Andersonvilles of the North: The Myths and Realities of Northern Treatment of Civil War Confederate Prisoners (review)

This book debunks the Southern postwar Lost Cause myth found in most Civil War captivity narratives which claimed that the 26,436 Confederate deaths in the many federal prison camps were due to a deliberate policy of ill-treatment perpetrated by policy makers, including Edwin Stanton, U. S. Grant, and even Abraham Lincoln, which caused misery, disease, starvation, and death throughout the northern prison system. According to the author, researchers in the past have for the most part leaned heavily on this theory, bypassing the accurate reportage in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion and The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion in favor of what the former POWs had to say. This, according to the author, was a mistake.

Modeling Yankee captivity narratives was their commentary about the Andersonville experience: the former prisoners charged that all Confederate jailers, especially Captain Henry Wirtz, Andersonville's Interior Commandant, were cruel, barbaric monsters acting on orders from Jefferson Davis himself to murder them. In both the North and the South, the postwar readership accepted these chilling but mostly exaggerated and sometimes totally inaccurate accounts, held as gospel even up to the present era. What makes this book unique is that the author follows up on William Best Hesseltine's Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (1930) and counters the Lost Cause accounts for the most part with inspection reports ordered by Union Colonel William Hoffman, Commissary General of Prisoners, and shows how Hoffman, who had the reputation of being overly parsimonious, responded to the problems in the camps as positively as he could.

Stylistically, each chapter begins with several Lost Cause comments about the following camps: Alton and Douglas in Illinois; Morton and Rock Island in Indiana; Johnson's Island and Chase in Ohio, Point Lookout in Maryland, Fort Delaware in the Delaware Bay, and Elmira in New York. There is no shortage of commentary about each being a "hell hole." Of these camps, only Elmira, called "Hellmira" by the prisoners, fell below acceptable, in part because of its bad location, frigid weather, large prison population, and the passivity of Colonel Hoffman. None of these facilities were hotels, but the author compares the death rates in each with those at the Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond and concludes that, with the exception of Elmira, sick Confederates had a better chance of survival in a Yankee prison camp than in a major Confederate medical facility.

The author also brings to light the Union decision to halt exchanges in the Dix-Hill Cartel in mid-1863. Rather than denying the Confederacy the use of manpower as so often was thought to be the reason, the author points to evidence that the Davis administration's decision to reenslave captured black troops and execute those officers who led them actually led to the decision. The idea was to make the Confederate government change its POW policy toward black Union troops whom the federal government felt a responsibility to protect.

Starvation, according to the author, did not take place in federal prison camps even when rations were cut back in 1864. The Confederates received exactly what the Union troops received, about 4,500 calories a day, but the problem was the diet: meat and bread without fruit or vegetables. Scurvy often resulted. The Confederates also could receive food and clothing from friends via the mail; they could also buy luxury items from camp sutlers if they had any money. The real problem in northern prisons was disease. Often, the Confederate troops arrived in camp with wounds that festered and killed them; with diseases they got in camp or on the battlefield and then spread in prison, and always with dirt, fleas, and lice. This resulted in diarrhea/dysentery, smallpox, scurvy, typhoid, all...