History of Andersonville (review)

BOOK REVIEWS79 and was arrested at sea, but so charmed her naval captor that he helped win her release and then resigned his commission, foUowed her to London and married her. There her book was published in 1865, ghosted by a prominent local hack. Much of her thirty-five years of postwar life was given over to efforts to capitalize her wartime celebrity, first as actress, then as reader of dramatic accounts of her espionage. Though she remained before the American public in that way, her fame dimmed until legend eventuaUy confused her with the gunwoman BeUe Starr. As to her book: first, it is surpassingly dull. Second, it foUows the pattern of Civü War spy memoirs by concentrating on the spy's comings and goings and tribulations —pretty weU defeating the reader who hopes to find inteUigence episodes to match the spy's claims or reputation. Third, it differs from most of its genre in that its claims about information delivered are modest indeed. Fourth, as a piece of literature it is to be classified as Inflated Victorian—as far from an American girl's natural style as the ghost, George A. Sala, could make it. We forgive—in fact we endorse— Dr. Davis's adjective: "G.A.S.-eous." In an eighty-page introduction Dr. Davis gives the background of this unremarkable document, unravels the thick web of myth that grew around BeUe Boyd years ago, and develops BeUe's personality and postwar life with considerable thoroughness . In forty-two pages of notes he gives many corroborations of her account from other sources. But to this reviewer the most significant result of his work lies in the contemporary reports he found of BeUe's appearances on the lecture platform. It is not evident that these elaborated substantiaUy on the limited story of her espionage that she unfolded in 1865. This may be taken as an indication that there was not much of a story after aU. So the message implicit in this book is that BeUe Boyd's fame has rested on factors other than the significance of her espionage. Now for the first time one of the two-dozen Civü War spy memoirs has been subjected to exhaustive and skülful detective work. That is a help to future scholarship, and one admires the dedication of the executors—the publisher as weU as Dr. Davis —but wonders at the same time if the publishing world could sustain even one more experiment of this kind. Edwin C. Fishel Arlington, Virginia History of AndersonviUe. By Ovid L. Futch. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1968, Pp. iv, 146. $5.00.) As the author of this latest history of the most infamous of Civü War military prisons has noted in his preface and has catalogued in his informative ten-page bibliographic essay, "many writers have dealt with AndersonviUe Prison, but few of them have attempted to approach the subject objectively." To his credit, Ovid L. Futch has constructed a scholarly volume in which historical objectivity has been scrupulously observed. He has carefully sifted through a host of unofficial memoirs, letters, and diaries as weU as official records to develop an intriguing account of what happened at AndersonviUe between February 14, 1864, and May 5, 1865, which would explain and affix responsibility for the tragic deaths of thirteen thousand of the nearly fifty thousand prisoners of war held there. Because of this inordinate loss of life—more than half of the losses sustained in aU of the southern military prisons combined—the AndersonviUe experience has long been thought by many to have been nothing more than a diabolical plot by savage Confederate leaders who were bent on destroying the Union by destroying captured Unionists. Certainly such a belief colored the post-war trial and execution of the prison,keeper, Captain Henry H. Wirz. Yet, though the author does ascribe some of the difficulties at AndersonviUe to the "gross mismanagement" of its commander, General John H. Winder; the commanding officer of the Georgia State Guard, General Howell Cobb; Captain Wirz; and others, he is careful to point out that the 80CIVIL WAR HISTORY scanty resources of the Confederacy in 1864 and 1865 had...