Civil War Prisons

CIVIL WAR PRISONS CIVIL WAR PRISONS A Study in War Psychology William Best Hesseltine FOREWORD BY William Blair Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 1930 by The Ohio State University. Foreword © 1998 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hesseltine, William Best, 1902-1963. Civil War prisons : a study in.war psychology / William Best Hesseltine; foreword by William Blair. p. cm. Originally published: 1930. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8142-0768-5 (pb : alk. paper) 1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Prisoners and prisons. I. Title. E615.H37 1998 973.77—dc21 98-2980 CIP Jacket design by Dan O'Dair. Printed by Cushing-Malloy, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 TO Katherine Louise Hesseltine CONTENTS FOREWORD BY WILLIAM BLAIR ix PREFACE xxiii I. TH E FIRST PRISONERS 1 II. EXCHANGE PRIOR TO THE CARTEL OF 1862 7 III. NORTHERN PRISONS, 1861-1862 34 IV. SOUTHERN PRISONS, 1861-1862 55 V. EXCHANGE UNDER THE CARTEL 69 VI. LIBBY AND BELLE ISLE 114 VII. ANDERSONVILLE 133 VIII. OTHER SOUTHERN PRISONS 159 IX. WAR PSYCHOSIS AND THE NORTHERN PRISONS 172 X. EXCHANGE UNDER BUTLER, 1864-1865 210 XI. TH E AFTERMATH 233 BIBLIOGRAPHY 259 FOREWORD Sometime in the 1920s William Best Hesseltine chose to examine a wound that had festered since the Civil War. For sixty-some years the charge had persisted that the South bore the responsibility for wartime atrocities in prison camps. Some, in fact, claimed that the leaders of the Confederacy deliberately plotted to kill Union prisoners through willful neglect of food and sanitary conditions. Today such allegations sound far-fetched, but as Hesseltine searched for a disserta tion topic to complete his doctoral studies at Ohio State Uni versity the statements still held currency. At the least they had never been debunked in a study by a trained historian. Published first in 1930, the resulting book dismissed the idea that Southerners conspired to kill Northern prisoners and spread the blame for the treatment of prisoners to the Union. Re viewers quickly recognized Civil War Prisons as an important contribution. Remarkably, it remains the only monograph of its kind and propelled its writer into a career at the University of Wisconsin that produced not only a dozen significant works but also some of the country's most gifted historians of the Civil War era. Hesseltine was not inclined to run from controversy. Ac cording to former students, he relished the provocative and used bold statements as part of his teaching style. Although only 5' 5" tall, he cut a much larger figure. Contributing to a formidable presence were his bald head, mustache, squat fig ure, booming voice, and bright eyes that pierced the smoke from his curled pipe. A forceful, gruff demeanor completed the picture of a self-proclaimed ornery boy, making him either a fiercesome person or a lovable curmudgeon—sometimes both. Undergraduates who packed his survey course four hun dred at a time found his lectures entertaining. He challenged their assumptions with his bold statements, hoping to stimu late fresh thinking and get a rise out of one or two. Former X FOREWORD teaching assistants remembered quips such as the one that conservatives "opposed the Declaration of Independence as much in 1776 as they do now."1 Although relatively gentle with undergraduates, he came down hard on graduate students. He pulled no punches in the comments scribbled in the margins of seminar papers. At least one had the rather unpleasant experience of stopping by the professor's office to pick up two dissertation chapters only to have them flung across the floor and into the corridor without Hesseltine even looking up from the desk. By all accounts, graduate seminars were chaotic, with the professor doing his best to ensure that the sessions proceeded "like a dog fight." However, Hesseltine's graduate students recognized that the gruffness hid a softer side and appreciated learning from some one who considered them not just students but professionals in training. Through him they learned how slippery the reclama tion of the past might be, especially in uncovering the hidden motivations of witnesses to events. His teaching made quite an impact. Among the thirty-two doctoral students he directed can be numbered T. Harry Williams, a Pulitzer Prize winner; Kenneth Stampp, who wrote pioneering books on slavery and Reconstruction; Stephen Ambrose, who has written notable biographies on key historical figures; and Richard Nelson Cur rent, who won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Hesseltine came to Wisconsin as a southern transplant. Born in Brucetown, Virginia, near the West Virginia border on Feb ruary 21, 1902, he had little memory of his father, a sea captain who died when Hesseltine