Haunted by Atrocity Read online

  On the day of the execution, Abram Parmenter recorded his disappointment at arriving too late to see Wirz hang, but the demise of the “Andersonville wholesale murderer” comforted him. The execution of Wirz, Parmenter commented further, seemed an appropriate fate “to satisfy the just claims of the law, and an outraged people.”22 A few days after Wirz’s burial, a Harper’s Weekly editor wrote, “There are crimes against God and man which ought not to be forgotten, and these for which Wirz suffered . . . are of them.”23 Even with Wirz dead, the palpable righteousness of the northern public lingered.

  The public excoriation and death sentence imposed on Wirz by the government satisfied a northern citizenry willing to overlook the warped sense of justice behind the process. It also made for exciting headlines and robust newspaper sales figures. By the end of 1865, northerners viewed Andersonville and Henry Wirz as the primary symbols of Confederate atrocity.24 This was not coincidence—the Wirz trial represented the logical continuation of the wartime pattern in which the government manipulated the emotional controversy of Civil War prisons for political gain. The desired object, not the message, changed after Appomattox. Instead of rousing a people to war, the one-sided vilification of Henry Wirz, and by extension the Confederate prison system, now justified the proper outcome of the conflict. It was an appealing vision, especially to a people still celebrating their dearly earned triumph. Nor was it technically incorrect, as the Confederacy had indeed inflicted intentional suffering on its prisoners, although the process of singling out Wirz now seems a product of convenience. Victory gave the North what Robert Penn Warren once called a “Treasury of Virtue,” a sense of moral reassurance, out of which its citizens could easily condemn the sufferings at Andersonville and other southern prisons rather than admit the failures of Union prison camps.25 Blaming Wirz and his fellow unnamed Confederates as uniquely responsible for the tragedy at Andersonville excused any acknowledgment of the tortured morality of the exchange process, bureaucratic dysfunction, or retaliatory behavior present in the Union prison system and signified an attempt to remember not only the 56,000 prisoner deaths but the Civil War itself in a positive light.

  Northern satisfaction soon proved temporary and problematic. Exultations over Wirz’s execution camouflaged but could not undo the truth that the Union, and not just the Confederacy, bore responsibility for the deliberate brutality that took place in Civil War prisons. Celebration could not last forever, and the task of integrating the former Confederacy back into the United States loomed. Many considerations complicated the process of Reconstruction, not least among them the difficulty of achieving a true sense of forgiveness between North and South. The combination of wartime prison atrocities with their repeated emotional manipulation created a powerful and singular memory that confirmed northern virtue, defied attempts to redefine the prisons as part of a just conflict, and distracted attention from the important questions of racial equality raised during the war. Nor would that memory, with its assurance of northern moral superiority, allow the reconciliation of the sectional bitterness that remained. “Prison horror,” according to historian David Blight, “and the hatreds it fostered in both sections, infested social memories of the war during Reconstruction years as nothing else did.”26 Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, the persistent northern anger over Civil War prisons delayed the spirit of national reconciliation and obstructed the acceptance of an inclusive reunification.

  From the very beginning of Reconstruction, the northern memory of Civil War prisons helped shape the contemporary political environment and became a significant issue in national politics. Thaddeus Stevens, a leader of the anti-Johnson wing of the Republican party and a driving force behind congressional Reconstruction, justified his unrealized desire for the confiscation and redistribution of Confederate property on the ground that ex-Confederates merited punishment for the barbarities at Andersonville and other places.27 In the 1866 Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Stevens and his congressional allies denounced President Johnson’s lenient policy of Reconstruction. Reminding Johnson and his supporters that the ex-Confederate states waged war “with the most determined and malignant spirit, killing in battle, and otherwise, large numbers of loyal people,” the committee declared presidential Reconstruction an insufficient penance for the South. In case the oblique reference to the deaths of thousands of Union soldiers in Confederate prisons went unnoticed, the committee included several pages of testimony from Dorence Atwater, a former inmate of Andersonville who compiled a roster of the dead and detailed the brutal conditions at Andersonville and other southern camps.28

  During the late 1860s, inflammatory rhetoric and images about Civil War prisons appeared in the northern press. These outcries were sparked initially by the question of what should be done with Jefferson Davis, who still awaited trial or release from prison. On June 30, 1866, cartoonist Thomas Nast, in Harper’s Weekly, contrasted the brutality and suffering of Andersonville with the relative luxury that Davis enjoyed at Fortress Monroe, Virginia. The public, an accompanying editorial maintained, should remember that Davis “is the same man who could see from his house in Richmond the island upon which Union prisoners were slowly starved and frozen, and who knew that thousands of his fellow-men imprisoned at Andersonville were pitilessly tortured into idiocy and death.”29 The ongoing animosity directed at Davis over his responsibility for the Confederate prison system may have delayed his discharge from prison, although he, unlike Wirz, escaped formal charges. And in late 1867, in response to southern irritation with the passage of the Reconstruction Acts, Harper’s Weekly ridiculed the South for protesting against northern “tyranny,” pointing out that not only had the Southern cause failed but also “there was no fame garnered at Salisbury: nor is Andersonville very bright and shining with classic glory.”30 Although the prison controversy never became the central focus in the debate over Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans’ use of the prison issue justified a stronger policy and convinced the public to support Congress as it successfully wrested control of the process away from Andrew Johnson. Once again, invocation of the traditional one-sided portrayal of Civil War prisons successfully served the desires of northern politicians. Throughout Reconstruction, discussion of the prison camps would consistently be used to justify the cemented relationship between northern morality and the Republican political agenda.

