Civil War Prisons Research Articles

Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans by M. Keith Harris

Reviewed by: Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans by M. Keith Harris Stuart McConnell (bio) Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans. By M. Keith Harris. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. Pp. 232. Cloth, $42.50.) Memories of the Civil War among the men who fought it were exceedingly complex, ranging from the reconciliationism of blue-gray reunions, through paeans to the foe’s valor (often in pointed contrast to shirking civilians), to continued denunciation of treason on the one hand and federal tyranny on the other. It was not unusual for individual veterans to combine many strands of memory, arguing that former enemies were manly warriors and fellow Americans but also that “we were right, immortally right and . . . the conqueror was wrong, eternally wrong,” as Confederate veteran Bradley T. Johnson put it in 1895 (74). Recent scholarship, led by David Blight’s magisterial Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), has emphasized the dominance of reconciliationism and the way that it helped whites to forget both the antislavery cause and the ongoing violence in the postwar South. M. Keith Harris emphasizes a contrary strain of memory, arguing that Civil War combatants refused to abandon their respective causes for many years after the war. Union veterans continued to insist that the Confederates had been traitors and, contra the recent scholarly emphasis on reconciliation, that the war had been fought (in the words of Union veteran Le Grand B. Cannon) “to free a race from chattel slavery” (109). Combing through regimental histories, monument dedications, memoirs, and published “war papers,” Harris finds repeated denunciations of slavery and slaveholding, not just tributes to union or invocations of manhood. Ex-Confederates were welcome to rejoin the national fold—provided that they did it on Unionist terms. For their part, Confederate veterans fired back that they had fought to defend the original Constitution from northern aggression. Even when southern political leaders such as Fitzhugh Lee and John Warwick Daniel spoke in favor of reconciliation, they “insisted that they and their comrades craft reconciliatory efforts on very specific terms—those that reflected the ideals set forth by the Revolutionary generation and adopted by the Confederate States of America” (71). That is: Victory for me, “reconciliation” for you, which is to say no true reconciliation at all. It was not that [End Page 306] the veterans were unconcerned with intersectional peace. But “ultimately, the memories of their lived past stood between veterans’ desires and reality. While they did not set out to intentionally hinder reconciliation, their words often did exactly that” (4). The book is organized as a sort of debate between positions, beginning with the “atrocity narratives” both groups of veterans told about each other, particularly with regard to Civil War prisons and the devastation of Sherman’s March. We then learn about the Union veterans’ commemorative attacks on Confederate treason, ex-Confederate responses to those attacks, Union praise for emancipation and defense of the war as a moral cause, and ex-Confederate rebuttals to those claims. A brief but stimulating epilogue considers neo-Confederates and the changing memory of the war in the present-day South. Harris’s picture of old soldiers still crossing ideological swords thirty years after Appomattox (“fighting them over”) is in some ways a familiar one, because by 1900 it was the way many Americans understood and portrayed Civil War veterans. Young people born after 1865, migrants from one region to another, and the great wave of immigrants after 1890 were all ready to move on from the wartime polarities, a process of dilution that Harris, in his epilogue, suggests is still ongoing. But moving on from the war meant somehow coming to terms with what the war had wrought, which in the postwar South was a dark world of disfranchisement, night riding, and horrific racial violence. Reconstruction and its aftermath are essentially absent from Across the Bloody Chasm, and yet those were the public events shaping the cultural and political realm in which the old soldiers made their arguments. That the Union veterans continued to denounce slavery and treason is admirable, and Harris has...

Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War Ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson (review)

Reviewed by: Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War Ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson Michael Burns Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War. Ed. Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8093-3264-9, pp., 224 cloth, $39.50. In the Civil War era, the midwestern United States, contemporarily known as the Old Northwest or the Middle West, contributed greatly to the conflict. Numerous Union leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and William T. Sherman, came from the Midwest. The famed Union Iron [End Page 91] Brigade consisted entirely of regiments formed in three midwestern states. In addition, the region produced the wheat and corn that fed the Union armies that marched through the Confederacy. Despite these contributions to the Union war effort, Civil War scholars have paid little attention to the region’s home front. In this work, seven scholars focus on numerous aspects of the midwestern home front to gain a better understanding of what the region’s population experienced during the war. Previously, many historians examining the northern home front treated the region as a monolithic entity. Aley and Anderson, however, argue that the Midwest fails to fit into the established historical mold and that the region consisted of a mainly rural population that settled the region from both northern and southern states. The region’s cross-cultural and rural nature contributed to the population’s home front experiences. Throughout the volume, historians examine both traditional fields, like the region’s economy and politics, and new areas of interest, like Civil War prisons and soldiers’ families. Michael P. Gray’s examination of the Johnson’s Island Prison in Ohio shows midwesterners’ fascinations with Confederate prisoners and the economic benefits of these prisons. Gray points out that Johnson’s Island contained a population of captured Confederate officers and that midwesterners’ curiosities with these visitors led to an economic boom in Sandusky, as well as nearby Great Lakes communities that established cruises to see the prisoners. This in turn embittered the Confederate officers, who publically displayed their disdain for the gawkers, and strengthened the local economies. Julie A. Mujic studies the experiences of college students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In this interesting and novel analysis, she finds that these young men attempted to create their own forms of patriotism through their education, justifying their absence from the battlefield. While other young midwesterners spilled their blood in the South, these students argued that their education prepared them to lead the United States in the conflict’s aftermath, which also contributed to Union victory. R. Douglas Hurt follows this with a study of the region’s agricultural power. Although seemingly an obvious piece of the midwestern experience, Hurt shows how the Union armies’ logistics benefitted from the agricultural power of the Midwest and how the midwestern economy grew in the process. In addition, the region expanded its agricultural power during the conflict, solidifying [End Page 92] its place as the breadbasket of the United States, something few historians have previously noted. Nicole Etcheson, Aley, and Anderson focus on the experiences of soldiers’ wives and families on the home front, revealing the weakening of the gender structure that resulted from the departure of so many men. Etcheson examines the relationship between the wives of Putnam County, Indiana, soldiers and their in-laws and how these influenced the gendered power struggle between husbands and wives. Since the soldiers pushed their wives to stay with their families when they went off to war, even if the wives’ families lived nearby, Etcheson argues, the “in-law relations were frequently a power struggle between husband and wife, and the husband’s authority often prevailed” (101). Aley concentrates on what the “vacant chair” meant for the women on the home front. She finds that the soldiers’ absences created uncertain futures for women and the soldiers’ families, since their futures were interconnected with their male kin’s presence. Anderson maintains that the experience of Iowa women resulted in the complicating of gender norms in the Midwest as, in the absence of their male relations, women gained...

Captive Audiences: Sound, Silence, and Listening in Civil War Prisons

This article listens to the role played by sound and silence in Civil War prisons. Applying the methodology of sensory history, it argues that the experience of captivity cannot be understood without considering the aural environment of prisons, including patterns of listening, conflicting interpretations of the same sounds, and the role of sound in resistance. Although war was noisy for participants in general, prisoners had good reason to infuse the aural environment with meaning. Amid the confusion of captivity, prisoners actively listened for clues to help interpret their current circumstances and future prospects. Echoes of battle, voices of civilians, and rumors allowed prisoners to listen beyond the guards and slightly empower themselves. Sound also entwined with how prisoners perceived the passage of time, especially on days they infused with acoustic importance such as Sundays and national holidays. Focusing on listening as a methodology is important because it has the flexibility to incorporate competing interpretations. Keepers and captives attached different patterns of meaning to the same sounds and this is useful to consider in examining lived-experience. Preserving acoustic harmony was part of prison guards’ larger task of maintaining order. Conversely, effective use of noise offered prisoners a unique method of resistance because it utilized one of the few advantages of a weak but numerically superior population. The aural world was a channel of practical knowledge and captivity experience, a point of disagreement between prisoners and guards, and a method of resistance.

