The Archaeology of Institutional Life

11. Maintaining or Mixing Southern Culture in a Northern Prison: Johnson’s Island Military Prison

11 Maintaining or Mixing Southern Culture in a Northern Prison: JohnsonÕs Island Military Prison David R. Bush Prisons are challenging resources for archaeological study. Marginalized from society, their isolation creates a place with which neither the institutionalized nor their guardians are completely familiar. To understand these human experiences, we need to be open to multilocal and multivocal dynamics. “For each inhabitant, a place has a unique reality, one in which meaning is shared with other people and places. The links in these chains of experienced places are forged of culture and history” (Rodman 2003:201). With this approach, we can appreciate how the institutionalized create a recognizable place out of the unknown and understand how institutions with the same agenda can be so diverse. Multiple voices, including the archaeological record, provide the perspectives of place essential to a fuller understanding of the institution. So, as De Cunzo (2006:184) succinctly states,“What began as an archaeology of places becomes an archaeology of people.” For many institutions, the goal is to promote a change in the institutionalized ; however,during the American Civil War,prisoner-of-war camps were created solely to detain captives until exchanged, not to punish or reform. For Confederate officers, capture typically meant transport to the Johnson ’s Island Military Prison (Figure 11.1), a Union-designed facility on a small island in Sandusky Bay of Lake Erie, Ohio. (Most others were modi- fied from existing prisons.) Isolation on an island deep within Northern territory dimmed prospects for escape, but proximity to Sandusky, Ohio, allowed for provisioning. Figure 11.1. 1864 Gould map of Johnson’s Island Military Prison. Maintaining or Mixing Southern Culture in a Northern Prison / 155 The prison gathered individuals from various social backgrounds and settings, forcing them to cope with their newfound existence. Confederate prisoners attempted to transform their physical spaces to address their varied needs. The Union guard inserted their influence into this space, especially when dictated by policies imposed from the higher command. The site of the Johnson’s Island Military Prison, therefore, provides an opportunity to archaeologically explore (1) social dynamics within and between disparate populations; (2) the struggle for the ownership of space; (3) changing social values; and (4) the ability of the institutionalized to adapt without sacrificing their values. Confederate Officers as Prisoners of War “In this country have arisen two races [i.e., Northerners and Southerners] which, although claiming a common parentage, have been so entirely separated by climate, by morals, by religion, and by estimates so totally opposite to all that constitutes honor, truth, and manliness, that they cannot longer exist under the same government.” —Charles Colcock Jonen Jr., quoted in McPherson 1998:22 At the time of the American Civil War the South could be viewed as a folk culture, emphasizing “tradition, rural life, close kinship ties, a hierarchical social structure, ascribed status, patterns of deference and masculine codes of honor” (McPherson 1998:24). These attitudes persisted in the South long after the North moved toward an “impersonal, bureaucratic, urbanizing , commercial, industrializing, mobile, and rootless” society by the midnineteenth century (24). The South placed high value on tradition and stability , while the North, in its view of change as progress, saw the South as backward or stagnant. Being an officer’s prison, the majority of those confined at Johnson’s Island were Southerners of some social standing.Almost all were literate, and most had access to a certain amount of wealth. Captured and brought to a Northern prison, grouped with hundreds of other prisoners, they now had no privacy, limited comforts, and constant contact with Northern guards (along with the prison’s indignations and threats). In this setting the prisoners struggled to maintain their cultural identity as Southern officers and gentlemen. 156 / David R. Bush The Union Guard The guard of the Johnson’s Island Military Prison comprised a very different population. These men were recruited locally as Hoffman’s Battalion, commanded by Maj. William Pierson, a local figure from Sandusky with no prior military experience. Lt. William Peel, of the 11th Mississippi Infantry , expressed his view of the guard in this diary entry (April 5, 1864): It is reported that the old troops, who have for several months past formed a part of our guard, are to be sent again to the front. The news excites a good deal of regret among us, since we will...