Prison Life among the Rebels: Recollections of a Union Chaplain (review)

BOOK REVIEWS349 creation of the Confederate Marine Corps allowed the Henderson clan to create the model military organization denied them in the 1840s and 1850s by Washington politics. The theme Donnelly might have developed was how the CSMC officers attempted to remake their new corps in the model of the British Royal Marines. The Confederate Marines, for example, performed the traditional ship-board security and combatant duties of the U.S. Marines, and they guarded Confederate naval bases in the same manner that their Yankee counterparts patrolled Northern naval installations. The CSMC, however, also found a role in coast defense, a Royal Marine but not a U.S. Marine Corps mission. Whatever the Confederate Marines did, they didn't do much because they were so few in number. Donnelly doubts that more than six hundred were on duty at any one time and that no more than fifty officers and twelve hundred men served in the CSMC during the course of the war. Whatever its shortcomings as a scholarly monograph, The Confederate States Marine Corps brings together an exhaustive collection of information about the Confederate Marines that makes it the primary source on the subject. It will remain Ralph Donnelly's legacy to Civil War history, and as a definitive reference work it will endure. Allan R. Millett The Ohio State University Prison Life among the Rebels: Recollections ofa Union Chaplain. Edited by Edward D. Jervey. (Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University Press, 1990. Pp. xiii, 94. $26.00 cloth; $12.50 paper.) In this slim volume, we read the edited letters of Henry S. White, chaplain of the 5th Rhode Island Regiment Heavy Artillery, who, along with about fifty men of his regiment, was captured by Confederate soldiers at Croatan Station, North Carolina, in May 1864. The Confederates sent him by foot and rail through the Carolinas and into Georgia. For about a day he was confined in a church in Andersonville and observed the stockade there. Then he went to the officers' prison at Macon, remaining there until the end of July; next, evidently by a special exchange, he was taken to Savannah and finally to Charleston, South Carolina, and released to Union authorities in September. Soon after his release, White, a Methodist minister, wrote eighteen letters on his journeys and sojourn as a prisoner for publication in the Zion Herald, a "fiercely independent" newspaper widely circulated in the Northeast. He described in rich detail Southern communities and the countryside, his encounters with Southern soldiers and civilians, conditions at Macon, and his "reverential musings." At once the letters represent ordinary and unusual aspects of prisoners' narratives. They 350CIVIL WAR HISTORY were part of the voluminous body of that genre appearing during the war and in the half-century thereafter. But as a chaplain's recollections, they were part of a relatively sparse literature. Additionally, they tell us much about life at a prison that has not been the subject of many scholarly publications. Especially at Macon, where conditions were not as bad as at Andersonville , White emotionally portrays privations of prisoners in food, shelter, clothing, and medical care; perhaps he unfairly condemns Southerners on this score, assuming that their wilful decisions, not shortages of supplies, dictated deprivation. He sketches interesting accounts of prisoners attempting to "make-do" in their cooking arrangements and recounts an amusing episode of officers ridding themselves of vermin— "graybacks." He adds substance to other reports of cruel behavior by the prison commandant, Captain W Kent Tabb. Like most reminiscent documents, the letters raise questions about an author's perspective at a remove from events. Often, as he recalls his comportment as a prisoner, he seems to be playing to a gallery of patriotic readers: he persists in protests against the forced march of prisoners in North Carolina until the guards slacken the pace; he lectures a Union prisoner, a Copperhead, on the duties and virtues of patriotism; he confounds Southern ministers attempting to justify slavery; he skillfully disarms Confederate officers seeking to suppress his prayers for the president and the Union; and he pleads for the right to visit sick prisoners. White was a committed chaplain, tending his soldierly flock as he led...