Civil War Prisons in American Memory Benjamin Gregory Cloyd Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2005 Civil War prisons in American memory Benjamin Gregory Cloyd Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Cloyd, Benjamin Gregory, "Civil War prisons in American memory" (2005). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 121. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/121 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. CIVIL WAR PRISONS IN AMERICAN MEMORY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of History by Benjamin Gregory Cloyd B.A., University of Notre Dame, 1998 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2000 August 2005 ©Copyright 2005 Benjamin Gregory Cloyd All Rights Reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A considerable amount of people deserve thanks for their help during this project. My advisor, Gaines M. Foster, provided consistent encouragement, keen editorial insight, and a model of scholarship for which I am deeply grateful. The dissertation committee, Wayne Parent, John Rodrigue, Charles Shindo, and Tiwanna Simpson offered helpful guidance, and, in the case of Professors Shindo and Simpson, advice and constant support throughout my graduate school career. For their professional courtesy and assistance in my research, I am indebted to the staffs of Andersonville National Historic Site, the Georgia State Archives, the Library of Congress, Middleton Library at Louisiana State University, the National Archives, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the United States Army Military History Institute. Several individuals at these institutions merit special thanks. Dale Couch and Greg Jarrell at the Georgia State Archives displayed quintessential southern hospitality and suggested additional avenues of inquiry. Dr. Richard Sommers of the United States Army Military History Institute personally took time to listen to the details of the project, guide me through the library, and locate materials that I otherwise would not have found. At Andersonville National Historic Site, Superintendent Fred Boyles graciously answered my questions and allowed me to roam freely throughout the park’s grounds and records. A 2003-2004 Louisiana State University Graduate School Dissertation Fellowship facilitated the research and writing process. Many friends and family members demonstrated belief in and support for me and this project—instead of listing all of them here I will thank them in person. I would be iii remiss, however, if I did not single out some of the most important contributions. Sean and Megan Lumley allowed me to turn their wonderful home into my base of operations for much of the summer of 2002. At Hinds Community College, my colleagues encouraged me in numerous ways. Martha Wilkins allowed me additional time for writing, Loyce Miles insisted that I finish, and Eric Bobo, Ben Fatherree, Sheila Moore, Mickey Roth, Chris Waldrip, and Stephen Wedding made my first year of full-time teaching so much fun that I still had energy left to go home and write. With me every step of the way through graduate school were Court Carney, Rand Dotson, and Matt Reonas. This dissertation might have existed sooner if not for their insatiable appetite for vice in many forms, but it would not exist at all without their ideas and their friendship. My brother Liam was a source of unexpected but welcome companionship and inspiration. As they have always done, my parents provided unwavering support and an infectious intellectual curiosity. The last thank you goes to Katie Cassady, whose example of wisdom, grace, and humor was and remains indispensable to this work and its author. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..………………………………………………………………iii ABSTRACT.……………………………………………………………………………..vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION.……………………………………………………....................1 2 “AWFUL, AWFUL SUFFERING”………………...…...………………………….9 3 “REMEMBER ANDERSONVILLE”……………………….……………………45 4 “SO LONG WILL THERE RISE UP DEFENDERS OF THE TRUTH OF HISTORY”…………………………………………………………………….....79 5 “TRUE HISTORY”……………………………………………………………...114 6 “A MORE PROPER PERSPECTIVE”………………………………………….150 7 “BETTER TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OUTSIDERS’ CURIOSITY”………194 8 “THE TASK OF HISTORY IS NEVER DONE”……………………………….225 9 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………..246 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………250 VITA ………………………………………………………………………………...…286 v ABSTRACT The memory of Civil War prisons has always been contested. Since 1861, generations of Americans struggled with the questions raised by the deaths of approximately 56,000 prisoners of war, almost one-tenth of all Civil War fatalities. During the war, throughout Reconstruction, and well into the twentieth century, a sectional debate raged over the responsibility for the prison casualties. Republican politicians invoked the savage cruelty of Confederate prisons as they waved the bloody shirt, while hundreds of former prisoners published narratives that blamed various prison officials and promoted sectional bitterness. The animosity reflected a need to identify individuals responsible for the tragedy as well as the stakes involved—how history would remember the Union and Confederate prisons. In the 1920s and 1930s, when the prison controversy finally bowed to the influence of sectional reconciliation, Americans began exploring the legacy of Civil War prisons against the backdrop of the First and Second World Wars and their even more terrible atrocities. Historians and writers, inspired by the pursuit of objectivity, probed the legacy of Civil War prisons, no longer to blame individual Union or Confederate officials, but instead out of a desire to understand how such horrors could be possible in a supposedly modern society. In recent decades, a trend developed towards commemorating and commercializing the tragedy of Civil War prisons, culminating in the 1998 opening of the National POW Museum at Andersonville, Georgia, site of the most infamous Civil War prison. The museum presented a universal narrative of the POW experience that interpreted Civil War prisons not as a terrible exception, but as the first in a series of vi modern atrocities. In its message of patriotic appreciation for the sacrifice of all American POWs, however, the museum also glorified their suffering as the inevitable cost of freedom. Throughout the reinterpretation of Civil War prisons, the effort to understand the prison deaths reflected a desire to find meaning in the tragedy. Although satisfactory answers for the prison atrocities of the Civil War remained elusive, the persistence Americans showed in asking the questions testifies to the enduring power of historical memory. vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Although the Civil War ended in 1865, the controversies it inspired never did. As northerners and southerners shaped the new political, social, racial and cultural world of the postwar nation, together they faced a crucial obstacle to reconciliation—the lingering memories of the brutal conflict. “The contrasting memories of this nation’s most bitter domestic conflict persisted,” historian Michael Kammen has observed. On one subject in particular, the bitterness refused to fade quickly: the wartime treatment of captured Union and Confederate soldiers. Of the approximately 410,000 soldiers taken prisoner, 56,000 died while imprisoned by the enemy. That figure accounted for nearly one tenth of the 620,000 men who perished in the conflict. Both the scale of the casualties in prisons and the accounts of the suffering there enraged Americans, North and South, not just during the war but long after Appomattox. As another historian, David Blight, recently stated, “no wartime experience . caused deeper emotions, recriminations, and lasting invective than that of prisons.”1 The subject of Civil War prisons proved so controversial in the aftermath of the war that the first substantial scholarly exploration of the failures of foresight and policy that doomed so many prisoners, William Hesseltine’s Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology, was not published until 1930. Considering the massive amount of attention devoted to various aspects of the Civil War since 1865, the absence of any objective analysis of the prison issue for some sixty-five years testified to the continuing sensitivity 1 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 101; David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 152. 1 of the subject. Even six decades after the war, Hesseltine acknowledged the delicate nature of his topic and the potential to inflame sectional debate. “It is possible now,” Hesseltine insisted at the beginning of his book, perhaps to convince himself, “to examine the prisoners and prisons of the Civil War in a scientific spirit.” Curiously, the appearance of Civil War Prisons simultaneously opened and closed the field among professional historians.