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“TO MAKE THE BEST OF OUR HARD LOT”: , CAPTIVITY, AND THE CIVIL

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of

Philosophy in the Graduate School of The State University

By José O. Díaz, B.S., M.L.S., M.A.

*****

The 2009

Dissertation Committee Approved by

Professor Joan E. Cashin

Professor C. Mark Grimsley

Professor Warren Van Tine ______

Adviser History Graduate Program

Copyright by

José O. Díaz

2009

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines the captivity of the American soldier during the

American Civil War (1861–1865). The plethora of fine works that exist about the

experiences of Civil War captives have focused their attention on the harshness of

life, the resulting casualties, and the need to assign blame. This

dissertation takes another approach. Instead, it examines how prisoners of war in

both the North and South adapted and made the best of a restrictive and harsh

environment. The study shows that prison life, in despite of its trauma and

suffering, included the rudiments of an American community. This dissertation

also examines the positive aspects of the prison experience. Many captives

accepted the reality of the circumstances and set out to make the best of their

situation. They used their values to engineer a culture of captivity that made endurable and survival possible. The adoption of this culture among Civil War prisoners of war is hardly surprising. The Civil War generation came to war equipped with habits and traditions that made captivity sustainable.

These traits did not disappear when the combat soldier relinquished his weapon and commenced the journey into captivity. If anything, the stressful nature of imprisonment pushed these habits underground briefly, forcing the prisoners to

ii reshape them in original ways. Thus, this work interprets captivity as a transforming experience.

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Contrary to popular belief, the labor of researching and writing a doctoral

dissertation is not a solitary endeavor. In the past eight years I have become

indebted to countless librarians, curators, and archivists who have offered me

their support and professional assistance. It is fitting that I recognize the

following institutions and their professional staffs for their help: The Library of

Congress, The National Archives, The Filson Historical Society, The

Historical Society, The Ohio Historical Society, The Ohio State University

Libraries, The History Institute Carlisle Barracks, The Rutherford B.

Hayes Center, The Clements Library (University of Michigan), The University of

North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Harvard University, Tulane University, The

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, and The University of , Urbana-

Champaign.

The biggest intellectual debt goes to Professor Joan E. Cashin. Since our first meeting on a bitterly cold January morning in 1996, Professor Cashin has been a model of what an academic advisor and mentor should be: responsible, dedicated, and professional. Without her support, patience, and intellectual acumen I never would have completed this project. My two other committee members Professors Warren Van Tine and C. Mark Grimsley read the iv dissertation and offered honest and insightful comments. Their combination of

criticism and encouragement resulted in a better dissertation. They are both first-

rate historians and consummate professionals.

I also received help and support from the following individuals: Dr. Kenneth

Andrien, Mr. Gary Arnold, Dr. John M. Bennett, Dr. Mansel Blackford, Ms. Laura

Blomquist, Mr. Mark Boarman, Dr. James K. Bracken, Ms. Nan Carter, Mr.

Nicholas Churchill, Ms. Marilyn McConnell-Goelz, Dr. Raimund E. Goerler, Ms.

Rachel Gruber (thanks for the inspirational T-shirt!), Ms. Mary Johnson,

Dr. James T. Jones, Dr. Nelson Lankford, Mr. David Lincove, Dr. Consuelo

López-Springfield, Mr. James L. Murphy, Dr. Edward Riedinger, Dr. Randolph

Roth, Rev. Glen Schwedtfeger, Dr. Geoffrey D. Smith, Ms. Kristina Starkus, Dr.

Thomas Suchan, Ms. Carolyn Wahlmark, and Dr. Guey- Meei Yang.

The work of completing a doctoral program requires time and money. From

Joseph J. Branin (Director, The Ohio State University Libraries), Dr. William J.

Studer (Director Emeritus), and the Library’s Advisory Committee on Research I received the financial and logistical support needed to bring this work to fruition.

The Virginia Historical Society granted me an Andrew W. Mellon Research

Fellowship. The fellowship allowed for two weeks of uninterrupted research at

the Virginia Historical Society. I am indeed very grateful.

My colleagues at the Library’s Cataloging Department, the Science and

Engineering Library, and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department,

v encouraged me, put up with my research leaves, and often endured long boring

Civil War stories. I thank them all.

I owe the most to my family. From my children, Jacob Samuel and Mara

Elizabeth, I have learned more than from any dusty tome I have ever read. To them history is a vast collection of grainy photos, whiskered old men, and pensive looking women. The long, joyful, and necessary backward glance that history truly is remains a mystery. Time, however, is on their side.

In the midst of poverty and life’s myriad difficulties my parents, Oscar and

Yolanda, raised and educated four children. The completion of this work is a

tribute to their tenacity and selflessness. My sisters, Yolanda, Gisela, and

Carmen, remain close to my thoughts. Any of them could have written a better

dissertation.

Today I also I remember my four grandparents. They all have passed on.

These nineteenth century people witnessed and endured the perennial booms and busts of a long-gone era with unbreakable courage and quiet determination.

Their lives were my first introduction to the mysteries of space and time. They are of blessed memory.

My biggest regret is that my father-in-law, Frank Hamilton Snure, did not live to see this small triumph. He would have enjoyed it. Frank was a practitioner of the old Quaker adage, “let your life speak,” and his life spoke. I miss his zest for life, his boundless curiosity, and his unspoken recognition that “broad and alien is the world.” Frank too, is of blessed memory. vi My mother-in-law Barbara and her husband and friend Phillip Beutel share a life of decency and faith. They are a daily reminder of the rewards of a life well lived. My brothers and sisters in-law (the Boggs, the Lunds, the Monrozeaus, the

Riveras and the Snures) also supported this endeavor. They rarely talked about the Civil War and never asked how much more time I needed. For that, and for

many other things, I am very grateful.

Finally, I dedicate this work with love and respect to my wife Karen. She

encouraged me to take this strange, and at times frantic, detour into nineteenth

century America. She listened to countless Civil War stories, read far too many

bad drafts, and selflessly adjusted to what a historian fittingly described as “the

ordeal of composition.” Through our children, she has given me the only eternity

I am entitled to achieve. Karen, more importantly, never doubted it.

José O. Díaz, Ph.D. January 2009

vii VITA

December 21, 1958 ...... Born Santurce, Puerto Rico

1982 ...... B.S. Natural Sciences Oral Roberts University

1988 ...... M.L.S., Library Science University

1989 ...... M.A .Latin American Studies

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: History Area of Emphasis: Early American History

Minor Fields: Modern American History Latin American History

viii TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... ii

ACKNOWLEDMENTS...... iv

VITA ...... viii

INTRODUCTION...... 1

CHAPTER 1 “ALL THIS GABBLE ABOUT WAR”: JOURNEY INTO CAPTIVITY...... 17

CHAPTER 2 “TO MEET THE EXIGENCIES OF THE MOMENT”: NORTH AND SOUTH ...... 41

CHAPTER 3 “WHOLLY DESTITUTE OF GOVERNMENT”: PRISON LIFE...... 59

CHAPTER 4 “LIKE STRAWS TO DROWNING MEN”: THE IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE .....82

CHAPTER 5 “HIS FACE AND HIS UNIFORM WERE HIS FATE”: BLACKS AND THE WAR...... 109

CHAPTER 6 “A VAST MUSEUM OF HUMAN CHARACTER”: LESSONS LEARNED ...... 130

CONCLUSIONS ...... 156

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 161

ix INTRODUCTION

After a daylong battle, infantrymen from a Michigan unit surrendered to

Rebel troops near the Halston River in East . The Confederates then lined up their prisoners, stripped them of all valuables, and forced them to south. By evening, prisoners and guards reached Bristol, Virginia, a railroad station destined to be the northerners’ last stop before the journey to a of war camp. Thus John L. Ransom, a quartermaster, became one of nearly

410,000 men taken captive during the . He would spend more than a year making the rounds of Confederate prisons from Belle Isle on the

James River to in . His captivity would end when he made a daring escape from a railroad cart near Savannah, Georgia, days before William

T. Sherman and his Army moved into the Deep South.1

Twelve months later, on November 14, 1864, was the scene of another engagement at Morristown. From his position, Confederate

Reuben G. Clark of the 59th Tennessee Mounted Infantry could see the enemy’s line. Shortly after the two armies clashed, the 59th’s right wing gave way, and in a matter of minutes, the Confederates were in full retreat. Union forces quickly trapped Captain Clark and forced him to surrender. Two days later, Clark and his

1 John L. Ransom, Andersonville Diary (: Berkley Books, 1986), 3.

1 men arrived in Knoxville, where the authorities took him to jail and

locked him in an iron cage. While in , the Confederate officer became

the object of intense curiosity to Federal officers and pro-Union citizens who

came and stared at him through the iron bars “as though I was a monster.” For

Captain Clark, the die was cast. He would remain a prisoner, confined to his cage

until the end of the war.2

The war and the experience of captivity meant different things to John L.

Ransom and Reuben G. Clark. Ransom survived hunger, disease, and violence

and returned home to Jackson, Michigan, as a conquering hero, while Clark spent

captivity fending off the venom of fellow southerners who remained loyal to the

Union and deemed him a traitor. Upon his release from prison, Clark left

Tennessee and spent the rest of his life in , Georgia, where he became a

successful businessman.3

The experiences of these men resembled those of thousands of former

prisoners of war. Nearly one-fourth of all Civil War soldiers spent time in

confinement. In some ways, Civil War captivity was a time-sensitive event. For

those who faced imprisonment early or late in the conflict, imprisonment could

be short-lived. In many cases, it was comprised of an episode of a few hours or

days, usually relieved by the issuance of a . For those captured during the

2 Reuben G. Clark, Valleys of the Shadow: The Memoir of Confederate Captain Reuben G. Clark, I, 59th Tennessee Mounted Infantry (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 51, 54.

3 Ibid.

2 heyday of the exchange cartel, detention, however, meant in a

makeshift prison for days or weeks until exchange came to their rescue. For a

large number of soldiers, it implied months or years spent hundreds of miles into

the enemy’s country, in a strange landscape and an unfriendly climate where they

experienced mistreatment, violence, and boredom.

The controversy about the treatment of all prisoners began during the war

itself. Shortly after , General summed up the moral

and political challenge that prisoners of war presented for the Lincoln

administration. “Our soldiers,” the egotistical but well connected North

Carolinian declared are, “either traitors to be hung or prisoners to be treated as

such.” President Lincoln made his choice and treated captured Rebels as

prisoners of war. , despite threats to the contrary, followed

Lincoln’s example and treated captured northerners as prisoners of war. These

presidential decisions did not translate, however, into decent or humane

confinement for either northerners or southerners. In fact, the war had hardly

begun when the first prisoners alleged that their captors had mistreated them.

Their chronicles of starvation, exposure to the elements, “deadlines,” and sadistic

guards commanded public attention and dominated most prisoners of war

accounts.4

4 Reid Mitchell, “Our Prison System, Supposing We Had Any: The Confederate and Union Prison System,” On to Total Warfare (Bonn, Germany: German Historical Institute, 1996), 567; U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: GPO, 1894–1899), Series 2,3: 5:795–797. (Hereafter referred to as O.R., all references are to Series 2 unless otherwise specified; New York Congressman Alfred Ely wrote one of the earliest accounts. Confederates captured Ely at Bull Run 3 Members of the press, North and South, also recognized a good story when they saw one. Soon newspapers and publishers exposed the nightmare of captivity to their respective audiences. In the North, ’s

The Liberator often led the charge. With headlines such as “Brutal Treatment of

Union Prisoners in Richmond: How They Are Starved to Death” and “Union

Prisoners Murdered by the Barbarians,” The Liberator’s drumbeat was relentless.

In response to the massacre of Black troops at Fort Pillow, the paper published over fifty news items laced with words such as “massacre,” “butchery,” and

“.” Like other newspapers, this one printed first-hand accounts that emphasized the enemy’s inhumanity. Additionally, The Liberator often printed full speeches and interviews with controversial figures such as General Benjamin

Butler and Senator .5

Many southern newspapers responded in kind. The Macon Weekly

Telegraph, for example, published a fiery account on the treatment of southern

men held at Point Lookout, Maryland. With obvious cynicism, the Georgia paper

ridiculed “Yankee generosity” and “Puritanical whine.” It went on to list instances of “barbarous treatment” including insufficient food, shelter, and wanton murders. The Fayetteville Observer acknowledged the physical frailty of many

and imprisoned him at Libby. See Alfred Ely, The Journal of Alfred Ely: A in Richmond (New York: Appleton and Company, 1862).

5 “Brutal Treatment of Union Prisoners in Richmond: How They Are Starved to Death,” The Liberator, January 29, 1864; Brutal Treatment of Union Prisoners in Richmond: How They Are Starved to Death,” The Liberator, Sep 2, 1864. Vol.34, no. 36; p. 143; Richmond Prison Experience: Statement of One of Dahlgren’s Men, The Liberator, May 20, 1864. Vol. 34, no.. 21; p. 84; “Speech of General Butler,” The Liberator, : Feb 10, 1865. Vol. 35, no. 6; p. 24; Treatment of Prisoners of War: Speech of Honorable Charles Sumner, The Liberator, Mar 3, 1865. Vol. 35, no. 9; p. 36. 4 Union prisoners. Responsibility for their condition, the North Carolinian daily

insisted, rested with the Federal government. The paper argued that the sad

condition of so many men was a testament to General U. S. Grant’s harsh

approach to war and to a Union policy reluctant to protect its own soldiers. 6

It was not long before the Union and Confederate governments became entangled in a fierce controversy over prisoners of war. In 1864, the

Sanitary Commission published a report titled Narrative of the Privations and

Sufferings of the United States Officers and Soldiers While Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Rebel Authorities, which purported to be a true account of life in the South for those unlucky enough to become prisoners. The Confederate government replied by appointing its own committee and issuing a Report of the

Joint Committee of the Confederate Congress to Investigate the Condition and

Treatment of Prisoners of War. To nobody’s surprise, the committee concluded that Union policies were responsible for the suffering of Federal prisoners.7

Following the war, the U.S. government bolstered its charges of southern brutality with the publication of two voluminous government reports: The Trial of and the House Committee Report on Treatment of Prisoners of

6 The Treatment of Our Prisoners at Point Lookout,” The Macon Weekly Telegraph, January 1, 1864, no. 1204, p. 1; “Prisoners of War,” Fayetteville Observer, February 27, 1865 no. 1413.

7 United States Sanitary Commission, Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers While Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Rebel Authorities: Being the Report of a Commission of Inquiry, Appointed by the United States Sanitary Commission with an Appendix Containing the Testimony, (New York: Loyal Publication Society, 1864); Confederate States of America, Congress, Joint Select Committee to Investigate the Condition and Treatment of Prisoners of War Report of the Joint Select Committee Appointed to Investigate the Condition and Treatment of Prisoners of War (Richmond, VA: The Congress, 1865).

5 War by the Rebel Authorities. Members of the Southern Historical Society replied with the publication in 1876 of The Treatment of Prisoners during the

War Between the States. The Society insisted that the starvation and medical neglect suffered by Federal prisoners of war in the South was traceable to the

Union’s blockade, Confederate military losses, and Grant’s decision to halt prisoner exchanges in 1864. In the end, both sides held their ground and the facts remained unchanged: 56,000 soldiers had died in prison, a mortality rate of more than 12 percent in northern camps and more than 15 percent in southern prisons.8

This dissertation is, however, about endurance and survival not about prison

fatalities or ghastly percentages. On the simplest level, this work shows the

dialectic of the prison experience, that is, how the American soldier behaved, adapted, and coped with the tension and inherent contradictions of imprisonment. Its central argument is that captivity differed very little in the

North and South and that prison life, in spite of its obvious and undeniable hardships, affected some positive changes among those men ensnared in its clutches. In short, it challenges the assumption that only the adversities of captivity merit scholarly attention.

8 United States. Congress Trial of Henry Wirz Letter from the Secretary of War ad Interim, in answer to a resolution of the House of April 16, 1866, transmitting a summary of the trial of Henry Wirz, (Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1868); William Jones, ed., The Treatment of Prisoners During The War Between The States (Richmond, VA: Southern Historical Society Papers, 1876); Statistics show that 15.5% of Federal prisoners died in captivity while 12% of Confederate prisoners died in Union hands. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 802.

6 From a historiographical perspective, this dissertation stakes out a middle

ground between competing explanations for the Civil War prisoner’s fate. The

most influential work is William Best Hesseltine’s Civil War Prisons: A Study in

War Psychology, published in 1930. He argued that a combination of northern hysteria and the collapse of southern infrastructure led to large numbers of fatalities among prisoners of war. This interpretation represented the first salvo in a long scholarly battle often tainted by ideology and sectionalism.9

Hesseltine’s interpretation explained Union mortality rates, but it failed to

explain how the war yielded similar mortality rates on both sides. To his credit,

he did not retreat from this dilemma. In fact, Hesseltine formulated the concept

of “war psychosis,” a mutual hatred created during the Civil War. This obsession

led the North to believe atrocity tales about southern prisons and thus to retaliate

by cutting supplies to the southern prisoners under its control. In other words,

the northern public, gripped by mass hysteria, demanded and got its pound of

flesh.10

The popularity of Hesseltine’s explanation has been remarkable. Indeed, it

has lasted in some form for over seventy years. His pioneering look at Civil War

prisons created a school of historiography grouping together those scholars who

adopted, albeit with some modifications, his view on the prison experience. These

fine academics reached their conclusion guided by the available evidence and

9 William Best Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1930; reprint, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1971).

10 See also Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking Penguin Press, 1988), 220 note #59. For complete argument, see Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, 172–209.

7 their own ideological persuasions. Professor James I. Robertson, for example, eloquently chronicled the northern facility at Elmira, New York. His work, published in the 1950s, seemed partially intended to offset the withering criticism

Andersonville Prison experienced after the war. Robertson’s work reminded

students of the war that plenty of southerners died in northern prisons as well.

Historian Frank L. Byrne also followed Hesseltine’s trail. Like Hesseltine, he

accepted the notion that Federal authorities could have done better in their

treatment of war captives.11

Hesseltine’s interpretation also influenced non-academic historians. Bruce

Catton, for example, made direct references to the war psychosis concept and

implied that Federal officers willfully abused Confederate prisoners of war.

Lonnie Speers’ fine treatment of individual prisons, North and South, reflected

Hesseltine’s view that Federal authorities needlessly retaliated against

Confederate prisoners. Benton McAdams’ excellent study on Rock Island Prison

joined Robertson and others in blaming Union officials for the suffering of

Confederate prisoners. Brian Temple’s history of and Michael

Horigan’s look at Elmira are also highly critical of the Federal government.

Temple posited Fort Delaware as a counterweight to Andersonville and focused

on the negative aspects of the prison and the alleged attempts by Union authorities to punish the inmates. Horigan also entered the historiographical fray

11 James I. Robertson, “The Scourge of Elmira,” in William B. Hesseltine, ed., Civil War Prisons (Kent, OH: Kent State University, 1962), 80; for more of Robertson’s criticism, see James I. Robertson, Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of Press, 1988).

8 on the side of Hesseltine and his students. Although he made no mention of war psychosis, Horigan stated that a breakdown of the Confederate transportation system and the destruction of the South’s ability to produce foodstuffs explained the high death toll at places such as Andersonville. Finally, J. Michael Martinez’s dual biography also followed Hesseltine’s historiographical cue and centered on the travails of two prisoners of war—ones northern, one southern—as they struggled to survive captivity.12

More recent schools are challenging Hesseltine’s groundbreaking

interpretation. Professor Charles W. Sanders Jr., for example, has built a new and intriguing argument. In his book, While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military

Prisons of the Civil War, he confronts “the stubborn refusal of scholars and the lay public to trace responsibility for the darkest chapter of the conflict to its source, the leadership of the Union and the Confederacy.” Sanders contends that although “organizational incompetence, inexperience, and chronic shortages of essential resources” are partly to blame for the high number of casualties found in Civil War prisons, the political and military leadership in both the North and

South fully understood that their policies harmed prisoners of war. Civil War prisons, Sanders concluded, killed men not by accident but by design. The

12 , The American Heritage Picture of the Civil War (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1960; reprint, New York: Bonanza Books, 1982), 500–505; Lonnie Speer, Portal to Hell: Military Prisoner of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1997); Benton McAdams, Rebels at Rock Island: The Story of Civil War Prison (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), xii.; Brian Temple, The Union Prison at Fort Delaware: A Perfect Hell on Earth (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc, 2003); Michael Horigan, Elmira: Death Camp of the North (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002); J. Michael Martinez, Life and Death in Civil War Prisons (Nashville, TN : Rutledge Hill Press, 2004).

9 importance of While in the Hands of the Enemy lies in its attempt to present an administrative history of Civil War prisons and more importantly, to assign blame for their lackluster performance. But Sanders, like Hesseltine before him, does not examine the entire prison experience. His concern is to understand the levers of power within the prison system and to call to task those who breached their obligations.13

Other historians have investigated additional facets of the prison experience.

George Levy’s study of near , Illinois, for example, provides a new analysis and raises some interesting questions. Levy found it difficult to reconcile the South’s lack of resources claim with its ability to carry on a four-year struggle. He portrayed life in Camp Douglas as difficult and unpleasant but manageable. The work of Dale Fetzer and Bruce Mowday on Fort

Delaware, a Union Camp that housed more than 30,000 Confederate prisoners is also iconoclastic in nature. Their research failed to corroborate the tales of horror

13 Donald J. Breen and Philip Raymond Shriver, Ohio’s Military Prisons in the Civil War (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964); Sandra Parker, Richmond’s Civil War Prisons (Lynchburg, VA: E.H. Howard, 1990); William O. Bryant, Cahaba Prison and the Disaster (Tuscaloosa: University of Press, 1990); Louis A. Brown, The Salisbury Prison: A Case Study of Confederate Military Prisons, 1861–1865 (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot, 1992); Lawrence F. Lee and Robert W. Glover, Camp Ford, C.S.A .The Story of Union Prisoners in (Austin, TX: Civil War Centennial Commission, 1964).; James R. Hall, Den’s of Misery: Indiana’s Civil War Prison (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2006); Frances H. Cassstevens, George W. Alexander and : A Confederate Prison and Its Commander (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004); For another historiographical proposal, see James M. Gillispie, “Guest of the Yankees: A Reevaluation of Union Treatment of Confederate Prisoners,” North & South, 5 (July 2002): 40–49; Charles W. Sanders Jr., While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: State University Press, 2006), 4–5; James M. Gillispie, Andersonvilles of the North: The Myths and Realities of Northern Treatment of Civl War Confederate Prisoners (Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 2008); Roger Pickenpaugh, and the Evolution of Union Prison Policy (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2007).

10 that became Fort Delaware’s best-known legacy. In fact, the authors contend that

this story is, indeed, remarkable, not because so many died, but because 33,000

southern prisoners and 6,000 northern guards lived out their war years on 75

acres and not only “few egregiously suffered” but somehow most of them survived.14

Equally revisionist is Michael P. Gray’s analysis of the Union prison at Elmira,

New York. Gray moved away from blaming the Union’s war machine. Instead, he

focused on the complexity of running a prisoner of war camp. His analysis

showed that captivity was more complicated than once believed. More importantly, prisoners, guards, and townspeople had a more direct role in the creation and management of the prison and many of them contributed to, and in some cases profited from, the business of captivity.15

I hope this dissertation offers a fresh understanding of the prison experience.

I include research in the Official Records of the War and newspapers, but I focus on the diaries and letters of prisoners of war. Like previous works on the topic, this study acknowledges that lack of preparation, incompetence, and the devastations of war contributed to truly depressing outcomes. But it also argues that prison conditions varied little, North and South, and that large numbers of prisoners not only found Civil War captivity survivable but some managed to

14 George Levy, To Die in Chicago: Confederate Prisoners at Camp Douglas, 1862–1865 (Evanston, IL: Evanston Pub. Co., 1994); Dale Fetzer and Bruce Mowday, Unlikely Allies: Fort Delaware’s Prison Community in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000), xv.

15 Michael P. Gray, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001).

11 learn, grow, and turn confinement into a source of political, intellectual, and spiritual strength. Unlike other works on the prison experience, this study documents the psychological wounds triggered by the moment of capture and the prisoners’ efforts to overcome them. Furthermore, it chronicles the captives’ attempts to understand their predicament and to fix blame on those they deemed responsible for it. This dissertation also shows that Civil War captivity was a war of ideas and that many prisoners, on both sides of the war, endured its ideological battles. The experience of African-Americans in the Civil War also appears in these pages, their contributions to the war effort, and the risks they encountered as soldiers, prisoners, and . In short, this dissertation takes the reader through the physical and psychological journey that nearly one fourth of all Civil

War combatants lived through and, many, conquered.

The struggle that began in 1861 immediately challenged the nation’s martial tradition. than a century had transpired since an armed militia held its ground at Lexington and Concord, and by the time unleashed the first shot of the war American forces had participated in only three conflicts. Each war offered a different set of trials, and each taught American soldiers different lessons on how to deal with prisoners of war.

The Revolutionary War, for example, led to improvised prison facilities, abominable conditions for the British as well as American prisoners, charges of brutality on both sides, retaliation as a political tool, and difficult negotiations between British and American envoys to reconcile an acceptable exchange

12 system. The offered its share of lessons. The belligerent nations

agreed that a quick exchange of prisoners of war was in everybody’s best interest.

Thus, by the end of 1812, both governments had sent their prisoners home.16

The Mexican-American War was also a useful training ground. For the first time in the country’s history, general officers found themselves having sole responsibility for the disposition of thousands of prisoners. Operating in a foreign country, relying on tenuous supply lines, and unable to allot sufficient troops to guard and protect prisoners, Generals and resorted to paroling entire garrisons captured after battle. In the end, the junior officers working under Scott and Taylor did not forget the lessons of the Mexican-

American War. They made good use of the parole system and treated deserters and traitors harshly. The veterans of the Mexican war learned to expect short periods of captivity, swift and exchanges, and a prompt return home.17

Thus America’s martial establishment learned that taking care of prisoners of war was complicated, expensive, and a task that should be avoided, if possible.

Consequently, when the war came, Union and Confederate authorities drew

16 Larry G. Bowman, Captive Americans: Prisoners During the (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976); Ethan Allen, The Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen (New York: Corinth Books, 1961); Walter R. Borneman, 1812: The War That Forged a Nation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004); Benjamin Franklin Palmer, The Diary of Benjamin F. Palmer, Privateersman, While a Prisoner on Board English War Ships at Sea, in the Prison at Melville Island and at Dartmoor, Now First Printed From the Original Manuscript (New Haven, CT: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Press, 1914); Edwin G. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

17 For an account of captivity in the Mexican-American War, see H. Edward Richardson, Cassius Marcellus Clay: Firebrand of Freedom (Lexington: University Press, 1976), 60–65; For more on the Mexican-American War, see K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846–1848 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Timothy D. Johnson, Winfield Scott: The Quest for Military Glory (Lawrence: University of Press, 1998), 204.

13 inspiration from the same intellectual tradition and employed first a doomed exchange cartel, and when that failed, a minimalist approach to the housing, feeding, and caring of their wards. The prisoners, schooled in comparable values of patriotism, courage, and virtue and influenced by the same evolving concepts of manhood, adapted and managed captivity in remarkably similar fashion. They faced the same trepidation when captured, coped with it by deploying familiar strategies, and went on to build a similar culture of captivity.18

These assertions are not an attempt to whitewash prison life. I do intend, however, to offer an explanation that moves away from bilateral accounts that portray Civil War captivity as an encounter between good and evil. This dissertation posits that, contrary to other scholarly views, captivity was not an

18 For an in-depth discussion on soldiers values and motivation, see the following titles: Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), ix; Bell I. , The Life of : The Common Soldier of the Union (, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952); Bell I. Wiley, The Life of : The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Indianapolis, IN: Charter Books, 1943); Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln’s Army, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951); Bruce Catton, Glory Road: The Bloody Route from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952); Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953); James I. Robertson, Soldiers in Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988); Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaign (New York: New York University Press, 1985); Earl Hess, Liberty, Virtue and Progress (New York: New York University Press, 1988); Randall Jimerson, The Private Civil War: Popular Thought During the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking, 1988); Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987); Joseph A. Frank and George A. Reeves, Seeing the Elephant: Raw Recruits at the (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); Michael Barton, Goodmen: The Character of Civil War Soldiers (University Park: State University Press, 1981); Charles Royster, The Destructive War: , , and the Americans (New York: Knopf, 1991); James M. McPherson, For Cause & Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); James McPherson and William J. Cooper, Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998). For a good discussion of American manhood in 19th-century America, see E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

14 experience shaped solely by manipulative newspaper editors, revenge-seeking

military bureaucrats, and gun-toting sentries. Most prison camps, the evidence

suggests, became undisciplined and unmanageable facilities nominally controlled

by prison authorities, but effectively in the hands of the prisoners themselves.

The captives made some critical decisions, reacted to imprisonment, and lived

and died with the consequences.

Writing in 1976, historian John Keegan began his landmark work, The Face of

Battle, with an unusual but, I posit, necessary disclaimer. The Oxford-trained

historian informed his readers that he had not been in battle and had never seen

or heard one. Like Keegan’s, my experience lies in reading, researching, and the

occasional tour of battlefields and former prisoner of war camps. I have never

been in combat or been a prisoner of war.19

Thus handicapped, my approach to this work has followed ’s

dual understanding of history as both “what happened” and “knowledge of what

happened.” I used established sources to retell particular aspects of what

happened. Concomitantly, I have sifted through prisoners’ letters and diaries in

search of their knowledge of what transpired. The result is an attempt to claim their understanding of the events that constituted the prison experience.20

19 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 13. Likewise, I feel compelled to indicate that I have never been a prisoner of war.

20 Bernard Bailyn, On the Teaching and Writing of History (Hanover, NH: Montgomery Endowment, Dartmouth College, 1994), 7–8.

15 This dissertation contains six chapters. The first chapter examines the moment of capture and traces the prisoner’s journey from battlefield to prisoner of war camp. The chapter also delves into the psychological aspects of capture and examines how the prisoners of war reacted to their sudden loss of freedom.

