Civil War Prisons Research Articles

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

Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons is the latest addition to the evolving historiography of Civil War incarceration. The slim book, organized in five chapters, is built around the five senses, and it is complemented by a useful introduction and reflective epilogue. Although the work is noticeably lean in appearance, it packs far more in terms of interpretation and innovation than the extensive coverage typical of macro-level studies. The book’s readability and unique methodology are what distinguish it and make it a significant contribution to the field. Evan A. Kutzler, who teaches not far from Andersonville, studied at the University of South Carolina under historian Mark M. Smith, who broke new ground with The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (2015). Under the mentorship of Smith, Kutzler captured the sensory methodology and moved it from battlefronts to home fronts by investigating the imprisoned. Kutzler writes, “Sensory history can help Civil War history move beyond stereotypes about soldiers and restore individuality without neglecting the big picture” (8). The author does admit, “This book takes interpretive risks. By juxtaposing the sensory experience of Union prisoners at Andersonville or Libby and Confederate prisoners at Johnson’s Island or Elmira, there is the danger of implying parity of experience … That is not something I wish to convey” (6–7). Indeed, class mattered during Civil War captivity, demonstrated in the latter two stockades Kutzler mentions; the officer prison at Johnson’s Island had a death rate of less than 2 percent, the enlisted men’s prison at Elmira nearly 25 percent. However, Kutzler continues, “Living by Inches presents subjective and emotional experiences in a way that leads to a greater understanding of what wartime imprisonment meant to those who lived it” (7). “For this reason,” he writes, his book “breaks from the usual debates about intentional mistreatment and whose prisons were more wretched. It does not dwell on mortality rates. Most prisoners, Union and Confederate, survived imprisonment” (5). Furthermore, Kutzler explains, “searching for an explanation as to why so many men died and who was responsible overlooks the human question of how so many lived” (5).

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

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

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

June 21 2021 Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons. Rebeccah Bechtold Rebeccah Bechtold Rebeccah Bechtold is an associate professor of English at Wichita State University where she specializes in soundscape studies of early and nineteenth century American literature. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Rebeccah Bechtold Rebeccah Bechtold is an associate professor of English at Wichita State University where she specializes in soundscape studies of early and nineteenth century American literature. Online Issn: 1937-2213 Print Issn: 0028-4866 © 2021 by The New England Quarterly2021The New England Quarterly The New England Quarterly (2021) 94 (2): 289–292. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00894 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Rebeccah Bechtold; Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons. The New England Quarterly 2021; 94 (2): 289–292. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00894 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsThe New England Quarterly Search Advanced Search In an August 15, 1863 diary entry, Union solider Horace Smith complained of his declining health while held captive at Virginia's Belle Isle Prison during the Civil War. Even though he could hardly “muster strength enough to crack a louse,” he lamented, “necessity compels me to muster all the strength I can twice a day for that purpose.” This compulsion—both to keep his body from becoming “one mass of filth,” as Nehemiah Solon would describe it a year later, and to record his attempts to do so—speaks to the varied ways prison life threatened the very identities of soldiers throughout the war (80). As Charles Lee stated during an 1864 excursion that allowed him outside Andersonville, “the fresh air and the green fields and forests made me feel almost like one risen from the dead” (45). Exposed to disease and hunger, subjected to unwelcome noise, and surrounded by the smell... You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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...

Camp Oglethorpe: Macon's Unknown Civil War Prisoner of War Camp, 1862–1864 by Stephen Hoy and William Smith

