Civil War Incarceration in History and Memory: A Roundtable

Abstract

Civil War Incarceration in History and MemoryA Roundtable Chris Barr, David R. Bush, Michael P. Gray, Evan Kutzler, and Kelly D. Mezurek May 1864. A group of men from Connecticut found themselves at a place that shook them to the core and traumatized their very identities. Robert Kellogg grasped a pencil and a small diary to chronicle the moment he arrived at Andersonville: “As we entered the place a spectacle met our gaze which almost froze our blood, our hearts failed us as we saw what used to be men now nothing but mere skeletons covered with filth and vermin. God protect us! He alone can bring us out of this awful mess.” Another Connecticut man peered inside the stockade to see the “horrors of horrors,” a scene that made his blood curdle. Ira Forbes, another brave member of the 16th Connecticut, had seen his fair share of horror. Antietam and Fredericksburg, with their bounties of death and destruction, seemed like mild prequels to what was inside a wooden stockade in rural Georgia. “Of all places of distress and misery and suffering which I have ever seen,” Forbes said, “this was the worst.”1 The experience of Civil War incarceration altered the lives of thousands of men. The stories of terror and loneliness, of physical and emotional trauma, bear out yet one more tragic chapter in the nation’s tale of war and woe. For this special issue of Civil War History, we have invited five leading scholars of Civil War prisons. Academic historians, public historians, and archeologists continue to collaborate to resurrect the stories of those who spent a transformative period locked away [End Page 295] from the outside world. Our hope is that this roundtable will shed light on the interdisciplinary nature of studying Civil War incarceration as well as provide some glimpses into where the field has come from and where it is headed. Chris Barr (CB) is a park ranger with the National Park Service at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. Previously, he was on the interpretive staff at Andersonville National Historic Site, where he developed a variety of educational programs both for school groups visiting the site and for teachers to use in the classroom. He also oversaw the interpretive operations of the park’s social media and Web presence, including the production of the popular Story in Stone series that highlighted burials in Andersonville National Cemetery. His research at Andersonville focused on the interplay between race and captivity, a topic he presented on at the 2014 Society of Civil War Historians Conference. David R. Bush (DB) is professor of anthropology at Heidelberg University and director of their Center for Historic and Military Archaeology. Bush has been involved with the investigations of the Johnson’s Island Civil War Military Prison site since 1988. Although trained in prehistoric archaeology, he has dedicated the past twenty-eight years to historic archaeology, bridging the historical record with those cultural materials left behind. His most recent book on Johnson’s Island, I Fear I Shall Never Leave This Island (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011), details one man’s experience through letters to and from his wife, contextualized with other historical and archaeological data. Michael P. Gray (MG) is professor of history at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses in American history, including a special topics course on Civil War prisons and the home front. His first book, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001), was a finalist for the Seaborg Award. Gray is finishing an edited volume, Civil War Prisons II: Trending Captivity in Blue and Gray, and working on a full-length treatment on the Johnson’s Island Prison. Gray has won internal and external grants relating to the prisons, including Civil War Prison Archeology: Team Teaching Public History on Johnson’s Island (2011) as well as the National Prisoner of War Grant, Andersonville, Georgia (2014). Evan Kutzler (EK) is assistant professor of U.S. and public history at Georgia Southwestern State University, ten miles south of Andersonville, the largest and most infamous Civil War prison. In addition to writing and teaching...