  Nothing symbolized the claims of Republican politicians as effectively as the existence of the corpses of thousands of dead prisoners. In a culture still reeling from the impact of inconceivable death, a strong fascination with the physical remains of the dead persisted. The popularity of the 1866 exhibit “Andersonville Relics,” displayed at the National Fair in Washington, encouraged Harper’s Weekly to predict that “whatever relates to the Andersonville dead is not likely soon to become void of interest, at least not to the loyal North.”31 And so, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the Johnson administration created an official program under the auspices of the Quartermaster’s Department to properly identify and bury the Union dead. By the end of 1867, among the national cemeteries created were four former Confederate prison sites: Andersonville, Danville, Florence, and Salisbury. Other victims of Confederate prisons were interred in the nearest national cemeteries. Meanwhile, the northern graves of perished Confederate prisoners lay all but forgotten.32 The priority placed on honoring the Union dead while ignoring their Confederate counterparts reflected the hardened intent of a North determined to honor its self-confirming memory of the prisons. Captain and Assistant Quartermaster James M. Moore, charged in 1865 with marking the graves of Union soldiers at Andersonville, revealed this sentiment when he reported that “nothing has been destroyed; as our exhausted, emaciated, and enfeebled soldiers left it, so it stands to-day, as a monument to an inhumanity unparalleled in the annals of war.”33

  Although the presence of the dead inspired much of the lingering acrimony over Civil War prisons, an even greater source of recrimination came from the
publication of numerous Union veterans’ prison narratives, a practice that remained common well into the early twentieth century. The frequent rehashing of the trauma, along with the animosity with which most former prisoners wrote, encouraged hostile memories of the prison camps. In many ways the postwar accounts, which took the form of memoirs, unsurprisingly resembled the wartime prisoner testimony. What separated the postwar accounts from their predecessors, especially after the Wirz trial, was the strident, amplified rhetoric. The competition and popularity of the memoirs encouraged the polemical nature of the accounts. Between 1865 and 1867, dozens of prison memoirs appeared, and the need to distinguish one’s product through sensationalism and vitriol became irresistible.34 This impulse led to titles such as Martyria and Life and Death in Rebel Prisons along with declarations like those of Joseph Ferguson, whose exaggerated account stated, “It is past question that the Confederate authorities did deliberately, and with thoughts of murder in their hearts, perpetuate the awful enormity of torturing to death sixty or seventy thousand helpless but brave men; slain by a refined process of cruelty.”35 Statements like these served the needs of the individual prison survivors in that it allowed them to share their experiences and turn a profit. Such declarations also catered to the appetite of the northern public for reminders of the moral justice of the Union cause at a time when white southerners were engaging in race riots, creating black codes to restrict the rights of the newly freed slaves, and forming the infamous Ku Klux Klan to terrorize African Americans. Authors like Ferguson knew that the northern public expected an attitude of outrage and denunciation toward the brutal, treasonous, and unrepentant South, and they willingly gave their audience reassurance of Yankee superiority over Confederate baseness.

  Another distinctive feature of the early postwar northern prison narratives involved the cessation of blame directed at the U. S. government for refusing to exchange prisoners for much of the war. Men like William Burson instead argued that “the rebels knew just how to demoralize the Union prisoners and make them useless to the Federal Government, and adopted this means to accomplish their hellish purpose.”36 From Burson’s perspective of hindsight, Union leaders deserved credit for avoiding this Confederate ruse. Alfred Richardson, imprisoned at Salisbury, North Carolina, praised the “credulity and trustfulness of our Government towards the enemy” in sending private shipments of supplies to Union prisoners, which the Rebels “openly confiscated.” Richardson lodged his only criticism of Union policy against Edwin Stanton’s “cold-blooded theory” that “returned prisoners were infinitely more valuable to the Rebels than to us.” Although this policy contributed to his hardship, Richardson seemed accepting of the correctness of the Union’s calculation, especially in the aftermath of victory. Along with the vindication of Union policy came Richardson’s attack against the camp commandant at Salisbury, Confederate major John H. Gee. Gee, claimed Richardson in an attack reminiscent of the accusations leveled at Wirz, insisted on giving the prisoners quarter rations even though the commissary warehouse, as well as the surrounding regions, enjoyed ample supplies of corn and pork.37 Like Richardson, other survivors singled out the men they held personally responsible for their suffering. Warren Goss, an Andersonville prisoner, blamed the harsh conditions on “the inflexible Winder,” while Josiah Brownell expressed his disdain for Wirz, saying of him “a more brutal coward I never saw.”38 In 1867, J. F. Brock swore that defenders of the Confederate prison system, and, in particular, “Jeff Davis and Benj. Hill are both liars.”39 Readers of these memoirs, most of whom were already familiar with the old conspiracy arguments, saw no reason to doubt the words of these heroes, and so the belief that deliberate brutality occurred only in Confederate prisons became even more ingrained in the North. The consistent appearance of similarly styled prison memoirs in the decades to come preserved a memory of Civil War prisons that rejected the prospect of reconciliation on the logical grounds that former Confederate supporters, capable of such atrocity, deserved continued contempt.