The World’s Largest Prison: The Story of Camp Lawton by John K. Derden, and: Captives in Blue: The Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy by Roger Pickenpaugh (review)

The World’s Largest Prison: The Story of Camp Lawton by John K. Derden, and: Captives in Blue: The Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy by Roger Pickenpaugh (review)

Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey by Peter Carlson (review)

Reviewed by: Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey by Peter Carlson Lorien Foote (bio) Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey. By Peter Carlson. (New York: Public Affairs, 2013. Pp. 268. Cloth, $26.99; paper, $15.99.) It is fitting that a former Washington Post journalist would write a book about the grand adventures of the Civil War’s most famous journalists, Junius Henri Browne and Albert Deane Richardson. Peter Carlson shares with his subjects a flair for narrating a dramatic tale, albeit in a literary style more suited to his twenty-first-century audience’s taste, and a wry, dry wit that survived the experience of living in, or in Carlson’s case writing about, Civil War prisons. Basing his narrative mainly on the separate book-length accounts that Browne and Richardson published in 1865, Carlson tells the intrinsically exciting story of two self-styled Bohemians who escaped from Salisbury Prison on December 18, 1864, and successfully reached Union lines at Strawberry Plains, Tennessee, in mid-January 1865. They were guided and helped along the way by slaves, children, bushwhackers, entire branches of Unionist families in the Appalachian Mountains, a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl, and the famous pilot Dan Ellis. All of this makes for page-turning reading, and Carlson proves himself to be a capable historian in piecing together the identities of individuals that Browne and Richardson encountered and in tracking down letters and other primary sources that fill in the story his heroes told. Browne and Richardson’s Civil War odyssey began when they were writers for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Richardson conducted a secret tour of several southern states during the secession crisis and sent anonymous reports to the newspaper with scathing criticisms of slavery and of [End Page 611] southern bombast, ignorance, and closed-mindedness; in the first two years of the war both men were part of the pioneering cadre of war correspondents who termed themselves the “Bohemian Brigade.” Carlson is at his best in his depiction of the lifestyle of Civil War journalists and of their attitudes toward their craft. In particular he brings to life Browne’s purposely eccentric and self-consciously cynical personality. Confederates captured the two Bohemians on May 4, 1863, on the Mississippi River and shipped them to Richmond. Although they had paroles from their Vicksburg captors, the Confederate agent of exchange, Robert Ould, refused to release them. Indeed, at one point he claimed they were hostages for every single southern noncombatant that the Union held. Imprisoned first in Libby, then in Castle Thunder, Browne and Richardson were transferred to Salisbury in February 1864, where they witnessed that prison’s transformation from relatively comfortable quarters to a squalid death trap when nearly ten thousand prisoners arrived in the early fall. Living in comparative privilege indoors, Richardson and Browne helped their fellow inmates as much as they could before their escape in December. Carlson comments in an appendix that “this isn’t an academic book so I see no need for footnotes,” but this reviewer is tasked with the job of writing a review for an academic journal (257). Keeping in mind that the intention behind this book is simply to tell a good story with factual accuracy, I have a few observations about the historical context that informs Browne and Richardson’s story. Carlson consulted a minimal number of scholarly works, judging by his appendix, and these were concentrated on Civil War journalism and guerrilla violence in the Appalachians. Broader reading would have enriched Carlson’s depiction of Browne and Richardson’s world. The journalists experienced the momentous burgeoning and subsequent collapse of the entire Confederate prison system that resulted in thousands of escapes from North and South Carolina prisons in the winter of 1864–65. Carlson attributes conditions at Salisbury to the simple fact that the Confederates were “running out of food” and is seemingly unaware of the mass movement of escaped prisoners from South Carolina prisons toward Knoxville that occurred at the same time his story takes place (144). African Americans appear in this tale as heroic and generous friends to Yankees, but...