The second chapter briefly surveys captivity throughout history and provides a panoramic view of the development of prisoner of war camps during the Civil

War. The next chapter scrutinizes prison life. By showing how prisoners of war reacted when faced with imprisonment, it demonstrates a commonality of activities, purposes, and beliefs among prisoners in both North and South. The fourth chapter departs from the long-standing supposition that the relationship between guards and captives is encapsulated in a struggle between dominance and vulnerability. Instead, the chapter reframes captivity as part of a larger ideological conflict in which both sides held sway and no clear victor emerged.

Chapter five examines the issue of race and its strange yet critical role in our perception of the prisoner of war experience. Finally, chapter six presents the prison experience as a didactic and moralizing event, one that placed coping and survival above sorrow and dread. This new path also demonstrates that even the perils of captivity failed to deter some prisoners from seeking constructive ways of dealing with imprisonment.

16 CHAPTER 1

“ALL THIS GABBLE OF WAR”: JOURNEY INTO CAPTIVITY

John Dudley Whitehead entered the Confederate service in 1861 as a sergeant

in the Portsmouth National Greys. His unit merged with the Confederate Army

and became known as Company H 3rd Virginia Infantry, Kemper’s Brigade,

Pickett’s Army of Northern Virginia. Whitehead proved to be a

competent soldier and leader of men. He saw action at Williamsburg, Manassas,

Seven Pines, Seven Days, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and Five Forks. After only one year, his men elected him captain, and by early

1863 Whitehead had risen to major in the Confederate Army.

In July 1863, Whitehead became a prisoner of war. On July 3, he led his men out of the woods, crossed the Emmitsburg Road, and assaulted the Union’s position near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The attack failed, and Federal troops captured Whitehead. After a short stint at Fort Delaware, he arrived at Johnson’s

Island in Sandusky, Ohio, on July 20. He wrote to his wife often and kept her abreast of his “very unfortunate situation.” Whitehead survived captivity. He arrived at , Virginia, on January 27, 1865, for exchange. Two weeks later, his exchange became official and he rejoined Lee’s army. His

17 Company H surrendered on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Courthouse. After the

war, he moved to Ontario, Canada, where he died in 1884.21

Many other combatants, North and South, shared Whitehead’s fate. They had survived the ordeal of combat, managed the spine-chilling shock of detention, and found themselves struggling against loneliness, despair, and the uncertainty of what lay ahead. This chapter examines such soldiers’ reactions to their abrupt loss of freedom, that is, what sort of feelings and reactions the moment of capture elicited among the men. To do so, the section examines the phases of captivity:

capture, forced march, physical search, interrogation and removal to temporary

quarters, encounters with civilians, and finally, transportation and arrival to a

prisoner of war camp. The chapter aims at demonstrating that from capture to

internment, prisoners of both the North and South encountered similar

challenges and met them in remarkably parallel fashions.

The din, smoke, and chaos of battle traumatized all soldiers. Some fired on

their own troops, executed the wrong battlefield maneuver, failed to hold their

ground, or simply ran away in fear. In some cases, the confusion of battle reached

such heights that it became problematic to determine if an actual surrender was

taking place. The Battle of , for example, was a particularly intricate

engagement. Large numbers of men fought at close proximity, and attacks came

from multiple directions. At one point in the battle, troops appeared to

have surrendered to members of the 16th Iowa. Before the actual surrender took

21 John Dudley Whitehead Papers, 1846–1892, VHS; United States Census Office, Ninth Census of the United States, 1870 (New York: Norman Ross Publishing Inc., 1991).

18 place, a Confederate counterattack materialized and the Iowans found themselves

in danger of losing their prisoners and their freedom. For a few moments,

confusion reigned. Finally, an Iowan sought badly needed clarification and asked

an Arkansas soldier which side was surrendering. “I’ll be damned if I know,” the

Rebel answered. When the dust settled, the tide had turned and the Iowans had

become prisoners of war.22

The act of surrender did not imply an end to danger. More likely, it implied

that the immediate chance of injury or death had, for the moment, receded.

Unfortunately, feelings of dread filled the vacuum. The newly minted prisoners

mourned their sudden loss of freedom, and bemoaned the passing of many

comrades in arms. One Union sergeant noticed after his capture that a transformation had taken place among the prisoners. The men had become

“passive beings, subjects to the will of the conqueror.” George A. Hitchcock, a

Massachusetts private, fell prisoner at Cold Harbor. For Hitchcock, the switch

from freedom to captivity indicated that a “new order of things had dawned.”

Former newspaper editor Bernhard Domschcke reached for a biblical metaphor and described his capture as a period of tribulation and suffering.23

22 Lee Kennett, : The Story of Soldiers & Civilians During Sherman’s Campaign (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995), 193.

23 Watson, Ronald, ed., From Ashby to Andersonville: The Civil War Diary and Reminiscences of George A. Hitchcock, Private, Company A, 21st Regiment August 1862–January 1865 (Campbell, CA: Savas Publishing Company, 1997), 215; Robert H. Kellogg, Life and Death in Rebel Prisons (Hartford, CT: L. Stebbins, 1865), 34; Bernhard Domschcke, Twenty Months in Captivity, (, WI: W. W. Coleman, 1865; reprint, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1987), 24, 28, 147n.

19 These emotions were not surprising in light of the fact that not many soldiers

on either side of the conflict anticipated capture when they went into combat.

They were logistically and mentally unprepared for the possibility of capture.

They seemed to have approached battle carrying the required ammunition and

limited supplies of food. Their plan was simply to fight, die, or return home.24

To further complicate matters, the pre-war rhetoric usually focused on glorious battles and an honorable death. Prior to the opening of hostilities, Union soldier Warren Lee Goss, like many of his contemporaries, received information about war from newspapers, books, and other forms of popular media. “In all the pictures of battle I had seen,” Goss wrote, “the officers were at the front on prancing steeds, or with uplifted swords were leading their followers to the charge.” A Minnesota-born farmer, equally influenced by soldierly narratives and childhood games, remembered wearing his blue uniform for the first time as the happiest day of his life. Thus, the men who marched to war had some ideas, albeit misguided, of what combat held in store for them.25

24 Historian Bell Wiley observed that early in the war, Northerners and Southerners were overloaded with equipment. Some Union soldiers estimated the weight of all their equipment to range from 40 to 50 pounds, including ammunition belt, canteen of water, haversack of rations, musket, and clothes. Southerners carried similar equipment. This equipment proved to be too cumbersome. See Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943), 25; The Life of Billy Yank (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1951), 64–65.

25 , This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), 6-7; Hess, Union Soldier in Battle, 3; Warren Lee Goss, Recollections of a Private: A Story of the Army of the Potomac (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1890), 40–41; Emmy E. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses: Children’s Voices from the Civil War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 9.

20 In contrast, few publicly discussed the fate of those captured in battle. Union

Sergeant William J. Crossley made this point with remarkable candor. As he marched south after the debacle at First Bull Run, the native remembered the dire predictions that heralded his departure from Providence.

Friends and neighbors alike warned the green recruits about the perils of battle and the chances of returning home maimed or dead. But “all this gabble about war” Crossley remarked, did not include “a solitary word about prisoners of war.”

Minnesotan Bjorn Aslakson encountered the same ordeal. Driven by patriotism, he answered the nation’s summons and joined Company H, 9th Minnesota

Volunteer Infantry. Writing years later, Aslakson confessed that he gave little

thought to captivity and focused instead on the possibility of a crippling injury.

Pennsylvania-born Confederate John Wesley Minnich betrayed his ignorance by

stating that becoming a prisoner of war was simply “not in my program.”26

The end of combat did not guarantee the protection of those who surrendered.

Lieutenant A. O. Abbott of the First New York Dragoons was one of the lucky ones. After his surrender, a Rebel soldier who was mourning his brother’s death sought revenge on him. Only the prompt intervention of a Rebel guard saved

Abbott from being assaulted. On September 1864, Captain William F. Tiemann of the 159th New York State Volunteers became a prisoner of war. His captors

26 Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987); William J. Crossley, Extracts From My Diary and From My Experiences While Boarding with Jefferson Davis, in Three of his Notorious Hotels in Richmond, VA, Tuscaloosa, AL, and Salisbury, NC, from July 1861 to June 1862 (Providence, RI: The Society, 1903), 12; Bjorn Aslakson, Aslakson Papers, The Carl I. Aslakson papers, 1864–1980, USMHI; Martínez, Life and Death in Civil War Prisons, 210.

21 accused him and his men of cowardice. Confederate armed guards prevented

Tiemann and his fellow prisoners from being clubbed to death.27

Unfortunately, not all prisoners received the protection they deserved. In

some cases, tempers boiled over with tragic consequences for prisoners. At the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in December 1864, the fighting became vicious.

The 10th Minnesota charged up a hill defended by Lieutenant Colonel William M.

Shy’s Tennesseans. After the battle subsided, the victorious Federals captured

numerous prisoners, among them General Thomas Benton Smith. In the heat of

the moment, as General Smith was being marched to the rear, an argument

ensued between Smith and his captor, Colonel William McMillan. The colonel

allegedly struck Smith on the head with his sword, causing nearly fatal brain

damage. Due to his injuries, Smith spent the last 47 years of his life in a hospital

for the mentally ill.28

The process of capture typically worked as follows: the winning side marched

its prisoners to the rear of the army where they were lined up and searched. They

then started on a rapid gait between two lines of cavalry. Any prisoner who failed

to keep up with the column could be shot. For the conquering soldiers, this form

of handling prisoners served many purposes: it helped them to take physical

27 A. O. Abbott, Prison Life in the South: At Richmond, Macon, Savannah, Charleston, Columbia, Charlotte, Raleigh, Goldsborough and Andersonville During the Years 1864 and 1865 (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1865), 18; William Francis Tiemann, Memoir 1894, VHS.

28 Wiley Sword, Embrace an Angry Wind, the Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin & Nashville (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 373.

22 control of the prisoners, to obtain military intelligence, and to take them effectively out of combat.29

Once the prisoners and their captors had reached a safe distance from the

battlefield, the winning side then engaged in the time-honored practice of

battlefield thievery. In theory, those who surrendered were to fall under the protection of military conventions that all soldiers upheld regarding the inviolability of private property. In reality, few soldiers paid attention to such formalities. Union soldiers showed little respect for General Order Number 100, a

Federal regulation stating that “money and other valuables” belonging to prisoners was deemed private property and the seizure of these valuables was considered “dishonorable.” Rebel soldiers followed a regulation that authorized the use of southern currency to pay for money and equipment taken from prisoners. Legal or not, the end result was the same: the victorious army treated the personal property of captured soldiers as war booty.30

Ohioan Samuel Fulton experienced first-hand this form of thievery.

Confederates forced him to relinquish his horse, sword, belt, and coat. The

Rebels, he explained, almost left him in “Adam’s first condition in the Garden of

Eden.” Union chaplain Henry S. White, captured on a visit to Federal troops in

North Carolina, also experienced this thievery firsthand. He remarked that

29 For examples see: George Haven Putnam, A Prisoner of War in Virginia 1864–5 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 10–11; Samuel. S. Boggs, Eighteen Months a Prisoner Under the Rebel Flag: A Condensed Picture of Belle Isle, Danville, Andersonville, Charleston, Florence and From Actual Experience (Lovington, IL: S. S Boggs, 1887), 12.

30 O.R., ser. 2, vol. 3: 163, 691.

23 Confederate soldiers stole his Bible, various books, clothing, and saddle.

Likewise, Confederate General Thomas J. Churchill of the First Arkansas

Mounted Rifles recalled how his captors took his spurs, sash, combs, brushes, and other necessities.31

With the prisoners stripped of valuables, and safely under guard, a new phase of captivity began. Here, prisoners faced interrogations, reflected on their capture, got to know their guards, and often wrote home. Although prisoners could be a valuable source of information for both sides, few captives described brutal or systematic interrogation. Soon after his capture, Bernhard Domschcke recalled how a succession of Confederate officers “pumped” him for information on military issues. Domschcke was uncooperative, leaving the curiosity of his interrogators “unsatisfied.” Confederate soldiers pelted John Worrell Northrop with political and military questions. The Rebels, he recalled, wanted to know

“how was Grant getting along, what we thought of Bobby Lee, and if McClellan would be our next president.” New York cavalryman Daniel G. Kelley fell captive while on picket duty. His captors took him before a Rebel officer, who demanded to know the precise location of the Union’s troops. He coolly replied that he was under no obligation to answer the Rebel officer’s questions.32

31 Samuel Fulton, Memoirs, USAMHI; Henry S. White, Prison Life Among the Rebels: Recollections of a Union Chaplain (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990), 11; O.R. ser.2, vol. 5, 477.

32 Domschcke, Twenty Months in Captivity, 28; John Worrell Northrop, Chronicle from the Diary of a War Prisoner in Andersonville and Other Military Prisons of the South in 1864 (Wichita, KS: Author, 1904), 28; Daniel G. Kelley, What I Saw and Suffered in Rebel Prisons (Buffalo, NY: Printing House of Matthew & Warren), 1866, 17.

24 During this phase, the men spent a considerable amount of time discussing what they felt to be the personal dishonor that accompanied capture. Private

Henry Sheldon McArthur of Company B, 75th New York Volunteer Infantry,

viewed surrender as an affront to his masculinity. To admit defeat, he maintained, undermined his manhood. McArthur went on to explain that death

would have been preferable to surrender. A soldier with the 12th Iowa capitulated

at Lovejoy’s Station, Georgia, on July 29, 1864. The men, he asserted, railed

against the idea of surrendering. Rebel troops captured S. J. Crowhurst at the

Battle of Shiloh. The Union man found his status as a prisoner of war shameful.

Beginning his march to the rear, he remembered that night’s walk as sad and

lonely. He found it dishonorable to be a prisoner of war. Finally, Alabama native

Alfred Lewis Scott found some personal redemption in his captivity. While at

Point Lookout, Maryland, he informed his father that he was troubled by his

captivity, but felt that his honor had been salvaged. “I did my duty like a man,” he

wrote, “and fought well while I was at it.”33

Dejection gripped many new prisoners. For some, the act of surrender left

them feeling like children. Private Henry H. Eby of the 7th Illinois Cavalry “felt

some like a boy after getting a good whipping” he did not deserve. John McElroy,

33 Henry Sheldon McArthur, Memoir 1864, USAMH; Ted Genoways and Hugh H. Genoways, eds., A Perfect Picture of Hell: Eyewitness Accounts by Civil War Prisoners from the 12th Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 95; S. J. Crowhurst, Papers, 1864, USAMHI; Alfred Lewis Scott, Memoir of Service in the Confederate Army, VHS. For a closer look at the concept of manhood, see Anthony E. Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993) and Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, , New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

25 a member of Company L 16th Illinois Cavalry, experienced depression after falling into enemy hands. He credited his state to the protracted battle that preceded his capture but also to the “humiliation” of surrendering the field to the enemy.

Equally affected was Confederate E. L Cox. After the 20th New York Cavalry

trapped Cox, he found himself unable to sleep because of depression.34

The moment of surrender often came with its own particular ritual. The

ceremony included an odd mix of submission and defiance. Union troops

detained Confederate Curtis Burke in Kentucky. Burke disabled his gun and

threw it away as far as he could. John W. Gift, a of Company K 1st

Iowa, experienced a brief period of captivity after Shiloh. After his exchange and parole, he returned home to Delhi, Iowa, where he described to welcoming crowds how his men cried and destroyed their weapons before surrendering.35

If surrender was a man’s fate, then how he gave up his freedom was of critical importance. To be captured in the field of battle lessened the sting of defeat.

Conversely, to be taken under any other circumstances wounded the soldier’s honor. Confederate troops operating in the captured Private

States B. Flandreau while the young man looked for chestnuts. He felt mortified that he was captured without a fight. He felt “almost broken-hearted.” Union

34 Henry H. Eby, Observations of an Illinois Boy in Battle, Camp and Prisons 1861–1865 (Mendota, IL: Author, 1910), 126; John McElroy, Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons, Fifteen Months a Guest of the So-called Southern Confederacy; a Private Soldier’s Experience in Richmond, Andersonville, Savannah, Millen, Blackshear and Florence (Toledo, OH: D. R. Locke, 1879), 59; E. L. Cox Dairy, 1864 Jul 1–1865 June 22, VHS.

35 Curtis Burke, Papers, USMHI; Genovese, A Perfect Picture of Hell, 88; Northrop, Chronicle from the Diary of a War Prisoner in Andersonville and Other Military Prisons of the South in 1864, 29.

26 soldier Harkness Lay of Company A 72nd, Ohio Volunteers, became a prisoner on

June 11, 1864, near Ripley, Mississippi, after the battle of Brice’s Crossroads. Lay

was not particularly proud of his situation. He and three friends, too tired to keep

fighting, hid in the bushes and fell sound asleep until discovered by Confederate soldiers. As native Charles Hopkins explained, the options were clear.

To die in battle meant to “die in glory,” he said.36

Prisons failed to undermine the camaraderie that motivated soldiers under

fire. If anything, it enhanced the soldier’s need to remain close to his comrades.

Louisianan Henry E. Henderson became a prisoner of war at the Battle of the

Wilderness. Union soldiers dragged him from his horse and drove him to the rear of the army. Henderson was pleased to see that the courier from his staff was also a prisoner. After all, he said, “misery loves company.” Private Flandreau, the chestnut picker who agonized over his capture, found reasons to feel better about himself and his situation. His captors housed him with several hundred other prisoners who, like Flandreau, became prisoners without the benefit of a military engagement. After comparing notes with his fellow prisoners, he concluded that others “had done worse than I had done.” They too had become captives without a fight.37

36 States B. Flandreau, Papers, 1804–1924,USAMHI; William B. Styple and John J. Fitzpatrick, eds., The Andersonville Diary & Memoirs of Charles Hopkins, 1st New Jersey Infantry (Kearny, NJ : Belle Grove Pub, 1988), 95; Harkness Lay, Diary, RBH.

37 Henry E. Henderson, Yankee in Gray: The Civil War Memoirs of Henry E. Henderson With a Selection of His Wartime Letters (Cleveland, OH: Western Reserve University Press, 1962); B. Flandreau, Papers, 1804–1924,USAMHI; Mark H. Dunkelman, Brothers One and All: Esprit de Corps in a Civil War Regiment (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2004), 150.

27 The encounter with former acquaintances from the other army was not always

a welcomed event. Coming face-to-face with erstwhile friends often showed how

deep the wounds of secession had become. During Lee’s aggressive offensive at

the Battle of the Seven Days, the contending armies met at Glendale, a vital

crossroad for any force attempting to cross the James River. The hard-fought

battle yielded a dreadful amount of slain, wounded, and captured men. Among

the prisoners was General George McCall. The Pennsylvanian was a career

soldier, had remained loyal to the Union, and now commanded a division under

George B. McClelland. As McCall and his soldiers marched to the rear, he ran into

General , a former subordinate in the old Army and soon to

become Robert E. Lee’s most trusted lieutenant. Longstreet recognized McCall

and attempted to shake hands with him. McCall begged off and icily said, “Excuse

me, sir, I can stand defeat but not insult.”38

Many prisoners spent their first days reviewing the battles they fought,

second-guessing their decisions, and assigning blame for their fate. George W.

Darby, a Pennsylvania native soldiering with the 3rd Division 5th Corps Army of the Potomac, became a prisoner at the battle of Yellow Tavern, Virginia, in 1864.

Rebel soldiers caught his unit by surprise, captured Darby, and hustled him off the field. His assessment of the affair was blunt. He viewed his capture as the result of “the criminal stupidity” of the officer in charge. Other prisoners agreed.

Albert Lewis Scott, the Confederate soldier imprisoned in Maryland, told his

38 Jeffry D. Wert, The Sword of Lincoln: The Army of the Potomac (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 115.

28 father that his captivity resulted from “the delinquency” of those in command.

Captain John Henry Guy, a member of the 5th Virginia Volunteers, surrendered

with thousands of his men at . Imprisoned at Johnson’s Island

near Sandusky, Ohio, he condemned the surrender and its architects. The officers

involved, he opined, should be court martialed and expelled. J. P. Jackson shared

in Guy’s disappointment. He remarked to a friend that his captivity resulted from

poor generalship.39

The process of assigning blame was, however, short-lived. The men hurriedly

shifted their attention to the possibility of getting away. The logistical

complications of transporting, feeding, and watching over thousands of men

offered the best chance for a successful escape or rescue. Confederate troops

seized Major Morton Tower’s company at Gettysburg. According to Tower, from

the moment of capture, he thought of nothing but escape. Southerner John

Copley, taken at Nashville in December 1864, and Northerner John Ransom

captured in Tennessee a year earlier, also entertained thoughts of freedom while

on their way to prison camps. Union guards could not contain James A. Thomas

and two of his comrades. The Confederate men jumped off the steamer Star

Golden Era and escaped while scores of prisoners in gray cheered them on.40

39 George W. Darby, Incidents and Adventures in Rebeldom: Libby, Belle-Isle, Salisbury (Pittsburgh, PA: Rawsthorne Engraving & Print Co., 1899), 24.Alfred Lewis Scott, Memoir of Service in the Confederate Army, 1861–1865, VHS; John Henry Guy, Diary, 1862 April 5– September 17, VHS; J.P. Jackson to David Clopton, April 22, 1862, Camp Chase, Ohio, Papers 1862–1863, VHS.

40 Morton Tower, Army Experience of Major Morton Tower from 1861 to 1864, VHS; John Copley, A Sketch of the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee; John L. Ransom, Andersonville Diary (New York: Berkley Books, 1986), 4; James A.Thomas to Father, February 26, 1863, FHS. 29 However dramatic these escapes were, they happened rarely. Most captives

found themselves on the road to a prisoner of war camp. During this part of the

journey, prisoners sometimes developed a sense of camaraderie and respect for

their guards. Their common humanity governed their daily interactions, at least

for the time being. Rice Bull of the 123rd New York became a prisoner at the

Battle of Chancellorsville. Rebel stragglers promptly robbed him. After the

robbery, the provost guard restored discipline, and Rice’s treatment markedly

improved. Amos E. Stearns of the 25th Massachusetts fell captive at Drewry’s

Bluffs, Virginia, on May 16, 1864. He described his guards as “gentlemen.”

Edmund DeWitt Patterson, an Ohioan fighting for the Confederacy, also

described the captain of the guard as a “gentlemanly sort of fellow.”41

Once they were on enemy soil, the prisoners became a source of

entertainment and derision to the population. Union Captain J. J. Greer

arrived in Columbus, Georgia, after his capture. He and his comrades felt like

“some traveling menagerie” being stared and jeered at by the locals. The residents

of Richmond, Virginia, subjected Union prisoner Willard Watson Wheeler to

taunts, which he quietly endured. Edmund D. Patterson remembered large

crowds in Sandusky, Ohio, running in confusion to get a good look at the

prisoners. Samuel H. M. Byers surrendered to Confederate raiders near Lookout

Mountain, Tennessee. The Iowan traveled from Atlanta to Augusta, Georgia,

41 K. Jack Bauer, ed., Soldering: The Civil War Diary of Rice C. Bull, 123rd New York Volunteers Infantry (San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1977), 63, 73, 82; Amos E. Stearn, The Civil War Diary of Amos E. Stearns, A Prisoner at Andersonville, ed. Leon Basile (East Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Presses, Inc., 1981), 62; John G. Barrett, ed., Yankee Rebel: The Civil War Journal of Edmund Dewitt Barret (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 118.

30 where he remembered a large crowd rushing to see the prisoners. “Barnum, with

all his monkeys and bears,” Byers concluded, “could never draw such crowds of

inquisitors.” Union troops captured James Powell near Spotsylvania Courthouse,

and charged him with espionage. After a short stint at the Old Capitol Building in

Washington, DC, the Federals shipped him to Boston’s Fort McHenry. Upon

arrival Powell marched through the streets of Boston. While on the march, he and

his fellow prisoners “were made to bow to the [Federal] flag.”42

Beneath the public’s natural curiosity, however, lay real danger for the

prisoners. Captured Rebel soldier John M. Copley remembered the abusive

crowd that gathered on the capitol grounds in Nashville to watch the prisoners.

Tennessee’s military governor and Unionist Senator were among the curious. The future president, according to Copley, subjected the men

to a considerable amount of “abuse and vituperation.” Confederate soldiers

transported Union prisoner Francis S. Reader to Lexington, Kentucky, where the

party ran into an unruly crowd. The mob, enraged at the Federals’ destruction of

the Lexington Military Institute, threatened to take revenge on Reader and his

fellow captives. The guards defended the men and, for their protection, located

them in a building where they had a full view of the street and surroundings.

Confederate Colonel Joseph Barbiere was neither impressed nor frightened by

42 J. J. Greer, Beyond the Lines or A Yankee Prisoner Loose in Dixie (: J. W. Daughaday, 1863), 45; Barret, Yankee Rebel, 124; Willard Watson Wheeler, The Diary of Willard Watson Wheeler August 24, 1861–Feb 15th, 1862, Clements Library, University of Michigan; Samuel Hawkins Marshall Byers, What I Saw in Dixie or Sixteen Months in Rebel Prisons (Dansville, NY: Robbins and Poore, 1868), 7; James Leavett Powell, Reminiscences, 1850–1865, VHS.

31 the unfriendly reception he encountered in Sandusky, Ohio, on his way to

Johnson’s Island. The mob jeered, spat, and hurled insults “in unmentionable language.” Barbiere concluded that Sandusky was “a sink of .” In the fall of 1864, a Georgia farmer outraged at the excesses of Sherman’s troops, knocked down a Union prisoner. A Confederate guard defended the unarmed

Federal soldier and pushed back the civilian. When the farmer complained personally to General the general was unmoved. “If you want to fight,” the Georgia-born West Pointer remarked, “go join a company and fight, but don’t hit a prisoner.”43

Enraged civilians were only part of the problem the prisoners faced. The explosive question of race was never far from the surface. Henry E. Henderson, an Ohio native fighting with the 9th Regiment of Louisiana Volunteers,

remembered warnings about how Blacks troops would kill Confederate prisoners

on sight. On their way north, Henderson’s party encountered some of Burnside’s

Black troops. According to Henderson, the Blacks troops showed “as much

curiosity as hatred,” but no violence ensued. On his way to a prisoner of war

camp, North Carolinian Louis Leon of the Charlotte’s Grays came across a

brigade of Black soldiers. Leon remembered that the Blacks gave the prisoners a

“terrible cursing and hollered Fort Pillow.” The African-American soldiers were

reacting of course, to the massacre of Black troops at the hands of Confederate

43 Copley, A Sketch of the Battle of Franklin, 115; Francis Reader, Papers, 1804–1924, USAMHI; Joseph Barbiere, Scraps From the Prison Table at Camp Chase and Johnson’s Island (Doylestown, PA: W. W. H. Davis, 1868), 256; Kennett, Marching through Georgia, 145.

32 soldiers led by General in Tennessee in 1864.

Confederate troops commanded by General Daniel C. Govan also had a taste of the animosity between Blacks and Rebel soldiers. Govan and his men fell prisoners at the second Battle of Jonesboro and were quickly exchanged. On route to their exchange, their train made a stop at Dalton, Georgia, a Union depot manned by members of the 44th U.S. Colored Infantry. According to a

Confederate soldier, white southerners and the Black Union men “had words”

and only the prompt intervention of white soldiers prevented the situation from

escalating. Govan’s men and the 44th would meet again.44

Not all prisoners encountered hostile crowds. Union troops caught up with

John C. Williams of the 34th Texas at the Battle of Yellow Bayou, Texas. The

Federals shipped Williams to , where white southern women defied

the guards by tossing bundles of clothing to the prisoners. During Robert

Kellogg’s trip south, a local postmaster offered to inform his relatives of his

whereabouts. Later on, he encountered an elderly woman who offered food and

words of encouragement. On May 3, 1863, Union forces commanded by General

Abel Streight surrendered to Confederate Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest

44 Henry E. Henderson, Yankee in Gray: The Civil War Memoirs of Henry E. Henderson With a Selection of His Wartime Letters (Cleveland, OH: Western Reserve University Press, 1962), 73; Louis Leon, Diary of a Tar Heel Confederate Soldier (Charlotte, NC: Stone Publishing Co., 1913), 62. Fort Pillow was not the only massacre of Black soldiers at the hand of Confederates. On April 18, 1864, in Poison Springs, Arkansas, a combined force of Confederate soldiers and Choctaw Indians slaughtered scores of Black Union soldiers attached to the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteered Infantry Regiment after they surrendered. On April 30th, 1864, members of the 2nd Kansas Colored Volunteered Infantry Regiment avenged their fallen comrades, killing Confederate soldiers after they had raised their hands in surrender. See Gregory J. W. Urwin, “We Cannot Treat Negroes … As Prisoners of War: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in Civil War Arkansas,” Civil War History 42 no.3 (1996): 193–210; Kennett, Marching Through Georgia, 219.

33 marched his prisoners to Rome, Georgia, where welcoming crowds fashioned a cookout and managed to feed Union prisoners and Confederate soldiers alike.

The prisoners, according to a Federal officer, received sufficient food and decent quarters.45

As the new prisoners of war crowded the enemy’s towns, the men received

their first taste of incarceration. The temporary facilities that welcomed them

ranged from open fields to county jails. One soldier from Iowa endured captivity

in an abandoned warehouse, followed by a Masonic Lodge Room, a Baptist

Female College, a City Hall, and finally, a prisoner of war camp in Madison,

Georgia. By and large, most men reacted with disappointment upon reaching

their temporary detention centers. The Union prison at Fort Delaware, for

instance, elicited terse comments from a Louisiana native. Captured at

Gettysburg, the young man wrote to his father in January 1864 and complained

about “filthy and muddy, miserable place.” Lieutenant Patterson, a Confederate,

found Fort Delaware disgusting as well.46

For some men, the quality of the accommodations was only one reason to

complain. When they shared living quarters with convicted criminals, they

protested vociferously. After arriving in Florence, South Carolina, one Union

prisoner complained about the humiliation of spending time with deserters,

45 John C. Williams, Letters, USAMHI; Kellogg, Life and Death in Rebel Prisons, 37, 52; Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 25.

46 Ted Genoways and Hugh H. Genoways, (eds), A Perfect Picture of Hell, 128; William James McLean, Papers, TSC; Barret, Yankee Rebel, 124.

