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

Introduction

INTRODUCTION IN 1998, JAMES MCPHERSON OBSERVED in Writing the Civil War that while the Civil War has been and continues to be the most written-about event in American history, a remarkably small percentage of the literature has focused on the prisoner of war issue. Since that time, about a dozen books on this topic have been published, though rarely by academic presses. This relative dearth of writing on the subject may reflect the belief that William Best Hesseltine’s seminal work, Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (1930), set such a high standard that there was little meaningful to add. More likely it reflects an understandable reluctance to tackle a subject that remains highly controversial nearly 150 years after the war ended. Whatever the reason, writing on this topic, whether by lay historians or Ph.D-holding scholars, has rarely shed new light on it or attempted to offer a new interpretation of prisoner of war policies and life inside the war’s camps. My intention is to offer a book that does offer a new perspective on Northern POW policies and how Federal officials treated Confederate captives during the Civil War. From the end of the war until Hesseltine’s book appeared, Union officials had been characterized as horribly inhumane when it came to their treatment of Confederate prisoners. Because of a basic lack of Christian compassion in Yankee DNA, postwar Southerners argued, conditions in Federal prisons were excessively harsh and deadly. According to writers from the Lost Cause era, Confederate prisoners were thrust into crowded and filthy pens where they were systematically denied adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Since Union officials had the resources to provide all of these things but cruelly chose not to, Southern prisoners suffered and died in huge numbers. 1 Hesseltine took a much more objective view of the situation. While he did think that given the North’s resources mortality in Union prison camps was too high, he did not attribute it to some congenital defect in Northerners’ basic character. Rather, he suggested they denied vital resources to Confederate prisoners because they suffered from what he called a “war psychosis.” After being bombarded with prison atrocity stories by the Northern press, officials decided in 1864 to initiate a retaliation program where supplies such as food and medicine were withheld as a way to dish out to Southern prisoners the same treatment that Union prisoners were believed to be receiving at places like Belle Isle in Richmond and Andersonville in Georgia. Northern officials were not evil, they were misguided. Since Hesseltine’s still-valuable book, there has been a noticeable trend back towards characterizing Northern officials as cruel, vindictive, and negligent in their prisoner of war policies. This has been most true of books published by non-academic presses but university professors have also tended to condemn Federal prison officials and policies as callous and unnecessarily harsh in their writing. In the 1960s one scholar described Union officials as acting towards Southern prisoners with “sadistic apathy.” In 2005 the most recent scholarly treatment of this issue, While in the Hands of the Enemy, was published by the prestigious LSU Press. In this prize-winning book, Charles Sanders breaks with past writers in that he holds both governments responsible for deplorable conditions in their prisons . But, like virtually every other work, this one is particularly hard on Northern officials. Sanders concludes that by the middle of the war, and especially during its final year, Union policies were “deliberately designed to lower conditions in the camps and increase immeasurably the suffering of the prisoners.” The literature has been almost uniformly negative in its assessment of Federal prison policies and treatment of Confederate prisoners of war. But there have been a couple of books published within the last decade that have broken with this well-established image of cruel and negligent Yankee keepers. In 2000 Northern Illinois University Press published Rebels at Rock Island by Benton McAdams. This excellent study of a notorious Northern prison acknowledged that life there was difficult and potentially deadly. But while showing that life there was hard, McAdams did not find any compelling evidence of a Federal conspiracy to lower conditions there. That same year Dale Fetzer and Bruce Mowday’s study of Fort Delaware, Unlikely Allies: Fort Delaware’s Prison Community in the Civil War, was 2 ANDERSONVILLES OF THE NORTH published by Stackpole...