Moving (Mostly) beyond Atrocities: New Directions in Civil War Prisons

In 2011, Michael P. Gray noted approvingly that scholarly interest in Civil War prisons was gaining traction, as several recent monographs had begun moving "beyond policy history, examining social, economic, and cultural ramifications" of the Union and Confederacy's military prison systems ("Advancing Andersonville: Ovid L. Futch as Prison Micro-Monograph Pioneer," in History of Andersonville Prison, ed. Ovid L. Futch, rev. ed. [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011], xxiii–xxiv). What he meant by "policy history" was the pervasive theme of grappling with and understanding the atrocious mortality rates that characterized the prisons. The narratives of death, suffering, and mortality were so strong that scarcely anything objective was written about the camps until William B. Hesseltine's 1930 Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology. Interest in the topic, however, remained limited. Before the 1990s, relatively few monographs and articles were written on Civil War prisons. Notable exceptions include Hesseltine's Civil War Prisons, a 1972 collection of essays, and Ovid L. Futch's History of Andersonville Prison, a pioneering work on the Confederacy's most controversial prison pen. The field's resurgence continued Hesseltine's legacy of interrogating culpability, but as Gray noted in 2011, the literature was now undergoing a discernable shift. He concluded that "more work must be undertaken," as scholars have only begun to scratch the surface. The two monographs under consideration are a direct product of Gray's call to action.

This connection is not hard to trace. The first work, Gray's Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered is the natural outgrowth of his 2011 historiographical article. Gray was also directly inspired by Hesseltine's 1972 collection. Whereas Civil War Prisons focused on individual prisons, Gray has assembled a team of scholars to interpret the prisons from a "macro approach" (xxi). The work also promises to deliver "a more holistic approach" that favors comparably to "the policy history and mortality rate-driven books" that have dominated the literature (xxxiv). The collection is largely successful on both fronts. Two outlier articles focus on Camp Lawton and Johnson's Island, but Gray justifies their inclusion by noting their innovative archeological approaches. Suffering, however, haunts the volume like a ghost of Andersonville, but rarely do the articles descend into the trope of culpability. The contributors address old issues with fresh perspectives when relevant, rather than rehashing worn-out arguments about intent and logistics. Addressing these captivity narratives, therefore, is not a criticism, per se, but rather a testament to the legacy of the prisoners themselves, whose stories live on and are seemingly inescapable.

Gray's contribution explores dark tourism, in which enterprising northerners facilitated viewing episodes and profited from the suffering of Confederate prisoners of war. Interest in observing prisoners began in earnest with the establishment of Johnson's Island. The termination of the Dix-Hill cartel enabled additional profit-seeking opportunities as new prisons were built and quickly filled. Elmira, the North's most notorious prison, became the site of competing observatories, much to the chagrin of the prisoners. Adding insult to injury, many southerners found the experience humiliating, with Gray concluding these activities were a direct violation of the Lieber Code. The prisoner narrative remains a persistent theme. Christopher Barr traces how prisoners, North and South, understood their captivity through the lens of slavery. The exchange cartel, suspended over the Confederacy's refusal to exchange black soldiers, forced many to see their imprisonment in racialized terms. African Americans, however, maintained the memory of their confinement long after the war's end, memorializing Andersonville as a site of freedom, honoring the Union soldiers who perished there.

In her contribution to the volume, Angela Zombek approaches the suffering narrative from a new angle as well, detailing how Catholic...