34 felons, prostitutes, murderers, and thieves. Another Federal soldier echoed these

sentiments when forced to spend the night with criminals in the local jail.47

In other places, race, not social class, elicited loud protestations. Not surprisingly, Confederates reserved a great deal of contempt for Black prison guards. Benjamin Anderson Jones remembered “the great humiliation” he felt upon entering the prison gates at Point Lookout and noticing that Black soldiers staffed the entrance. When Confederate Thomas Davis Creed became a prisoner late in the war at Newport News, Virginia, he found the officers in charge of the prison fair and kind. His greatest complaint was the presence of Black soldiers, whom he described as “repugnant.” Black guards carried out their duties, enforced discipline, and when necessary, used deadly force to discipline those under control. After his capture, North Carolinian Lewis Leon remembered the white and Black troops guarding him. The African-Americans, in his opinion, were “as mean as hell.”48

While rebel soldiers found the idea of Black soldiers in control of white men abhorrent, northern soldiers showed disdain for home guards, local militias, and

other not battle-tested troops assigned to guard them. For northerners,

experience and character mattered. Federal prisoner Lucius Barber expressed the

47 A. O. Abbott, Prison Life in the South, 111; Melvin Grigsby, The Smoked Yank (Sioux Fall, SD: Dakota Bell Publishing, 1898), 167.

48 Benjamin Anderson Jones, Memoirs 1861–1864, VHS; Thomas Davis Creed, Diary,1864 May 4–1865 February, 19, VHS.; Leon, Diary of a Tar Heel Confederate Soldier, 64; Charles C. Enslow, Papers, LC.

35 views of many when he remarked that only those with combat experience made

good guards. The local militias, in his view, were altogether a different story.49

The militias, like the prison system about to receive Barber and his comrades, existed mostly on paper. Dated records, scanty supplies, and outmoded weapons represented half the problem. Lack of military training and poor discipline simply made matters worse. At the war’s outset, state militia and assorted volunteers rushed to fill in the ranks. Once the 90-days war promised by both sides failed to materialize, Union and Confederate authorities wrestled from the states the power to draft and turned 90-day assignments into nine months and three-year extensions respectively. On March 28, 1862, Jefferson Davis sent to Congress a piece of legislation recommending conscription and four months later, the

Federal Congress passed the militia law extending the initial 90 days assignment for a period of up to nine months. The draft in both regions left the state militias

with little to do except guard prisoners, watch for fugitive slaves, and otherwise

attempt to maintain peace in the local communities. From time to time, state

militias rose to the occasion. In 1863, Pennsylvania militia rushed to protect the

state from Lee’s invasion, and in nearby Ohio, it assisted in capturing

Confederate raider . In the South, the home guards often

consisted of civil servants, injured veterans, men too old to serve in the military,

and those who managed to buy their freedom from the draft. In the winter of

49 Lucius W. Barber, Army Memoirs of Lucius W. Barber, Company D, 15th Illinois Volunteer Infantry: May 24, 1861, to Sept. 30, 1865 (Chicago: J. M. W. Jones Stationery and Print Co., 1894), 160–161.

36 1864, this assortment of men came through for the Confederacy. On the morning of March 1, five battalions of intellectuals, government workers, factory hands, boys, and old men managed to stop ’s assault on the outskirts of

Richmond. Dahlgren’s five hundred troopers were part of a two-pronged attack intended to punish Richmond and to release thousands of Union war prisoners held at Libby and Belle Isle. The attack failed, Dahlgren lost his life, and

Richmond authorities saw the wisdom of relocating some its prisoners deeper into the Confederacy.50

Not withstanding these moments of military prowess, the transfer of prisoners to the jurisdiction of the state militia wounded their pride. The authorities separated the commissioned officers and common soldiers, thus disrupting military and personal bonds. Some officers felt compelled to try to remain in contact with their men, such as Confederate John Henry Guy of the 5th

Virginia Volunteers who became a prisoner of war following the surrender at Fort

Donelson. Guy made a stop at Camp Chase near Columbus, Ohio, and ended his journey into captivity at Johnson’s Island, near Sandusky, Ohio. While in

Sandusky, Guy penned eight missives to encourage his men housed at Camp

Douglas near Chicago to use their time in confinement wisely.51

50 James B. Whisker, The Rise and Decline of the American Militia System (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1999), 335–338; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 427, 492; Duane Schultz, The Dahlgren Affair: Terror and Conspiracy in the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 127–130.

51 John Henry Guy, Diary, 1862 April 5–September 17, VHS.

37 This was solid advice. Time was one of the few possessions the men had in

abundance. The collapse of the cartel in 1863 made the prospect of a speedy

release impossible. Faced with this reality, Southern authorities decided to

relocate thousands men in locations that made rescue attempts and prison

breakouts if not impossible, then at least highly unlikely. They sent their wards on harrowing journeys away from their army, their government, and their loved

ones.

The logistical challenge was enormous. The problem of transporting and

feeding thousands of prisoners by land and sea taxed available resources on both

sides. The bureaucracies were, however, undeterred. They consigned the

prisoners’ well being to the bottom of the list of their priorities. Thus the

prisoners received rations and quickly found themselves loaded onto rail cars

and, in some cases, onto ships. The men made their own preparations for the

journey. Union prisoner Warren Goss traded his shoes and overcoat for boots

and cooking utensils, and when the time came, headed for the boxcars. Robert

Kellogg recalled the long, uncomfortable journey traveling through the Carolinas

to Macon, Georgia, during which, he said, there was no room even to sit down.

Ohioan Edmund D. Patterson echoed Kellogg’s complaints and reported that in

the boxcars the men could not sit or lie down. Those who reached their final

destination by ship also experienced pain and discomfort. Former newspaper

editor and Confederate Lieutenant Anthony M. Keiley arrived in Elmira, New

York, in May 1864 after a harrowing fifty-hour boat ride. Walter D. Addison, an

38 officer in Breathed’s Battery of Stuart’s Horse Artillery, gathered as much

hyperbole as he could muster and compared his boat ride to a slave ship.52

The end of the trail found the prisoners arriving at the gates of a prison camp.

Their initial views of the camps left an indelible mark on many prisoners. When

Confederate arrived at , Indiana, in the fall of

1863, he saw that the authorities had made few provisions to receive the new prisoners. Many men slept through the night in the open air on the ground.

Wyeth concluded that this situation showed the indifference of the authorities.

Union soldier W. W. Day of Company D of the 10th Wisconsin Volunteers

observed that prison authorities released the men into the enclosure without much concern for their general welfare. A New York soldier made the long trek to the Deep South, arriving at Andersonville in the spring of 1864. To him, the prison looked like a vast anthill. Alabamian Joel Calvin McDiarmid arrived at

Point Lookout, Maryland, during the waning days of the war. He found the place overcrowded and the accommodations limited. Finally, Union private Robert H.

Kellogg found Andersonville hellish.53

52 Warren Lee Goss, The Soldier’s Story of His Captivity at Andersonville, Belle Isle and Other Rebel Prisons (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1867), 64–65; Kellogg, Life and Death in Rebel Prisons, 47; Barrett, Yankee Rebel, 119; Kellogg Life and Death in Rebel Prisons, 47; Barrett, Yankee Rebel, 119; Anthony M. Keiley, In Vinculis or The Prisoner of War (New York: William E. Rudge’s Sons, 1940) 155; Reminiscences of Walter D. Addison, Thomas Jefferson Green Papers, no. 289, 3–4, Southern Historical Society, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

53 John Allan Wyeth, With Saber and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1914), 286; W.W. Day, Fifteen Months in Dixie or My Personal Experience in Rebel Prisons: A Story of the Hardship, Privations and Sufferings of the Boys in Blue During the Late War of the Rebellion A Private of Co. D 10th Regiment WI Infantry WI Volunteer Infantry (Watonna, WI: People’s Press Print, 1889), 28; John Worrell Northrop, Chronicle from the Diary of a War Prisoner in Andersonville and Other Military Prisons of the South in 1864 (Wichita, KS: Author, 1904), 57; John R. Kellogg, Life and Death in Rebel Prisons 39 The sounds the men encountered were equally forbidding. The groans of men

and the creaking of rusty gates reminded Union Chaplain Henry S. White of the

waves of the sea. For Lieutenant Alonzo Cooper, 12th New York Cavalry, the

prison’s noise compared to a rapidly spreading fire alarm that quickly

overwhelmed a city. Solon Hyde, a hospital steward with the 17th Ohio

Volunteers, remembered the ominous whispers of voices he heard upon laying eyes on Belle Island. Federal soldier Melvin Grigsby described the forbidding

sounds of Andersonville. It was, he said, “unlike the noise of an army or the roar

of a large city because there were no sounds of wheels or rattle of tools.” As he

entered the prison, he remembered, he heard a “Babel of human voices” emitting

a “strange and doleful sound.”54

For prisoners, North and South, the first days of captivity seemed to produce

the greatest distress. The strangeness of the prison landscape, however, did not

last. The initial bouts of anxiety finally gave way to organized efforts aimed at

survival. This process manifested itself early. Now it was up to them and their comrades to engineer a strategy for survival. Many men would rise to the occasion by defying the hopelessness of prison life and transforming captivity and themselves.

(Hartford, CT: Wiley, Waterman & Eaton Co., 1865); G. Ward Hubbs, ed., Voices from Company D: Diaries by the Greensboro Guards, Fifth Alabama Infantry, Army of Northern Virginia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 367.

54 White, Prison Life Among Rebels, 41; A. Cooper, In and Out of Rebel Prisons (Oswego, NY: R. J. Oliphant, 1898), 72; Solon Hyde, A Captive of War (Shippensburg, PA: Burd Street Press, 1996), 28; Grigsby, Smoked Yankee, 90.

40 CHAPTER 2

“TO MEET THE EXIGENCIES OF THE MOMENT”: PRISONS NORTH AND SOUTH

William James McKell, a native of Chillicothe, Ohio, enlisted in August 1862,

for three years in the 89th Regiment, Company D Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He reached the rank of sergeant when Confederate troops captured him at

Chickamauga and imprisoned him at Andersonville, Georgia. His trip to the prison took five harrowing days in a suffocating, overcrowded train. Upon laying eyes on Andersonville, McKell judged the place ill-suited for preserving life. His

initial assessment was prophetic. McKell died on July 28, 1864.55

A month before Sergeant McKell commenced life as a prisoner of war,

Lieutenant Colonel Federíco Fernández-Caváda of the 114th Pennsylvania

Volunteers had trudged a similar path. The Cuban-born Colonel had seen action

at Antietam and Fredericksburg. At Gettysburg, the Mississippi troops of General

William Barksdale overran Fernández-Caváda’s men near a peach orchard. Soon,

he found himself at Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. Libby, according to

Fernández-Caváda, was an unassuming brick building with a tin roof. The prison

was gloomy, and the tapping of rain against the roof created a mournful sound.

55 William James McKell, Journal, RBH.

41 Like other prisoners, Fernández-Caváda wondered about his future as a prisoner

of war.56

The men who crowded places like Libby Prison and Andersonville had good reasons to be concerned. The fate of prisoners of war throughout history had been lethal. , executions, and forced labor had been common practices.

Advocacy on behalf of war captives started in the sixteenth century when philosophers wrote about the management of prisoners of war. Chief among them was the Dutch-born jurist Hugo Grotius. His De Jure Bellis et Pacis (On the

Law of War and Peace, 1625) explored the legality of war, its causes, and the handling of prisoners and civilians. By the 18th century the French political

philosopher Montesquieu, in his L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Laws, 1748), also

promoted a more humane treatment of prisoners of war.57

These intellectual breakthroughs had far-reaching consequences. They

encouraged the appearance of new institutions that would play a critical role in

the American Civil War: the exchange and the parole systems. The exchange

system allowed captors to place inmates on waiting lists and to exchange them

under beneficial terms. The parole scheme relied on the officers’ integrity and

granted them the privilege of living outside the prisoner of war camp without

56 F. F. Caváda, Libby Life: Experiences of a Prisoner of War in Richmond, VA, 1863–64 (Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co., 1865), 23–25.

57 Arnold Krammer, Prisoners of War: A Reference Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 1–9; Walton K. Richardson, “Prisoners of War as Instruments of Foreign Policy,” Naval War College Review, 23 (1970): 48.

42 attempting to escape. These arrangements worked moderately well throughout

the Napoleonic . Problems ultimately emerged, however. Issues of strategy

and mutual distrust between the belligerent powers led to the collapse of the

exchange system and to the birth of a new institution: the prisoner of war camp.58

Initially, the Federals and Confederates used ships, forts, warehouses, and castles to house their war captives. These facilities served properly as holding centers as long as a workable exchange program was in place. Once exchanges ceased and the numbers of prisoners reached crisis proportions, living conditions for prisoners of war markedly declined.59

Moreover, as the secession crisis deepened, it became abundantly clear that

neither side had given prisoners of war a second thought. No written code existed

and none was in the works. In the meantime, problems began to mount. General

David Twiggs’ surrender of Texas, the seizure of Fort Sumter, the privateers’

crisis, the capture of Congressman Alfred Ely at Bull Run, and the murky legal

status of Confederate soldiers united to create a sense of urgency on the question

of what to do with prisoners of war.

The uncertainty began to lift with the publication of Francis Lieber’s “The

Disposal of Prisoners.” The German-born jurist addressed the thorny issue of

belligerent recognition and concluded that exchanging prisoners of war did not

constitute the de-facto recognition of the South as a legitimate belligerent power.

58 Richard Garrett, P.O.W. (Newton Abbot, England: David & Charles Limited, 1981), 28.

59 Garrett. P.O.W., 50.

43 But in spite of these scholarly ruminations, Lincoln did not change his mind, and the issue of prisoners of war remained in political limbo.60

The professor was not finished contributing to the war effort. Lieber, a

Unionist, served as the head of the Loyal Publication Society of New York and also assisted the Union War Department in drafting legal guidelines for the

Union Army, the most famous of which was the so-called General Orders Number

100, or Lieber Code. The Code offered guidelines on how soldiers should conduct themselves in wartime and covered subjects such as military jurisdiction, martial law, and the treatment of prisoners of war, spies, deserters, and civilians.

Adopted on April 24, 1863, the Code defined prisoners of war as individuals attached to a hostile army taken by surrender or capitulation. The document condemned the mistreatment of prisoners and explicitly called for no , revenge, cruel imprisonment, want of food, mutilation, or execution.

The Lieber Code went on to form the basis of the first modern laws of war. It is widely considered to have inspired future attempts to codify international law such as the Brussels Conference of 1874 and The Hague Conventions of 1899 and

1907.61

60 Francis Lieber, New York Times, “The Disposal of Prisoners,” August 19, 1851, 5:3.

61 Hartigan, Lieber’s Code and the Law of War (Chicago: Precedent Pub., 1983); Section III 49 reads as follows: A prisoner of war is a public enemy armed or attached to the hostile army for active aid, who has fallen into the hands of the captor, either fighting or wounded, on the field or in the hospital, by individual surrender or by capitulation. All soldiers, of whatever species of arms; all men who belong to the rising en masse of the hostile country; all those who are attached to the Army for its efficiency and promote directly the object of the war, except such as are hereinafter provided for; all disabled men or officers on the field or elsewhere, if captured; all enemies who have thrown away their arms and ask for quarter, are prisoners of war, and as such 44 Unfortunately, for men like Fernández-Caváda and McKell, the Lieber Code meant little in the hastily constructed prison facilities that housed thousands of men in both the North and South. During the Civil War, more than 225 facilities served to confine prisoners of war. Generally, Civil War prisons fit into eight broad categories: existing jails, coastal fortifications, converted buildings, barracks enclosed by a high fence, clusters of tents enclosed by a high fence, barren stockades, converted fairgrounds, and open areas surrounded by guards.

At Fulton County Jail, Georgia, and the Missouri Penitentiary in Saint Louis, authorities put their existing jails to work and quickly filled them with captured

prisoners of war. Some locations, like Fort Pulaski, Tennessee, and Castle San

Marcos, Texas, were coastal forts pressed into duty as prison camps. Others, such

as Pemberton Warehouse, Virginia, and Maxwell House, Tennessee, were hastily

converted buildings originally meant for purposes other than the housing of

prisoners of war. Killian’s Mill, South Carolina, and Johnson’s Island, Ohio,

quartered their prisoners in a series of barracks enclosed by high fences. At

Morris Island, South Carolina, and Camp Davidson, Georgia, clusters of tents

were all that separated men from their freedom. Andersonville, Georgia, typified

the worst of Civil War captivity as stockades surrounded the men. The

fairgrounds at the Charleston Race Track in South Carolina and Indianapolis,

Indiana, also served as makeshift prisons. Finally, at San Pedro Springs, Texas, a

exposed to the inconveniences as well as entitled to the privileges of a prisoner of war; Kramer, Prisoners of War, 88.

45 few miles northwest of , Confederate authorities confined their prisoners to an exposed area surrounded by armed guards.62

Overcrowding and deplorable management plagued the prisons of the Civil

War from the start. Faced with scarce resources and with the task of creating a national government, the Confederacy struggled to provide basic requirements to captured Union soldiers. The Federal government met an equally daunting challenge of caring for thousands of prisoners. Both sides hesitated at the start, and both hoped for a rapid victory to secure a quick, lasting peace. When such a victory failed to materialize, neither side was prepared to handle prisoners of war.

During the first three years of the war, state governments in the South exercised control over all prisons located across their individual states. Early in

1864, Richmond authorities realized the folly of this tactic and attempted to impose control over the prison camps in the Confederacy. They did so by making

Richmond’s Provost Marshall, General Richard H. Winder, as commander of all southern prisons. The Marylander had an excellent military pedigree. He came from a martial family, had attended West Point, and made a career in the pre-war army. But Winder proved to be the wrong man for the job. Rude, inflexible, and abrasive, he followed rigid military protocol and managed to alienate almost

62 Speer, Portals to Hell, 323.

46 everyone, first as provost marshal, and then as prisons commissioner. The task required administrative and personal skills that Winder utterly lacked.63

The Federal government’s choice for this position was more felicitous. Like

Winder, New York-born William Hoffman was a career soldier and West Point

graduate. Unlike his Confederate counterpart, Hoffman had stayed loyal to the

Union, spent time as a prisoner during Texas’ secession crisis, and was released.

He could be petty, but he was careful with money, efficient, and responsible. But

even Hoffman’s administrative skills were no match for the tidal wave of

southern prisoners that ended in Union camps. Both Winder and Hoffman

received difficult assignments. They tackled jobs that offered little military visibility and no chance for battlefield promotion. Each fought an unyielding

bureaucracy that, consciously or not, placed the fate of prisoners of war at the

bottom of its priorities. The results were two similar prison systems overwhelmed

by the numbers, ignored by the public, and inadequately supported by their

governments.64

The first prisoners of the Civil War, in both regions, received the same

treatment: immediate parole. The use of the parole system had worked for the

French and the British during the Napoleonic Wars and the United States and the

British during the War of 1812. Offering paroles worked for everybody.

63 Arch Frederic Blakey, General John H. Winder, C.S.A. (Gainesville: University of Press, 1990), 207–208.

64 Leslie Gene Hunter, Warden for the Union: General William Hoffman (1807–1844), Ph.D., University of Arizona, 1971.

47 Southerners managed to keep enough soldiers on the field and Northerners

showed concern for the fate of their own troops. Perhaps more importantly,

neither side had to deal with the housing and feeding of prisoners of war. When

the parole and exchange cartel fell apart over the twin issues of Black Union

soldiers and the numbers of released Confederate soldiers, both Richmond and

Washington found their preparations unsuitable for the task.65

The failure of the exchange cartel brought about a hurried but logical reaction from both sides. The South, with its agricultural economy, turned its warehouses

into prisoner of war camps. By 1861, the Richmond authorities had purchased an

abandoned cotton factory in Salisbury, North Carolina and made it a prison for

Union soldiers as well as an internment camp for those accused of disloyalty to the southern cause. The North usually turned its maritime fortifications into prisons. As the conflict dragged on, the need to recycle and convert into jails other existing facilities became more pressing.66

By all accounts, the conversion process did not go well. The Salisbury prison

became overcrowded and by October 1864, newly arrived prisoners went without food for days. The following month, town officials indicated that the inmate population was reaching 10,000 and that a general scarcity of meat, water, and other essentials prevailed. In late December, Confederate authorities gave up on

65 For a more detailed look at the cartel and its collapse, see Charles W. Sanders, While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 130–133.

66 Louis A. Brown, The Salisbury Prison: A Case Study of Confederate Military Prisons, 1861– 66 (Wendell, NC: Avera Press, 1980).

48 the facility, stopped all repairs, and ordered all prisoners transferred to other

locations. Closing Salisbury was no easy task. Sherman had completed his March

to the Sea and with 8,000 inmates still waiting for relocation and the Ohioan’s juggernaut on the loose General John Winder suggested paroling all prisoners.67

The problems of overcrowding and safety were not unique to Salisbury Prison.

In Virginia, Libby Prison and Belle Isle encountered similar challenges. Libby

administrators put inmates to work and allowed Union officers to draw

guidelines on how to preserve good order and cleanliness. These measures were

not enough as the growing numbers of prisoners overwhelmed the facility. Belle

Isle encountered the same fate, as Grant’s relentless push south flooded the

prison with new captives until it contained three times the optimal number of

prisoner.68

The Union’s drive forced Confederate jailers to shuttle their prisoners around

the south. The prison at Cahaba, Alabama, a warehouse lacking basic facilities, was bulging at the seams. Rebel authorities temporarily closed Cahaba prison and moved its population to a new facility in Georgia. After a few cosmetic changes, Cahaba prison reopened and once again was crowded with the sick and wounded.69

67 Frances H. Casstevens, “Out of the Mouth of Hell”: Civil War Prisons and Escapes (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2005), 293–310; Speers, Portals to Hell, 209–213.

68 Prisoner’s Club, Constitution, 1862, VHS.

69 William O. Bryant, Cahaba Prison and the Sultana Disaster (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 2; O.R., ser.2, vol. 7:998–1002, 1088.

49 Like Cahaba Prison, the facility at Florence, South Carolina, lacked all the

basics, including housing, proper medical care, even firewood. The situation led

many inmates to attempt escapes and kept those prisoners who remained behind

poised for rebellion. Adjutant General John F. Lay was worried and he predicted

that unless something was done, the prisoners could take over the prison, and

destroy the railroad. He told his superiors that the facility needed additional

troops to secure the prisoners.70

Nearly fourteen months before the end of the Civil War, Confederate

authorities opened Andersonville Prison near Americus, Georgia. The prison

received six-hundred prisoners from Richmond, Virginia, on February 24, 1864.

Following Dahlgren’s Raid, southern officials hastened the transfer of prisoners to the new facility. The place consisted of acres of open ground surrounded by a

stockade fence and earthworks barricades. Makeshift tents and shallow holes, built by prisoners, dotted the landscape. Overcrowding led to illnesses and death and, soon, prisoners died at a rate of 100 per day. Approximately 13,000 died from the combined effects of overcrowding, illness, exposure, and incompetent management. Tines Kendrick, a 104-year-old former slave from Trenton,

Arkansas, once visited the Georgia prison. He described it as “’worstest place” he

70 O.R. ser. 2, vol. 7:841.

50 had ever seen. According to Kendrick, thousands of men struggled to survive

amidst filth and sickness.71

The lessons of Andersonville’s breakdown fell on deaf ears. The experience

did not deter the Confederate government from continuing to build large,

unmanageable prisons and to relocate thousands of sick and injured prisoners. In

yet another attempt to stave off disaster, southern leaders authorized the

construction of Camp Lawton in Millen, Georgia. The little-known facility became

one of the South’s largest prisoner of war camps constructed during the war. Built

in October 1864 as a safety valve for Andersonville, Camp Lawton received

prisoners for approximately a month and a half before Confederate authorities

began to evacuate the camp in late November as Sherman’s soldiers approached.

During Camp Lawton’s six weeks of operation, the inmate population topped

10,000 and nearly seven hundred died.72

North of the Mason-Dixon Line the situation was no different. Coastal

fortifications became one the Union’s ready-made solutions to the issue of prisoners of war. Imposing and sturdy, these military forts were poorly equipped to warehouse large numbers of men. Located close to water, however, they

71 Tines Kendrick, Born in : Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936- 1938. American Memory Project, October 15, 2007 Kendrick was born in Crawford Country, Georgia, in 1833. He was the biracial son of a slave and an overseer. See also Andrew Ward, The Slaves’ War: the Civil War in Words of Former Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 178– 332; William Marvel, Andersonville: The Last Depot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), ix; Speers, Portals to Hell, 259–266.

72 William Giles, Disease, Starvation, and Death: Personal Accounts of Camp Lawton (Napa, CA: Lulu Press, 2005); Speers, Portals to Hell, 279.

51 minimized the possibilities of breakouts or rescue attempts. Unfortunately for the wretched souls who inhabited them, their proximity to water made them damp, cold, and a breeding ground for respiratory illnesses.

Human error and its consequences also contributed to the prisoners’ misfortune. Fort Warren in Boston Harbor was one of the first sites selected as a prison and the first shipment of prisoners was nearly eight times larger than expected. As time went on, Federal authorities turned forts on the Atlantic coast into military prisons. Forts Warren, Lafayette, McHenry, and Delaware served as jails for blockade-runners, Confederate officers, and political prisoners. Fort

McHenry housed former Union officers now fighting on the Confederate side.

Fort Warren gained the distinction of housing such high-ranking Generals as

Richard S. Ewell, Isaac R. Trimble, John Gregg, and Simon Bolivar Buckner.

After the war it also served as the temporary residence of former Vice President of the Confederate States of America Alexander H. Stephens. Fort Delaware acquired its notoriety from its capacity to house large numbers of prisoners and its recurrent problems with drainage and sanitation.73

The powerful symbolism of military forts was not enough to stem the tide of

prisoners of war. As the conflict dragged on, Union officials sought to identify

73 O.R. ser.2, vol. 2: 110, 154–56;Edward A. Pollard, Observations in the North (Richmond, VA: n.p., 1865), 42–44; John A. Marshall, American Bastille: A History of the Illegal Arrest and Imprisonment of American Citizens During the Late Civil War (Philadelphia: Thomas W. Hartley, 1869), vi; Richard F. Hammerlein, Prisons and Prisoners of the Civil War (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1934), 26; Norman Rukert, Fort McHenry: Home of the Brave (Baltimore, MD: Bodine & Associates, Inc., 1983); O.R., ser. 2, vol. 2:228; Brian Temple, The Union Prison at Fort Delaware: A Perfect Hell on Earth (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2003), 39.

52 additional facilities suited to hold captives. Soon jails and state penitentiaries saw their prison rolls grow beyond petty thieves and occasional felons. Prisoners of war now joined common criminals in state-run institutions. Alton, Illinois, saw

its penitentiary commandeered and turned into a prisoner of war camp.

Columbus, Ohio, also witnessed its state prison turned into a jail for war captives.

The Columbus prison held the legendary Confederate General John Hunt Morgan

who staged one of the most daring escapes in the history of Civil War prisons.74

The Rebel capital was not the only population center burdened with prisoners

of war. In Washington, DC, the dilapidated Old Capitol served as a prison after

housing the U.S. Congress in the 1810s and then as a boarding house. This facility housed some of the Confederates captured at Manassas and functioned as a

prison until the end of the war. Luther R. Willis was one of the many soldiers who

spent time at the Old Capitol Building. Captured at Sayler’s Creek, he arrived on

April 14, 1865, hours before Lincoln’s assassination. His jailers placed Willis and his fellow prisoners like “sardines.” Following the President’s death, Willis’ life and that of his comrades hung in the balance. Mobs of Blacks and whites

surrounded the prison. Only the prompt action of Federal troops prevented the

mob from storming the building.75

74 Speers, Portals to Hell, 148–150; O.R., ser.2, vol. 6:588–89.

75 , Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York, : Harper and Brothers, 1941), 356–357; Luther E. Willis, Johnson’s Island Collection, OHS; Casstevens, “Out of the Mouth of Hell”, 109–119.

53 Cities in the Midwest also witnessed the arrival of thousands of captives. The authorities turned recruitment centers as well as the state fairgrounds into prisoner of war camps. Camp Morton, named after the Unionist Governor, contained hundreds of prisoners in the camp’s horse stalls and exhibition areas.

Rock Island, Illinois, faced similar challenges after Union authorities used it to house prisoners taken at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Rock Island suffered from incompetent administrators, a poor water supply, and insufficient staffing. By

December 1863, about 5,000 men had arrived at the facility and a few days later, cases of appeared. Eventually, smallpox became the prison’s deadliest threat killing 529 men.76

Illness, want, and death were not sufficient deterrents. The exigencies of war

prevailed, so many training facilities were converted into prisons. Other camps

appeared in Chicago, Illinois; Columbus, Ohio; Springfield, Illinois, and Elmira,

New York. All of them witnessed the same litany of apparently unavoidable

problems and half-hearted solutions. Camp Douglas finished the war with a ten

percent mortality rate and throughout the war experienced floods, brutal

weather, and epidemics. The facilities at Camp Chase, in Columbus, Ohio, and

Camp Butler near Springfield, Illinois, offered mediocre living conditions and

encountered some, if not all, of the logistical woes of hastily caring for thousands

of unexpected guests. By the summer of 1864, the Federal government had

converted a rendezvous point for western New York troops into a prisoner of war

76 Speers, Portals to Hell, 75–77; McAdams, Rebels at Rock Island, 51, 210.

54 camp. Ultimately known as Elmira, the facility would house close to 13,000 prisoners. Confederate inmates referred to it as “Hellmira” and many remembered it as the worst camp throughout the war. Nearly

3,000 men died there. The last Confederate prisoners walked out of Elmira on

September 27, 1865.77

In some prison camps, the authorities even failed to provide shelter so the inmates had to learn to fend for themselves. The South operated one of those facilities at Andersonville. The North built a similar one in Maryland on a strip of land where the Potomac River hugs the Chesapeake Bay and christened it Point

Lookout. The camp housed 20,000 prisoners living in government-issued tents.

