine concluded that while organizational failings explained the Confederacy’s mistreatment of prisoners, another rationale was needed to clarify the Union’s almost identically poor prison record.35

  Hesseltine found his answer in the fashionable contemporary theory of psychoanalysis, which, as historian Peter Novick states, scholars of Hesseltine’s era believed to be “devoted to unearthing objective truth.”36 According to Hesseltine, the grim record of the more prepared, wealthier, and provisioned Union prisons could be explained only as the result of “war psychosis,” a psychological condition that he described as inspiring “the fiercest antagonism toward that country’s enemies.” As the war continued and northerners heard more about the sufferings taking p
lace in Confederate prisons, “the inevitable reaction of the prisoners and the people of the North was to demand that the prisoners in the Northern prisons should be given a similar treatment.” In other words, the psychological desire for revenge caused the public to inspire Union officials to treat prisoners badly by reducing rations and withholding supplies when, unlike in the South, the food and supplies existed to care properly for the Confederate captives. So thorough was “war psychosis,” Hesseltine observed, that even as conditions deteriorated in the Union prison system, northerners still believed that “prisoners in the Northern prisons were accorded excellent treatment.” One of the most remarkable features of Hesseltine’s “war psychosis” involved its durability. After Appomattox, “war psychosis” still contained such emotional power that it continued to fuel the prison controversy during Reconstruction with the execution of Wirz, the “waving of the bloody shirt,” and the appearance of scores of prisoner memoirs. Hesseltine thus categorized the postwar years of northern indignation over the prisons as a sincere, if hypocritical, reflection of the passion stirred up by the prison controversy during the war. His “study in war psychology” again attacked the traditional belief that evil individuals bore responsibility for the tragedy and instead confirmed the modern, more scientifically nuanced perception of how the world worked. Hesseltine’s revisionist combination of objective psychoanalytic theory and the impersonal dominance of large bureaucratic organizations, with their capacity for mismanagement, presented the history of Civil War prisons in a more compelling, usable form, especially compared to the outdated sectional memories of the prisons.37