was only a few years old. As a child, he grew up steeped in the lore of the Civil War through stories told by an older generation who could recall some of the events. Some of his life was spent at a military institute owned by his uncle—ironic because Hesseltine lived most of his adult life as a pacifist. When the time came for college, he enrolled in Washington and Lee University, a center for the Confederate mystique as the burial place of Robert E. Lee, who had served as the institution's president after the war. That Hesseltine appreciated the southern perspective would FOREWORD XI show in his book on prisons, yet he was not a neo-Confederate. He rejected those who romanticized the South of "lavender and old lace" and gained notoriety for taking on the southern intellectuals who wrote /'// Take My Stand, a manifesto that offered the South's agrarian tradition as the solution for the sins of an industrial society. According to Hesseltine, the "Young Confederates" who espoused this stand made themselves "a little ridiculous in apotheosizing agrarian culture and elevating the yeoman farmer to a pedestal. Agrarian culture, as anyone reared on a farm will tell them, is almost a contradiction in terms, and the average farmer of the South most certainly is unde serving of a pedestal." Hesseltine characterized the people in this movement—noted southern intellectuals such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Frank Owsley—as ostriches sticking their heads in the sand. Somewhere along the way he became an independent-minded maverick, although never completely divorced from his own past as a southerner.2 He marched resolutely toward a doctorate along a route marked by the usual difficulties of balancing a transient life as a student/educator with a family. After securing his bachelor's degree in 1922, he started his teaching career with a one-year stint at the University Military School in Mobile, Alabama. While teaching at a small college in Missouri he used his sum mer vacations to earn a master's degree at the University of Virginia. In 1926 he landed, with his wife and two children, at Ohio State University, where he worked under Arthur C. Cole, a scholar distinguished for studies of the causes of the Civil War. Under this tutelage, Hesseltine produced the dissertation that would later become Civil War Prisons. He collected his Ph.D. in 1928 at the age of twenty-six and took up a position as professor of history at the University of Chattanooga in Ten nessee. He was still there in 1930 when Civil War Prisons was published by Ohio State University Press. In the first paragraph of the introduction to Civil War Prisons Hesseltine makes it clear that although he knew he had en tered a controversial area, he expected that passions had cooled enough to allow the first examination of the topic in a scien Xll FOREWORD tific spirit. The treatment of prisoners remained an inflam matory issue throughout the postwar period. Northerners took the lead in this debate, beginning during the conflict with a congressional investigation of released prisoners of war that revealed the suffering in the Southern camps. Then came the personal accounts of the prisoners themselves. The most grip ping stones concerned the atrocities at Andersonville, where roughly 13,000 of 45,000 inmates died, primarily from disease and malnutrition. Invariably, the prisoners depicted their guards as inhuman beasts and the Confederacy as doing its best to exterminate the inmates. Photographs collected by a congres sional committee showed skeleton-like men whose appearance foreshadowed that of survivors from World War II camps. Even as the war grew more distant, these images came back to haunt. Through the latter nineteenth century, they provided ammunition for Republicans attempting to discredit opponents in the Democratic Party, which included the white South that had fought for the Confederacy. Republicans asked voters if they would turn the government over to the men who had been responsible for the torture of helpless victims. Southerners fought these impressions with publications by Confederate veterans and the memoirs of key political figures such as Jefferson Davis. Beginning in 1876, the Southern His torical Society devoted two full editions of its journal to re nouncing the prison allegations. The journal blamed Northern Republican James G. Blaine for once again whipping up this frenzy against the South in an unsuccessful bid for the presi dency The editor of the papers articulated what became the counterargument to the Northern story. Confederate authori ties, according to this version, always ordered kind treatment of prisoners, established camps in healthy places, and pro vided the same provisions for prisoners and guards.

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