  Although outnumbered, ex-Confederate prison survivors resisted the one-sided charges of their Union counterparts. In their own late 1860s memoirs, Confederate veterans of Union prisons not only refuted the northern arguments but also made their own accusations. Decimus Barziza, held at Johnson’s Island, ridiculed the “alleged” brutality supposedly taking place in southern prisons and insisted that the “horrible treatment” at prisons like Fort Delaware and Point Lookout occurred with the purpose of forcing Confederate prisoners to swear an oath of allegiance to the Union or face “starvation, cold, and ill-treatment.”40 A. M. Keiley felt impelled to write his own prison account as a response to the North, which “is not only writing the story of the late war, but the character of its late enemies.” In doing so, Keiley compared his experience at Point Lookout and Elmira with those of the Andersonville prisoners. Keiley believed that Union major E. L. Sanger, the head of the Medical Department at Elmira, acting on the instructions of Edwin Stanton, refused to supply the prison with the medicine prisoners needed. An indignant Keiley wondered how the North could “studiously ignore” the evidence of its own brutality while condemning Wirz, “who was not the monster whom that scandalous tribunal declared him.”41 As bitter as he felt about the treatment he received in the North, the one-sidedness with which northerners attacked the Confederate prison record angered Keiley the most. Other southerners perceived the northern hypocrisy as well. L. M. Lewis, in the preface to W. A. Wash’s prison account, hoped that “if we would have a just verdict from the grand juries of coming generations,” northern prisons such as “Alton Penitentiary, Camp Douglas, Camp Chase, Rock Island and Elmira” should “be placed by the side of the exaggerations about Libby, Belle Isle, Tyler and Andersonville.”42 As they reminded readers of the inconsistencies in the Yankee interpretation of the prison controversy, Barziza, Keiley, Lewis, and Wash reinforced southern frustrations not just with the war, but with a reunion dominated by northern memory.

  The persistent bitterness of the prison narratives on both sides ensured that the emotions stirred up by Civil War prisons retained their relevance as the first postwar presidential election loomed in 1868. As part of its strategy, the Republican Party focused attention on the prisons, a tactic one scholar called “the most powerful political weapon that could be used by the North in securing Republican victories at the polls.”43 Although the Republican Party dominated the North, the sizable number of Democratic sympathizers there worried the Republican establishment. Since the white South remained anti-Republican, the possibility existed that a rejuvenated Democratic Party might challenge the Republican majority, threatening the hard-earned political power justified by the war. In the fall elections of 1867, Harper’s Weekly, as usual, took the lead in reminding its readers of the stakes. Those “who love freedom, will vote for the Republican,” the editor wrote, “while all who secretly wish . . . the Andersonville pen had succeeded, will vote for his Democratic opponent.” On July 4, 1868, another Harper’s article lamented that had the Democrat George McClellan defeated Lincoln in 1864, “the rebel army and the Andersonville jailers would have sung Te Deum.” A week later, a Harper’s Weekly editor referred to Andersonville as “the Palladium of Southern Democratic liberties.”44 Throughout 1868, Republican publications such as Harper’s Weekly delighted in hammering Democrats by repeatedly charging them with behavior only slightly less traitorous than that of the Confederacy.

  Over the last few months of the election, a torrent of similar sentiments flooded the northern press. On October 3, an anonymous letter to Harper’s Weekly stated the obvious point of the agitation over Andersonville and the other southern prisons: “I should like to see a picture of that stockade, and on the left the United States Cemetery, with the Stars and Stripes flying over those poor boys’ graves. I do believe,” the author concluded, “it would clench the nail in the political coffin of Seymour and Blair.” Three weeks later, with the election only days away, an illustration titled “The Political A
ndersonville” appeared in Harper’s. The cartoon depicted the unfortunate Republican voters of the South as trapped in a giant stockade—symbolic of the white Democratic South’s tactics of violence and fraud to ensure victory at the polls. A grim specter, the ghost of a dead Andersonville inmate, loomed over the scene. The caption quoted Wade Hampton, the ex-Confederate general and South Carolina gubernatorial candidate, as the main advocate of these abuses of democracy. “Agree among yourselves . . . that you will not employ any one who votes the Radical ticket,” Hampton threatened, and “use all the means that are placed in your hands to control this element.”45 The denial of democratic liberties in the South and even the alliance between northern and southern Democrats, the engraving suggested, insulted the memory of the sacrifice that thousands of imprisoned soldiers made during the war. Over the course of the campaign, the Republican press succeeded in portraying the Democrats not only as corrupt, undemocratic, and unpatriotic, but as disrespectful of the dead Union prisoners.