Reviewed by: Camp Oglethorpe: Macon's Unknown Civil War Prisoner of War Camp, 1862–1864 by Stephen Hoy and William Smith Evan A. Kutzler Camp Oglethorpe: Macon's Unknown Civil War Prisoner of War Camp, 1862–1864. Stephen Hoy and William Smith. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-8814-6691-1. 234 pp., cloth, $35.00. Before reading further, one may wish to search Google Maps for "Seventh Street, Macon, Georgia," and find the point where that street intersects with multiple [End Page 310] railroad tracks. The rail crossing marks one point on the western perimeter of Camp Oglethorpe, a fifteen-acre prison and the subject of Stephen Hoy and William Smith's Camp Oglethorpe: Macon's Unknown Civil War Prisoner of War Camp, 1862–1864. In contrast to Andersonville, about sixty miles away, this prison contains no marked cemetery, no memorials, and no signs. "Overshadowed by the horrors of nearby Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Georgia," Hoy and Smith write, "the history of Camp Oglethorpe has all but vanished from memory" (1). The industrial ruins on top of the Civil War ruins of Camp Oglethorpe are a reminder of the challenge—and the importance—of recovering the history of this place. The first challenge in writing about an individual Civil War prison is balancing a tight focus with sufficient historical context. Hoy and Smith demonstrate that Camp Oglethorpe covered multiple uses in the 1840s and '50s—from militia training ground to the space for agricultural exhibitions, picnics, and religious revivals (6, 9–12). When Georgia seceded from the United States in 1861, the site became a training camp for Confederate recruits. The rapid increase of Union and Confederate prisoners in early 1862 necessitated the repurposing of Camp Oglethorpe into a military prison (22). In some ways, Camp Oglethorpe's developmental history followed a course more similar to Northern prisons, like Camp Chase, than other Southern ones, like Andersonville. Many Civil War prisons, including Camp Oglethorpe, had disjointed histories. Camp Oglethorpe contained a large number of Union prisoners for only part of 1862 and 1864; it had no significant use as a military prison in 1861, 1863, or 1865. As the authors trace, the Emancipation Proclamation, changing prison policies, and military changes affected the use of the site. The first prisoners arrived in the aftermath of Shiloh. That spring and summer, the population at Camp Oglethorpe grew and prisoners faced a slew of problems that defined other places as well: military officials whose discipline bordered on cruelty, unpalatable food, and—as the weeks and months went on—the growing threat of so-called camp diseases (25, 31). As suffering increased, so too did the number of successful and unsuccessful escape attempts, which often involved enslaved people who provisioned and sheltered fugitive Union prisoners (34, 39). By late summer, with the "Dix-Hill" prison exchange system in place, Camp Oglethorpe began to empty (39–40). Camp Oglethorpe did not become a prison again until May 1864, when the breakdown of the prisoner exchange resulted in captive populations that exceeded early war numbers. Chapter 5, "Fresh Fish," is the second and last chapter to discuss Camp Oglethorpe as a prison; however, it is the heart of the book's contribution to site's history. While the authors tend to avoid direct comparisons, they suggest something important here. The experiences of Union prisoners were worse at camp Oglethorpe in 1864 than 1862. Still, Camp Oglethorpe—even in 1864—never [End Page 311] approximated Andersonville. As with their telling of the 1862 history, Hoy and Smith focus on prisoner resistance, especially escape attempts. Unlike Andersonville, where the US Army let the stockade rot in place, Camp Oglethorpe was neither confiscated by the US government nor long remembered at the local or national level. Hoy and Smith interpret this act of forgetting as an active decision. While Camp Oglethorpe had been the site of celebration in the 1840s and 1850s, the prison years were too difficult to remember. "The discomfort of Camp Oglethorpe's association with Andersonville," Hoy and Smith write, "prompted the city to treat the property as if haunted, as if tainted with memories that were unmentionable" (146). When railroad expansion...

