Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons by Evan A. Kutzler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons by Evan A. Kutzler Kelly D. Mezurek (bio) Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons. By Evan A. Kutzler. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 208. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $29.95.) In Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons, Evan A. Kutzler provides the model example of just how much we have yet to explore in the history of the American Civil War. By interrogating how prisoners used their senses as part of the struggle to adapt to and survive prison, this book contributes to the scholarship that explores how wartime experiences challenged and often reinforced how Civil War soldiers understood the cultural worlds in which they lived. While death was ever present, Kutzler seeks to understand “how so many lived” (5). He argues that the imprisoned men feared that the debilitating effects of captivity had the potential to diminish their civility and threatened their manhood. As a result, both Union and Confederate soldiers used their senses, which were assaulted more severely than while in regimental camps or battle, to justify their causes for war, to reinforce sectional differences, and to claim superiority over their enemies in order to withstand the psychological and physical hardships and deprivations of the prison experience. While the structure of the book may seem as if each chapter explores one of the five senses, Kutzler skillfully integrates combinations of the various senses, as is the human experience. But that does not fully recognize [End Page 295] the artful methodology Kutzler demonstrates throughout. For example, chapter 3 is probably the most engaging discussion of lice one will have the pleasure to read. The vermin serve as the host to Kutzler’s deep analysis of touch as perceived by nineteenth-century Americans. And instead of “inventorying the soundscape” in chapter 4, Kutzler skillfully interrogates listening and what sounds and silences meant to the captives (85). He further demonstrates how deeply entrenched is the practice of using senses to explain and understand one’s lived experiences when he includes poetry and song lyrics by and about prisons and prisoners. And the choice to include the voices of prisoners from different prisons, not just one location or type of confinement, helps to illustrate the mobility of captivity during the Civil War, something most prison studies fail to explore. Unlike the widespread references to manhood and masculinity, the question of how race impacted the use of senses as a means to explain and understand the prisoner experience is less explored. Kutzler’s own interpretation of the breakdown of the Dix-Hill Cartel, which led to the increased need for prisons, argues that race was the most important factor. He justly explains that few sources left by African American prisoners of war are readily available, so those men are not part of his research. But the accounts left by Confederates who were captured, transported, and guarded by Black soldiers do not lack sensory commentary. And Confederate prisoners did not all “avoid exhibiting even a whisper that might be interpreted as rebellious exultation” when the news of Abraham Lincoln’s death reached the prisons (103). White southerners used their taunts to applaud the president’s assassination as a form of retaliation against their African American guards. Overall, though, Kutzler succeeds at what he promises to do in this volume. He uses the prisoners’ own words, relying heavily on diaries, to show how they used their sensory perceptions to explain their thoughts, beliefs, and ideas about their experiences and worldviews. The breadth of his archival research is to be commended. And, for the most part, he refrains from engaging the postwar debates over blame and which government inflicted more harm. His desire to show a diversity of prisoner accounts that include a multitude of voices contributes to the ongoing scholarship that challenges the concept of a “common soldier.” When he shares his personal experiences in the conclusion, Kutzler offers strong support for his caution to readers that the acuity of our senses “depends on time and...