Andersonville and the Whitewashing of History

We know of the suffering and death at Andersonville prison during its fourteen months as a Confederate prison for captured Union soldiers in 1864 and 1865. After the war, it was a focal point of African American resistance to white supremacy, white terror, and the efforts of the adherents of the Lost Cause to rewrite and erase history.

Adam H. Domby is assistant professor of history at the College of Charleston, had an interesting article in the September issue of Civil War History entitled The Contested Legacy of Race at Andersonville National Historic Site. Dombyis tells I story I had never heard before, that perhaps bears some examination here.

Professor Domby begins his article with the story of the Reconstruction Era attack by a white mob on a group of 200 freedpeople living on the site of the former Andersonville prison. After the prisoners had been liberated by the army, the army took possession of the stockade and began the creation of the cemetery there. The area of the stockade not being used for the cemetery was turned over to former slaves by the military commander. Many of them worked at the cemetery interring the remains of the prisoners and performing other work. When the military commander was called away to Marietta, the pre-war owner of the land took action against the blacks. According to Domby:

Turner Hall’s faith was surely tested on July 29, 1868, when a mob of his white neighbors destroyed his home in Sumter County, Georgia. He could do nothing as the crowd of armed men struck his neighborhood. The inhabitants—all recently freed from slavery—must have feared for their lives. Members of the mob entered each dwelling in turn, tossing belongings into the yards. Then they nailed the doors shut from the inside before climbing out of the holes they broke in the ceilings. The mob included the county sheriff as well as most of the white men who lived within a ten-mile radius. Benjamin Dykes, the local planter who led the mob, had owned much of the land on which these freedpeople resided before the war. Now three years after the war, he intended to reclaim what had been his. Aided by armed whites, Dykes turned “out thirty odd families,” or around two hundred people, from their homes. Stunned and outgunned, the unarmed freedpeople could do nothing for the moment. As they stood homeless with their possessions scattered about, it began to rain. That weekend, the mob returned to burn at least nine dwellings and destroy the freedpeople’s crops.

The expelled African Americans were now blacklisted by local whites and could find neither employment nor housing. Many moved away.

Domby writes that a contest over the memory of what happened at Andersonville developed after the war:

While postwar southern defenses of Confederate treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) display a Lost Cause version of Andersonville’s past, the countless prisoner narratives published after the war were rarely forgiving. As Caroline Janney and M. Keith Harris have correctly pointed out, although many northerners “promoted reunion, they were not necessarily calling for reconciliation,” as the two terms “are related but not interchangeable.” Indeed, the version of the past created by former captives was often embittered and unforgiving. For many years, the dominant discussion about Andersonville within white newspapers continued to center on who bore responsibility for the suffering at the camp. Not until significantly after the war did a strong “reconciliationist memory” calling for bygones to be bygones develop among many former prisoners—and even then, forgiveness often remained conditional. White southerners’ refusal to admit their poor treatment of prisoners constantly hampered efforts at reconciliation, as former prisoners and their descendants refused to accept a Lost Cause narrative of the prison.

The massive prisoner of war camps only came into being in 1863 and 1864 because following the creation of the United States Colored Troops the Confederacy refused to exchange captured African American soldiers for Confederates held by the Union. This led to the collapse of the exchange cartel which in the first two years of the war had insured that prisoners were exchanged within months, or even weeks, of capture. Rather than locate the cessation of prisoner exchanges with the treatment of black soldiers, post-war Lost Cause accounts blamed Ulysses Grant for the starvation at Andersonville. Domby writes:

Confederate accounts of prisons almost unanimously placed the blame on northern leaders because starving Union prisoners to death contradicted the myth of white southerners’ moral superiority. This exculpation of white southern guilt was premised on the fact that Union authorities ceased exchanging prisoners, leading to the deadly overcrowding at Andersonville. This white southern version of the past conveniently ignored the fact that the Confederacy’s refusal to recognize black Union prisoners as legitimate soldiers had led to the exchange’s suspension. Even in their denials of moral responsibility, local propagators of a southern white version of the past displayed a discomfort with the reality of what occurred. In 1911, just ten miles up the railroad from Andersonville, in Montezuma, Georgia, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) unveiled a monument to the Confederate soldiers of Macon County. Its inscription is revealing: “NO NATION ROSE SO FAIR AND WHITE OR FELL SO PROUD AND PURE OF CRIME.”

African Americans became guardians of the graves of the Andersonville dead, and so they were the special targets of those laboring to restore white supremacy. From 1870 onward, Blacks went to Andersonville on May 20 to decorate the graves of the Union dead. This Memorial Day tradition was called Andersonville Day. The 1891 Andersonville Day ceremony was attended by more than 10,000 people, most of whom were Black.

This photo shows black and white Union veterans at Providence Spring at Andersonville in 1896:

andersonville providence.JPG

Blacks who participated in the Andersonville Day commemorations used the time together to celebrate their new freedom to travel, to gather together in large numbers, to enjoy a picnic with other former slaves. They also asserted a commonality with the former prisoners. They had all been imprisoned by white Southerners, hunted by dogs if they tried to escape, and punished with pain for infractions.

Blacks could also remind Northern whites that the graves of their brothers were kept by Black Southerners. In contrast with the disloyal Southern white Confederates, Black prisoners of war had mingled their blood with that of white Union soldiers.

The effort by Southern whites to bar blacks from a role in the memory of Andersonville was soon transformed into an effort to take control of the Andersonville narrative by depicting it as a place where a white Southerner had been persecuted and killed:

On May 12, 1909, just a few weeks before Andersonville Day, the Georgia United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated a monument to Henry Wirz, Andersonville’s commandant during the war, just outside the prison grounds. Though northern veterans condemned the monument for celebrating the Confederacy’s crimes, thousands of white Georgians took special excursion trains to see the unveiling. This granite monument honoring a Confederate executed for war crimes angered Union veterans, undermining efforts at reconciliation. The monument aimed to rescue Wirz’s name and celebrate him as a martyr to the Confederacy. As a monument to the Lost Cause and, implicitly, white supremacy, the obelisk left a physical stamp on the land that declared the Confederacy irreproachable and untarnished.

As the Andersonville Day commemorations became increasing dominated by white narratives, African Americans were pushed to the periphery by some white Union veterans as well as by former Confederates. Reconciliationist and Lost Cause narratives revised the history of Andersonville just as they revised the history of the Civil War.

In the 1930s, Georgians interested in offering a “true history” of Andersonville devoid of Confederate responsibility for the suffering there made efforts at turning the stockade area into a garden. This was resisted by Union veterans who saw it as an effort to impose Lost Cause romanticism on a place of suffering. The Union groups began involving African Americans in their Memorial Day celebrations once again.

The ability of the story of the prison to still arouse resistance among some Southern whites was exemplified when the play The Andersonville Trial came South. In 1960, the play was cancelled in Atlanta and Birmingham by its producers because it was considered so controversial. This was a play about a trial that happened 95 years earlier!

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Author: Patrick Young

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