Andersonville and the Literature of Violence

In 2015, MacKinlay Kantor's Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War novel Andersonville was reprinted for the first time in 15 years. The reissue has a new cover but no introduction to acquaint new readers with a book that several prominent judges in the 1950s called "our greatest Civil War novel." I've written this essay partly as such an introduction, which should be useful for those who haven't read or even heard of this important book. But, I also want to use the occasion of Andersonville's latest iteration to raise some issues of novelistic categorization—specifically what it means to classify a book as a Civil War novel, a War Novel, a novel of Modern War, etc.

Andersonville is a depiction of the most notorious of the Civil War prison camps—what was officially named Camp Sumter, in southwest Georgia. The camp was an open-air rectangle, 17 acres square, surrounded by a 15-foot high pine-log stockade. About 13,000 men perished there in 16 months, between February 1864 and May 1865 (MacPherson, 796, 802). In a sense, the prison camp itself is the novel's main character, but the book is also a panoramic, composite portrait of the United States during the antebellum period and the war, in that Kantor depicts life in the prison from the perspectives of multiple Union soldiers who were sent there as well as the Confederate guards who watched and sometimes shot them, the doctors who treated them (or tried to), the officers who ran the Camp, horribly, and even some local civilians who watched the monstrosity being born in their midst. For almost every character whom he introduces, Kantor writes a rich life-story up to the point where each man enters the hellish prison camp. The fullness of so many represented lives is what accounts for Andersonville's nearly 800-page length. I find the effect of Kantor's arrangement incredibly powerful—and heartbreaking. Over and over, we meet some fellow—from Maine or Michigan, Iowa or New York—and we watch him emerge into young manhood from out of his family life, in all its particulars—and then we see him die, in almost every case, and die in the most degrading fashion. The result is that even the most ordinary of the lives depicted—even those pre-war lives that seem tough, unlucky, or unpleasant—comes to seem like a most-longed-for paradise, compared with the utterly wretched end to which every one of them is brought: a death by starvation, exposure, disease, accident, or murder, all depicted in fairly horrific detail.

Nevertheless, it surprised me that some historically minded admirers of the book, such as Bruce Catton and Henry Steele Commager, have said that Andersonville was the best novel about the Civil War.¹ I naively assumed that such an accolade would have to go to a book that depicted battles primarily. But, now I think I see what they meant. It is a variation on what Walt Whitman meant when he lamented repeatedly in his Civil War diary that the real war was too vast—too vastly heroic and horrible—ever to get into the books.² That, for me, seemed at first to be MacKinlay Kantor's achievement. To me, it felt like he did get the real war, and in some sense the whole war, into his book. And, this is partly because, as many historians agree, the Civil War was one of the first truly modern wars, and modern wars are horrible in ways that we still have trouble seeing clearly, and I believe MacKinlay Kantor saw that.³ Over and over, the novel juxtaposes the narrative of an individual, normal (pre-war) life with a horrible end to that life—not an end on the battlefield either, but an end that seems wholly unnecessary and irrelevant to the Civil War's larger meaning or purpose. And, so I would say Andersonville defamiliarized both war and peace; at least on a first read, it renewed my horror of war at the same time that it renewed my appreciation...