Living by Inches

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

Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered ed. Michael P. Gray

Reviewed by: Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered ed. Michael P. Gray Brian D. McKnight (bio) Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered. Edited by Michael P. Gray. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2018. Pp. 232. Cloth, $45.00.) Over the course of the past two decades, Michael Gray has established himself as a leading scholar of the Civil War prison experience. His first book, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison (2001), broke new ground, and this current offering does the same. Often anthologies fail to live up to their potential because of the inability of their essays to bring cohesion to the topic or the failure of the essays to capitalize on the power of scholarly innovation. This book avoids both of these issues [End Page 127] and effectively brings the study of Civil War prisons into the twenty-first century. Gray, a professor of history at East Stroudsburg University, has gathered an exceptional collection of scholars offering new and interesting treatments of the Civil War captivity experience. In his introduction, Gray does an excellent job of taking the reader through the historiography of Civil War prison and prisoner studies. His examination of the major figures and works is bolstered by his solid appreciation for the impact of our contemporary concerns on the writing of history. In this case, he uses the centennial celebration in 1961 as a touchstone in the development of a mature study of Civil War prisons and shows how that development has continued up to the present day. Scholars lamenting our field's loss of focus on historiography will be pleased with the quality and content of Gray's introduction. Divided into three sections, the book does less studying the prisons and prisoners and more deconstructing the integral elements of captivity. Evan Kutzler's essay on the environmental aspects of captivity reminds readers that the common louse could wreak havoc on the morale of prisoners. Kutzler uses the louse to call for a greater focus on environmental concerns during the Civil War by reminding readers that "how prisoners gave meaning to the sounds of birds or the feeling of lice says much about both the experiences of captivity as well as the imaginations, presumptions, and standards they brought with them into war and captivity" (17–18). Gray's offering examines the tourism industry that popped up around prison camps and brought citizens to the stockades to view the captured enemy. He concludes that despite the Union army's proud adoption of Francis Lieber's code, it clearly looked the other way when it came to violating General Orders No. 100, section III, articles 56 and 75, which explicitly protect prisoners from "intentional suffering or disgrace" and any intentional "indignity" (43). Angela Zombek explores the importance of religion to the prisoners through her examination of the wartime activism of Catholic priests. Although these three essays do not hold together as well as essays in subsequent sections, they are excellent, innovative treatments. The second section focuses on the suffering of prisoners and opens with Lorien Foote's discussion of retaliation against prisoners of war. From using prisoners as human shields to the Confederacy's permitting state courts to charge and prosecute Federal prisoners during wartime, the Confederacy walked a dangerous line in regard to the rules of warfare. Christopher Barr's essay examines race and slavery within the prison environment and finds the power that race had over captivity, with a healthy [End Page 128] dose of historical memory. Tellingly, Barr writes, "If the politics of slavery and emancipation could affect how white prisoners understood their captivity, it defined how black prisoners experienced it" (117). Kelly Mezurek treats the ironic phenomenon of Confederate prisoners being held by black Union guards. For the Union army, using African American prison guards permitted black participation, but in a more menial role than that of front-line soldier. It gave the army a place to assign black troops outside the limelight of combat operations and had the added psychological benefit of turning the racial tables on white southerners fighting for the cause of racial superiority. Perhaps the most innovative section of the book is its...

Living By Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons

Contrary to popular opinion, Civil War battles were not always formal military engagements or guerilla skirmishes between Confederate and U.S. forces. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war (POWs) knew that their battles were starkly different from armed conflicts. POWs understood that fights in captivity occurred against their enemies, themselves, elements, animals, insects, and diseases. We know an extensive amount of information about infamous prison camps, including Andersonville and Elmira. Recent scholarship has brought to light the complexity of pardoning and surrendering processes and the "black flag" policy's racial politics. However, the day-to-day lived experiences of imprisoned soldiers and their struggles for survival are regularly portrayed in cliché terms. In Living By Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons, Evan A. Kutzler argues that rather than view POWs through a stereotypical lens, we must understand the complicated lives of captives in more concrete ways.

