Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory by Benjamin G. Cloyd (review)

If you want to start an argument with a defender of “southern heritage,” one word will suffice: “Andersonville.” Say it, and you will elicit a torrent of arguments that include frequent references to “Elmira,” the death rate in northern prison camps (even though the “Yankees” had abundant resources and the Confederacy could not even feed its own armies), and charges that the Lincoln administration deliberately allowed northern and southern soldiers to languish in prisons because doing so served U.S. policy better than fulfilling the prisoner exchange cartel. The arguments would be substantially the same as those that appeared in the 1876 inaugural volume of the Southern Historical Society Papers.

Persistent (but diminishing) southern defensiveness over charges of Confederate guilt is only one facet of the story that Hinds Community College professor Benjamin Cloyd explores in Haunted by Atrocity. An apparent outgrowth of his master’s thesis at Louisiana State University, it is a wide-ranging study of how Americans have confronted (or failed to confront) the lessons of Andersonville and, more generally, all Civil War prisons. It is an excellent monograph that explores its subject clearly and systematically, with insight and elegance.

Readers are accustomed to encountering monographs with titles grander than the scope of the books, and Cloyd admits that “it would not be unfair to change the subtitle of the book to ‘Andersonville in American Memory’” (2). Indeed, Cloyd researched the experiences at and memories of other prisons, South and North, less thoroughly and presents them only for context and comparison. The centrality of Andersonville and the execution of its commandant, Captain Henry Wirz, in Civil War memory makes Cloyd’s decision understandable and defensible.

Cloyd’s is a straightforward chronological presentation, with chapters divided as the subject matter dictates. His analytical framework borrows from David Blight’s Race and Reunion (2001), particularly Blight’s concept of a tripartite structure of memory. Cloyd designates his three traditions as “divisive,” “objective,” and “emancipationist,” the latter defined as African Americans’ understanding of prisons “as symbols not of atrocity, but of freedom” (49). Echoing Blight, Cloyd argues that the emancipationist tradition was forgotten as white Americans, South and North, embraced a reconciliationist objective memory.

Cloyd’s impressively diverse sources include official records, wartime and postwar prisoner-of-war memoirs, and polemics, as well as novels, films, monographs by other historians, and public documents related to the creation and administration of the Andersonville National Historic Site and the National POW Museum. Appropriately for a book about historical memory, Cloyd not only draws from the insights of seminal works in the historiography—from William Hesseltine’s 1930 Civil War Prisons to the recent works of Charles Sanders and James Gillispie—but analyzes their place in the evolution of memory.

Building on Sanders’s 2005 While in the Hands of the Enemy, Cloyd concludes that “the reason for the perpetration of atrocity toward Civil War prisoners was clear—it furthered the war aims of both participants—and the responsibility lay on both sides” (29). He determines to combat what he believes is the erroneous and injurious narrative that consoles Americans and explains away responsibility for what occurred in prison camps, South and North. Rooted in a revelation that American intellectuals took away from the two world wars—that “evil [is] typical of modern war”—as well as strengthening sectional reconciliation, this “objective” memory replaced the “divisive” memory that reigned from the Civil War through 1914 (136).

“Excusing both the Union and Confederacy as equally guilty allowed Americans to continue to avoid the daunting task of honestly and more accurately assessing the responsibility for the tragedy of Civil War prisons,” Cloyd writes in the fullest statement of his thesis. “Objective memory possessed increasing attraction for Americans by 1960—it was profitable and also helped validate America’s claim to a position of moral leadership in the world. But even a successful illusion is still...