A Pilgrim-Critic at Places of Public Memory: Anna Dickinson's Southern Tour of 1875

This essay examines accounts of visits to Civil War prison sites, cemeteries, and battlefields that were generated by the popular speaker Anna E. Dickinson during an 1875 lecture tour of Southern states. An ardent Unionist, Dickinson visited places that she believed to exemplify Union sacrifice and Confederate wrongdoing. We analyze her accounts—captured in letters to her mother—in order to understand how this rhetorically skilled public figure used these visits as opportunities for invention and interpretation, generating textual responses oriented toward public memory-making. We argue that her letters enact what we call a pilgrim-critic persona, which both demonstrates an affective connection to places and undertakes a critical investigation of what happened there. Employing the concept of the pilgrim-critic enables this analysis to contribute to rhetorical studies of public memory by highlighting the inventional resources used when visitors interpret their experiences of memory places.

Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory by Benjamin G. Cloyd (review)

Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory by Benjamin G. Cloyd (review)

I Fear I Shall Never Leave This Island: Life in a Civil War Prison by David R. Bush (review)

I Fear I Shall Never Leave This Island: Life in a Civil War Prison by David R. Bush (review)

Captives in Blue: The Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy

Captives in Blue: The Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy

I fear I shall never leave this island: life in a Civil War prison

I fear I shall never leave this island: life in a Civil War prison

Which Side Are You On, God, Which Side Are You On?

Which Side Are You On, God, Which Side Are You On? Mitchell Snay (bio) George C. Rable . God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War. The Littlefield History of the Civil War Era, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Michael T. Parrish. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 586 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. The Civil War persists in American history, often unnerving our sense of historical time. My parents, born in 1919 and 1920, recalled seeing Civil War veterans marching in Memorial Day parades in Chicago. The last living solider from the Union army, Albert Henry Woolson of Minnesota, died when I was two years old. Maudie White Hopkins, the "last Confederate widow," had married a man who once fought in a war to preserve slavery. She passed away in 2008, the same year that the United States elected its first African American president. Yet, for the most part, the Civil War lies deeply in the past. The picture of two armies arrayed against each other in open fields with muskets strikes us as ancient history. The level of human carnage remains hard to comprehend. At this writing, 1,461 American soldiers have died fighting in Afghanistan since 2001. On September 17, 1862, at the Battle of Antietam, 2,108 Union soldiers were killed. The religious world of the Civil War remains equally alien. Recognizing that an extremely wide range of contemporary beliefs exist, I think it safe to say that a providential interpretation of human events—the belief that God directs the course of human affairs—is no longer a governing majority assumption in American life. Entering the religious sensibilities of the time thus remains a challenge for the Civil War historian. In God's Almost Chosen People, prolific and talented historian George C. Rable has provided us with the best religious history of the Civil War we are likely to see in our lifetime. In this long, thorough, inclusive, intelligent, and sensitive study, Rable seeks to demonstrate how "religious beliefs shaped popular thinking on the conflict" (p. 7). His research in both published and manuscript sources is prodigious. The use of quotations is skillful and judicious. It is hard to imagine a more inclusive history. The book gives as equal and balanced attention to both North and South as is perhaps possible. Rable pays appropriate attention to major Protestant denominations—Baptists, Methodists, [End Page 83] and Presbyterians—yet also includes numerically smaller ones such as Episcopalians and Quakers. Catholics receive considerable space as well. Rable describes a Catholic counter-narrative during the secession crisis that was based on a call for Catholic national unity around faith and a standard liturgy. We see Catholic Sisters working in hospitals as nurses. American Jews appear in more than a perfunctory role. We hear rabbis preaching politics from the pulpit and learn about the Ladies Hebrew Association for the Relief of Sick and Wounded Soldiers in Philadelphia. African Americans of whatever denomination—enslaved, emancipated, and military—receive attention, too. God's Almost Chosen Peoples is topically inclusive as well. Its characters include fire-eating clergymen, abolitionist ministers, army chaplains, Christian soldiers, blasphemers, freethinkers, and nurses. There are more than occasional references to the leading intellectuals among American churchmen, such as Horace Bushnell of the North and James Henley Thornwell of the South. Rable offers a critical discussion of the Confederate deification of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson as the ideal Christian soldier. There are the usual anecdotes of pocket Bibles that saved lives by stopping enemy bullets. We get a glimpse into the religious life of Civil War prisons. We see how the war on the home front, especially in embattled communities like Missouri, divided congregations and denominations. In his discussion of camp religion, Rable debunks the myth of a Civil War fought by Christian armies. While he acknowledges the revivals that spread through the Confederate armies during the winter and spring of 1863, he argues that observant Christians actually comprised a small minority of Civil War soldiers. Rable instead presents a picture of widespread blasphemy, gambling, and drinking in both armies. There were nearly 200,000 cases of sexually transmitted diseases in the...