Damp winters conspired with unhealthy water to make living conditions less than acceptable.78

Five hundred miles to the North, near Sandusky, Ohio, Union officials built a facility dedicated to housing Confederate officers. The Federal Quartermaster

General Montgomery Meigs ordered his newly appointed commissary general of prisoners, Lieutenant Colonel William Hoffman, to find a suitable location for a prison facility near Lake Erie. Hoffman’s search yielded Johnson’s Island, a strip of land about two and one-half miles off the shore at the city of Sandusky, Ohio.

77 George Levy, To Die in Chicago: Confederate Prisoners at Camp Douglas, 1862–1865 (Evanston, IL: Evanston Publishing, 1994); William H Knauss, The Story of Camp Chase: A History of the Prison and its Cemetery, Together With Other Cemeteries Where Confederate Prisoners are Buried, etc. (Nashville, TN, Dallas, TX: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Smith & Lamar, agents, 1906).

78 Speers, Portals to Hell, 151–154.

55 Johnson’s Island became the first Union camp created exclusively for Rebel officers captured in battle.79

The Island’s exclusive responsibility of caring for Confederate officers did not

translate into better conditions for its inmates. In fact, one Virginia native found

the place inconsequential and not very attractive. Johnson’s Island suffered from

inadequate sanitation, shoddy construction, and a mediocre water supply. Ohio’s

northern winters also contributed to the men’s misery. Like all Union prisons, it

quickly became full beyond capacity.80

The steady flow of new prisoners led Union authorities to convert other

islands into prisons. David’s Island, located in Long Island Sound, made the

transition from medical facility to prison in a relatively short time and soon

became home to nearly 2,500 Confederate prisoners. Hart Island, also in the New

York area and only a few miles south of David’s Island, opened for business just

as the Confederacy was dying in April 1865. Nevertheless, it became the final resting place for 235 Confederate soldiers. The seven percent death rate resulted from chronic diarrhea and pneumonia triggered by cold weather, overcrowding, and poor hygiene. The soon-to-be notorious Riker’s Island, located in New York’s

79 O.R., ser. 2, vol. 3:54.

80 Charles E. Frohman, Rebels on Lake Erie, Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1965; Westwood Todd, Johnson’s Island Collection, OHS; Henry Kyd Douglas, I Rode with Stonewall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), 260, 265.

56 East River, also held Confederate prisoners and like many of its counterparts

failed to care adequately for its inmates.81

On both sides of the conflict, more camps became available. Their diversity

was remarkable. Lesser-known places, big and small, such as Camp Ford near

Tyler, Texas, and Camp Groce at Hampstead, Texas, dotted the landscape. The

rather threatening images conjured up by sprawling compounds such as Elmira,

Point Lookout, and Andersonville co-existed with city halls, county jails, Masonic

temples, colleges, and private homes that, at one time or another, served as de

facto prisoner of war camps.82

When confronted with vast numbers of prisoners, Federal and Confederate officials took similar steps to deal with the situation. They took buildings,

intended for other purposes, and rushed them into service as detention centers.

They chose locations for similar reasons, deployed inadequate resources, and

interned the prisoners under less than ideal conditions. Initially, both sides tried

to make do with current facilities and antiquated delivery systems. When that

proved insufficient, the authorities ordered the construction of new facilities

away from the fighting. Northerners and Southerners appointed inexperienced

prison commissioners, unfit soldiers, and reluctant bureaucrats to manage these

new institutions. The result was a prison system born in haste, raised on faulty

81 Speers, Portals to Hell, 147–148, 254.

82 Charles C. Nott, Sketches in Prison Camp: A Continuation of Sketches of the War (New York: A. D. F. Randolph, 1865).

57 assumptions, and nurtured by inadequate resources. The consequence was needless suffering on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.

58 CHAPTER 3

“WHOLLY DESTITUTE OF GOVERNMENT”: PRISON LIFE

Samuel H. M. Byers of Iowa became a prisoner of war at Lookout Mountain,

Tennessee, in 1864. His trip to a prison camp followed a recognizable pattern.

Cursed and physically mistreated by his guards, he found himself traveling hundreds of miles by train, barge, and on foot until he reached Libby Prison in

Richmond, Virginia. There, he experienced the usual initiation inflicted on all

newcomers to Libby. Hundreds of veteran prisoners surrounded him chanting

“fresh fish, fresh fish!”83

Nearly 500 miles away, a Confederate lieutenant underwent the same

initiation rites. Horace Carpenter became a prisoner at Port Hudson, remained

on parole in New Orleans for two months, and finally got word that he was

heading for Johnson’s Island in Sandusky, Ohio. His trip to Ohio was uneventful,

and with all administrative formalities completed, Lieutenant Carpenter had his

first taste of prison life. As the big gates swung open, he recalled, seasoned

83 Samuel Hawkins Marshall Byers, What I Saw in Dixie or Sixteen Months in Rebel Prisons (Dansville, NY: Robbins & Poore, 1868), 8, 9.

59 prisoners greeted the newcomers with cries of “fresh fish, fresh fish!” This

gauntlet was bewildering, he recalled.84

In this chapter, I will examine the nature of captivity among soldiers from both North and South. The chapter will focus on the prisoners’ everyday life,

specifically how the prisoners transformed a situation that for many seemed

“unendurable” into a survivable experience.85

Once the initial shock of incarceration was over, the new captives grasped that

the first order of business was survival. Union soldier Robert H. Kellogg, for

example, realized that the simple observance of certain rules of conduct would

probably make all the difference. Self-discipline, he thought, would help him to

endure whatever lay ahead. In this test of wills, Kellogg had decided, he would

come out victorious. “I will live,” he said, “to spite them.”86

Northern prisoner Robert Loudon Drummond was also convinced that he had the right recipe for survival as well. He had a strong constitution, and faith in his country, and faith in his God. More importantly, “with true Scotch stubbornness” he was determined to live. John W. Northrop summed up his philosophy for survival by quoting from Seneca, “Let every man make the best of his lot and prepare for the worst.” Learning camp rules was indeed essential as Northrop learned while watching a prisoner shot by guards. He was thankful to his fellow

84 Horace Carpenter, “Plain Living at Johnson’s Island,” Century Magazine 41:5 (1891): 709.

85 Hiram Smith William, This War So Horrible: The Civil War Diary of Hiram Smith Williams (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 131.

86 Kellogg, Life and Death in Rebel Prisons, 88. 60 inmates who taught him camp rules and repaid their generosity by mentoring

new arrivals.87

The need to rely on friends and strangers made it clear that prison survival

was not a private endeavor. Many prisoners understood this and moved toward the creation of some form of social order. These arrangements focused on organization and support as they often do in civil society. The prisoners saw no

need to reinvent the wheel and they used instruments already at their disposal.

Federal Lieutenant George H. Putnam argued that the preservation of military

efficiency and discipline were key to survival, especially the observance of

military rank. He contended that often the enlisted men failed to exercise self-

restrain. This lack of control contributed to unnecessary illness and death.88

Discipline, self-respect, and its ancillary benefits were not the sole purview of

uniformed soldiers. Fraternal groups, well known and respected in civil life, made

their presence felt among the prisoners. Few were as active, North and South, as

the Order of Free and Accepted Masons. Freemasonry emerged out of the

medieval guilds of stonemasons that built the great Romanesque and Gothic

cathedrals and palaces of the later Middle Age. By the time the Civil War broke

out, thousands of Masonic lodges existed on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Men joined lodges for many reasons, including fraternity, prestige, social

87 Robert Loudon Drummond, The Religious Pray the Profane Swear: A Civil War Memoir (Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 2002), 56; John W. Northrop, Chronicle from the Diary of a War Prisoner in Andersonville, 59.

88 Putnam, Prisoner of War, 48–49.

61 mobility, and a modicum of spirituality. It also provided relief in times of distress

for the Mason and his dependents. Additionally, the Masonic Craft, with its

quasi-military traits, evoked the memory of some of the nation’s best-known

founding fathers.89

Masonic loyalty impressed non-Masons as well. Major William McKinley, an

Ohio native and future president, witnessed after the battle of Winchester a

Union surgeon sharing his time and money with Confederate prisoners. McKinley

later discovered that they were all Freemasons, and shortly thereafter he joined

the fraternity. Solon Hyde, a Union nurse doing time at Andersonville, noticed a

Masonic Temple already in place, with the traditional square and compass

suspended over the door. Illinois prisoner John McElroy recalled that

Freemasons outside the prisons assisted captives and were, in his opinion, one of

the few groups interested in the prisoners’ welfare.90

According to Masonic tradition, fraternal obligations extended to the grave. A.

J. Dunne, a prisoner at Camp Groce, Texas, witnessed one of these Masonic

duties as Union and Confederate Freemasons participated in a Masonic funeral.

Lieutenant S. M. Dufur of Company B, 1st Vermont Cavalry served as a conduit

between Union and Confederate Freemasons. Through his intervention, a dying

89 Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons: A History of the World’s Most Powerful Secret Society (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001), 205–221; For a look at Freemasonry’s role in the shaping of post- revolutionary America, see Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

90 William H. Armstrong, Major McKinley: William McKinley & the American Civil War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000), 100; Hyde, A Captive of War, 213; John McElroy, Andersonville: A Story of a Rebel Prison (Washington, DC: The National Tribune, 1899), 125.

62 Union prisoner received aid from a Confederate guard. Dufur showed the

Confederate guard the square and compass pin worn by his comrade in arms. The next day, the guard brought food and supplies for the dying man. In the case of

Freemasonry, the men were being loyal to fraternal ties begun in civilian life that were clearly elastic enough to withstand the strain of war.91

Freemasons were, however, not the only fraternal group represented in prison

camps. At Andersonville, the Odd Fellows also made their presence known.

Founded in eighteenth century England, the society brought men together for unity, mutual assistance, and fellowship. The idea of a group dedicated to mutual assistance seems to have struck many people as strange or odd. Odd Fellows remained true to their calling, and in addition to building a hut near the southeast corner of the camp, they provided aid and succor to their fellow brothers.92

The practice of brotherly love, relief, and solidarity among some prisoners did

not put an end to conflicts between prisoners. Not surprisingly, groups and

coalitions with distinct political agendas got organized in some prisons. At Rock

Island, Illinois, Confederate prisoners organized an underground operation

known as Seven Confederate Knights or 7CK. Its members swore to punish those

who took the Union’s oath of allegiance and to die rather than to take that oath.

91 S. M. Dufur, Over the Dead Line or Tracked by Bloodhounds (Burlington, VT: Free Press Association, 1902), 98, 99; A. J. Duganne, Camps and Prisons: Twenty Months in the Department of the Gulf (New York: J. P. Robens, 1865), 259.

92 James N. Miller, The Story of Andersonville and Florence (Des Moines, IA: Welch, 1900), 31; Don R. Smith and Wayne Robert, An Introduction to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Rebekahs (Linden, CA: Linden Publications, 1992).

63 The order’s motto was “It is sweet and becoming to die for one’s country.” Its

insignia consisted of a seven-pointed star. Ohioan Asa Isham remembered a

group known as the Council of Five Hundred, with the goal of engineering a

massive prison breakout.93

The hardships of imprisonment, and the prisons’ ensuing lawlessness,

convinced many soldiers of the need for mutual protection. The activities of

Andersonville’s Raiders offered the most vivid example of the need for self-

protection. This group became a criminal gang whose sole aim was to pillage and

rule the camp by force. Henry Wirz, Andersonville’s commander, did little to stop

them. Plagued by physical ailments, handicapped by his poor command of the

English language, and overwhelmed by the managerial challenges of the prison,

Wirz exercised a hands-off policy.94

This policy only further sent the prison into a downward spiral of anarchy and

violence, emboldening the Raiders. This, Warren Goss remembered, convinced many inmates to come together and to deal with the problem. The men, acting with Henry Wirz’s approval, built an opposition group called the Regulators and promptly rounded up nearly 200 criminals and handed them over to the

93 Asa Isham, Prisoners of War and Military Prisons; Personal Narratives of Experience in the Prisons at Richmond, Danville, Macon, Andersonville, Savannah, Millen, Charleston, and Columbia With a List of Officers Who Were Prisoners of War from January 1, 1864 (, OH: Lyman & Cushing, 1890), 52; Thomas F. Berry, Four Years with Morgan and Forrest (Oklahoma City, OK: Harlow Ratliff Company, 1914), 298:”C7K,” in (September 1904): 455.

94 Warren Lee Goss, The Soldier’s Story of His Captivity at Andersonville, Belle Isle and Other Rebel Prisons (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1867), 152; Darrett B. Rutman, “The War and Trial of Henry Wirz,” Civil War History 6 (117–133): 1960.

64 Confederate guards. Wirz ordered all but the most serious offenders back into the stockade. The prisoners organized their own form of punishment, and armed with clubs, they formed a gauntlet for the released Raiders. Prison authorities ordered the guards to fire at any Raider who refused to run the gauntlet.95

The group’s leadership encountered a different fate. General Richard Winder,

the Confederacy’s Prison Commissioner, granted the prisoners’ request to

conduct their own trial for the worst offenders. The jury consisted of eighteen

newly arrived prisoners. The prisoners elected three judges and several of the

in the prison prosecuted the cases. The jury found six men guilty, and all died on the gallows.96

For many prisoners, meeting violence with violence worked. At least, it

removed immediate threats of danger to themselves. Other forms of violence,

however, required different skills. How to handle the psychological isolation built

into captivity mandated a more nuanced response. Some prisoners opted to

define themselves, and often their cause, in contrast to their enemy and his

ideals. If the comparison was favorable, then their self-esteem improved. Civil

War prisoners, on both sides of the conflict, engaged in this exercise. Northerners

and Southerners experienced pride and devotion to their cause and hoped to

95 William Marvel, Andersonville: The Last Depot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 97.

96 Ibid; Grigsby, Smoked Yank, 113–119.

65 prove their superiority to their captors by adopting certain standards of conduct

when possible, or by swindling and humiliating the enemies if necessary.97

Standards of conduct were important to a Confederate officer with the unlikely name of Decimus et Ultimus Barziza. The adopted Texan was born on

September 4, 1838, in Virginia, the tenth and last son of Phillip Ignatius and

Cecelia Amanda (Bellett) Barziza. At the outbreak of the Civil War he volunteered for service and became part of General ’s Texas Brigade.

Wounded at Gettysburg, he spent time at Point Lookout and Johnson’s Island.

Barziza disliked northerners. He found them strange and was contemptuous of their ways. He described them as “bloated with self-love.” Warren Goss remembered trading with Confederate guards at Andersonville. He found them naïve. Union soldier O. H. Bixby became a prisoner after First Bull Run. The

Confederate authorities sent him to Richmond. Bixby was shocked by the treatment he received, particularly from Southern women. Only two women, he claimed, treated him well. He attributed their kindness to the fact that they were natives of New Jersey.98

The contempt was mutual. Bixby recalled South Carolinian soldiers making it

clear to him that they had no objection to fighting with gentlemen, but had no

desire to fight their social inferiors. New Yorker Henry MacArthur recalled some

97 On group affiliation, see David M. Messick and Diane N. Mackie, “Intergroup Relations,” Annual Review of Psychology 40 (1989) : 45-81; and Robert Joseph Ursano and James R. Rundell, “The Prisoner of War,” Military Medicine, 155 (April 1990): 176–177.

98 Decimus et Ultimus Barziza, The Adventures of a Prisoner of War, 1863–1864 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 55; Warren Lee Goss, The Soldier’s Story, 113; O.H. Bixby, Incidents in Dixie Being Ten Months, 20, 21.

66 of the speakers he heard while a prisoner at Camp Croce, Texas. One of the speeches drew a comparison between the ignorance of northerners and the intelligence of southerners. According to MacArthur, the speaker quoted the

Biblical story of David and Goliath to show that victory would crown Confederate efforts.99

In prison, conflict was not the sole domain of prisoners and guards. The

inmates’ politics, geographic distribution, and branch of service brought both

unity and conflict among the prisoners. Cavalryman John McElroy recalled

disagreements among the different groups. The cavalry, the artillery, and the

infantry bickered about their respective abilities and contributions to the war effort. New prisoners ran into trouble with veteran prisoners. Volunteer soldiers

distrusted those dubbed as “$300 men.” Western soldiers stayed away from

Easterners. Supporters and detractors of General McClellan often came to blows.

The level of turmoil among the prisoners led Andersonville inmate Eugene

Forbes to observe, undoubtedly with a good dose of hyperbole, that the prisoners

showed more cruelty to each other than the Rebel guards did.100

Sometimes, captives questioned their fellow inmates’ personal valor. In an

instant of anger, Andersonville inmate Charles Hopkins referred to the

compound’s 31,000 inhabitants as either “contented” or “cowards.” It would be

99 Ibid, 31; Henry Sheldon McArthur, USAMI; J. J. Greer, Beyond the Lines or A Yankee Prisoner Loose in Dixie (Philadelphia: J. W. Daughaday, 1863), 75.

100 John McElroy, Andersonville, 87; William B. Styple, ed., Death Before Dishonor: The Andersonville Diary of Eugene Forbes, 4th New Jersey Infantry (Kearny, NJ: Belle Grove Pub., 1995), 74.

67 next to impossible, he wrote, to keep these men locked up if they wanted to get

out. Charles Mattocks of the 17th felt the same way. He shrewdly observed

that some of the imprisoned officers enjoyed their “immunity” from bullets and

considered the adversity and trials of captivity a small price to pay for personal

safety.101

Bigotry also reared its ugly head in prison camps. Native-born soldiers often

displayed contempt for foreign-born men. Confederate troops captured General

Orlando Willcox at First Bull Run. The Detroit native soon traveled to Charleston

and Columbia, South Carolina, before arriving at Libby Prison. In one of his

letters home, Willcox referred to the Irish-born Colonel Michael Corcoran as “a

low-bred…cunning foreigner.” The prisoners, nonetheless, found that those same

ethnic ties, political affiliations, and religious connections could work to their

advantage. Bernhard Domschcke, editor of a German-language newspaper in

antebellum Milwaukee and a captain in the Wisconsin infantry, fell captive at

Gettysburg. While at Libby Prison, he noticed how men used influential friends

and family to get exchanged. Even religious affiliation, Domschcke noted, became

a useful tool used by the prisoners. On one occasion, Richmond’s Catholic bishop

visited the men to preach and share a meal with them. Catholics and non-

Catholics alike flocked to him. Within days, according to Domschcke, “Behold the

miracle! Catholics and all who claimed to be Catholics were exchanged.”

101 Charles Hopkins, The Andersonville Diary & Memoirs of Charles Hopkins 1st New Jersey (Kearny, NJ: Belle Grove Pub. Co., 1988), 93; Philip N. Racine, ed., Unspoiled Heart: The Journal of Charles Mattocks of the 17th Maine (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994).

68 Expressions of anti-Catholicism were not surprising in nineteenth century

America. In the 1840s and 1850s, the movement, fueled by

suspicions that German and Irish Catholic immigrants would soon overwhelm

the country, emerged as political force, ran national candidates, and managed to

carry the state of Massachusetts in the fall 1854 elections.102

Notwithstanding Domschcke’s observation, the fact remained that location,

not religion, determined the mechanics of prisoner exchange. For most Union

troops captured in the Eastern Theater, the long-awaited exchange meant a

march to Aiken’s Landing on the James River, and later on, City Point, Virginia.

At City Point, the men pledged not to return to combat until officially exchanged.

Confederate authorities then released them into Union hands, and after a short

boat ride, they landed in Annapolis, Maryland. After a week or so in the naval

city, the former prisoners arrived in Alexandria, Virginia, and waited for their

parole to become official. For Confederate troops captured in the west, the

gateway to the Confederacy was normally Vicksburg, Mississippi. Of all these

locations, City Point, Virginia, grew to unrivaled prominence. Historian Nelson

Lankford explained how the town exhibited the North’s industrial capacity for

waging war. The city, overlooking the James and Appomattox Rivers, became the

Federals’ supply base for the Union armies operating in the East. Following the spring portion of the 1864 , General Ulysses S. Grant

102 Bernhard Domschcke, Twenty Months in Captivity: Memoirs of a Union Officer in Confederate Prisons (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1987), 50.; Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850’s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Robert G. Scott, ed., Forgotten Valor: The Memoirs, Journals & Civil War Letters of Orlando B. Willcox (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1999), 337. 69 managed the from City Point nearly eight miles behind Union lines. During this time, the once moderately busy port became one of the world’s busiest as the North’s manufacturing capacity delivered massive quantities of food, clothing, ammunition, and other supplies for the . Most erstwhile captives, however, seemed unconcerned with City Point’s industrial prowess. They were simply happy to come home.103

For those who remained in prison, immediate survival, not the forlorn hope of

exchange, remained the key concern. For some of these men, ethnic fealty

became instrumental for adaptation and survival. Minnesotan Bjorn Aslakson

spent a year as a prisoner of war at Andersonville. Instead of bunking with total

strangers, he purposely sought the company of fellow Scandinavians, so they

could make a shelter together. Lieutenant Emeric Szabad followed a similar path.

Confederate forces captured the Hungarian-born soldier near Licking Run,

Virginia, in late 1863 and shipped him to Libby Prison. Upon his arrival, he

sought help from a fellow Hungarian with whom he shared eating utensils and

other goods. Iowan Francis C. Davies spent time at Salisbury, North Carolina,

and at Libby Prison. While at the Carolina stockade, he noticed that about 200

Catholics, mostly Irish, lived apart from the rest of the prison population. Finally,

Ohioan Solon Hyde recalled an Irish colonel who commanded an Irish brigade in

the Confederate Army. The officer made a series of recruiting trips to

Andersonville where he spoke to his “brethren from Erin’s Isle.” Irish soldiers in

103 Dunkelman, Brothers One and All, 148–149; Lankford, Richmond Burning, 157; Caváda, Libby Life, 200.

70 the prison booed the colonel. They made it clear that they would not turn their

backs on their adopted country.104

Prisoners on both sides of the conflict took their religion with them when they

became prisoners of war. Their faith gave many soldiers spiritual relief, as has

happened in many other conflicts. Their letters to friends and family made

frequent mention of religious conversions, prayer meetings, and Bible classes.

William Norman concentrated on his faith to distract himself from the gruesome

realities of prison life. He repeated the Lord’s Prayer often and kept “his mind on

God.” Tennessee-born Thomas Herndon informed his relatives of his efforts at

fasting and praying. He was, he said with some understatement, serious about his

faith. At Point Lookout, Maryland, Confederate prisoner Benjamin Anderson

Jones experienced a religious conversion. Northerner Bjorn Aslakson commented

that in the midst of the wretchedness of prison life, the word of God found willing

listeners among the prison population. These professions of faith bear witness

not only to the nation’s religious heritage, but also to the powerful religious

revival that swept the armies in late 1863 and 1864.105

104 Bjorn Aslakson, Carl I. Aslakson Papers, 1864–1980, MHI; Stephen Beszedits, ed., The Library Prison Diary of Colonel Emeric Szabad (Toronto: B&L Information Services, 1999), 84; Francis C. Reader, Papers, MHI; Hyde, A Captive of War, 266–270.

105 William Norman, A Portion of My Life: Being Short and Imperfect History Written While a Prisoners of War on Johnson’s Island, 1864 (Winston-Salem, NC: J. F. Blair, 1959), 16; Thomas Herndon, Civil War Reminiscences of Thomas Herndon, Colonel Co. L, 14th Tennessee Vol. Johnson’s Island Collection, OHS; Benjamin Anderson Jones, Papers, VHS; Bjorn Aslakson, Carl I. Aslakson Papers,1864–1980, MHI; Gardiner H. Shattuck, A Shield and Hiding Place: The Religious Life of Civil War Armies (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), 9.

71 Nourishing the soul, however, was not the only of prisoners’ concerns. Even

before capture, the men spent a good deal of time thinking about food, its

amount, and quality. The perception that their jailers intentionally withheld food

from them was chief among these concerns. Newspaper accounts increased these

perceptions. , for example, dramatically wrote about

“prisoners dying by inches in a lonely southern dungeon.” To make matters

worse, Federal authorities made known a retaliation program against

Confederate prisoners of war. The program yielded a three-pronged initiative

that included reduction of food, elimination of sutlers’ privileges, and halting of supplies from loved ones. Historian Bell I. Wiley explained, however, that the

Federals implemented the short-lived program as an across-the-board food reduction for prisoners as well as for Union soldiers. Congress had determined that army rations were plentiful. Furthermore, other historians have observed that these reductions affected non-food items such as candles and luxuries like and tea. In other words, these cutbacks reeked of bureaucratic overreaching more than strategic punishment.106

Civil War prisons, nonetheless, developed their own methods to organize the

ownership and allocation of economic resources. This system resulted from a

clash between command-driven solutions ordered by prison authorities and

106 William B. Hesseltine, “The Propaganda Literature of Confederate Prisons,” Journal of Southern History 1 (1935): 57; Our Prisoners Must Be Exchanged,” New York Times, July 9, 1862, 3; Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1952), 224–25; Jack Morris Ivy, Jr., “Camp Chase, Columbus, Ohio, 1861–1865: A Study of the Union’s Treatment of Confederate Prisoners of War,” (Master of Military Arts and Science Thesis: Command and General Staff College, 1990), pp. 64–67, 83, 91–96; Levy, 180–187.

72 market-generated alternatives implemented by prisoners and their relatives,

guards, and local merchants looking to turn a profit. The birth of this

microcosmic, profit-seeking economy is not unique to the Civil War. R. A.

Radford, a World War II prisoner of war, observed that outside agents such as the

Red Cross provided the men with basic food and shelter, and sometimes,

additional luxury items. But these goods did not stop the inmates from seeking to

improve their standard of living by exchanging commodities and services.107

The market economy ultimately triumphed and it was open to competition in

the production and delivery of merchandise and services. Everything had a price.

Next to food, sex became an important commodity bought, sold, or exchanged,

although prisoners rarely spoke explicitly about it. The evidence allows us to

surmise that some level of homosexual activity took place in prison camps.

Captain Domschcke, for example, was troubled by the widespread knowledge that some Union prisoners “did obscene favors” for the Rebel guards in return for lenient treatment. Confederate General James Archer in prison at Sandusky,

Ohio, was involved in an incident in which some prisoners “had General Archer down and they all got drunk and got hugging each other and saying that they had slept together many a time.” Sergeant Goss, the twice-captured Federal soldier, remembered one officer at Andersonville who kept a couple of handsome young

107 R. A. Radford, “The Economic Organization of a POW Camp,” Econometrica, 12: (1945).

73 men around the office and made “pets” of them. The officer referred to these men as “Yankee girls.”108

The allocation of scarce resources went far beyond meeting nutritional or

sexual needs. Men sought little extras that would bring joy and comfort in an

otherwise joyless and uncomfortable situation. In Johnson’s Island, Ohio, for

example, men sold their talents to the highest bidder. Barbers, shoemakers,

tailors, furniture makers, and bakers applied their trade. They sold items such as

gutta-percha jewelry, rings, pins, and furniture. Solon Hyde, the Army nurse held

at Andersonville, recalled a thriving market in a sector of the camp he referred to

as “commercial row.” According to Hyde, “No merchant on New York’s Broadway

ever put more vim and zeal into his business.” Tattoo artists also made a good

living at Andersonville. According to northerner Robert K. Sneden, the artists

charged from one dollar to five dollars per tattoo, and customers walked away

sporting hearts, men’s and regiments’ names, crossed flags, and muskets. Profits

from the tattoo business allowed soldiers to buy various goods from sutlers.

Andersonville residents Harkness Lay and Simon Peter Obermeir noted in their

diaries the price and variety of goods available for purchase at the stockade. At a

time when scarcity and even food riots plagued the South, prisoners with money

108 Domschcke, Twenty Months, 51; C. Van Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War Diary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 131; Goss, Soldier’s Story, 254.

74 and connections had access to apples at 25 cents each, butter for $4 a pound,

tomatoes for 50 cents each, and even whiskey for $400 a pint.109

Civil War prisoners of war used tobacco as a form of currency, just as some

troops did in World War II. At Point Lookout, Maryland, prisoners set up booths

to buy and sell tobacco. Confederate surgeon John Allan Wyeth remembered how

tobacco became an important medium of exchange. According to Wyeth,

entrepreneurs purchased tobacco from camp sutlers, divided it, and sold or

traded it at a profit. The common unit of currency was a "chaw" of tobacco, cut

about one inch square and a quarter of an inch thick.110

The unofficial market economy that flourished among the men was not

without its frustrations. Prison sutlers represented part of the problem. They

were civilians who followed the men from battlefields to prison camps to sell

their wares. The military regulated their prices and controlled their access to the

prisons. Some prisoners welcomed the sutlers’ presence, but many despised them

for hoarding goods and overcharging. Confederate Luther R. Willis expressed

109 Louis A. Brown, The Salisbury Prison: A Case Study of Confederate Military Prisons, 1861– 1865 (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Publishing Company, 1992), 57; Charles E. Frohman, Rebels on Lake Erie (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1965), 17. Hyde, A Captive of War, 220; Charles F. Bryan, Jr. and Nelson D. Lankford, eds., Robert K. Sneden, Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey (New York: Free Press, 2000), 232–233; Harkness Lay, Diary, RBH; Simon Peter Obermeir, Diary of Simon Peter Obermeir of Washington Township, Sandusky, Ohio Co. A 72nd Ohio Volunteers, RBH.

110 J. B. Stamp, “Ten Months Experience in Northern Prisons,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 18 (Winter 1965): 491–93; John Allan, Wyeth, With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Surgeon and Soldier (New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1914), 298.

