Paternalism and Imprisonment at Castle Thunder: Reinforcing Gender Norms in the Confederate Capital

Abstract

Paternalism and Imprisonment at Castle ThunderReinforcing Gender Norms in the Confederate Capital Angela M. Zombek (bio) Castle Thunder’s inmates were a hard lot. In 1863, members of a special congressional investigative committee derided them as “desperate and abandoned characters,” mainly murderers, thieves, deserters, substitutes, forgers, and “all manner of villains.” Commandant George Alexander’s harshness inspired the Confederate Congress to investigate the legality of his favored punishments, which included whipping, bucking and gagging, and solitary confinement. Ultimately, the committee, and Alexander’s subordinates—like warden Baldwin T. Allen, who testified on his behalf—condoned his conduct, and emphasized the necessity of rigid rules, since anything less would hinder officers’ ability to control the motley crew of inmates.1 Scholars’ focus on military prisons has painstakingly chronicled inmates’ suffering and intentional maltreatment.2 But Castle Thunder had a broader function: the Confederate government consolidated power through establishment and control of military prisons. National control over prisons was radical, especially since antebellum southern civilians remained skeptical of state-controlled [End Page 221] penitentiaries and Americans generally believed that the national government should be restrained in criminal matters. But Confederate political and military officials eschewed antebellum disdain for institutions of confinement. They instead believed that military prisons should punish enemies, suppress dissent, and promote Confederate ideology.3 Click for larger view View full resolution Castle Thunder Prison, Petersburg (Richmond), April 1865, photograph by Andrew J. Russell. (Library of Congress.) Confederate military officials used Castle Thunder to create a gendered definition [End Page 222] of nationalism, exalted its commanders as prime examples of southern manhood, and castigated white male and female inmates as deviants whose recalcitrant gendered behavior threatened the cause. Prison officials exercised paternalism by using imprisonment to supervise civilians who betrayed the cause. Meanwhile, journalists crafted messages about prison officers and inmates that showed the southern public how to behave. Confederate officials like Castle Thunder commandant George Alexander and Richmond’s Provost Marshal John Winder used the prison to imbue gendered behavior with meaning, and the Richmond press helped southern civilians envision how proper southern men and women should support the national project.4 Click for larger view View full resolution General John N. Winder, C.S.A, before 1861. (Library of Congress.) Castle Thunder’s history points to how the Civil War disrupted gender norms [End Page 223] and exacerbated social anxieties, which Winder and Alexander corrected and controlled through imprisonment. They used the prison to guard white women in the absence of men, reprimand women who exhibited masculine behavior, and judge how men should balance their duties as heads of household with their obligations to defend the state. Castle Thunder provided a concrete reminder that southern nationalism required proper male and female behavior and that defiance warranted imprisonment.5 The Confederacy’s gendered version of nationalism remained engrained in southerners after war’s end. In postwar Richmond, Union victors maintained the prison for several months to bring order to the city, but southern inmates petitioned for release based on gender expectations that the vanquished Confederates promoted throughout the war. Many Castle Thunder inmates illuminate a paradox in gender dynamics that disturbed the southern social order, as many white and lower-class women assumed traditionally male roles, and imprisonment either emasculated men, or restrained hypermasculine enemies. White southerners had long prided themselves on maintaining a stable gender consensus in their slaveholding society. Under this construct, patriarchal white male heads of household wielded authority over dependents—wives, children, and slaves—and patriarchal power guided social, political, and economic relationships beyond the home. War, however, inspired Confederate officials to scrutinize the behavior of a wide range of “suspicious” characters of both genders, ultimately revealing that the South’s longstanding gender conventions did not command the loyalty necessary to sustain the war effort. Lower-class men and, perhaps more importantly, women who defied gender conventions rejected antebellum norms and took advantage of war’s chaos to create new opportunities. Conservative officials, like Winder and Alexander, made themselves the arbiters of female virtue and male honor to a degree unheard of in the antebellum period and used Castle Thunder to force compliance with Confederate nationalism, which depended on perpetuating the familiar, patriarchal social...