Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War

Captivating Captives, An Excursion to Johnson's Island Civil War Prison

16 Captivating Captives z An Excursion to Johnson’s Island Civil War Prison Michael P. Gray In the vast historiography of the Civil War, scholars have especially concentrated on the battlefield, from strategy and tactics to the leaders that put their plans into motion. Eventually, there was a filtering down to the common soldier, and while historians continue to evolve beyond battlegrounds with much fresh social and cultural input—this natural progression from a “behind the lines” perspective can be further developed by studying “behind the stockade walls” of Civil War prisons. Some audiences may be more interested in the romantic image of the honorable soldier stepping onto fields of glory rather than examining those who were captured; however, those imprisoned should not be discounted, nor should their scholarly investigation. More often, when scholars delve into the camps, they tend to gravitate toward stockades with high mortality rates. This is largely due to the notoriety of Andersonville and the many comparisons made to that Georgia pen. Consequently, other confines are overshadowed. Moreover, a recent pattern in Civil War prison scholarship follows this trend, focusing on the administrative policy of prisons with a tendency to emphasize mortality among captives. This occasionally leads to generalizations that neglect other significant dynamics in and out of the stockade walls. Civil War prison studies constitutes a largely untapped subject that merits going far beyond death figures and, indeed, compels a deeper examination into prison yards and their host communities with regional, economic, social, and cultural approaches.1 17 captivating captives Within Civil War prison scholarship, one theme that is particularly overlooked has to do with the impact of camps beyond their specific locale.2 This chapter seeks to correct this deficiency and lay some groundwork for more investigation into an intriguing and, hopefully, growing aspect of not only Civil War prisons but also “the viewing” of Civil War soldiers generally. It might also better explain the importance of how contemporaries scrutinized captured soldiers under the lens of societal norms and to what extent people might undertake to see them in the broader context of the nineteenth century. Little scholarly investigation of the “looking,” “viewing,” or even “gawking” of prisoners has been undertaken nor of the reaction inmates might give in response to being considered spectacles.3 How various prison populations might be treated differently by the enemy, along with how civilians entered into the framework of the prisoners’ captivity, might seem astonishing when compared to present-day standards. Moreover, soldiers’ shame in being labeled as “prisoners of war” resulted in a shared benefit that meshed victory on the military front at having taken the enemy with a celebratory sensation on the home front in the surrounding publicity as found in their advertising and promotion; meanwhile, prisoner humiliation only grew worse. An excellent example of this occurred in the Midwest (at the time referred to often as the Middle West) at a prison that had minimal deaths and one that has received little attention by academic historians . Contemporaries, however, certainly recognized its significance, and they left behind a record of an unusual fascination that subsequent generations ignored. The decision to select Johnson’s Island in Ohio as a prison camp led to consequences that reverberated throughout the entire Northern home front. Like other prisons, Johnson’s Island has a complex history with many layers, yet it, nonetheless, possesses a distinctive place among prisons because of its unique prison population: Union leaders had decided it would be used to confine Southern officers. In reality, its population was even more diverse. Again like other camps, this Ohio prison brought about dramatic economic benefits for the host community, Sandusky, that eventually trickled to other locales in the Midwest and Great Lakes region. But it was the Southern gentry that first caught the eyes of many midwesterners’ imaginations as they could hardly contain themselves in anticipation of seeing their new, rare, exceptional, if not exotic, island guests. In early fall 1861, William West was working at his store in Sandusky, Ohio, when a courier entered with a message that an important military michael p. gr ay 18 man who recently checked in at West’s boardinghouse wanted to see him. The anxious Sanduskian went off immediately to West House and found the newly appointed commissary general of Union prisons colonel William Hoffman, who had recently arrived from Cleveland, waiting. West removed his hat as Hoffman told him that...