75 outright hostility against sutlers and thought they should be hanged. Others felt that the sutler’s “confessed objective” was money and only money.111

Pursuing material comfort was not the prisoner’s only enterprise. Often the

men tricked the authorities to gain back some control over their situation. In

taking advantage of the guards, prisoners in the Civil War found both an

interesting method to obtain material goods and information. Consider, for

example, the experience of Sergeant Abram J. Price of Company G Sixth Ohio

Volunteers Infantry. Confederate troopers captured him at the Battle of

Chickamauga in 1863 and sent him on to Danville where the young sergeant

quickly mastered the art of bartering. One good pair of boots, he found, was

worth twenty loaves of bread. The agreement was uncomplicated enough. A

Confederate guard would provide ten loaves of bread and receive one boot. Upon

receiving the second consignment of ten loaves, the prisoners would surrender

the second boot. The problem, according to Price, was that Union soldiers did not

live up to the agreement. Sheer embarrassment and fear of official reprisals likely

prevented the guards from reporting the violations to their superiors.112

Prisoners often used roll call as an opportunity to harass guards. According to

Colonel Frederick A. Bartleson of Illinois, the men disrupted roll call by giving

erroneous numbers and failing to remain in place. These and other activities, the

111 Stephen T. Rives to H. A. Rives, February 29, 1865, Johnson’s Island Collection, OHS; Luther E. Wills, Reminiscences While a Prisoner at Johnson’s Island, OHS; Francis A. Lord, Civil War Sutlers and Their Wares (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969), 17, 81–89, 93.

112 Abram J. Price, A Narrative of Prison Life and Escape, OHS.

76 Illinois native confessed, kept the Confederate guards restless. Union Sergeant

John McElroy also remembered the prisoners building a scarecrow. The human figure “talked” to the guards and made them laugh. According to McElroy, the guards allowed these activities to occur partly because they were helpless to stop them. This community, he described with obvious exaggeration, included 25,000 boys and young men “wholly destitute of government.” For the outnumbered

Rebel guards, maintaining order in the prison was not possible. The bulk of their energies were concentrated on preventing escapes.113

The possibility of escapes coupled with the daily challenges of running a prison camp, kept officials uneasy. Rumors, both genuine and imaginary, became

endemic among the prisoners. The fact that both sides considered prison

breakouts throughout the war lent credibility to the endless prison chatter.

Dahlgren’s Raid had furnished a psychological blow to Confederate authorities.

Rumors of imminent attacks on Camp Douglas swept through Chicago and kept prison officials and city residents on edge. Other rumors about Confederate plans to rescue Johnson’s Island inmates added to the mix.114

Not all escapes received the prominence they deserved. Confederate Sergeant

Berry Greenwood Benson of McGowan’s Sharpshooters Battalion did not wait for

113 Margaret W. Peelle, ed., Letters from Libby Prison; Being the Authentic Letters Written While in Confederate Captivity in the Notorious Libby Prison, at Richmond (New York: Greenwich Book Publishers, 1956), 50–51; McElroy, Andersonville, 225; The literature by and about Vietnam-era prisoners of war indicates that many captives found humor to be helpful. Ralph Gaither, a Vietnam-era POW, recalled that humor under the difficult circumstances could be a useful, if covert, way of fighting back. See Ralph Gaither, With God in a POW Camp (Nashville, TN: Broddman Press, 1973).

114 Peelle, Letters from Libby Prison, 50–51; Charles Frohman Collection, RBH. 77 southern sympathizers to come to his rescue. In the fall of 1864, Benson dug his way out of and roamed the northern countryside for nearly three weeks. He trusted nobody and lied about his identity as often as necessary.

Benson alternately identified himself as a farmer in search of a stray horse or a distraught brother trying to reach an ill sister. He slept in cornfields and abandoned barns and he obtained food and information from unsuspecting farmers and city folk. He traveled on foot and stole rides on freight cars going to the South. By late October 1864, Benson crossed into Virginia and rejoined his old unit in a futile attempt to halt Grant’s final push into Richmond.115

The putative benefits of a successful prison breakout led the Confederate

secret service to plan a raid on the Union prison at Elmira, New York. To that

effect, a Confederate courier named John Surratt checked in to the St. Lawrence

Hall in Montreal in early April 1865. His job was to survey the New York prison

beforehand and report to General Edwin Gray Lee, the official in charge of

Canadian operations. The attack never materialized, and Surratt’s information

gathering activities in upstate New York hindered, but did not prevent, John

Wilkes Booth’s effort to commit .116

The collection of reliable information was one of the prisoner’s most

important tasks. In Columbia, South Carolina, Union prisoners held at the Old

115 Susan W. Benson, ed. Berry Benson’s Civil War Book: Memoirs of a Confederate Scout and Sharpshooter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1962), 156.

116 James L. Swanson, : The 12-day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 27; Michael W. Kauffman, American Brutus: and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2004), 203.

78 Lunatic Asylum received intelligence from Black civilians on Sherman’s approach to the city. As his forces closed in to deliver the final blows, the city was in an uproar. Even the panicky evacuation of the city did not prevent Union prisoners from learning the latest events. On February 13, 1865, the old Black man who delivered the camp’s firewood jumped down from the driver’s seat to fix the tailgate. He quietly informed the prisoners that Sherman was within thirty miles of the city. Thus, the prisoners found out that liberation was a few days away.117

Women also became important sources of information and aid. During his

imprisonment at Castle Lighting, Ohio native Abram Price observed Union

sentiment in the heart of the Confederacy. After a few months as a prisoner, he

noticed a young, white woman living directly across the street from the barracks.

She was a regular visitor to the prison and she became one of the men’s key sources of fresh information. According to Price, the unnamed woman, peered out the upstairs window of her house and communicated with the men through sign language. In Atlanta, an underground operation known as the Union Circle provided succor to Union prisoner in hospitals and jails all over the city. Emily

Farnsworth, a Massachusetts native, risked her life to bring food and news to

Union soldiers. Like other members of this pro-Union group, Farnsworth worked to validate her secessionist credentials by also visiting Confederate wounded.118

117 Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson and the Americans (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 7.

118 Abram Price, Papers, OHS; Thomas G. Dyer, Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 162–163.

79 While in jail, some captives found relief and expression in the cultural and

intellectual realms. For many prisoners, occupying the mind became an

obsession. Many decided to take the opportunity to learn foreign languages.

Johnson’s Island, Ohio, populated by Confederate officers, boasted of language

instruction in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, and French. Prisoners also

established musical and theatrical groups that put on shows for their fellow

prisoners. The minstrel show, one of the most popular forms of entertainment in

the nineteenth century, found an eager audience at Johnson’s Island, Ohio, where

the men organized “The Rebellonians,” a minstrel group that performed in the

prison’s Block Nine.119

Sports in general, mostly baseball, were also popular. Prisoners in Salisbury,

New Orleans, Tuscaloosa, and Johnson’s Island played baseball. Confederate

Edward D. Patterson provided a detailed look of a game played between the

“Confederate Baseball Club” and the “Southern Baseball Club.” According to

Patterson, the “Confederates” beat the “Southerners” nineteen to eleven and a considerable amount of money changed hands. This level of physical activity represented the exception, not the norm, at most prison camps. In fact,

Johnson’s Island was a special facility in which Union authorities housed only officers, usually the “best survivors” among prisoners of war.120

119 Roger Long, “Johnson’s Island Prison,” Blue & Gray, 12 (1987):22

120 Barrett, Yankee Rebel, 190; Speers, Portals to Hell, 327; Diane N. Mackie, “Intergroup Relations,” Annual Review of Psychology 40 (1989): 45–81; and Robert Joseph Ursano and James R. Rundell, “The Prisoner of War,” Military Medicine, 155 (April 1990): 176–177.

80 Surviving prison life was not merely an accident. As the evidence suggests, many prisoners developed a strategy. Once they understood the nature of their confinement, they organized their lives in the most sensible, productive ways they could. They relied on organizations that offered familiarity and security and set out to complete achievable tasks and to build spiritual, economic, and cultural enclaves that met their immediate needs, whether in the North or South. These accomplishments are hardly surprising considering the makeup of each army.

The prisoners were mostly young Americans, schooled in analogous values of patriotism, work, courage, and virtue. They shared comparable educational levels and similar images of the enemy across the battlefield. The locations and conditions of their captivity were, at best, undesirable, and at worst, criminally negligent. Neither side had a monopoly on mistreatment and suffering. Perhaps more important, however, is that most prisoners in both the North and South seemed to have understood the simple lesson that captivity did not represent an end to the struggle. Once the guns went silent, a contest of wits ensued.

81 CHAPTER 4

“LIKE STRAWS TO DROWNING MEN”: THE IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE

In early 1941, a secret branch of the British Special Operations Executive

decided to use Italian captives in the propaganda war it waged against fascist

Italy. The logic was simple: if British propaganda could influence Italian

prisoners of war, then the prisoners could spread the Allied message among their

fascist brethren. Meanwhile, in the Pacific war theater, American and British

forces routinely used Japanese prisoners of war as sources of information. The

Japanese soldiers’ code of conduct facilitated the process. Once Japanese soldiers

became prisoners, they felt dishonored and became willing to assist their captors.

The Allies, therefore, considered prisoners of war invaluable tools in their efforts

to defeat the Axis powers.121

The belligerent powers in the American Civil War also understood the

potential value of war captives. The evidence indicates, however, that neither

government had a methodical approach toward the indoctrination of prisoners of

war. Prisoners, guards, and relatives made up for this glaring strategic deficit.

121 Kent Fedorovich, “Propaganda and Political Warfare: The Foreign Office, Italian POWs and the Free Movement, 1940–43,” in Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich, eds., Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II (Oxford, England: Berg, 1996), 119–148; Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), 40–41.

82 They engaged in often planned, but mostly unstructured, surreptitious efforts to challenge and reeducate the enemy. In this war of ideas, the goal was to convince the opponents to change their allegiance. The method consisted of weakening the opponents’ morale by cutting off the supply of information, spreading rumors and half-truths, and offering enticements to those willing to shatter the bonds of sectional loyalty. This chapter demonstrates that both prisoners and guards joined in the ideological struggles that took place behind prison walls. Both groups tried to hold their ideological ground while attempting to undermine their opponents’ cause. The chapter also shows that neither side was particularly successful and that, comparatively speaking, few soldiers traversed the ideological divide.

The existence of some form of propaganda campaign inside prison camps was hardly unexpected. After all, Confederate and Union diplomats waged an all out propaganda war in , the former seeking foreign recognition while the latter worked against it. Seasoned diplomats such as Charles Francis Adams and

Thomas Haines Dudley ably represented Lincoln’s government. On the

Confederate side, James Mason and acted ineffectually as Jefferson

Davis’ representatives.122

The diplomatic battles went beyond the issue of foreign recognition. Union representatives, for example, downplayed European outrage over General

122 David Hepburn Milton, Lincoln’s Spymaster: Thomas Haines Dudley and the Liverpool Network (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003). For a look at the Confederate secret service, see James D. Bulloch, The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, or How the Confederate Cruisers Were Equipped (New York: Modern Library, 2001).

83 ’s infamous General Order Number 28. They also expressed consternation over the alleged production of a Confederate fleet on British naval yards. Southern authorities had their arguments to make. They emphasized the region’s cotton production and its critical importance to British manufacturing as well as the alleged hypocrisy of Lincoln’s government, the South’s military prowess, and focused on southern incompatibility with northern society. The diplomatic games abroad, however, represented only one phase of the struggle.

At home, President Lincoln restricted his involvement in the propaganda battles to occasional letters of support. Private groups and local municipalities carried out the ideological heavy lifting.

During the war, communities and individuals shaped the ideological agenda.

In the North, the agenda included support for the Union, ethnic pride, and if and when necessary, cash bounties. Irishmen on the Union side, for example, contributed soldiers and Catholic chaplains, and they proudly displayed the colors and symbols of the Emerald Isle. Southern propaganda incorporated the defense of southern society from an increasingly tyrannical Federal government.

Regional stereotypes assisted in these squabbles. Southerners had positive stereotypes of themselves and Northerners had negative stereotypes of

Southerners. In the South, Yankee greed was a favorite theme. Above the

84 Mason-Dixon Line, Northerners dwelled on the strength and resiliency of the

Yankee spirit.123

Not surprisingly, these regional caricatures affected the way prisoners and

guards interacted. Initially, animosity typified the relationship that existed

between captors and their jailers. Federal soldier James S. Anderson fell captive

at Chickamauga and spent time at Belle Isle, Danville, and Andersonville. He

came to despise his guards and referred to one of them as a “vulgar wretch.”

Union Sergeant H. Bixby found out that Richmond papers referred to Union

soldiers as Hessians. He retaliated by calling the Confederacy the

“Conthievederate States.”124

Southern contempt for Union guards was equally palpable. Confederate prisoner James A. Thomas wrote to his father from Camp Morton, Indiana, in

1863. He told him about the difficulties of prison life and complained about men that “clothed with a little brief authority” inflicted pain and suffering upon the prisoners. Thomas closed his missive with an optimistic note stating that the day would come when he and others would be compensated for every insult and every

123 Phillip Shaw Paludan, A People’s Contest: The Union & the Civil War, 1861–1865 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), 21, 24.

124 James S. Anderson, Nineteen Months a Prisoner of War in the Hands of the Rebels: Experience at Belle Isle, Richmond, Danville and Andersonville (Milwaukee, WI: Star and Son, 1865), 16.

85 blow. Louisianan William James McLean, an inmate at Fort Delaware, referred to

German-born Federal guard as “one thing dressed in soldier’s clothes.”125

Prisoners, on both sides, attempted to undermine the enemy’s resolve to fight.

Union prisoner John W. Urban witnessed such propaganda. The Rebel guards, he

remembered, tried to create the impression that the Federal government was

losing steam and had forgotten its prisoners, because he concluded, they hated

the Union and they wanted to recruit Union men. Oftentimes, guards engaged in

their own brand of political forecasting. Union soldier Daniel Kelley, captured at

Cold Harbor, was impressed with the guards’ curiosity. Above all, they wanted to

know if Lincoln would be re-elected. According to Kelly, the idea of Lincoln’s re-

election elicited dire predictions of four more years of war. From the days of

defiance in the winter of 1861 until Palm Sunday 1865, strong pro-Union feelings

had existed in the South. Lincoln knew this and took advantage of it.126

The experience of the so-called began amid some

uncertainty when Colonel James A. Mulligan, himself a former prisoner of war,

conjured up the idea of recruiting Southern men for the Union cause. Mulligan’s

initial target was the hundreds of Irish Confederates housed at Camp Douglas in

Chicago, Illinois. In February 1862, Mulligan wired General Henry W. Halleck seeking permission to recruit Confederate soldiers into the Union army. Halleck

125 James A. Thomas Letter to Father, September 26, 1863, FHS; William James McLean to Mother, December 12, 1863, Tulane Special Collections, TU.

126 John Urban, In Defense of the Union or Through Shot and Shell and Prison Pen (Chicago: Monarch Book Company 1887), 495; Daniel Kelly, What I Saw and Suffered in Rebel Prisons (Buffalo, NY: Printing House of Matthew & Warren, 1866), 22. 86 referred the Colonel’s request to the War Department and after receiving no answer, he authorized Mulligan to go ahead with the program. Before too long, the enterprising Colonel enlisted 228 Confederates in the Union Army. The plan, however, ran into a myriad of hurdles. First, word came that the War Department was banning the enlistment of prisoners of war. The ban, however, was apparently short-lived and by July 1862, Secretary Stanton authorized the U.S.

Marshal in to enter into conversations with prisoners of war to ascertain if they were interested in serving in the United States army. This policy seemed ad-hoc and by February 1863, Union field commanders seeking recruits among prisoners received instructions to the effect that the Secretary of War had forbidden the recruitment of prisoners of war. Stanton’s prohibition soon began to fragment and his War Department allowed exceptions in those cases where prison commanders could determine if the inmate seeking admission into Union ranks was truly loyal. This proviso resulted in an increase in the number of

Confederate prisoners joining the Union army but also led to a considerable increase in desertions among the newly-recruited soldiers. In August 1863,

Stanton moved to stop the bleeding by instructing commanders that prisoners could be accepted into the Union Army if they had been forced into rebel service, had tried but failed to escape, and loyal citizens could vouch for them.

Additionally, no prisoner could be released without the Secretary of War’s permission.127

127 Richard Nelson Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union soldiers from the Confederacy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 111–112.

87 Stanton’s good intentions greatly slowed the down the number of prisoners

eligible for recruitment. Meanwhile, some field and prison commanders sought

exceptions to the Secretary’s ruling in an attempt to accelerate the induction of

prisoners of war. Others ignored the acerbic war secretary and continued to

dispense the oath of allegiance. Finally, as prisoner of war camps bulged with

new prisoners, Stanton consulted with President Lincoln. The President decided

that something had to be done and moved to use the prisoner of war camp at

Point Lookout, Maryland, as a test case.128

In an attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff, the president composed a

questionnaire that prison officers would administer to every Confederate

prisoner of war housed at the aforementioned facility. The survey consisted of

four questions aimed at ascertaining the prisoner’s motives behind his

application to join the Federal Army. Camp officials privately quizzed nearly eight

thousand Confederates. One of those men was twenty-three year old Bartlett Y.

Malone. The North Carolinian participated in most of the great battles and

campaigns in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. In his diary, he described

how Union authorities privately interviewed every member of his company on the

oath question. According to Malone, his interrogators asked him these questions:

Do you wish to take the oath and join the U.S. forces? Do you wish to do

government work? Do you wish to be paroled and go home, provided your home

is inside Union lines? Do you wish to go south? Malone replied that he wished to

128 Ibid; Harold M. Hyman, “Lincoln’s Galvanized Yankees,” Lincoln Herald 65–66 (1963–1964): 32–36.

88 go back to the South. He and most of his colleagues would remain in custody

until the end of the war.129

Meanwhile, the President’s experiment worked. The interviews allowed the

Federal government to screen these prisoners and to permit one thousand of

them to take the oath. The Union had handpicked those on whose loyalty it could

rely. These individuals, Lincoln surely hoped, would assist in stitching the nation

back together. As usual, President Lincoln was thinking ahead.130

Federal prisoners also did some thinking. Many betrayed the cause and went

over to the enemy. Their reasons varied. Sergeant John Heimsvath of Company D

First Delaware wrote to Confederate authorities from Richmond’s Small Pox

Hospital on February 10, 1864. The young man informed the southern officials of

his wish to take the Oath of Allegiance to the Confederate States. His brother and

several relatives, Heimsvath indicated, were soldiers in the Rebel Army and he

was not interested in fighting against them. Union soldier Daniel Higgins, an

inmate at Castle Thunder, wrote to the prison commander Lieutenant R. M.

Booker. Higgins indicated that he wanted to be released and wished to join the

Confederate Navy. He praised Booker’s warm heart and closed the letter with

assurances of his trustworthiness.131

129 Ibid, 823; William Whatley Pierson, ed., The Diary of Barlett Yancey Malone (Chapel Hill,: University of North Carolina Press, 1919), 47.

130 Ibid.

131 John Heimsvath, Letter to Richmond’s Provost Marshal, VHS; Daniel Higgins to R. M. Booker, VHS.

89 For the men who remained loyal to the cause, no motive justified .

Whether “galvanized” Yankees or oath takers, the fact remained that going to the enemy’s side was betrayal. Prison authorities, a Union soldier recalled, moved the

“galvanized” soldiers from the prison immediately for their own safety. Those who remained loyal cursed and threatened them. Their former comrades in arms viewed them as treacherous men who were probably passing secrets to the guards. Officials at Elmira Prison did not take any chances. They built a new structure inside the camp for oath takers known as the “Glass House.”

Confederate prisoner John Copley recalled that at Camp Douglas, Illinois, the authorities ordered the prisoners to vacate certain barracks. They gave the newly furnished quarter, known as “Tory Barracks” or “Loyal Row,” to those favored by the authorities.132

Just as German officials would do during the Second World War, Federal authorities granted oath-takers special privileges such as jobs and extra rations.

Confederate David A. Deaderick recalled that when a soldier’s “grit” gave out, he would request the oath and his treatment would immediately improve. These soon-to-be galvanized Yankees wore a red flannel badge. Animosity against these men ran high. William McLean wrote home to his father and described the oath takers’ jobs as hauling “filth.” Illinois private John McElroy considered the galvanized Rebels’ new clothes and equipment a personal insult. New Jersey

132 John M. Copley, Sketch of the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, 150; Ransom, Andersonville Diary, 147–148.

90 native Eugene Forbes despised oath takers too. In the eyes of many soldiers,

these men had placed individual comfort ahead of the nation’s survival.133

In their refusal to accept the oath of allegiance, many Confederate soldiers fought against the notion that their cause was somehow flawed. Virginian R. B.

Ewan refused to take the oath while captive at Elmira Prison in upstate New

York. The offer to renounce the South was a blow to his loyalty. He went on to say that the southern cause was just, and he would rather remain in prison than accept the pledge. Others picked up the same theme by blaming not the cause, but the oath-takers. Confederate Tom Jenkins witnessed many Rebel soldiers taking the oath of allegiance and joining the Union cause while at Fort Delaware.

In his eyes, this treason was almost preordained. Those who deserted our country, he argued, were of northern birth. Their hearts, he concluded, were never with the Confederacy.134

At Rock Island, Illinois, those who remained loyal to the Confederate cause

decided to take matters into their own hands. When hundreds of Confederate

prisoners accepted Lincoln’s offer and took the oath, loyal southerners resolved

to offset the deleterious influence of such action by encouraging southern

133 Burke, “Curtis R. Burke’s Civil War Diary,” 116, 344–45; J. B. Stamp, “Ten Months Experience in Northern Prisons,” Alabama Historical Quarterly (1956), 18:495; Homer B. Sprague, Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons: A Personal Experience, 1864–1865 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Son, 1915), 65–66; David Anderson Deaderick, Papers. LC; William James McLean to father, March 19, 1864, Tulane Special Collections, TU; Eugene Forbes, Death Before Dishonor: The Andersonville Diary of Eugene Forbes (Kearny, NJ: Belle Grove Publishing, 1995), 132; McElroy, Andersonville, 551.

134 Michael Horigan, Elmira: Death Camp of the North (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002), 32–33; Dale Fetzer and Bruce Mowday, Unlikely Allies: Fort Delaware’s Prison Community in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000), 111.

91 prisoners to take a Confederate oath and join the Southern cavalry. The leaders of

this movement informed President Jefferson Davis that the purpose of this action

was to prevent other southerners from taking the “fatal step.” From prison, they

sought the Confederate President’s approval to accept these newly constituted

cavalry units and reminded him that these men had remained steadfastly loyal to

the South.135

The battle over the prisoner’s loyalty often took place beyond the prison walls.

Newspapers on both sides of the divide entered the ideological jousting and like

finely tuned prizefighters exchanged blows with frightful rapidity. The scuffle

between the New York Herald and Richmond’s Daily Dispatch over the

treatment of prisoners of war was typical. In its October 31, 1863, issue, the pro-

Union and venomously anti-Lincoln New York Herald detailed the arrival on northern soil of former prisoners. The paper claimed that Confederate authorities had mistreated the men. The exposé included the rhetorical question, “Now, what is to be done?” The paper answered its own question. “Those prisoners at

Richmond must be rescued by force of arms.” The Army of the Potomac, it went on to say, if properly equipped and led, could take the city of Richmond. The paper surmised that such an enterprise would make the Army unbeatable. A month later, the Herald, happy to blame Lincoln and his cabinet for any

135 O.R., ser. 2, Vol. 8:201–02.

92 transgressions revisited the issue of prisoners of war and publicly blamed

Secretary of War for delays in securing the prisoner’s release.136

Not to be outdone, Richmond’s Daily Dispatch matched the Herald’s

bellicosity. Two weeks after the Herald made its position known, the Richmond

paper editorialized about the treatment of northern soldiers. Allegations of

starvation and cruel treatment, the Dispatch indicated, were lies intended to

buoy the North’s declining spirit. The paper also took up the issue of

Confederates held in northern prisons, calling their treatment diabolical and

rejected the “crocodile tears” northerners shed over the suffering of Yankee

prisoners. The editorial, however, went on to defend the treatment of northern

prisoners on the grounds that southerners were defending themselves from an

invasion executed by savages. These and other highly public debates made their

way to prisons and became part of an important, albeit less public, struggle

between prisoners and their guards. The protagonists in this drama understood

the importance of using information as a weapon in the propaganda war.137

The political drama over the status of prisoners of war took the national stage on August 29, 1864. On that day, the Democratic National Convention assembled in Chicago, Illinois, and nominated General George B. McClellan for the presidency. The assembled Democrats declared their unswerving fidelity to the

Union. They referred to the war as four years of “failure” and accused the Lincoln

136 The New York Herald, October 31, 1863, p. 6; November 28, 1863, p. 6.

137 The Daily Dispatch, November 13, 1863, p. 2; November 30, 1863, p. 2.

93 Administration of using the pretence of military necessity to ignore the

Constitution. The Democrats attacked the administration’s disregard of Union

prisoners of war, claiming that the prisoners’ and the nation’s welfare demanded

an immediate cessation of hostilities. Ohioan Solon Hyde, an inmate at

Andersonville, vividly recalled the nomination of General McClellan for the

Presidency at the Democratic Convention. He remembered how Confederate

guards at the southern prison approached him to talk about the possibility of the

war ending. They seemed hopeful that a political compromise was in the making.

According to Hyde, the idea that Democrats might cut off war appropriations was

“like straws to drowning men.”138

The value of manipulating political events to debilitate the enemy’s resolve

became obvious early in the war. Private James Miller of the 111th Pennsylvania

wrote home in 1862 and informed his siblings that Rebel prisoners understood

the political divisions north of the Mason-Dixon Line. According to Miller, Rebels

showed an “air of superiority” and pointed to Democratic victories in midterm

elections as a sign of discord and turmoil in the North. The prisoners, Miller

remembered, were very much “tickled” by the results of the midterm elections.139

At Camp Lawton, another Georgia prison, a Union soldier recalled how Rebel guards furnished the prisoners with extracts from northern newspapers calling

138 South Trimble, ed., Platforms of the Two Great Political Parties, 1865–1912, Inclusive (Washington, DC: U.S. House of Representatives, 1912), 20–21; Hyde, A Captive of War, 266– 267.

139 Pvt. James Miller to brother, November 1862, Harpers Ferry, Va., Miller Brothers Papers, Schoff Collection.

94 the war a failure and exalting McClellan as the nation’s next president. According to Sergeant Oates, the Union prisoners retaliated against this form of propaganda by staging a mock presidential election and choosing by an overwhelming margin. The Rebels, Oates concluded, failed to appreciate that

Union men were willing to endure captivity and would never ask for peace.140

More entrepreneurial prisoners like Captain Alvah S. Skilton gave the

politicians a chance, weighed their options, and took action. The veteran of nine

engagements, the Ohioan ran out of luck on the outskirts of Atlanta and became a

prisoner. His diary made note of the “Chicago Convention” and described

political bantering among Union prisoners discussing the issue of prisoner

exchange. In his election-day entry on November 8, 1864, Skilton betrayed his

frustration at the government’s unwillingness to enact a workable exchange

system. He decided that if the government could not come up with a plan, he

would take matters into his own hands, so he escaped from prison two days later.

He managed to stay free until Confederate soldiers caught up with him near

Ducktown, Tennessee. He would remain a captive until the end of war.141

For those behind bars, the idea that northern political bickering and southern nationalism could compromise seemed to be a forlorn hope. Editorials and proclamations aside, the implementation of any workable agreement to conclude the war hinged on political matters beyond the prisoners’ control. Whether

140 Sergeant Oats, Prison Life in Dixie: Giving a Short History of the Inhuman and Barbarous Treatment of Our Soldiers by Rebel Authorities (Chicago: Central Books Concern, 1880), 136.

141 Alvah Stone Skilton, Civil War Diaries, RBH.

95 legislated or not by the Democrats, the issue remained in the hands of a determined President Lincoln, a stubborn Congress, and a recalcitrant southern legislature. The give and take of the democratic process would determine the issue’s fate.

Meanwhile, the relationship between prisoners and guards could be, at times, civilized. These encounters constituted a form of unintended indoctrination in which prisoners and guards got to know each other as people and dwelled on the many things they shared in common. Early in the war, Confederate troops captured Steven Schwartz, who remembered how his relationship with the guards became more and more cordial. The guards, according to the Union sergeant, visited the men often in perfect sociability. Federal prisoner John Urban tried to convince a Rebel guard to assist him in an escape attempt because the guard’s friendly manner had convinced Urban and some of his fellow inmates that he might be a Confederate sympathizer. Urban guessed wrong and received no assistance from the guard. One Union chaplain, a Rhode Island native, Henry S.

White remembered mingling with the guards in general conversation as

Confederate guards spoke freely about their objections to arming Blacks. William

Norman witnessed many political arguments, but never saw anyone switch sides.

Soldiers constantly traded “political questions,” he maintained, but everyone held their ground.142

142 Stephen Schwartz, Twenty-two Months a Prisoner of War: A Narrative of Twenty-two Month’s Imprisonment by the Confederates in Texas, Through General Twiggs’ Treachery Dating from April 1861 to February 1863 (St. Louis, MO: A. F. Nelson Publishing, 1892), 135– 136; Urban, In Defense of the Union, 438; White, Prison Life Among the Rebels, 17; Norman, 96 In some cases, these relationships could turn into business ventures. Consider the case of Captain John S. Kidder of the 112th New York Volunteers. The New

Yorker commanded a company of guards at Elmira Prison. A wound received at

the Battle of Spotsylvania landed him a new job guarding prisoners. Kidder was

content with his job and commented that most prisoners behaved well. While on

guard duty, two Confederate prisoners approached Kidder and told him that they

fought against him at the Battle of Spotsylvania. One of them accurately

described the wound suffered by Kidder’s commanding officer. Kidder, who had

seen former prisoners while at a hospital in Annapolis, was sympathetic to the

men’s situation. In an attempt to help the prisoners, and undoubtedly to help his

own finances, Kidder offered to assist the men in selling the rings and trinkets

they made to the citizens of Elmira. During the remainder of his time at Elmira,

he brokered many deals, kept an inventory, and developed a very successful small

business selling prisoner-made articles.143

Captain Kidder’s business was the exception, however, not the rule. Prisoners

and guards typically engaged each other either to take advantage of a given

situation or to influence and manipulate their opponents. Northern-born

Confederate Henry E. Henderson remembered how Union guards used gossip to

intimidate Confederate prisoners. According to Henderson, some of the guards

tried to frighten them with stories about Black soldiers murdering Confederate

William M. A Portion of My Life: Being a Short & Imperfect History Written While a Prisoner of War on Johnson’s Island (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1959), 205.

143 James M. Greiner, Subdued by the Sword: A Line Officer in the 121st New York Volunteers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 148–150.

