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

3. Continuity and Change

–3– CONTINUITY AND CHANGE MODERN WRITERS AND THE ISSUE OF FEDERAL TREATMENT OF CONFEDERATE PRISONERS SINCE THE WAR GENERATION and its immediate descendents left the stage in the first third of the twentieth century, fewer people were willing to deal with the controversial issue of prisoners of war. Many probably thought there was little left to say on the topic given the rather large amount of material Northern and Southern writers produced in the halfcentury after the war’s conclusion. Some were probably reluctant to reopen old wounds. Others likely had an understandable reluctance to touch a topic that continued to generate heated debate by partisans on both sides of the issue. It was far more comfortable to leave such issues alone. Over the past century, though, a few writers have stepped forward and addressed this particular topic. Most of the writing is fairly recent, perhaps a response to James McPherson’s 1998 comment in Writing the Civil War that this topic has been neglected relative to the voluminous attention other aspects of the war years have received. “Although good books and articles on individual prisons (especially Andersonville) have appeared in recent years,” McPherson wrote, “only one general study of this important matter has been published since 1930.” Since then two general studies have been published, the most recent, While in the Hands of the Enemy, on a major academic press. Still, compared to other aspects of the war this area remains an under-explored topic.1 Modern treatments of the subject, at least regarding Federal treatment of Confederate prisoners, has tended to reinforce rather than seriously 51 challenge the Lost Cause-era interpretation that Union prison camps were unduly harsh and lethal. Some commentators have approached the issue of Confederate prisoner mortality far more dispassionately than their Lost Cause predecessors did but reached basically the same negative conclusions about Northern motives and actions towards Southern captives. Others have accepted the Lost Cause interpretation completely and have added their voices to their ancestors’. But a small handful of writers have begun to question seriously the premise that Confederate prisoners were mistreated as a matter of policy and died in inexcusably high numbers. They are, however , in such a minority that they have made little if any impact on the thinking in this area. Surprisingly the beginning of the twentieth century saw two historians, James Ford Rhodes and Holland Thompson, try to bring a level of objectivity to this issue that had been glaringly absent in most writing up to that point. Rhodes warned researchers that veterans’ accounts and many of the postwar treatments were highly suspect. He described most postwar narratives and second-hand writing as “entirely polemical.” “In no part of the history of the Civil War,” Rhodes added, “is a wholesome skepticism more desirable, and nowhere is more applicable a fundamental tenet of historical criticism that all the right is never on one side and all the wrong on the other.” Researchers needed to be especially wary, he said, because in the “mass of material the man with a preconceived notion can find facts to his liking.” Rhodes tried very hard not to fall into the traps others had of taking postwar writing at face value and using it to castigate the era’s officials.2 That is not to say he did not find fault. He found quite a bit of mismanagement on both sides but no convincing evidence that Federal or Confederate officials designed their prisons to produce as much suffering and death as possible or that those authorities were woefully derelict or negligent in their duties. The closest Rhodes came to indicting Union officials was to suggest that it was a bit surprising to him that mortality statistics between Northern and Southern prisons were so close given the North’s vastly superior resource capabilities. He viewed that as a topic for further investigation, though, and did not conclude that the comparable numbers constituted de facto proof of Yankee misconduct towards Confederate prisoners.3 At about the same time, Holland Thompson was reaching similar conclusions . In 1911 he wrote, “We must believe that the greatest horrors—for there were horrors—arose from ignorance or apparent necessity, rather than from intention.” Thompson had interviewed dozens of former prisoners and discovered that there was a wide range of experiences, even among 52 ANDERSONVILLES OF THE NORTH those who had been at the same prisons at the...