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

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

Camp Oglethorpe: Macon’s Unknown Civil War Prisoner of War Camp, 1862-1864

Located along the Ocmulgee River, Macon, Georgia, is known for its International Cherry Blossom Festival, the Ocmulgee National Monument, Mercer University, among other historic and cultural sites. Yet, as Stephen Hoy and William Smith argue in Camp Oglethorpe: Macon’s Unknown Civil War Prisoner of War Camp, 1862-1864, Macon is not known for having been the site of a prisoner of war (POW) camp during the American Civil War. Both long-time residents of Macon, Hoy and Smith recognized that they were living within minutes of an important site that had long since faded from public memory. Taking advantage of their location and the hundreds of accounts written by Union POWs, the authors resolved to bring Camp Oglethorpe out of the shadow of Andersonville and other more infamous Civil War prisons to present this clearly-written and well-researched study of Macon’s “unknown prisoner of war camp.”

The Intellectual Roots of the Lost Cause: Camaraderie and Confederate Memory in Civil War Prisons

The Intellectual Roots of the Lost Cause: Camaraderie and Confederate Memory in Civil War Prisons

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

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

Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons

Review of: Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War, by Angela Zombek and Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered, edited by Michael P. Gray.

Remembering the Finnish Civil War: Embodied Empathy and Fellman Field

On 28 April 2013, ninety-five years after Finland's civil war (27 January–15 May 1918), artist Kaisa Salmi created a performance called Fellman Field: A Living Monument to 22,000 People. It was a site-specific event organized at Fellman Park in Lahti. There, for almost a week in 1918, thousands of civil war prisoners were held to await transport to a prison camp. In 2013, an impressive number of people (close to 10,000) gathered at this site to participate in a commemoration of the civil war, which is still one of the most repressed traumas in the national consciousness of the Finns. This article discusses Fellman Field as an artwork in terms of its utilization of embodied empathy: the sympathetic understanding of the other through physical and emotional experience. The case of Fellman Field demonstrates the challenges and successes of a site-specific participatory performance that aims to promote understanding and constructively handle the complexity of a national tragedy.

Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War by Angela M. Zombek

Reviewed by: Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War by Angela M. Zombek Sarah Purcell Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War. By Angela M. Zombek. ( Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2018. Pp. xxii, 287. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-60635-355-4.) Angela M. Zombek shows the value of fresh periodization and framing in this book on Civil War military prisons. Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War puts Civil War military prisons in the context of early republic and antebellum histories of incarceration in the United States, an early starting point that enables Zombek to provide some surprisingly insightful analysis. Zombek also shifts the frame of antebellum and Civil War prison scholarship away from some of the most famous and well-studied cases (other than the prison at Andersonville, Georgia, which is included) to focus on Camp Chase Prison (Ohio), Johnson's Island Prison (Ohio), Old Capitol Prison (Washington, D.C.), Castle Thunder Prison (Virginia), and Salisbury Prison (North Carolina) as well as the penitentiaries that preceded them in those states. Zombek avoids the northeastern United States to shift her analysis away from the well-known narratives of the dominant Pennsylvania and Auburn, New York, prison systems. Zombek uses these shifts to argue the somewhat startling premise that both Union and Confederate "wartime officials relied heavily on antebellum practices to manage thousands of captives. Antebellum assumptions about prison administration, the proper treatment of inmates, inmates' identity, and methods of punishment born in penitentiaries shaped the administration of both Union and Confederate military prisons" (p. x). Zombek finds that wartime prison officials relied on antebellum standards of humane treatment to pattern the punishments they fashioned for prisoners of war, wartime criminals, and civilians suspected of treasonous behavior. She stresses the commonality in goals—punishment—between antebellum penitentiaries and Civil War prisons, and she demonstrates well how continuities in penal theories and practices influenced everything from the Lieber Code to prison architecture. In carefully themed chapters, Zombek demonstrates how antebellum ideas about prisons shaped the experiences and identities of both prison officials and inmates. Chapter 1 charts how military, state, and federal officials (and some prison reformers) debated penal theories in the antebellum period, and chapter 2 examines how those debates influenced the building of penitentiaries in Ohio, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Georgia before the war. In chapter 3 Zombek argues that both Union and Confederate officials assumed much power from the states in prison administration during the Civil War but continued to follow established antebellum patterns of administration and punishment. Chapter 4 employs creative use of prisoners' writings to argue that prisoners "manipulated [End Page 699] rules and shaped the internal dynamics of prisons," and in the process Zombek uncovers how military prisons shifted prisoners' own identities—often in ways comparable to prewar criminals (p. xix). Chapter 5 examines prisoners' correspondence and visitors to probe the prisons' wider social and political engagement. Even though outsiders were often concerned with prisoners' well-being, chapter 6 demonstrates that they retained a fear of escaped war prisoners, who were stigmatized as criminals. Despite stressing continuity, Zombek does chart some important areas of change. She argues in chapter 7 that the growth of the population of imprisoned women, who "faced an even harsher stigma than men," was one of the most significant changes of the wartime penal system (p. 158). Zombek could have analyzed race more closely but handles gender well. Chapter 8 details state and federal debates about prison reform after military prison closure, and the conclusion examines the failure of those reforms after the war, even as federal power was enhanced by prison control. Zombek's tightly written and argued account will be required reading for anyone interested in the penal system and should appeal to anyone open to seeing Civil War prisons in a new way. Sarah Purcell Grinnell College Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered ed. by Michael P. Gray

Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered ed. by Michael P. Gray

Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered ed. by Michael P. Gray

Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered ed. by Michael P. Gray

Civil War Incarceration in History and Memory: A Roundtable

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...

Andersonville and the Literature of Violence

Andersonville and the Literature of Violence Patrick Cesarini (bio) In 2015, MacKinlay Kantor's Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War novel Andersonville was reprinted for the first time in 15 years. The reissue has a new cover but no introduction to acquaint new readers with a book that several prominent judges in the 1950s called "our greatest Civil War novel." I've written this essay partly as such an introduction, which should be useful for those who haven't read or even heard of this important book. But, I also want to use the occasion of Andersonville's latest iteration to raise some issues of novelistic categorization—specifically what it means to classify a book as a Civil War novel, a War Novel, a novel of Modern War, etc. Andersonville is a depiction of the most notorious of the Civil War prison camps—what was officially named Camp Sumter, in southwest Georgia. The camp was an open-air rectangle, 17 acres square, surrounded by a 15-foot high pine-log stockade. About 13,000 men perished there in 16 months, between February 1864 and May 1865 (MacPherson, 796, 802). In a sense, the prison camp itself is the novel's main character, but the book is also a panoramic, composite portrait of the United States during the antebellum period and the war, in that Kantor depicts life in the prison from the perspectives of multiple Union soldiers who were sent there as well as the Confederate guards who watched and sometimes shot them, the doctors who treated them (or tried to), the officers who ran the Camp, horribly, and even some local civilians who watched the monstrosity being born in their midst. For almost every character whom he introduces, Kantor writes a rich life-story up to the point where each man enters the hellish prison camp. The fullness of so many represented lives is what accounts for Andersonville's nearly 800-page length. I find the effect of Kantor's arrangement incredibly powerful—and heartbreaking. Over and over, we meet some fellow—from Maine or Michigan, Iowa or New York—and we watch him emerge into young manhood from out of his family life, in all its particulars—and then we see him die, in almost every case, and die in the most degrading fashion. The result is that even the most ordinary of the lives depicted—even those pre-war lives that seem tough, unlucky, or unpleasant—comes to seem like a most-longed-for paradise, compared with the utterly wretched end to which every one of them is brought: a death by starvation, exposure, disease, accident, or murder, all depicted in fairly horrific detail. Nevertheless, it surprised me that some historically minded admirers of the book, such as Bruce Catton and Henry Steele Commager, have [End Page 253] said that Andersonville was the best novel about the Civil War.1 I naively assumed that such an accolade would have to go to a book that depicted battles primarily. But, now I think I see what they meant. It is a variation on what Walt Whitman meant when he lamented repeatedly in his Civil War diary that the real war was too vast—too vastly heroic and horrible—ever to get into the books.2 That, for me, seemed at first to be MacKinlay Kantor's achievement. To me, it felt like he did get the real war, and in some sense the whole war, into his book. And, this is partly because, as many historians agree, the Civil War was one of the first truly modern wars, and modern wars are horrible in ways that we still have trouble seeing clearly, and I believe MacKinlay Kantor saw that.3 Over and over, the novel juxtaposes the narrative of an individual, normal (pre-war) life with a horrible end to that life—not an end on the battlefield either, but an end that seems wholly unnecessary and irrelevant to the Civil War's larger meaning or purpose. And, so I would say Andersonville defamiliarized both war and peace; at least on a first read, it renewed my horror of war at the same time that it renewed my appreciation...