97 soldiers on sight. Confederates used similar tactics to keep Union men on edge.

In the summer of 1863, Union Chaplain James McCabe found himself at Libby

Prison in Richmond. By early July, Confederate guards informed the Federal

prisoners of a Union debacle in Gettysburg. The news shocked the men. Finally, a

Black orderly told them the truth and the good news spread like wildfire. The

men celebrated with Chaplain McCabe leading them in singing “The Battle Hymn

of the Republic.”144

Often, prisoners dismissed true stories as enemy fabrications. According to

William J. McKell, on one occasion guards informed the men that local papers contained lots of news. McKell and his comrades rushed to obtain a copy. The paper, he recalled, contained one piece of news: an account of the Confederate victory at Fort Pillow. The Ohioan refused to believe its details, and ignored the story. Confederate prisoner Samuel Pickens, an inmate at Point Lookout, summed up the feelings of many when he said that most prison information was unreliable.145

The question of reliability was important. But even more critical was how to

reach and influence the enemy. Private Henry S. McArthur of Company B, 75th

New York Volunteer Infantry spent time at Camp Groce in Hempstead, Texas. In camp, the prison authorities held assemblies intended to kindle Confederate patriotism. For the prisoners’ benefit, the camp’s commanding officer staged the

144 Henderson, Yankee in Gray, 73; Paludan People’s Contest, 351.

145 McKell, Diary, RBH; G. Ward Hubbs, ed., Voices from Company D, 367.

98 meetings near the guard line where prisoners could hear the speakers. The

lectures consisted mostly of comparing the ignorant North and the chivalrous

South. Some speakers quoted the biblical story of David and Goliath and insisted

that God was on the southern side. Others directed their words to the prisoners

and told them about the hopelessness of the Union cause. Northern public

opinion remained divided, the speakers insisted, while southerners spoke with

one voice. Not surprisingly, the orators had a solution to the prisoners’ dilemma:

renounce the Lincoln administration.146

Southern prisoners equally resented Federal efforts to manipulate them.

Confederate soldier Miles O. Sherrill remembered how Union authorities at the

Elmira Prison in upstate New York induced southerners to become “trusties.”

According to Sherrill, these men would cheat their fellow soldiers. The existence of collaborators was of course, not a uniquely southern phenomenon. Union

Sergeant Goss recalled how the Confederate commissary employed Union prisoners to sell for him and to defraud fellow prisoners. According to Goss, the prisoners despised these men for their subservient attitude towards the Rebels.

Goss also observed that prison authorities tended to make these offers when conditions were particularly harsh.147

146 John Urban, In Defense of the Union or Through Shot and Shell and Prison Pen, 495; Daniel Kelly, What I Saw and Suffered in Rebel Prison, 19; Henry Sheldon McArthur, Dairy, USMHI.

147 Miles O. Sherrill, A Soldier’s Story: Prison Life and Other Incidents in the War of 1861–1865, 11; Goss, The Soldier’s Story, 167–168.

99 Some prisoners fought back against what they perceived as propaganda and

tried to set the record straight. Union soldier H. Bixby remembered speaking

with some of his captors on his way to New Orleans. One of them confided that he

was fighting because northern troops had come south to take their farms away

from them. Bixby informed him that Federal soldiers only wanted to put down

the Rebellion and not to take away his land. Jefferson Davis, Bixby insisted, had

misinformed the South regarding northern motives. Maine soldier Nathan Webb

recalled conversing with his Rebels guards and trying to show them how “the

” had deceived and led them to war. 148

The pressure to switch sides often came from outside the prison walls.

Confederate James A. Thomas had an interesting exchange with his father, who apparently suggested the possibility of accepting the oath of allegiance, to which his son replied that he would not renounce his government. He hated the enemy’s cause, he insisted, and to take the oath would be tantamount to perjury.

Confederate William J. McConathy must have sensed that his own father might have been considering posing the same question to him. In one of his letters, he thanked him for his “silence upon that point.”149

Many prisoners decided that every scrap of information coming from the

other side intended to undermine their support for the war. Confederate

148 Bixby, Incidents in Dixie, 44; Nathan Webb, Diary of Nathan Webb, March 19, 1862 through May 31st, 1864, ALPL.

149 John A. Thomas, Letter to Father, September 8, 1863, FHS; William J. McConathy, Letter to Father, January 24, 1863, FHS.

100 Lieutenant John M. Porter became a prisoner of war and found himself housed at

Johnson’s Island in Sandusky, Ohio. The manner in which Northern newspapers

covered the war disturbed the Kentuckian. He argued that the northern press

covered the alleged suffering of Union men at Richmond prisons, but said little

about the Federal treatment of Confederate prisoners. Porter concluded that the

enemy’s press was not trustworthy. Ohio prisoner William J. McKell offered a

stronger assessment. He described the contents of most newspapers and their editorials as lies. He thundered against the Richmond Examiner’s decision to publish a speech by a “Northern .” McKell dismissed the speech and did not bother to read it because he believed its sole purpose was to support the

Rebel cause.150

To the end of the conflict, some soldiers doubted the veracity of the

newspapers. On April 23, 1865, Union authorities offered Creed T. Davis and his

fellow prisoners the oath of allegiance. According to Davis, the prisoners agreed

to subscribe to it for two reasons: this action could no longer hurt the

Confederacy and to do otherwise would only bring about needless suffering. “The

Confederacy is dead,” Davis mused, “or so are the newspapers telling us.” Davis’

distrust is understandable but somewhat exaggerated. Not all newspapers aimed

at scoring propaganda points. Some just got their stories wrong. Iowan Samuel

150 John Porter, Papers, FHS; McKell, Diary, RBH.

101 H. M. Hawkins found out through a northern newspaper that he had perished in battle but he pinched himself and concluded he was, indeed, alive.151

The struggle to influence one’s enemy knew few boundaries. Both sides used

religion to score political points. North Carolinian William H. S. Burgwyn spent

time at Fort Delaware until his parole in March 1865 and while at the Maryland

prison, the young captain often attended religious services that included

propaganda. Burgwyn remembers enjoying the preaching of a Presbyterian

clergyman because it was free from “sectional matters.” Union soldier H. Bixby

attended an Episcopal religious service, which commenced with a long prayer for

Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy. Union soldiers hissed the minister until

he admitted that he prayed for Jeff Davis because his church obliged him to do

so. Union soldier Willard Wheeler had a similar experience at Libby Prison.

During church services, the preacher substituted the phrase “President of the

Confederate States” for “President of the United States” in his prayer book.

According to Wheeler, most of the audience walked out when the minister read

that passage.152

Religion was only one way to appeal to prisoners on behalf of a cause. The use

of what we might call celebrity endorsements was another and both sides used it.

After his famous escape from a Columbus, Ohio, prison, Confederate General

151 John Porter, Papers, FHS; Byers, What I saw in Dixie, 12; Creed Thomas Davis, VHS.

152 Herbert M. Schiller, ed., A Captain’s War: The Letters and Diaries of William H. S. Burgwyn 1861–1865 (Shippensburg, PA: The White Mane Publishing Co., 1994), 156; Bixby, Incidents in Dixie, 52. Willard W. Wheeler, The Diary of Willard Watson Wheeler August 24, 1861–Feb 15th, 1862 CL.

102 John Hunt Morgan became a celebrity for the southern cause. The famous escapee scheduled a visit to the Confederate prisoner of war camp in Danville,

Virginia, undoubtedly for recruiting purposes. The announcement indicated that the general would meet with any prisoners who would like to talk to him.

According to a Union prisoner, Morgan never showed up. The word among the

Federals was that he did not make an appearance because no one wanted to talk to him.153

The Federals also recognized the importance of these celebrity endorsements.

Five-hundred miles north of Danville, Virginia, the famed abolitionist Frederick

Douglass spoke to a packed house in Sandusky, Ohio, about the Union’s war

aims. Guards watching over Confederate inmates at Johnson’s Island made sure

the prisoners knew about Douglass’ visit to the area. Another celebrity used to

spread the Union message was Pauline Cushman, a white New Orleans-born

actress and occasional northern spy. She recorded Confederate troops

movements and passed the information along to the Federal’s Army of the

Cumberland. Eventually, her luck ran out and Confederate authorities jailed her

for spying but Union troops rescued her in a surprise operation. The Federals then granted Cushman an honorary commission and sent her on a speaking tour of northern cities, hoping that her story would assist with recruitment.154

153 Hyde, Captive of War, 131; James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008), 247.

154 Barrett, Yankee Rebel, 160; David William, A People’s History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom (New York: New Press, 2005), 141.

103 The Rebel government, plagued with high rates of desertion, was also interested in new conscripts. Recruitment was, in fact, the prime reason behind

Confederate efforts to indoctrinate its prisoners of war. Such efforts seemed to

backfire, however, and only provoked animosity on a large scale. According to

sergeant Samuel S. Boggs, the Rebels visited the stockade nearly every morning

trying to get craftsmen to take the non-combatant oath. The oath would make it

possible for Union prisoners to receive better treatment without bearing arms

against the North or assisting in any military operations. For Boggs, however, this

was tantamount to joining the Rebel Army. Willard Wheeler shared that view. He

would take a parole but would not do anything that would give the appearance of

an acknowledgement of the Southern Confederacy. New Jersey infantryman

Charles Hopkins received an offer for a non-combat oath, but he too refused. He

said he would rather die than betray the cause. Simon Peter Obermeir, a member

of Company A, 72nd Ohio Volunteers, recalled that Rebel authorities targeted

“foreigners” and those whose enlistments had expired. The Confederates had no

takers. “The boys,” Obermeir indicated, literally told the Rebels “to go to hell.”155

The need to strengthen the Confederate ranks led recruiters to try some rather

peculiar strategies. New Yorker Robert L. Drummond witnessed some of them

after he surrendered to the Eighth Alabama Regiment in the fall of 1864. He

spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner at Libby Prison, and then at

155 Boggs, Eighteen Months a Prisoner Under the Rebel Flag, 32; Willard W. Wheeler, Diary, CL; William B. Styple and John J. Fitzpatrick, eds., The Andersonville Diary & Memoirs of Charles Hopkins 1st New Jersey Infantry (Kearny, NJ: Belle Grove Pub., 1988), 74; Simon Peter Obermeir, Diary of Simon Peter Obermeir of Washington Township, Sandusky, Ohio Co. A 72nd Ohio Volunteers, RBH.

104 Salisbury, North Carolina. While at the North Carolina enclave, Drummond noticed that on certain days a recruiting officer would march into the stockade followed by a well-dressed and well-fed Confederate soldier and a Black man carrying bread and meat. The officer’s message was clear—to remain in prison was tantamount to death, but to swear allegiance to the Confederacy meant food and clothing. According to Drummond, the officer would conclude his argument with an “air of self-satisfaction.”156

Escaping the harshness of prison life was not the only reason soldiers chose to

betray the cause. More routine concerns sometimes came into play. The evidence

indicates that those who had relatives or close friends on the other side were

more likely to make the leap requesting to switch sides. The foreign-born had

unresolved loyalty issues that made them easier targets for an indoctrination program. Other soldiers, as a Confederate prison guard told his father after a visit to Andersonville, were just “tired of the war.”157

The struggle over the prisoners’ hearts and minds yielded a few converts.

Neither side took full advantage of the conflicted loyalties and disillusionment

that affected many soldiers. The Federal bureaucracy, for example, allowed

nearly two years to transpire from the moment Colonel Mulligan broached the

idea of using foreign-born parolees as soldiers to the moment when Lincoln’s

questionnaire arrived at Point Lookout. On the Confederate side, the choices

156 Robert L. Drummond, The Religious Pray the Profane Swear: A Civil war Memoir (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publisher, 2002), 69–70.

157 James Miller Wysor to Father, Sunday August 7, 1864, VHS.

105 were limited. Unlike the Lincoln administration, the Confederacy spent the war

trying to safeguard its independence, not of reuniting a divided country. Its

military planners’ main concern was the preservation of a combat-worthy army.

They did try to pressure Federal captives to leave the fold and join the South, but

with very limited success. With no workable cartel and with few Union men

taking the bait, the Confederacy’s choice was to release the prisoners

unconditionally, or as one Union captive once observed, to leave the men to “root

hog or die.” The Confederacy made its choice.158

Next to the galvanized Yankees program, the Union’s best attempt to

indoctrinate and lure Confederate soldiers resided in the generous terms of

Lincoln’s reconstruction plan. The plan, based on reunion, did not call for the

removal of the cultural elements that led the vanquished foes to take up arms. Its

blueprint for reconstruction included the Ten-Percent Plan, which specified that

a southern state could be readmitted into the Union once ten percent of its voters

(from the voter rolls for the election of 1860) swore an oath of allegiance to the

Union. Voters could then elect delegates to draft revised state constitutions and establish new state governments. Additionally, the plan called for an unconditional pardon for all white southerners, except for high-ranking

Confederate army officers and government officials. Lincoln guaranteed that the

Federal government would respect private property except for slaves.159

158 Day, Fifteen Months in Dixie, 28.

159 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 35–37.

106 With the exception of Lincoln’s initiatives, the indoctrination of prisoners of

war lacked cohesion. Neither side attempted the formal re-education classes that

other governments would try in the next century. Any successful efforts appeared

to have been more the result of individual initiatives and personal contacts. The

very image of prisoner of war camps probably contributed to this reality. Prisoner

of war camps sheltered the remnants of the losing faction. The unqualified, the

crippled, and the young pulled the administrative levers. Very few surmised that

such a place could be a vital cog in the overall war effort.160

The military’s attitude toward the value of prisoners of war was also an

important factor. To his credit, U. S. Grant and his Bureau of Military Intelligence

did not think much of information obtained under duress. In fact, General Grant often complained about the quality of information volunteered by prisoners of war and did not like the idea of Confederate deserters facing their erstwhile comrades in battle. His dealings with the First U.S. Volunteers illustrate the

point. In July 1864, the regiment, who had been recruited at the Prison Lookout

camp, led a raiding party into Elizabeth City, North Carolina. General Grant was

uneasy by the possibility that these former Confederates, if captured, would be

punished as deserters. For their protection, Grant sent the First U.S. Volunteers

to assist General John Pope in Minnesota where other Confederate deserters had

been serving with the Thirtieth Wisconsin Cavalry. The Confederates faced a

160 For some examples of political reeducation programs, see Curt Bondy, “Observations and Reeducation of German Prisoners of War.” Harvard Educational Review 14 (Jan., 1944): 12–19; Henry W. Ehrmann, “An Experiment in Political Education.” Social Research, (Sept. 1947): 146– 54; Judith Gansberg, Stalag USA: The Remarkable Story of German POWs in America (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1977).

107 similar dilemma. They found themselves in possession of thousands of Union

men apparently willing to take the oath and join the Confederacy. But on the few

occasions when galvanized soldiers took the field the results proved so

disappointing that General William Hardee recommended that “all authority to organize similar commands be revoked.”161

The issue of how far the governments should have gone in enticing prisoners

of war to cross the ideological line is hard to gauge. The soldiers’ letters revealed a steadfast commitment to their cause, an unwillingness to betray family,

community, and country. In the face of such fealty, it is understandable that the

incentive of better treatment failed.

161 William B. Feis, Grant’s Secret Service: The Intelligence War from Belmont to Appomattox (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 199–200; Richard Nelson Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists, 121, 130.

108 CHAPTER 5

“HIS FACE AND HIS UNIFORM WERE HIS FATE”: BLACKS SOLDIERS AND THE WAR

The battle lasted three days. A white officer recounted what happened once the victor, tired and impatient to exact some measure of revenge, took control.

The enemy, he remembered, “appeared furious, beside himself.” An officer intervened and managed to save the white troops from execution. Black soldiers,

however, did not fare well. Within a few moments, there were no Black soldiers

alive anymore. The year was 1940. The massacre took place in the small French

village of Airaines. Elements of the German Second, Sixth, and 46th Infantry as

well the Fifth and Seventh Panzer divisions had faced stiff resistance from the

Mixed Senegalese Regiment of Colonial Infantry. White officers led the Black

regiments made up of reliable, French-speaking Senegalese troops. The massacre at Airanes was not an isolated incident. Murder, abuse, and neglect of French- speaking Black prisoners of war became a common occurrence in May and June

1940 as the German army fought its way toward .162

162 Raffael Scheck, “They are Just Savages: German Massacres of Black Soldiers from the French Army in 1940,” The Journal of Modern History 77 (June 2005): 330–331; See also David Killingray, “Africans and African Americans in Enemy Hands,” in Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich, eds., Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II (Oxford, England: Berg, 1996), 181–204.

109 Seventy-six years earlier, a very different war had yielded similar episodes. In

April 1864, the Union garrison at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, included 295 white

Tennessee troops and 262 U.S. Colored Troops. Confederate Major General

Nathan Bedford Forrest attacked the fort on April 12 with a cavalry division of

2,500 men and demanded . Union commanders refused,

and the Confederates overran the fort. Casualties were high, and only sixty-two

Black soldiers survived the encounter. Confederate soldiers executed scores of

Blacks after they surrendered. Union Naval Officer William Ferguson visited the

fort the day after the battle and concluded that evidence of a massacre was

unmistakable. The Fort Pillow Massacre became a symbol of Rebel hatred of

Black troops, and cemented the Black troops’ resolve to join the war effort.163

For all soldiers, the decision to enter the struggle was fraught with danger. For

African-American troops the war experience was yet more complicated. In the battlefield, they encountered the chasm between the South’s official policy of re-

enslavement and the reality of an enemy determined to kill as many of them as

possible, sometimes including those wounded or taken captive. Exceedingly

harsh treatment awaited those who somehow made it to prison. In camp, they

lived next to men suspicious of their valor and often contending that Blacks had

no place in fighting in a white man’s war.

163 John Cimprich, Fort Pillow, A Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Andrew Ward, River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (New York: Viking, 2005).

110 The American Civil War was never quite a white man’s war. Since the 1830s,

Americans had thoroughly debated slavery and its various related issues. After the opening of hostilities and Lincoln’s call for volunteers, the debate over the fate of Black Americans did not lessen in importance. If anything, it became more

intense. In the South, some free Blacks attempted in vain to join the southern

militias. In the North, Union Generals David Hunter and John W. Phelps sought,

also unsuccessfully, to raise Black troops. The generals’ failure was, however,

short-lived. Three months later, the Federal government passed the Militia Act of

1862. The act permitted the use of Black labor in the performance of non-combat

duties. By January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation made it lawful for

Black Americans to join the Federal armed forces. Two months later, President

Lincoln enacted the first national draft, and by late spring, various Union

generals had launched recruiting initiatives. In March 1863, a mere nine weeks

after the President declared that former slaves were now “forever free,” nine

hundred Black troops from the 1st and 2nd South Carolina paved the way for

thousands of African-Americans troops by seizing Jacksonville, Florida. Black

military involvement in the war had commenced in earnest and at war’s end, the

Army of the James contained the largest percentage of United States Colored

Troops (USCT) of any Civil War army. Blacks composed nearly 40 percent of its officers and enlisted soldiers.164

164 Charles H. Wesley, “The Employment of Negroes as Soldiers in the Confederate Army,” Journal of Negro History, 4 (July 1919), 243; Ira , Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867: Series II The Black Military Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 6–7, 41–43; James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War, (New York: 111 The enlistment of Blacks elicited a strong reaction on both sides of the

conflict. In the North, there was confusion as well as widespread opposition to

the use of African-Americans as soldiers. Many white northerners disliked the

idea of serving next to their Blacks counterparts. A New York soldier explained

that whites were “too superior” to fight next to African-Americans. Ohio-born

General William T. Sherman made it clear from the outset that he believed the

war should be a white man’s war. He cruelly commented that “sandbags” would

be more useful than Black soldiers. Congressman George Julian of Indiana

remarked that northerners hated African-Americans with a “supreme hatred.”165

The opposition to African-American enlistment was, however, not unanimous. Some prominent Black citizens lobbied the government to permit

Blacks to enlist and fight in the armed forces. Chief among them was Frederick

Douglass. The Marylander made his views known in speeches and writings, and in private meetings with President Lincoln. Eventually, efforts by Douglass and

1965), 565; Stephen V. Ash, Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That Changed the Course of the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); Edward G. Longacre, “Black Troops in the Army of the James, 1863–1865,” Military Affairs 45 (1) (February 1981): 1– 8.

165 Robertson, Soldiers Blue and Gray, 31; Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman (New York: Random Press, 1995), 158; McPherson, Negro Civil War, 248. The debate over Black enlistment did not prevent Blacks from serving in the U.S. Navy. The United States had always employed Black sailors. African-Americans had served with distinction in the Navy during Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and even in peacetime. At war’s end, Blacks composed twenty-five percent of the Federal navy. For more on Black sailors see: Herbert Aptheker, Negro Casualties in the Civil War (Washington, DC: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., 1947), 67–59.

112 others paid off. He personally helped to enlist men for the Fifty-fourth and Fifty- fifth Massachusetts Colored Regiments.166

Some northern newspapers viewed the enlistment of Black soldiers as a military necessity. In 1863, The Daily Cleveland Herald, in Cleveland, Ohio editorialized about the need to bring Blacks troops into the conflict. The paper acknowledged that the war had not gone well and that not enough white men had volunteered into service. The answer to this dilemma, the paper concluded, was the enlistment of Black soldiers. Crushing slavery, the paper argued, is the only way to end the war and one hundred thousand Black troops, armed and equipped, can do the job. With great foresight, The Daily Cleveland closed its editorial by warning potential black soldiers that, if captured, they would receive no mercy from the enemy.167

Many northern soldiers understood the potential benefits of enlisting Black troops. Virginia-born and West Point-educated George H. Thomas was one them.

This graduate of West Point had remained loyal to the Union, and when confronted with the issue of Black troops he opined that if Blacks were property, then the Federal government was within its constitutional right to seize property to put down the Rebellion. Thomas went further and argued that military life could assist Blacks in the transition from slavery to freedom. Iowan Charles O.

Musser wrote to his father in 1863 and insisted that most of his comrades saw the

166 David W. Blight, Fredrick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).

167 “The Enlistment of the Blacks,” The Daily Cleveland Herald, Saturday, May 23, 1863; Is. 121.

113 enlisting of Black soldiers as a “necessity.” Blacks, he argued, will fight “like

demons” because “they know their fate if taken prisoner.” Maine soldier Daniel

W. Sawtell echoed Musser’s analogy. In a letter to his sister, he wrote that Blacks

fought harder because, if captured, they probably would not get home.168

The Confederacy reacted to the Union’s policy of arming Blacks with anger.

For the South, Black recruitment was an attempt to bring on a “servile war.”

President Jefferson Davis declared that his government would charge Federal officers captured in areas included by the Emancipation Proclamation with leading such a war. In Southern states, the penalty for leading an insurrection was death. Fortunately, the execution of white officers was never widespread, and all credible evidence indicates that Confederate troops put to death eleven Union officers from Black units. The fate of Black soldiers captured in battle was, however, another story.169

The Richmond government had not drafted a policy addressing the treatment

of Black prisoners. When Confederate field officers demanded advice on how to

proceed, Rebel authorities issued a series of conflicting orders that often led to

enslavement and murder. Finally, on November 30, 1862, the Confederate

168 Thomas B. Buell, Warrior Generals, 351; Barry Popchock, ed., Soldier Boy: The Civil War Letters of Charles O. Musser, 29th Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 58; Peter H. Buckingham, ed., All’s For the Best: The Civil War Reminiscences and Letters of Daniel W. Sawtelle, Eighth Maine Volunteer Infantry (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 221.

169 O.R., ser. 2, vol. 5:940; William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and his Hour (New York: Harper Collins, 1991); .); On May 1st, 1863, the Confederate Congress passed a resolution decreeing death for captured white officers of Black Union soldier units. Some scholars have determined that the Confederate government never officially implemented the policy. See James G. Hollandsworth, “The Execution of White Officers from Black Units by Confederate Forces during the Civil War,” Louisiana History 35 (1994): 489.

114 Secretary of War, James A. Seddon, informed General Pierre T. Beauregard that

the Confederate government would not recognize Union Black soldiers as

legitimate combatants, and Seddon recommended the summary execution of

Blacks captured in arms.170

Seddon’s recommendation created a new issue for the Federal government: how to protect Black soldiers captured in battle. Abuses against Black prisoners quickly captured headlines. Newspapers routinely published accounts of

Confederate mistreatment of African-American soldiers. Harper’s Weekly, for

example, described executions at Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, and Battery

Wagner. The New York Times cheered reports that, under pressure from Union

General Benjamin Butler, General Lee was treating captured Blacks as prisoners of war.171

Northern Blacks also joined the voices demanding protection and equal

treatment for African-American captives. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton got an

earful from New Yorker Theodore Hodgkins who sternly warned him that, “no

soldier whom the government will not protect can be depended upon.” Hannah

Johnson, the mother of a soldier in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, urged

President Lincoln to retaliate against Rebel soldiers and to “do it at once.” James

Henry Gooding, a Black merchant marine and journalist, also pressured the

170 O.R., ser. 2, vol. 4, 945-946, 954; Howard C. Westwood, “Captive Black Union Soldiers in Charleston: What To Do?,” Civil War History, 28 (1982), 28–44.

171 “Rebel Atrocities,” Harper’s Weekly, May 21, 1864, 334; “From the Army of the James,” The New York Times, October 24, 1864, 1.

115 government in his weekly column in the New Bedford Mercury. He advocated for the rights of Black men to enlist and to receive equal pay. Gooding did more than writing. He joined the Massachusetts 54th and participated in the regiment’s

major engagements. On March 9, 1864, the Mercury erroneously reported

Gooding’s death at the . The truth was perhaps sadder.

Confederates captured Gooding after he was wounded. Like many of his white

counterparts, he made the perilous journey to Andersonville where he died five

months after his arrival.172

The nation’s best-known Black activist, , also demanded protection for Black prisoners. He accused President Lincoln of indifference to

the fate of Blacks captives. The murder of these prisoners, Douglass wrote,

seemed to affect the President “as little as the slaughter of beeves for the use in

the Army.” Douglass’ insistence on retaliatory measures finally prevailed. In

August 1863, two weeks after the assault on in South Carolina,

Lincoln issued a retaliatory order. The President warned that his government

would not tolerate the murder, selling or enslavement of Black Union soldiers.

Lincoln’s words sent a clear message: the policy of separate and unequal that

existed in the Union Army had its limits.173

172 Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, (eds.), The Black Military Experience (Cambridge, England, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 587; Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, (eds.), Freedom’s Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War (Cambridge, England, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 108; Virginia Matzke Adams, On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letter From the Front, Corporal Gooding (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), xiv, 114.

173 David Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 166–167.

116 Unfortunately for Black soldiers, Presidential edicts had little power below the

Mason-Dixon Line. After the Battle of Milliken’s Bend on June 7, 1863, Union officers alerted General Grant that few, if any, Black soldiers captured in battle had been paroled or exchanged. Grant broached the matter with Confederate

General and demanded equal protection for his Black soldiers.

Taylor remained faithful to Confederate edicts and replied to Grant that his command would turn over Black troops to the civil authorities for prosecution.174

Efforts to compel Rebel officers to recognize Blacks prisoners as legitimate

soldiers continued throughout the war. On July 22, 1864, Confederate troops

wounded and captured Private Wilson Wood of the Sixth U.S. Colored Heavy

Artillery. The Rebels held the wounded soldier in a prison camp. The prison

commander, Colonel William P. Hardeman, wrote to his counterpart and

informed him that Private Wood was receiving “such medical attention as we

have.” He promptly added that Confederate policy regarded Private Wood as a

runaway slave and that his previous owner, or the Confederate government,

would return him to slavery. The Union commander, Brigadier General J. M.

Brayman, answered the missive. He reminded Hardeman that the United States

would stand for all soldiers “who might wear its uniform and bear its flag.” He

warned Colonel Hardeman that, “for every black soldier reduced to slavery,” he

was empowered to “exact ample retaliation.”175

174 Wilson, Black Phalanx, 315–16; O.R., ser.2, Vol. 5:940.

175 National Archives, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780s–1917, RG 94.

117 General Ulysses S. Grant agreed that those who wore the uniform and bore

the flag deserved Federal protection. In the fall of 1864, he articulated his views

on Black prisoners in correspondence with General Robert E. Lee. On October 1,

Lee proposed to Grant the reestablishment of the old exchange cartel and Grant

immediately inquired about the status of Black prisoners. He pressed Lee by

asking if he planned to treat Black men the same as white soldiers. Lee, following

Richmond’s policy, replied that his government was willing to exchange all

captured soldiers of “whatever nation or color” with the exception of Confederate

deserters and “Negroes belonging to our citizens.”176

Grant dismissed Lee’s offer, indicating that the United States was committed

to securing all lawful rights for its soldiers. He pressed Lee again, and Lee once

again repeated Confederate policy. He was willing to reestablish a general

exchange, but “recaptured” Southern property was not subject for exchange. The right course of action, he concluded, was the prompt return of all property to the rightful owners. Grant took the legal high ground and argued that escaped slaves, by virtue of their service to the Union, had earned equality under the laws of warfare. Lee balked, and without mentioning them by name, harkened back to the legal precedents of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision of 1857. In other words, former slaves had no right to personhood and remained

176 Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (New York: Random House, 2000), 203–208.

118 property subjected to the disposition of their owners. Legal arguments and high-

level diplomacy aside, the facts on the ground remained unchanged.177

From the outset, the presence of Black troops on the battlefield enraged most

white Confederate troops. A South Carolinian described for his sister a bloody

encounter with Black troops in which Confederates allegedly killed hundreds of

Black soldiers and took only two prisoners. In the same battle, rebels captured

approximately one thousand white troops. After the , the

Army of Northern Virginia’s Chief of Artillery, General Edward Porter Alexander

commented that some of the Black prisoners surrendered but Confederates shot

them anyway. He admitted that there was a “great deal of unnecessary

killings.”178

To justify their slaughter, Confederate troops demonized Blacks soldiers.

North Carolinian Matthew Love described to his mother the killing of Black

troops. According to Love, his men shot and bayoneted the “heathen,” explaining

that he and his men did not care whether they captured or killed Black troops.