Reading With LincolnMarching to the Drumbeat of Abolitionism: Wheaton College in the Civil War, David E. Maas.Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union, Roger Pickenpaugh.

Reading With LincolnMarching to the Drumbeat of Abolitionism: Wheaton College in the Civil War, David E. Maas.Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union, Roger Pickenpaugh.

Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory. By Benjamin Cloyd. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. $37.50, hardcover.

Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory. By Benjamin Cloyd. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. $37.50, hardcover.

Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory

Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory

Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union (review)

Reviewed by: Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union Michael P. Gray Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union. By Roger Pickenpaugh. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8173-1652-5, 400 pp., cloth, $29.95. Ohio educator Roger Pickenpaugh, author of a study on the Buckeye state's Camp Chase in Columbus, has taken on the challenging task of writing a general history of northern prisons. The author sets out to look at various confines in their "entirety," examine "variations" in compounds, as well as "overall prison policy." The dust jacket also contains accolades from Jimmy Carter, who grew up near Andersonville in Plains, Georgia, and William Marvel, who had a history of that infamous prison published in 1994. In fact, Marvel claims, "it is an ambitious examination of almost all Union military prisons, [which] … addresses a specific historical category that has, to my knowledge, not been treated." To the contrary, however, Captives in Gray is only somewhat ambitious, since it neglects certain Union prisons while it limits coverage of others due to its relatively short length. The topic, moreover, has been "treated" with James Gillispie's Andersonvilles of the North: The Myths and Realities of Northern Treatment of Civil War Confederate Prisoners. Pickenpaugh is much less analytical than Gillispie or, for that matter, Charles Sanders in his 2005 While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War, both of which have provocative, yet highly questionable, theses. Pickenpaugh plans to add a companion to his book with an investigation of southern prisons, but one might wonder if it will, when complete, be a significant contribution to the field of Civil War prisons; if it follows the same pattern of Captives in Gray, it will be perhaps more comparable to Lonnie Speer's 1997 single-volume narrative history Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War than a study that breaks new ground. Captives in Gray indeed has some strengths. Pickenpaugh's early observations in setting the stage for prison policy from the commissary general to the secretary of war are detailed, as well as distinguishing early treatment among captives. If there is any new insight, it comes with the author's Camp Chase expertise when he examines the exchange system, which reduced prisoner numbers, but, as he convincingly writes, failed for a variety of reasons: "There is one other aspect of the [exchange] question that must be considered. That is the Union's frustrating experience with paroled prisoners" (67). From the War Department "designed to make parole less of an incentive, the orders declared that no furloughs would be granted to paroled prisoners" (67). Troops, thinking they would be perhaps on their way home on furlough, [End Page 197] were instead sent to the parole stations, like Camp Chase; unhappy with their situation, they became mutinous. Benton Barracks, Camp Parole, and Camp Douglas had similar problems, to the point where rioting occurred at the latter Chicago depot. This argument might be debatable, considering long-standing and recent scholarship about propaganda, politics, and military necessity playing into the system's failure, but it is interpretive and may be more persuasive if further developed. Pickenpaugh's other thematic chapters investigate the preparations for inmates in 1861, their arrival in 1862, the aforementioned exchange system and collapse from 1862 to 1863, and the resultant expansion of more compounds in 1864 until the war's end. The author also threads into the journey the stockades, prison and guard life, escapes, provisions, the Union's 1864 retaliation policy (which he believes existed), and finally health, hospital care, and release. Captives in Gray generally falls short in thought-provoking interpretation or persuasive argument, which may leave some professional historians disappointed. The author's research is commendable, and his prose will hold the attention of an academic and general audience, but the book lacks in-depth perspective on local personnel, information on host communities, and varying social conditions inside stockades, all of which played into inmate lifestyle. For example, like other prison camp macro-monograph writers before him, Pickenpaugh makes generalizations; he notes that Johnson Island diarists "reflect elements of life that...

Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer's Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer's Civil War Thomas J. Brown (bio) Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer's Civil War. By Peter H. Wood. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 134. $18.95 cloth) No white American of the Civil War era offered a more sympathetic metaphor for the black experience than Winslow Homer did in juxtaposing slavery with the Andersonville prison camp. Peter H. Wood's study of Homer's Near Andersonville (1866), originally presented as the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at Harvard University, provides an alert, informed, and imaginative analysis that in many ways serves as a model for the reading of a great topical work of art. Wood concisely but ably situates Homer in the specific antebellum and wartime contexts in which the artist grew up and launched his career, and he outlines several important planes of interpretation that shed light on the canvas. Although he delivered these lectures before the publication of Benjamin G. Cloyd's Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory (2010), Wood effectively conveys the horror and outrage with which Northerners viewed Andersonville. He sets the dismal backfire of General George M. Stoneman's attempt to rescue Union prisoners in late July 1864 against the backdrop of the ongoing presidential campaign, succumbing to a conventionally melodramatic view of Lincoln's electoral prospects but rightly emphasizing that the summer was a period of crisis in the Union commitment to emancipation and in southern slaves' thinking about the relative risks involved in fleeing across the military lines or awaiting the advance of the Union army. Wood also shrewdly explores the ideological commitments of the first owner of the painting, a former missionary schoolteacher in the Port Royal laboratory for Reconstruction whose appreciation for the canvas nicely supports [End Page 252] Wood's argument about the contemporary resonance of Homer's work. Wood's attention to provenance typifies the way in which he adopts strategies associated almost exclusively with art historians. Drawing on his more than three decades of research on Homer, he moves easily between famous canvases and ephemeral visual culture, including not only magazine illustrations that Homer generated but also prints to which he responded. Similarly, Wood touches briefly but profitably on the relationship between Homer and Eastman Johnson and on similarities between Near Andersonville and works by Vermeer, Géricault, and Manet. These observations demonstrate commendable intellectual range and, in several instances, wise attention to the formal organization of the painting as well as its more direct thematic subject. It is in the concentrated, thoughtful act of looking that this book truly excels. Wood painstakingly gleans every shred of visual information from the canvas, and he subjects each detail to a creative process of generalization. He persuasively identifies significance in many lines, shadows, gestures, and subordinate objects. The patient discipline so evident in this research gives way in the last of Wood's three essays to a flurry of insights about the condition of slavery and the possibilities of a profoundly antislavery vision. The dramatic contrast in intellectual pace helps to make the book a delight to read. Over the last several decades a host of scholars trained in art history such as T. J. Clark, Albert Boime, and Kirk Savage have influenced understandings of the past in ways that extend well beyond their academic fields. Peter Wood is the rare historian who has in turn drawn skillfully on the specialized methods of art history. The historical profession is indebted to him for that leadership, and the reader will be indebted to him for this little gem of scholarship. [End Page 253] Thomas J. Brown Thomas J. Brown teaches history at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. He is the editor of Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial (2011). Copyright © 2011 Kentucky Historical Society

“We Stand on the Same Battlefield”: The Gettysburg Centenary and the Shadow of Race

On November 19, 1962, acclaimed Civil War historian Bruce Catton delivered an address to an eager audience at Gettysburg College. That evening, instead of offering listeners installments from his popular New York Times Magazine series, which chronicled the “great turning points” of the Civil War, the fifty-five-year-old editor of American Heritage addressed the ongoing centennial commemoration of the conflict. Well aware that the very next year the greater Gettysburg community would observe the one hundredth anniversary of the conflict’s most celebrated battle, Catton came to urge both caution and careful consideration in the looming ceremonials. “If we are not careful,” he declared, “we may become prisoners of the Civil War—prisoners of its romance, of its legendry, of the odd, heart-warming, and ever-living impulses which its people, its flags, its songs and its stories send tingling along the spine.” What troubled Catton was not the propensity of his fellow Americans to look back on the conflict, but the “irresistible force of sentiment” that overwhelmed any discussion of the causes and consequences of the war.

Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union (review)

Reviewed by: Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union Angela M. Zombek (bio) Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union. By Roger Pickenpaugh. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 400 pp. Cloth $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-1652-5.) Conditions that inmates faced in Civil War military prisons have generated controversy for the past century and a half. Historians such as William B. Hesseltine and Charles W. Sanders Jr. have sought to explain the prisoner-of-war crisis and inmates’ consequent suffering. Hesseltine cites Union officials’ responses to rumored atrocities in Southern camps to explain poor conditions, while Sanders contends that both Northern and Southern captives suffered intentional maltreatment at the hands of Union and Confederate officials who viewed prisoners as pawns in a political game. Pickenpaugh’s [End Page 131] Captives in Gray accepts these interpretations of prisoners’ suffering, holding federal officials culpable for harsh conditions due to the implementation of a retaliatory policy (188, 209). Pickenpaugh’s work builds on existing interpretations and significantly adds to the scholarly understanding not merely of administrative decisions but of how such decisions impacted inmates behind bars. Captives in Gray provides a survey of how prison establishment, the Dix-Hill Exchange Cartel, the breakdown of prisoner exchanges, and the consequent spike in prison population affected Northern camps such as Johnson’s Island, Camp Chase, Camp Douglas, Elmira, Fort Delaware, and Point Lookout, among many others. The book is based on solid research. Pickenpaugh readily acknowledges and carefully avoids relying on the bias of veterans’ memories of the prison experience that were recorded in the late nineteenth century. Instead, he weaves a narrative from countless manuscript sources that illuminates the boredom and loneliness of prison life, prisoners’ hopes for exchange, their attempts at escape, their suffering from disease and malnutrition, and death behind bars. Pickenpaugh’s work begins in 1861 with the establishment of the war’s earliest prisons, the capture of political prisoners, and an overview of William Hoffman’s role as commissary general of prisoners. The book concludes by detailing the unfortunate spike in the prison population during the war’s final months and the high death rate apparent in early 1865. The author’s main contribution to prison scholarship is his description of how top-down dynamics—such as the federal government’s unpreparedness in meeting the prisoner-of-war crisis, the operation and cessation of the exchange cartel, the inexperience and inconsistency of prison guards, Hoffman’s reluctance to address sanitary conditions, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s “policy of harsh retaliation”—affected inmates behind bars (220). These dynamics forced inmates into crowded camps where improvised activities, such as talking politics, forming prison bands, writing letters home despite censorship, or participating in work details, either as punishment or for physical activity, helped inmates pass long hours of confinement. After the exchange cartel collapsed, inmates relinquished hope for release, unless they decided to attempt escape. This option, Pickenpaugh asserts, was hardly promising, as escapees faced enormous odds when they ventured over or under prison walls into enemy territory on their journeys south. Northern prison camps were indeed tragic, as Pickenpaugh’s work demonstrates. He starkly notes that 25,967 of the total 214,865 Southern captives held—a figure that totals just over 12 percent—died in Union camps (202). The suffering of Confederate captives is a relatively well-known fact, but Pickenpaugh’s work highlights a number of aspects not typically discussed in prison scholarship. He calls attention to the fact that political prisoners [End Page 132] represented a “wide variety of social classes,” that prison guards suffered from the same monotony that plagued inmates, that prisoners frequently engaged in work details outside of prison walls, and that many Southern prisoners became “galvanized Yankees,” choosing Union military service over imprisonment (6, 171, 199). Both scholars and the general public can gain much knowledge about the prison experience from Pickenpaugh’s work, as it encourages thought about war and the consequent crisis of imprisonment. Angela M. Zombek University of Florida Angela M. Zombek Angela M. Zombek is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Florida. Her dissertation...

Haunted by atrocity: Civil War prisons in American memory

Haunted by atrocity: Civil War prisons in American memory

Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the North.

Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the North.