A Home for Wayward Boys: The Early History of the Alabama Boys’ Industrial School by Jerry C. Armor

Reviewed by: A Home for Wayward Boys: The Early History of the Alabama Boys’ Industrial School by Jerry C. Armor Clay Cooper A Home for Wayward Boys: The Early History of the Alabama Boys’ Industrial School. By Jerry C. Armor. Foreword by Wayne Flynt. (Montgomery, Ala.: NewSouth Books, 2015. Pp. xiv, 186. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-60306-345-6.) Nostalgia glosses the pages of Jerry C. Armor’s A Home for Wayward Boys: The Early History of the Alabama Boys’ Industrial School as he constructs a past where white reform school students were acceptably mischievous and simply in need of moral and educational guidance. A former juvenile probation officer, Armor has written an institutional history of the Alabama Boys’ Industrial School (ABIS), which began in 1899 as a result of the efforts of Elizabeth Johnston. The daughter of a North Carolina planter who died in a Civil War prison camp, Johnston began ministering to convict laborers in Birmingham’s coal mines after the war. She ultimately decided to create the school as an alternative to prison for white juvenile offenders. Underage African Americans continued to languish in convict labor camps until black Alabamians founded a reform school for minors in 1911. Armor posits, without [End Page 197] evidence, that Johnston would have likely supported integration if possible, even though ABIS only integrated by court order in 1970. Johnston was a tireless warrior who successfully lobbied the Alabama legislature and set up the school’s all-female board of directors. Here especially the insights of women’s and gender historians would have provided perspective for Johnston’s accomplishments. Armor does not cite the work of a single academic historian until the brief epilogue. Additionally, Armor discusses the Christian faith of Johnston and others in a manner befitting a religious text, arguing that God was an active agent. Armor asserts, for example, that “God must have been involved,” and that “the Lord truly began to work” (pp. 45, 46). After an extensive chronological narrative of the school’s founding, Armor organizes the rest of the work as a thematic overview of early-twentieth-century school life. He briefly discusses the school newspaper, military training, sports, and work activities designed to teach job skills. Academically, ABIS was mostly a remedial school, as children were far behind their appropriate grade level. ABIS’s disciplinary practices were unusual for a reform school: there were no guards or detention areas for students before World War II. A few chapters include more quoted material than the author’s own words, resembling an institutional sourcebook. Refusing to engage the work of other historians until the closing pages minimizes the appeal of this book for a broader audience. The author does not make a historical or historiographical argument to unite the text, and his conclusions about the present state of the criminal justice system would likely rankle many historians. To meet new federal standards for the treatment of juveniles, Alabama radically reorganized ABIS in 1975 and changed its name to Alabama Youth Services, Vacca Campus. Armor depicts the new juvenile delinquent as younger, hardened, and much tougher to reform. Instead of examining the continuing racial inequalities within the Alabama legal system that contribute to black majorities in juvenile and adult detention centers, Armor relies on the tired Reaganite straw men of illegal drugs and single-parent homes as the explanation. He also hints at the dwindling influence of Christianity in government institutions. Gender historians will raise an eyebrow at Armor’s assertion that biology can explain the relative dearth of female criminality. Rescuing ABIS from obscurity is an important task, but the author misses an opportunity to contribute to the broader dialogue on southern educational, legal, and cultural history. Clay Cooper Middle Tennessee State University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association