The thing they disliked most was the need to bury them. Before the Battle of

Olustee, a Confederate lieutenant reminded his troops that Black soldiers had

177 Ibid; Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Against Adversity, 1822–1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 381–382.

178 J. Roderick Heller, III and Carolyn Ayers Heller, eds., The Confederacy Is on Her Way Up the Spout: Letters to South Carolina, 1861–1864 (Athens: University of Georgia, 1992), 123; Edward Porter Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander, Gary Gallagher, ed., (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1989), 462.

119 come south to pillage, kill, and rape and he encouraged his men to take no prisoners.179

The barbarous practice of mutilating the enemy found willing practitioners on

both sides of the conflict. Confederate guerrillas captured twenty men from the

51st U.S. Colored Infantry and mutilated them. They also shot their white

lieutenant in the mouth. Similar acts of brutality took place in Kentucky and

Georgia, where Southern guerrillas captured and hacked Black soldiers to death.

In Saltville, Virginia, Confederates entered a Union hospital and executed

wounded Blacks soldiers in their beds. Eyewitnesses alleged that guerrilla chief

Champ Ferguson walked about the battlefield executing Black and white prisoners. After the war, Union authorities tried, convicted, and hanged Ferguson for murder. In Jackson, Louisiana, a Confederate Lieutenant shot dead a wounded Black soldier and bragged about having personally shot thirteen Black prisoners. Confederate General Kirby Smith reminded General Richard Taylor

that a “no quarter policy” was the easiest way to handle the dilemma of Black prisoners of war.180

179 Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (New York: Random House, 2000), 205; Arthur W. Bergeron Jr., “The Battle of Olustee,” in John David Smith, ed., Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, 2002), 144.

180 Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliances of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Meridian Books, 1991), 157–158; Thomas D. Mays, “The Battle of Saltville,” in John David Smith, ed., Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003), 213; George S. Burkhardt, Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War (Carbondale, IL: Southern University Press, 2007), 187–201; Thurman Sensing, : Confederate Guerilla (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1942); O.R., ser. 2 vol. 6, 21–22.

120 Black troops answered Confederate mistreatment with fury. In Louisiana, a

company of Black cavalrymen seized and executed seventeen Confederates. In

South Carolina, a Confederate general alleged that members of the 26th U.S.

Colored Infantry stabbed a wounded southern prisoner to death. A Maine

cavalryman told his friends back home that some of his Black troops executed

Confederate soldiers after they surrendered.181

If captured, Black soldiers needed all the bravery they could muster.

Confederates trapped H. B. Turrill, an enlisted white man in the 72nd Ohio, at the

Battle of Guntown, Mississippi. The Ohioan remembered how well his Black

comrades-in-arms performed in battle and how when captured, they marched

along amidst “the cruel jibes, curses, and threats.” The Confederates, Turrill

remembered, shot Blacks for “mere sport.” For the Black soldier, he concluded,

“his face and his uniform were his fate.” After the Battle of Crater, Rebels paraded

Black captives through the streets of Petersburg, Virginia, in what a captured

Union officer recalled as a circus-like atmosphere. Onlookers called out verbally

“see the white and nigger equality soldiers” and “yanks and niggers sleep in the same bed!”182

Those who made it to a prisoner of war camp fared no better. Henry Lull of

the 146th New York remembered that Confederate guards punched Black soldiers

181 Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, 156.

182 H. B. Turrill, “Guntown: The Hideous Butchery of the Colored Troops in the Disastrous Retreat,” The National Tribune, October 27, 1892, 2; Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862–1865 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 247–248.

121 and denied them medical treatment. Elgin Woods of the 11th Massachusetts saw

Rebel guards verbally abuse Black prisoners of war and treat them “worse than

dumb brutes.” New Yorker Oliver B. Fairbanks recalled how Black prisoners went

without nourishment for days rather than beg Confederate guards for food.

Warren Goss claimed that, in the course of carrying out amputations, Rebel surgeons purposely mutilated Black soldiers.183

Confederate troops also felt great anger and bewilderment at white Union

officers leading Black troops. They questioned the officers’ motives. They sensed

these men represented the leading edge of a new social order they loathed. John

McElroy recalled the treatment given to Major Albert Bogle of the Eight U.S.

Colored Troops, that of “studied indignity.” According to McElroy, the Rebels

took every opportunity to insult him. Federal Lieutenant John Viers encountered a similar fate after he led Black troops in combat. Confederate troops seized the wounded officer after a fierce struggle, and then chastised him for “commanding niggers.” The Union officer retorted that he was proud to command Black troops.184

Disdain for Black soldiers and their officers was not the sole preserve of the

Confederate rank-and-file. On October 13, 1864, Kentucky-born and West Point-

183 George J. W. Urwin, Black Flag Over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 79; Luis F. Emilo, A Brave Black Regimen: History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863– 1865 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 429; Goss, Soldier’s Story, 159.

184 John McElroy, Andersonville, XX; Versalle F. Washington, Eagles on Their Buttons: A Black Infantry Regiment in the Civil War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 59.

122 graduate Confederate General John Bell Hood surrounded a Union garrison near

Dalton, Georgia. Colonel Lewis Johnson, a white officer, commanded the Union

outpost together with the 44th U.S. Colored Infantry. Hood, the famed one-legged

and one-armed general, brought superior force to bear and demanded the

garrison’s immediate surrender. Hood offered no terms. Johnson’s choice was

surrender or death. Johnson asked if Hood would respect all soldiers’ rights as prisoners of war. Hood ignored the question and insisted on immediate surrender, adding ominously that he could not restrain his men and “would not if

he could” [emphasis mine].185

Johnson had reasons to be concerned. He mentioned in his official report of

the encounter that Patrick Cleburne’s division was “overanxious to get at the

niggers.” Ironically, Cleburne himself had proposed, on January 2, 1864, the

emancipation of southern slaves and their admission into the Confederate army.

The Irish-born Major General was convinced that slavery had become one of the

Confederacy’s main weaknesses and that its termination would reinforce the

Southern cause. Confederate authorities rebuffed Cleburne’s proposal and, on this day, Hood’s superior numbers prevailed and Johnson gave in to the inevitable and capitulated. Confederate soldiers stole the prisoners’ valuables, and then, separated the Black prisoners from the rest. Hood turned over more than 600 Blacks and their white officers to Major General Bates’ division. Bates’

Tennessee troops subjected the white officers to a torrent of insults. On their way

185 O.R., ser. 1, Vol., 39, 719.

123 to a prisoner of war camp, they executed a Black soldier who refused to work and

murdered five others unable to keep up with the marching column. Ignoring

Colonel Johnson’s protests, Hood sent Blacks from Ohio and Indiana to the

South as slaves. Confederate soldiers threatened Johnson and his men

throughout the march, and according to Johnson, only the prompt intervention of Rebel guards saved his life.186

The South’s top field commander, Robert E. Lee, also harbored doubts about the fighting capacities of the Black soldiers. On September 20, 1863, Lee informed Jefferson Davis about the gathering of Union forces in Norfolk,

Virginia, where occupation forces included Black troops. Without fully understanding the enemy’s capabilities, Lee concluded they would not be a

serious threat. Nearly a year later, he suggested a daring raid to liberate Southern

prisoners held at Point Lookout, Maryland. Lee’s rationale for the proposed

assault lay on the fact that Blacks represented the majority of the troops at Point

Lookout. From Black soldiers and the poor leadership of their white officers, Lee concluded, “a stubborn resistance…may not be reasonably expected.” The

General was wrong. He misjudged the abilities of Black soldiers and the key role they would play in the conflict.187

186 Ibid; Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 274–276; Sword, Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, 56–57; Craig L. Symonds, Stonewall of the West: Patrick Clerburne and the Civil War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), 181–202.

187 Fellman, Making of Robert E. Lee, 204.

124 During the Civil War African-Americans did more than to fight and die for the

Union. Slavery had prepared many Blacks to work behind Rebel lines. Illinois native John McElroy encountered southern Blacks pressed into service as prison workers at Andersonville. He noticed their “cunning and secretiveness.”

According to McElroy, the slaves had profound interest in the Federal prisoners of war but veiled it, if necessary. In the presence of Rebel soldiers, slaves faked ignorance, beyond the reach of southern guards, they understood that Union soldiers were allies and offered their help. This assistance took the form of information, supplies, and guidance, and saved the lives of many Union soldiers caught behind enemy lines.188

One of those knowledgeable, willing accomplices was Alonzo Jackson. This

South Carolinian slave rendered assistance to many Union escapees running

away from the Confederate prison at Florence, South Carolina. According to

Jackson, he often showed soldiers the way to the Union gunboats. In one

instance, he personally escorted prisoners into Union-controlled territory. An

unidentified Black woman assisted Union escapee S. M. Durfur. After convincing

herself that Durfur was not dangerous, she confided in him that he wasn’t as ugly

as she thought he would be and did not have horns. She proceeded to divide her

scanty rations with him.189

188 John McElroy, Andersonville, 134.

189 Henry H. Eby, Observations of an Illinois Boy in Battle, Camp and Prisons—1861 to 1865 (Mendota, IL: The author, 1910); Ira Berlin et al., eds., Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom and the Civil War (Edison, NJ: The Blue & Grey Press, 1992), 156; S. M. Dufur, Over the Deadline, 150.

125 When Ohioan Nelson Purdum escaped from Libby Prison, he owed his

success to the kindness of Blacks Southerners in Virginia. During his run for the

Union lines, Purdum affirmed that he and his comrades only trusted Blacks.

Michigander John Ransom also managed to break out, and in his quest to reach

friendly lines, he also relied on the protection of Blacks. On one occasion, the

timely advice of a nameless Black woman prevented Ransom’s party from

running headlong into a Confederate picket.190

African-Americans offered more than directions and good wishes. Anne

Green, a former slave from Durham County, North Carolina, vividly recalled the

assistance her mother and other slaves rendered to a wounded Union escapee.

According to Green, the badly wounded man was “just a boy” and needed help.

The slaves promptly hid the man, patched his wounds, and fed him a decent

meal. When a Confederate party appeared in search of the man, the slaves

claimed ignorance. That night, according to Green, the former prisoner headed

north clutching under his arm a parcel of food and a bottle of brandy.191

Blacks were equally instrumental within prison walls. J. J. Greer sought the

assistance of Blacks in his escape attempt and he referred to them as “faithful and

unwavering friends.” With their help, he managed to obtain a map, a rope, and a

chisel. Lieutenant Colonel Fredrick Bartleson recalled how potential escapees

190 Ransom, Andersonville Diary, 208; Nelson Purdum, Papers 1862–1892, OHS.

191 Sarah Anne Green, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938. Library of Congress American Memory Project, October 15, 2007

126 sent a Black child through a recently-dug tunnel in order to measure its fitness

for an escape. He also remembered that the Black man who swept out the prison

gave the Union men intelligence about the guards, warning them that prison

authorities suspected that they had hidden a large cache of gunpowder in an

underground tunnel. Union captive George Bailey remembered that he received

information from the outside world thanks to the “ingenuity” of slaves who

smuggled newspapers and other items into the prison.192

The daring of Blacks was also evident in the area of military intelligence. The

contribution of Blacks to what a historian referred to as the “intelligence war” was

incalculable. Union soldiers christened information received from African-

Americans as “Black dispatches.” In May 1863, Confederate General Robert E.

Lee publicly recognized that the chief source of information to the enemy was

“through our Negroes.” If that was true, then Charlie Wright was Lee’s worst

nightmare. Wright arrived at Union lines from Culpeper, Virginia, in June 1863.

The Bureau of Military Information debriefed the young Black man. Intelligence

officers recognized Wright’s reliability, especially his knowledge of troop

dispositions and movements. The wealth of his information convinced General

Joseph Hooker that Lee’s army was on the move and heading north into

Maryland.193

192 J. J. Greer, Beyond the Lines, 58; Eby, Observations of an Illinois Boy, 173; Peelle, Letters from Libby Prison, 40–41, 76; George Bailey, A Private Chapter of the War, 47.

193 P. K. Rose, Black Dispatches: Black American Contributions to Union Intelligence During the Civil War (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1998), 5; O.R., ser.2 vol. 25, 826.

127 Blacks provided field as well as naval intelligence. The case of South Carolina

slave offers a good example. Confederate authorities employed

Smalls as wheelman on the steamer Planter. Upon hearing about the Federal’s willingness to enlist Blacks, Smalls took the Planter and surrendered it to the

Union Navy, carrying the ship’s Black crew and their families past Confederate

gunboats. As he left slavery behind, Smalls lowered the South Carolina colors and

hoisted a white flag. Smalls became a Union sailor and participated in seventeen

engagements. After the war, he represented South Carolina in the U.S. House of

Representatives from 1875 to 1887.194

When hostilities broke out in 1861, some slaves remained in the Confederacy

and played an important, albeit discreet, role as spies. William Jackson, for

instance, worked as Jefferson Davis’ coachman. On April 17, 1862, he escaped

into Union lines. The former slave made the best of his situation and granted an

extensive interview to the New York Tribune. The Union scored propaganda

points as Jackson depicted Jefferson Davis as “ill” and described a Confederate

leadership in turmoil. Mary Louvestre gathered information about Confederate

plans to refit the ironclad Merrimac and passed it along to Union forces, which

allowed the to accelerate completion of its own ironclad, the Monitor.

194 Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 71–74, McPherson, Negro’s Civil War, 154–157; Nalty, Blacks in the Military, 178–181.

128 Mary Elizabeth Bowser played a similar role, laboring as a house slave in the

Confederate and was part of Elizabeth Van Lew’s spy ring.195

For African-American troops, the conflict that erupted in 1861 was a parallel civil war. While Union and Confederate soldiers treated most white captives as prisoners of war, Black troops experienced a brutal and unpredictable reality. In this other war, the rules of combat did not always apply and Black troops surrendered at their own peril. African-Americans remained, however, undeterred. They became an important part in the Federals’ war effort by providing muscle and flexibility to Grant’s army. The Confederate government’s resolution to deny Black soldiers prisoner of war status created additional challenges to Federal authority, but more importantly, it forced the Lincoln administration to take a very public position on its commitment to the freedom and equality of all its soldiers. Perhaps more significant was the African-

American troops’ willingness to serve in spite of the inherent risk of captivity. By doing so, Black prisoners of war forced the country and its leaders to recognize publicly that they deserved equality and protection under the law.196

195 Joan E. Cashin, First Lady of the Confederacy: ’ Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 126–127; Quarles, The Negro Civil War, 91–92; Joe H. Mays, Black Americans and their Contributions Toward Union Victory in the American Civil War, 1861– 1865 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 66–67;.David D. Ryan, A Yankee Spy in Richmond: The Civil War Diary of “Crazy Bet” Van Lew (Mechanisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1996); Elizabeth R. Varon, Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)

196Gabor S. Boritt (ed.), Why the Confederacy Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 137. 129 CHAPTER 6

“A VAST MUSEUM OF HUMAN CHARACTER”: LESSONS LEARNED

In August of 1862, Philip Lutes, a 24-year-old farmer from Stark County,

Ohio, feeling pressured by , enlisted as a private in Toledo, Ohio, with

Company K, 100th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Lutes, the eldest of six children,

fought in half a dozen engagements. He was among those of the regiment taken

on September 8, 1863, while guarding the railroad at the Virginia state line.

Confederates imprisoned him at Richmond, Virginia, where he died on

November 1, 1863, less than two months after his capture. In one of these letters

home, Lutes informed his brother that most white soldiers of his acquaintance

were “cool” to the Emancipation Proclamation, although some soldiers wanted

the slaves freed. His personal views were, however, clear. “I want slavery blotted out,” he told his brother, “so it will never be the cause of another war.”197

The privations of captivity left an indelible mark on some men. For many

former prisoners, the scars of confinement made readjustment to civilian life

nearly impossible. Captivity had been particularly unkind to Jason Roberts. The

father of five children returned home to Indiana damaged by scurvy. Throughout

197 Philip Lutes Collection, 1862–1863, RBH.

130 the rest of his life, other chronic ailments affected the once healthy man. Roberts’

wife noted erratic, and at times, violent behavior toward his family and

neighbors. His condition worsened, and by 1886, his wife had the once vibrant

farmer committed to the Indiana Hospital for the Insane. His admission record

included the notation, “suffered in prison during war.”198

Thus far, suffering has remained the focal point of the prison experience

during the Civil War. Historians continue to argue over the severity of prison life,

the number of victims, and the need to assign blame. Few, if any, have viewed

and analyzed captivity as a formative experience. This chapter proposes that for

some men, captivity was an affirmative, life-altering experience. For some men, a

series of practical lessons could be drawn from the ongoing battle to stay alive in

a foreign and dangerous setting.

The lessons that enabled soldiers in both the North and South to endure

captivity varied from man to man. Such lessons even provided some prisoners

with a deeper understanding of themselves and what might be called the human

condition. This education imbued some men with a sense of self-respect,

developed in them leadership qualities, and assisted them to rethink an imperfect

past and outline a more hopeful future. In the end, some men learned that they

did not have to be passive victims. They could confront captivity, gain some

control over their current situation, and develop a reservoir of life-enhancing

skills they could deploy later in life. Prison time, in spite of its undeniable

198 Eric Dean, Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam and the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 84–85, 87.

131 hardships, affected some constructive transformations among those men ensnared in its clutches.

For some prisoners, the lessons began before they arrived at a prisoner of war camp. Confederate guerrillas operating in the Shenandoah Valley captured Union cavalryman Joseph Schubert as he walked down a country road. The Rebels escorted him to their commanding officer, Confederate Colonel John Singleton

Mosby. Schubert was nervous, as Mosby had developed a reputation for shooting or prisoners. The guerrilla commander sensed the young man’s apprehension and assured him that his life was not in danger.

For the next few days, Schubert received invaluable lessons on how guerrillas operated. He learned that Mosby and his men had regular places, local farms where they obtained shelter, food, and intelligence. Only Mosby seemed to know

the group’s final destination. In five or six days on the road, Schubert never saw a single Union soldier. He would spend time at Libby Prison, Bell Isle, and

Andersonville, and he would conclude that prison life was more challenging than

any battlefield.199

The trials of prison life demanded a variety of coping skills. Confederate

Lieutenant John M. Porter drew some subtle lessons from his confinement.

Prison life, he observed, provided a unique opportunity for the study of human nature and for learning the virtue of patience. Other soldiers agreed. General

Orlando B. Willcox wrote to his wife from Libby Prison and assured her that

199 Joseph Schubert, Papers, USMHI.

132 captivity had not broken his spirit. He informed her that he had learned virtues such as “patience and caution.” Thomas W. wrote to his mother in 1863 from Camp Chase, Ohio. The solitude of prison, he told her, had helped him to mature his judgment.200

Few soldiers analyzed human nature as keenly as Sergeant Warren Lee Goss.

By his own account, flag raisings and other expressions of devotion to the Union led the Massachusetts soldier to join in the upcoming fight. Goss fell captive early in the war, was exchanged, recaptured, and sent to Andersonville. While at the

Georgia camp, he wrote his observations of what it took to stay alive in such a place. His analysis called for five crucial elements: adaptation, denial of one’s immediate reality, optimism, resistance, and new priorities. In prison, the New

Englander pointed out, adaptation is crucial. The survivor, he went on to say, is,

“the calm, phlegmatic man of philosophical balance.” To survive in prison, he indicated, every misfortune must be turned into a victory, every tragedy into an opportunity. Sergeant Goss claimed that imprisonment was a life-changing event.

The experience reordered a man’s values and priorities, thus altering his station in life. The standards of merit valued among friends and family back home no longer held sway. Prison life established a new order of things, and those who managed these new sets of principles stood a better chance for survival. Goss, like

200 John M. Porter, Diary, FHS; Robert G. Scott, ed., Forgotten Valor: The Memoirs, Journals & Civil War Letters of Orlando B. Willcox (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1999), 337; Thomas W. Bullitt to mother, January 3rd, 1863, Bullitt Family Papers, FHS.

133 many other prisoners of war, emerged from captivity somewhat physically frail but also stronger psychologically.201

Like Sergeant Goss, Lieutenant Colonel Federíco Fernández-Caváda spent a good deal of time trying to understand human behavior under the duress of prison life. For him, the odd behavior exhibited by some of the prisoners was the outer manifestation of an internal struggle. This psychological brawl, Fernández-

Caváda concluded, pitted the soldier against the inner civilian in constant antagonism. The struggle ebbed and flowed with unintended consequences.

When the soldier prevailed, he claimed, the prisoner handled captivity better.

The opposite was true when the civilian won the match. Those moments led the prisoner into a pattern of despondency. Minnesotan Bjorn Aslakson reached his own conclusions about human behavior in captivity. In prison, he recalled, adaptation was the key. The human system, he concluded, can get used to hardship, particularly if it has not been “pampered” too much.202

The homogeneity that typified Civil War armies, particularly southern troops, faded away in captivity. It was true that many men sought company among their own kind, but avoiding the diversity of captivity was nearly impossible. John

McElroy, a Kentucky-born Union soldier, spent time at Andersonville with the

48th New York. He found the New Yorkers “odd” and their peculiarity was a

“source of never-failing interest.” Known as the L’Enfants Perdu or the Lost

201 Goss, Soldier’s Story, 40, 92–93, 104; Warren Lee Goss. “Recollections of a Private” (Part I), The Century Magazine, Vol. XXIX, Nov. 1884; John M. Porter, Diary, VHS.

202 Caváda, Libby Life, 129; Bjorn Aslakson, The Carl I. Aslakson Papers, 1864–1980, USMHI.

134 Children, the outfit included nearly every European nation. Prisoners renamed

them the “Lost Ducks.” The unit was mostly French but also included Italians,

Spaniards, Portuguese, and Levantines or men of Middle Eastern descent.203

Some prisoners found the variety of prison life enjoyable. According to Frank

Moran, Libby Prison had its own unique personality. He was a Captain of the 73rd

New York Volunteers. Rebels captured him at Gettysburg and imprisoned him

first at Libby and later at Macon, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina. The

New Yorker described Libby as a place where the fortunes of war brought into

“close communion every type and temperament.” He craved the association with

different cultural and professional groups of Libby’s inmates and he concluded

that Libby was “a vast museum of human character.”204

Captain Edward D. Dixon of the 55th North Carolina had a similar experience.

He was struck by the variety of men confined at Johnson’s Island and the need to

get along with so many types. He observed that the prison had “almost every

character—the devout Christian, the Jew, the infidel, and the non-descript.”

Confederate Westwood Todd seemed intrigued by the behavior of some

Louisiana natives. He found them “lively as monkeys.” One of them confided to

203 McElroy, Andersonville, 161.

204 W. C. King and W. P. Derby, eds., Camp-fire Sketches and Battlefield Echoes (Springfield, MA: W.C. King & Co, 1887), 180–185.

135 Todd that he did not believe in hell. He said he expected to die and go to either

Paris or New Orleans.205

Lieutenant Fernández-Caváda also noticed the different array of men that

populated Libby. His comments betrayed, however, the sense of community that

their common surroundings imposed upon all prisoners. According to

Fernández-Caváda, the men apportioned Libby Prison into zones. The Libby

“community,” the Cuban-born soldier pointed out, represented nearly every state

in the Union. Not surprisingly, the so-called prison community disappointed

some men. Confederate soldiers captured Amos Stearn at the Battle of Drewry’s

Bluff in 1864. They shipped him first to Libby Prison, and then, to Andersonville,

Georgia, where he spent nearly ten months. He entered the stockade assuming

that, in the midst of privation, the inmates would behave like “one great family.”

Instead, he found that among the inmates was rampant. Equally shocked

was Sergeant William J. Crossley. The Rhode Islander described his predicament

by saying that in prison, he felt like “a lamb surrounded by wolves.”206

Many soldiers learned that they could not control the facts on the ground but

they could manage their attitudes toward them. Union prisoner Robert Kellogg

arrived at Andersonville in 1864. The Connecticut sergeant learned that the right attitude made a difference. Survival at the Georgia prison, he remarked, required

205 Edward D. Dixon, A Recollection of His Imprisonment at Johnson’s Island, Johnson’s Island Collection, OHS; Westwood Todd, Reminiscences Dating from His Capture, April 6 Through the End of June, 1865, Johnson’s Island Collection, OHS.

206 Caváda, Libby Life, 69; Amos Stearn, Diary, CL; Crossley, Extracts From My Diary, 11.

136 vigilance and sacrifice. Upon arriving at a prisoner of war camp, Confederate

Cavalryman G. W. Jones had serious concerns about his future. Jones did not despair. Instead, he decided to “put my wits to work.”207

This mental change was critical. The opposite track could lead to intellectual surrender, psychological abandonment, and even insanity. Charles Hopkins, a member of the First New Jersey Infantry, witnessed such dreadful results.

According to Hopkins, in a few weeks, healthy men found themselves reduced to

“imbeciles.” Men he had previously looked up to as friends and comrades, turned into “raving maniacs.” For Bjorn Aslakson, the most terrible thing to witness was the sight of a violently insane man pretending he was home with his wife and his family. New York Lieutenant and future publishing magnate George H. Putnam also learned the need to find a useful way to occupy the mind.208

The dire circumstances of prison life often compelled men to reexamine their life’s priorities and to construct new ones. Many did so with an emphasis on practical matters. Louisianan William J. McLean spent his captivity at Fort

Delaware. The young man wrote home in March 1864 and informed his father that if he survived the war, he wanted to own a farm, which was, he believed, independence. For David H. Conrad, his new perspective in life included some

207 Kellogg, Life and Death in Rebel Prisons, 34; G. W. Jones Private Co H 24th VA Cavalry Point Lookout.

208 William B. Styple, The Andersonville Diary & Memoirs of Charles Hopkins, 95; George Haven Putnam, A Prisoner of War in Virginia 1864–1865 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 47– 48; Bjorn Aslakson, The Carl I. Aslakson Papers, 1864–1980, USMHI.

137 useful applications. The Fort McHenry inmate told his wife that in prison he was learning to cook, sweep, and make beds.209

In prison, the idea of time suffered measurable alterations. Traditionally, God,

nature, and the clock regulated the rhythms of nineteenth century America. Time

also served as a vehicle to reform criminals. The nation’s correctional system

relied on the so-called Auburn and Pennsylvania systems. These schemes, built

on the notion that “habits of industry” drove away the idle thoughts that led to

sloth, demanded rigid work schedules, and combined mandatory silence and

as ways of forcing inmates to confront their own

inadequacies and transform their lives. Civil War prisons abandoned this

rehabilitative purpose. The manipulation of time and the attempt to silence the

prison population remained.210

Many prisoners noted how a rigid clock time, enforced by prison authorities,

dictated the inmates’ routine and robbed them of the freedom to use liberally

whatever time they had available. Schedules that commenced at 6:00 A.M. and extended until 7:00 P.M. ruled the lives of thousands of prisoners at facilities such

as Fort Delaware, Libby, Andersonville, Danville, and Castle Morgan. This

rigidity and its demands for punctuality became difficult to meet, particularly to

the many yeomen farmers that made up both armies. Rhode Islander Thomas

209 William James McLean to Father, March 19th, 1864, TU; David Holmes Conrad to Elizabeth Conrad, Nov 25, 1864, Holmes Conrad Family Papers, TU.

210 Cheryl A. Wells, Civil War Time: Temporality & Identity in America, 1861–1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 91–92.

138 Simpson, for example, lost both his money and his watch in prison. New Yorker

Daniel G. Kelley had to choose between a blanket and his watch. He picked the

former and discovered himself at the mercy of the authorities and their notions of

prison time. Captain John Guy, a Virginia native soldering with the 5th Virginia

Volunteers, commented that the idea of time had suffered a major change. “In

prison,” he remarked, only two days matter, “the day he comes in and the day he

goes out.” Many prisoners fought nonetheless to maintain a sense of personal

time. In Elmira, New York, Confederate prisoners built a sundial in an attempt to

retain a sense of time.211

With time on their hands, many inmates sought pleasure in writing to their

loved ones. Thousands of men put their feelings on paper in the form of diaries,

journals, and miscellaneous notes. Kentuckian John M. Porter wrote home from

Johnson’s Island, Ohio. He informed his father that prison had given him access to a supply of very good books. Georgian Sidney Lanier spent time at Point

Lookout, Maryland. His time in prison offered him enough material to write a

based on his experiences as a prisoner of war. The novel, Tiger Lilies,

appeared in 1867. Confederate Edmund DeWitt Patterson did not consider the

day done until he had penned his thoughts in his diary.212

211 William C. Harris, Prison Life, 45–47; Bryant, Cahaba Prison, 57; Kelley, What I Saw, 35; Cooper, In and Out, 222; John Gay, Papers, VHS; Claw W. Holmes, The Elmira Prison Camps: A History of the at Elmira, New York, July 6, 1864–July 10th, 1865 (New York: Putnam, 1912), 64.

212 John M. Porter, Letter to Father, January 15, 1864; Sidney Lanier, Tiger Lilies: A Novel (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867); Barrett, Yankee Rebel, 133.

139 Letter writing was more than an idle pastime. Prisoners wrote numerous letters to camp commanders, military authorities, politicians, relatives, and friends requesting relief or exchange. They learned the importance of airing their views and, when possible, of making their cases to the influential and the powerful. Confederate Henry Sheppard sought help from a well-connected relative, and through his uncle’s good offices, Sheppard succeeded in communicating with former President . The prisoner had hoped that Pierce would use his influence to lobby on the prisoner’s behalf. Pierce, the nation’s fourteenth President and a Democrat rather indifferent to slavery, sent him a cordial and disappointing reply. He told Sheppard that, “You could not entertain a more mistaken opinion than to suppose that I have the slightest power for good with this government.”213

In other cases, relatives and friends did manage to intercede and achieve

positive results on behalf of prisoners. Confederate surgeon John Allen Wyeth

who spent time at Camp Morton, Indiana, had an uncle, David A. Smith, who

practiced law in the same circuit with President Lincoln. Smith approached the

President and negotiated Wyeth a parole. The conditions of parole were simple:

Wyeth would have to live with his uncle and continue his studies at the University

of Illinois. Wyeth declined the offer. His parents, he remembered, had told him

that they would rather have him “come home in a coffin than dishonored.”

Likewise, the Seeley family interceded on behalf of Dr. E. M. Seeley, a surgeon on

213 Henry E. Shepherd, Narrative of Prison Life at Baltimore and Johnson’s Island, Ohio (Baltimore, MD: Commercial Ptg. & Sta. Co., 1917), 17–18.

140 the 21st Illinois Volunteers. Confederates captured him near Saint Louis,

Missouri, and held him in Richmond. His wife and other relatives wrote to

President Lincoln’s Secretary John G. Nicolay and asked him to send money to

the imprisoned physician. Nicolay mailed Dr. Seeley twenty dollars and assured

him he would help in any way possible. Illinoisan A. Burwell sought the release of his nephew from a Northern prison. He explained to his attorney that his brother was a good Union man but his sons had chosen to defend the Confederacy.

Burnwell showed his frustration with both sides of the conflict by cynically affirming that the difference between Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis was that “one makes his enemies fight for him and the other cannot get his friends to do it.”214

In jail, inmates craved information about prison conditions and other local

developments. To keep them informed, many facilities established newspapers.

Such publications included the Camp Douglas Prisoner Vidette, Camp Chase

Ventilator, Fort Delaware Prison Times, Libby Prison Chronicle, and the Old

Flag at Camp Ford, Texas. Usually handwritten, these papers featured

advertisements for prisoners providing various services, facetious news,

editorials, and articles on the events taking place within the facility. The Stars

and Stripes in Rebeldom, for example, was a prisoner-generated papers aimed

214 Wyeth, With Sabre and Scalpel, 298; Michael Burlingame (ed.), With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda and Other Writing of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 119–120; A. Burwell, A. Burnwell to J. M. Carlisle, Esq., ALPL.

141 “to create a little world of our own, and to enjoy the benefits of a newspaper, the

debate, and the social gathering.”215

Some prisoners went beyond camp newspapers and reached a national

audience. Major George McKnight, a Louisiana native, made the best of his

writing skills. Under the name “Asa Hartz,” he placed a humorous advertisement

in the personal section of the New York Times. McKnight’s ad requested “a

substitute to stay here in my place.” How McKnight paid for the ad remains

unknown. Union General Benjamin Butler placed a newspaper ad to inform a

southern friend that his son was alive and well in a northern prison camp.216

The realization that the pen could be at least as mighty as the sword stayed with many prisoners long after the war ended. The case of Gustavus Gessner offers a powerful example. Dr. Gustavus Gessner joined Ohio’s 72nd Volunteers at

age sixteen. By all accounts, he was a competent, brave soldier. Twice wounded

and twice captured, he traveled the usual circuit of Confederate prisons. After the

war, he returned to Fremont, Ohio, and took on the gruesome task of assisting

families and loved ones in identifying those who perished in captivity. Gessner

went on to assist in the creation of the Ohio Chapter of the National Association

of Prisoners of War in 1873. In 1881, he joined other outraged former prisoners in

loudly protesting the appointment of former Union General Samuel Sturgis as

215 Speer, Portals to Hell, 123–24, 183, 196, 217; The Stars and Stripes in Rebeldom: A series of newspapers written by Federal prisoners (privates) in Richmond, Tuscaloosa (New Orleans: Published by the Union Lyceum at Parish Prison, [1861], UIUC; Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York: Free Press, 2008), 328.

216 Levy, To Die in Chicago, 248–49; Roger Long, “Johnson’s Island Prison,” Blue & Gray, 12 (1987): 21; Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 126.

142 superintendent of the Ohio Soldier’s Home in Washington, DC. Gessner and

many of his comrades blamed Sturgis for the military debacle at Brice’s

Crossroads in June 1864 and their subsequent imprisonment. Their efforts to block Sturgis’ appointment ultimately failed but succeeded in reopening an investigation of the battle.217

In confinement, men learned to appreciate the value of individual privacy.

The prisoners became intensely sensitive to any perceived infringements.

Lieutenant Patterson, the Ohio-born Confederate housed at Johnson’s Island,

recalled how Union guards under the “pretense” of searching for ladders

conducted a search of his personal effects. He referred to the guards as

“contemptible whelps.” Many prisoners told their friends and relatives to observe

the strict requirements of military censors. A resident of Fort Delaware informed

his wife that a two-page letter was his limit. In a subsequent missive, he informed

her that he and other inmates had reached an agreement with the authorities:

they could now send and receive longer letters, as long as they did not write

anything “abusive” about the Yankees. Massachusetts soldier Ruben Harlow

asked his wife to write often and to include, in accordance with prison rules,

envelopes folded “on one end.” Confederate James K. McCombs asked his cousin

217 Gustavus Gessner Papers, Local History Collection, RBH, Presidential Library, Fremont, Ohio; Dr Gessner’s efforts were, however, unsuccessful. Samuel Sturgis had friends in high places and managed to weather the storm. Through it all, Gessner was undeterred. He solicited help from Dr. John B. Rice, a former physician and surgeon with his old 72nd, and by 1881, a U.S. Congressman. Rice raised a minor scandal and brought the matter of Sturgis’s appointment before the House Military Committee. Sturgis found himself on the defensive and offered a spirited defense of his actions. He sought public support from both Sherman and Grant and received a tepid endorsement from Sherman.

143 Kate to write as often as possible and included stamps with his letters. Finally,

Confederate Captain Simon C. Wilkerson wrote to his wife from Johnson’s

Island, Ohio. His letters reminded her not to stop writing until his exchange was

official. They contained stamps and indicated that he expected her to write

approximately once a week.218

The chance for an education gave some men direction for the future. Thomas

W. Bullitt found himself a prisoner of war at Camp Chase in Columbus, Ohio.

Bullitt spent a great deal of time studying and reading. His most earnest desire,

he told his father, was to leave prison and then devote two or three years to

uninterrupted study. Confederate Captain S. A. Hayden marveled at how quickly

the mind turns to reading when all other avenues of engagement are closed.

Union soldier and Wisconsin native Samuel D. Ripley enlisted as a private in the

36th Wisconsin Infantry, and he landed in the Confederate prison in Salisbury,

North Carolina. He wrote to his mother often and told her that after prison he

wanted to improve his education. Confederate officer John Hampden

Chamberlayne proudly informed his mother that every day he spent a good deal

of time studying German. H. H. Wiseman reported on his effort to read Lindley

Murray’s Powers of Religion on the Mind. He also told his mother that in prison,

218 Barrett, Yankee Rebel, 168; John Phillip Thompson to Kathy Cornelia (Cave) Thompson, June 27, 1863; John Phillip Thompson to Kathy Cornelia (Cave) Thompson, October 20, 1863, VHS; Reuben Harlow, Letter, [1863] December 30, Richmond, VA, to Mrs. Reuben Harlow, VHS; James K. McComb to Katherine Margaret (Coiner) Palmer, January 18, 1865, Coiner Family Papers, 1826–1986, VHS; Simon C. Wilkerson, Letter to wife, April 13, 1864; Letter to wife, September 22nd, 1864; Letter to wife, May 20th , 1864, RBH; Most of the censoring in Civil War letters came from prisoner of war camps. Prison authorities did not want outsiders to know what was happening in individual prisons and thus attempted to control the content and length of individual letters.

144 you could see grown men learning to write. While at Andersonville, cavalryman

John McElroy got his hands on a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, and by his own

account, he developed some knowledge of basic physiology and anatomy.219

The prisoners also developed a sense of the importance of caring for their

fellow inmates. Confederate A. J. Hammack in prison at Johnson’s Island

confided in his brother that he could have escaped from prison but was unwilling

to abandon his men. Union soldier Samuel D. Ripley decided that his goal in life

should be to help those close to him. He went on to recognize that hitherto,

“avarice was my governing principle,” but he needed to change. Northerner W.

W. Day learned to enjoy the camaraderie among the men. He recognized the need

to become a good companion while in southern prisons.220

The task of caring for fellow inmates could generate powerful bonds among

the men. Some of these attachments survived the war and led some men into

important post-war activities. Northerner William Cadwell, a former prisoner of

war and physician, spoke eloquently about a yet undiagnosed mental disorder

that affected many former prisoners. Speaking as retiring president of the

Northwest Ohio Mental Association, he listed loss of power to concentrate, a

219 Thomas W. Bullitt, Letter to Father, January 14th, 1863, Bullit Family Papers, FHS; S. A. Hayden to Elizabeth Hayden, Johnson’s Island Collection, OHS; Samuel D. Ripley to Mother, 1864; John Hampden Chamberlayne to Mother, Johnson’s Island, August 15th, 1863, VHS; H. H. Wiseman, Letter to Mother, December 25th, 1864, USMHI. The book young H. H. Wiseman was reading is a biographical compilation of individuals distinguished by their greatness, learning, or virtue. See Lindley Murray, The Power of Religion on the Mind in Retirement, Affliction and at the Approach of Death (New York: Trustees of the Residuary Estate of Lindley Murray, 1838); Emmy E. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, 96.

220 A. J. Hammack to Brother, April 21, 1862, VHS; Samuel D. Ripley, Letter to Mother, 1864; Day, Fifteen Months in Dixie, 17–18.

145 spirit of unrest, and sleeplessness as common symptoms found among those who endured captivity. Today, we would call this post-traumatic stress disorder.221

In prison camps, a general’s epaulets were not a prerequisite for leadership.

Confederate John Guy offered a remarkable example. The lieutenant decided that incarceration did not relieve him from the duty of looking after his men. With his sister’s help, he wrote seven letters intended to motivate his former subordinates to use a good portion of their prison time reading and studying. Time in prison, the Tennessean explained, should be spent wisely. He went on to argue that time behind bars could be profitable and that the men may be able to look back with satisfaction at their prison life. He lectured the men on how to read, the acquisition of knowledge, and the relationship between knowledge and business acumen. Finally, he counseled his men against idleness, gambling, and other

“frivolous amusements” of prison life.222

Prison also tested the soldiers’ patriotism. Civil War soldiers on both sides invoked the ideals of the Revolution. Most Union men believed that disunion would tear down the nation and would prove them unworthy of the republican ideals that formed the nation. Most Confederate soldiers also summoned ideas of freedom against tyranny to justify their reliance on the states’ rights doctrine. So how did imprisonment affect these ideals? Did the soldiers act against their beliefs under duress? Did they betray their cause? Answers to those questions are

221 William Caldwell, Address of Retiring President of the Northwest Ohio Mental Association, 1889, William Caldwell Family Papers, Local History Collections, RBH.

222 John Henry Guy, Diary, VHS.

146 hard to ascertain. But we know that some soldiers on both sides had no real

loyalty to the cause and some volunteered because friends and relatives

volunteered. Others received a summons from the draft board and found

themselves in uniform.223

The surviving evidence indicates that most prisoners remained loyal to their

ideals. Their writings are replete with calls for bravery, endurance, strength, and

vindication. Time in jail strained, but did not break, the bonds of loyalty. Some

men saw in their captivity the invisible hand of God. Confederate John J. Guthrie informed his mother that his imprisonment was God’s will and said that he welcomed God’s decree. Illinois native John McElroy joked about the men’s lack

of musical talent, but had no doubt about their faithfulness to the cause. Finally,

Union Lieutenant Jacob Heffelfinger described a July 4 celebration in which a large crowd gathered around a miniature American flag.224

Few issues unleashed the fires of patriotism on both sides more than the

subject of deserters and collaborators. Confederate soldiers captured sergeant

Samuel S. Boggs at the Battle of Chickamauga. The Illinois native quickly found

himself making the rounds at Belle Isle, Danville, Andersonville, Charleston,

Florence, and Libby Prison. He noticed that at the various prisons Rebel authorities visited nearly every day trying to convince skilled workers to take the

223 James M. McPherson, For Cause & Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 18–20.

224 John J. Guthrie, Letter to Mother, April 20th, 1862, VHS; John McElroy, Andersonville, 158 ; Jacob Heffelfinger, Diary, USMHI.

147 non-combatant’s oath. As far as Boggs was concerned, taking the oath was treason. To his satisfaction, few men took the offer and most seemed determined

to honor the flag. New Englander Warren Goss remembered how Confederate

authorities used collaborators to steal from prisoners. According to Goss, most

men despised collaborators. Artillerist H. H. Wiseman served with the 1st

Tennessee heavy artillery. After Union forces captured and paroled him at

Vicksburg, Mississippi, he rejoined the fight in January 1864, and once again, the

Federals made him a prisoner of war and shipped him to Elmira Prison in

December 1864. There Wiseman learned that 4,000 Confederates had applied to take the oath. He described them as “a low down set of men.”225

One man’s traitor was, however, sometimes another man’s hero. The reasons

for petitioning to take the oath were many and far more nuanced than just a lack

of devotion to the cause. Justifiable or not, those who took the oath incurred the

wrath of their fellow soldiers. New Yorker Charles Alexander, for example, simply

could not endure the hardships of the prison. In a letter to Confederate

authorities, the Belle Isle inmate described the prison as a den of criminals. He

assured the Rebel government that he was prepared to take the oath of allegiance

to the Confederacy and to become a peaceful citizen. S. Kitchen, first name

unknown, had more personal reasons to request the oath: Kitchen had two

brothers serving with the Eighth Virginia Cavalry and wished to join them.

Edward Vernon of the 40th New York told the camp commander at Belle Isle that

225 Boggs, Eighteen Months a Prisoner Under the Rebel Flag, 32; Goss, A Soldier’s Story, 46; H. H. Wiseman, Papers, MHI.

148 he wanted to take the oath and join the Confederate Navy. Vernon, a native of

Scotland, had lived in New Orleans prior to the war and had no connections to

the North. Under his signature, Vernon scribbled the phrase, “I deserted last

September.”226

To remain loyal to the cause did not imply an unwillingness to discuss the

merits of the war. These discussions offered keen insights into prisoners’ views,

and their views were thoughtful and, at times, critical of their own government.

Ohioan Solon Hyde offered harsh criticism of the Union’s policy on prisoners of war. He called the Union’s demands for fair treatment for Black soldiers

“foolish.” The Federal government, he concluded, took the doctrine of military necessity to an extreme. Vermonter William B. Stevens of Company G, 4th

Vermont Infantry, agreed. He thundered against the government’s decisions to

suspend the cartel and labeled the controversy over Black soldiers as a trivial

matter. Union soldier Melvin Grigsby contended that, as a matter of principle,

halting the exchange was correct, but as matter of public policy, he held it was

wrong. James W. Vance let his distaste with Federal authorities be known.

Forced to write his diary around the margins of his New Testament, the Ohioan

voiced his belief that Federal authorities seemed more concerned with political affairs than with suffering soldiers.227

226 Charles Alexander, Letter to CSA Department of Henrico, November 1863, VHS; S. Kitchen, Letter to CSA Department of Henrico, July 5th, 1863, VHS; Edward Vernon, Letter to Camp Commander, January 26th, 1863, VHS.

227 Hyde, A Captive of War, 41. Peelle, Letters from Libby Prison, 21; Barrett, Yankee Rebel, 189, 129; Jeffrey D. Marshall, ed., A War of the People: Vermont Civil War Letters (Hanover, NH: 149 Equally outraged was Augustus Pitt Adamson of Company E., 30th Georgia,

Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Union troops had captured him near Calhoun,

Georgia, and sent him to Rock Island, Illinois. The young Adamson felt that

Confederate authorities should not agree to treat Black soldiers as prisoners of

war because, he argued, that would force southerners to abandon the right to

their own property. Confederate soldier Grant Taylor also disagreed with his

government on political issues. After some of his men became prisoners of war in

Marietta, Georgia, the erstwhile farmer wrote home saying that his comrades in

arms should remain in prison unless exchanged for white men. Illinois Colonel

Frederick Bartleson also took his government to task. If prisoners have to suffer,

he concluded, the government must demonstrate that their suffering furthered

the cause, and that no other approach was possible. Union soldier George

Brookings joined the chorus and demanded seriousness from his government.

Confederates captured Brookings and his entire regiment at Murfreesboro,

Tennessee. The Minnesotan unleashed his anger not on his captors, but on his

government, which he accused of not prosecuting the war energetically.

Brookings made it clear that he had no desire to be exchanged until the Union

abandoned its “milk and honey” approach to destroying the Rebellion.228

University of Press, 1999), 219; Grigsby, Smoked Yank, 132; W. Vance Papers, 1864 May 12–Nov 22, OHS.

228 A. P. Adamson, Sojourns of a Patriot: The Field and Prison Papers of an Unreconstructed Confederate (Murfreesboro, TN: Southern Heritage Press, 1998), 241; Ann K. Blomquist and Robert A. Taylor, eds., This Cruel War: The Civil War Letters of Grant and Malinda Taylor, 1862–1865 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000), 205; Peelle, Letters from Libby Prison, 28; Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 68.

150 The effects of war on family also captured the men’s interest. A cousin notified

Ohio-born Edmund DeWitt Patterson that she could support his decision to fight

for the South. His father urged him to give up the Rebel cause. But for Patterson,

there was no turning back. He sadly concluded that he and his family had nothing

in common. John Burrill of the Second New Hampshire Infantry wrote home to

his parents and asked about the draft, which was, he thought a sign of northern

patriotism. He believed it was the right course of action and that it would help

shorten the war. Burrill chastised draft opponents and concluded that all young northerners should join the struggle. Those unwilling to face danger, he said,

cannot call themselves free Americans. Thomas W. Bullit wrote to a friend about

the righteousness of the southern cause. “A land without liberty is as dark,” he

pointed out, “as a heart without hope.”229

The suffering of prison life continues to be a dominant theme in the study of

Civil War prisons. Some historians have focused their attention on the moral and

legal aspects of how to treat captives in a time of war. Others have set their sights

on dramatic prison breakouts and trigger-happy guards. Most have taken for

granted that, among its survivors, prison life yielded at best, veteran’s reunion,

and at worst, post-traumatic stress disorder compounded by episodes of

depression and suicides.

The story is, however, more complicated. Prison life seemed to have exerted a

positive influence among some of the captives. The evidence presented in this

229Barrett, Yankee Rebel, 145; John Burrill, Letters to Parents, August 1st, 1863, September 13th, 1863, VHS; Thomas W. Bullitt to Katie, February 18th, 1864, FHS.

151 chapter suggests that many soldiers entered the prison walls with trepidation, fearing prison guards, and the prison bureaucracy. But most prisoners got down to the business of living and, armed with the tools of the past, they began to carve out a new existence. This temporary life, designed to meet the exigencies of the moment, shaped the men in unexpected ways.

After the war, the former prisoners got on with the business of living. John

McElroy, the teenage cavalryman held at Andersonville, survived captivity, wrote his memoirs, published a novel, and made a career as a printer and newspaper executive in Toledo, Ohio. Michael Dougherty, one of McElroy’s fellow inmates, also walked out of prison and twenty-eight years after the war’s end, the Irish- born Pennsylvanian received the Congressional for bravery under fire. Confederate Captain William Burgwyn, the deeply religious North

Carolinian, returned home from prison and became a . Billy Bates, a 15- year-old Andersonville inmate, testified against Henry Wirz, graduated from the

University of Michigan, and traveled the nation lecturing on his prison experience. Another youngster, William Smith, also survived Andersonville, although a bout with scurvy left him wheelchair bound for the rest of his life.

After the war, he moved to Florida and published his memoirs. The front page is adorned with the Prophet Micah’s enduring aspiration that, “Neither shall they learn war anymore.”230

230 Werner, Reluctant Witness, 100–102, 145, 147.

152 Some former prisoners brought home more than illness and memories.

Illinois soldier Hugh R. Riddle spent the last thirteen months of his military

career as a prisoner of war in Tyler, Texas. While in captivity, fellow Union

prisoners from Long Island, New York, taught the Midwesterner the game of

baseball and after his release from prison, he returned home to Springfield,

started college, and in fall of 1865 arranged the first game of organized baseball ever played in Illinois.231

Other men found the lure of combat in other wars hard to resist. The watchful

Federíco Fernández-Caváda survived Libby Prison, returned home to

Philadelphia, and left to join Cuba’s struggle for independence. Appointed U.S.

Consul to Cienfuegos, he shortly thereafter became a general officer in the

Insurgent Cuban Forces of the War of the Ten Years (1868–1878) and for the

second time in his military career found himself a prisoner of war. Tried and

convicted of treason by Spanish authorities, this survivor of Gettysburg and Libby

Prison met his end in front of a firing squad in 1871. He was 40 years old.232

Decimus et Ultimus Barziza, a Confederate, also survived prison. On his way

from Johnson’s Island, Ohio to Point Lookout, Maryland, Barziza dove through

the open window of a moving train, near Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. He made his way to Canada, where assisted by a Confederate spy network, made it back home to Texas. In February 1865, he published his memoirs. He settled in ,

231 Hugh R. Riddle, Statement on first game of organized baseball in Illinois, Riddle Papers, ALPL.

232 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Saturday, August 19, 1871, 381.

153 where he prospered at the law, joined the Democratic Party, and opposed

Reconstruction. He established the state’s first trust company, the Houston Land

and Trust Company before his death in 1882.233

Sergeant Major Robert H. Kellogg endured Andersonville and on November

30, 1864, became a free man. After a furlough to Connecticut, he rejoined his

unit, and completed his military service at Camp Parole, Maryland. He helped

process thousands of former prisoners heading north after his captivity. Kellogg

wrote his memoirs, testified against Henry Wirz, and settled in Ohio. He assisted

in the composition of his regiment’s history and became the man chosen as a

model for “Andersonville Boy,” a bronze memorial to the Sixteenth Connecticut.

He died in Delaware, Ohio, in 1932.

Union soldier Melvin Grigsby, barely eighteen by the time he arrived at

Andersonville, managed to survive imprisonment, became an attorney and politician, and penned his memoirs under the title The Smoked Yank. After attending college in Wisconsin, he settled in Sioux Falls, . He also became a Rough Rider, commanded a cavalry regiment known as Grigsby’s

Cowboys during Secretary Hay’s “splendid little war,” and joined an old hunting friend named Teddy Roosevelt on the charge up San Juan Hill.234

233 Barziza, Adventures of a Prisoner of War, ii–iii; Walter Prescott Webb (ed.), The Handbook of Texas (Austin, Texas: State Historical Association, 1952–76).

234 John Toland, Captured by History: One Man’s Vision of Our Tumultuous Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 10–11; Louis Sues, Grigsby’s Cowboys: Third United States Volunteer Cavalry, Spanish-American War (Salem, SD: J.E. Patten, 1900), 63.

154 The end of the Civil War marked the beginning of a different struggle. After

his prison stint, Warren Lee Goss fired one of the first salvos in the print war over

the fate of Civil War prisoners. He followed his Soldier’s Story with nearly half a

dozen other titles on the Civil War and its leaders before his death in Rutherford,

New Jersey, in 1925. John Wesley Minnich, the cocky Rebel who once proclaimed

that he had no plan to surrender, did surrender and marked time in northern

prisons. He relocated to Louisiana and, like many southerners, defended the cause in the pages of the Confederate Veteran. Minnich had plenty of time to think about the war. John Tyler, the nation’s tenth President, occupied the White

House the year Minnich was born. Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency a week before Minnich’s death. And so it was. The reluctant witnesses to

Andersonville, Elmira, Johnson’s Island, and Libby Prison had lived, learned, and passed on.235

235 Martínez, Life and Death in Civil War Prisons, 210, 218.

155 CONCLUSIONS

In 1864, Abraham Lincoln met with one man who had successfully dug his

way out of Libby Prison. These were hard days for war captives. The death toll

kept mounting and nearly 70,000 Union and Confederate soldiers languished at

Florence, Andersonville, and Elmira. Worse yet, Lincoln and his generals were

determined to break the Confederacy through attrition if necessary. The

President heartily congratulated the erstwhile captive. Trying to find humor in

the situation, the Chief Executive quickly asked, “What did you do with the dirt?”

Lincoln’s quip could not overshadow the reality prisoners and their loved ones

faced. In Vermont, the grieving family of a deceased prisoner of war inscribed his

tombstone with the words, “entirely and wholly neglected by President

Lincoln.”236

Americans have not neglected the Civil War. Its social and political impact continues to this day. If anything, each generation has reinterpreted the conflict

236 Nearly 15,000 at Florence, 32,000 at Andersonville, and 12,00 at Elmira; William C. Davis, Lincoln’s Men: How President Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 124–125; G. Wayne Smith, Nathan Goff, Jr.: A Biography (Charleston, WV: 1959), 48–49.

156 to support its own agenda. Battles, generals, and combatants, often assisted by the fairy dust of Hollywood, have reached mythical status.237

Somehow, the prisoners of the Civil War have failed to elicit similar veneration in popular memory. Instead, the public ignored them, and in the post

Civil War period, elected officials such as Robert G. Ingersoll, manipulated their sacrifices to gain office and to attack political adversaries. Once again, the ex- prisoners found themselves caught in a political game and at the mercy of forces they hardly controlled.238

The captives’ struggle to manage their immediate reality defined the prison experience as well. Most men had joined the fight expecting to abide by codes of honor and to display the courage demanded by their society. Captivity shattered those expectations immersing soldiers in an environment where suffering represented the rule, not the exception. In that setting, traditional codes of conduct did not always work. Holding fast to them was not always possible, and adaptation became the key to survival.

237 Ronald Reagan played the fictional prisoner of war Web Sloane in the 1954 film Prisoner of War. portrayed John in three highly successful films: , Rambo II, and Rambo III. Vietnam prisoners of war have received more attention than any other group. This is indeed remarkable when we look at the numbers of prisoners per war. The American Civil War yielded more than 400,000, 4,120; World War II 130,201, the Korean War 7,140, the 745, the Pueblo Incident 83, Iraq Wars 31, Somalia Incursion 1. See Elliot Gruner, Prisoners of Culture: Representing the Vietnam POW (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 14, 104–105.

238 Robert G. Ingersoll was born in , New York, in 1833, the son of a Congregationalist minister. His family moved to Illinois, where he was admitted to the bar and became a court lawyer. He served as a Colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War and became a Republican. In 1876, he nominated James G. Blaine as the party’s presidential candidate. For samples of Ingersoll post-war oratory see: Ingersoll, Robert G. The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. IX (New York: The Dresden Publ. Co., 1909), 157–158.

157 This dissertation has shown that most prisoners of war adapted to some of the

demands of captivity. In the process, they managed a remarkably similar

transformation from combatant to prisoner. Most captives, for example, wrestled

with their immediate surrounding and its consequences. For some,

imprisonment signified a time of profound spiritual and intellectual isolation. For

others, captivity became a transforming experience that led to a deeper

understanding of themselves and of their fellow men. Some prisoners

experienced religious transformations. Others, traumatized by their

imprisonment, thought long and hard about changing individual habits, enhancing personal relationships, and turning their lives around. Through their prison experience, many soldiers developed a sense of new priorities. They understood the importance of family, friends, and the advantages of working together. Many had the chance to step out of their own selves and cared for others that needed assistance.

Time behind bars spent in close proximity to the enemy gave some men the chance to think more deeply about their rivals and their motivations. Union officer Frederick Bartleson, for example, tried to find a rationale for the mistreatment of Union prisoners. Confederate authorities, he concluded, mistreated Union prisoners because they lacked the means or the disposition to treat them well. Federal soldiers, Bartleson wrote, are fighting for the Union.

Southerners are fighting for independence and animated by hatred against

158 invaders. In a tone of understanding, he concluded that when men fight for independence, the justness of the cause matters little.239

Some prisoners described captivity as a spiritual contest between good and evil. Few did it as elegantly as Lieutenant Colonel Federíco Fernández-Caváda.

Writing from Libby Prison, the Pennsylvanian described prison life as an inner struggle in which good and bad qualities vie for control. The suffering of prison life, he contended, was redemptive. The experience stripped a man of all the superfluities of life while teaching him life’s most important lessons. The time men spent facing the challenges of imprisonment, he concluded, was a

“crucible.”240

Many psychologists claim that a person with a clear sense of meaning or value will be more resilient in adverse conditions. Just like Goss and Fernández-Caváda maintained, finding meaning in suffering was critical to survival. Research in the psychology of health supports the claim that a sense of coherence, hope, or control increases the chances of overcoming various medical conditions. In the case of these prisoners of war, some men clearly sought to remain hopeful and to build a familiar value system. This structure helped them to maintain their sanity as well as contributed to their survival. Furthermore, this configuration made their day-to-day existence tolerable.241

239 Peelle, Letters from Libby Prison, 71.

240 Fernández-Caváda, Libby Life, 154–160.

241 V. E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Beacon Press, 1959); A. Steptoe and A. Appels, Stress, Personal Control and Health (New York: Wiley, 1989); M. Friedman, Personality 159 Finally, captivity compelled many prisoners to grapple with the issue of race.

After Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, slavery was at the center of the struggle. White Union troops encountered Blacks as they occupied the South, fought with them in battle, and relied on them for support while in captivity.

Union captives witnessed the high price Blacks and their white officers paid to defend the Union. Confederate prisoners also faced Blacks, first as enemy soldiers, and later on, as prison guards. African-Americans had become an integral part of the war and their contribution to its outcome was undeniable.

Unfortunately, their role would be obscured and their status would loose ground

as the nation hastened to put the war behind it.

Heretofore, the intellectual struggle among historians has centered on what

side killed more inmates and why. This research indicates that the prison

experience extended beyond a mere contest between guards, inmates, and

politicians. The images of prisoners outwitting guards, organizing themselves,

rethinking their own lives, counseling others, and making individual changes

proffer a different outlook of the captivity experience altogether. Notwithstanding

its many challenges, imprisonment possessed a strong didactic aspect and many

prisoners took advantage of it. For those men, the apparent futility of

imprisonment opened new possibilities and provided the opportunity to learn,

change, and begin anew.

and Disease (New York: Wiley, 1990); Ellen Sherwood, “The Power Relationship Between Captor and Captive,” Psychiatric Annals, 16:11 November 1996; David Kentsmith, “ and Other Prisoners of War,” Military Medicine, 147 (November 1982).

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188 Elmira Daily Advertiser

The Daily Cleveland Herald

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Macon Telegraph

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Richmond Whig

Harper’s Weekly

Roanoke Times

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189 South Trimble. (ed), Platforms of the Two Great Political Parties, 1865–1912, inclusive. Washington, DC: U.S. House of Representatives.

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