If you pick this book up thinking it is an indictment of Northern prisoner of war camps, you will be disappointed. This book is aimed at debunking some of the myths about prisons in the North. Unfortunately, at times it feels like it is a bit too much of a brief in defense of the Union prison system.
In his search of the Official Records, James Gillispie finds ample evidence that the Union behaved more humanely than is commonly understood today in its treatment of prisoners. He also says that the main reason for the deterioration of prisoner conditions was the breakdown of the prisoner exchange cartel in 1863 and that this was caused by Confederate violations, not a Union desire to retain prisoners to cripple the Southern armies.
Gillispie does not paint a rosy picture of Union prisons. He tells us many times in this book that Union prisons “were not perfect.” True, but sometimes they were a lot worse than “not perfect.”
The issue of prison atrocities was important from early in the war and remains so in modern accounts of Civil War prisons. Popular awareness in the North of bad conditions at Andersonville, Libby and other Confederate prisons was high. As horribly emaciated prisoners from those prisons were photographed in the last year of the war, awareness turned to anger at the inhumanity of incarceration. A Northern narrative of intentional abuse, ordered by Jefferson Davis himself, began to take hold in Unionist consciousness.
After the war, dozens of memoirs by the men freed from the Southern stockades were published, eventually becoming a literary genre of their own. Historians now believe that some of these books exaggerated the intentionality of the imposition of suffering. The overall impact was to depict the Confederacy as anti-Christian and immoral.
After the war ended, Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville camp, was tried, convicted, and executed for the deaths of prisoners. The emotional testimony of prisoners against Wirz stirred even more negative feelings against the defunct Confederacy. Northerners believed that they had triumphed over an inhuman regime in the South.
Gillispie says that facing the harsh moral judgement of the North, many Southern whites began to publicize the abuse they say befell Confederates held in Unionist prisons in the North. The author writes:
ex-Confederates did not want to accept that God favored the Yankees over themselves or that Southern honor had been forever sullied by its gross mistreatment of Northern prisoners during the war. Southerners resolved the crisis by creating a model for interpreting the Civil War era that came to be known as the Lost Cause. This model allowed Southerners to take pride in their Confederate past in part by denying that God had played much, if any role, in the military outcome and by arguing that the true story of how prisoners were treated showed that the South had been humane and Christian in its care of prisoners while Northerners had been the true demons. How each side prosecuted the war and conducted itself in battle became more important in the Lost Cause school than ultimate victory or defeat. That model taught, among other things, that losing carried no stigma and could even be called heroic if one fought nobly and chivalrously against a huge and unprincipled foe….
Gillispie tells the story of the drive by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to prove the guiltlessness of Wirz as part of its sanctification of the memory of the Confederacy. If Wirz was accused by Northerners of being the worst criminal of the war, and he was innocent, that might prove the stainlessness of the white Southern cause. This whitewash of Wirz’s record reached its apogee in the first years of the 20th Century when the UDC successfully raised the funds to erect a Wirz monument near the Andersonville camp.
Lost Cause adherents also sought to cleanse the Southern record, claims Gillispie, by inverting the charge of Confederate abuse of Union soldiers and flinging it backs at Northerners. A key feature was the constant reference to various Union prisons as “the Andersonvilles of the North.”
Southern writers deployed statistics to brand the North as the real malefactor. Gillispie says that Lost Cause authors claimed that:
26,436 of the 220,000 Confederates held by the North died, a mortality rate of 12%. That statistic became an important weapon in the Lost Cause arsenal because it was higher than the mortality rate among Union prisoners in Confederate care. Southern writers after the war often claimed that despite serious shortages only 22,576 of the 270,000 Union prisoners held by the Confederacy died, a mortality rate of 8.36%. Unlike the well-supplied North, one Southerner wrote in 1898, “the Confederate Government did all that could possibly be done for the well-being of Federal soldiers. . . .” This idea was expressed often by Southern writers in the postwar era; it seemed to be cold hard evidence that the Confederacy had acted with utmost humanity towards Federal prisoners at all times thus refuting Northern accusations and actually turning them on their heads. (p. 33-34)
Gillispie points out that the Southern white narrative was based on shaky stats. He writes:
The problem is that the numbers given here and used quite often by Southern writers after the war was that they were contained in a report by Federal Surgeon-General Joseph K. Barnes that was lost—if it ever existed. Not only is evidence lacking that this report ever existed, the numbers are not supported by any other wartime documents, official or otherwise. Furthermore, they conflict with those provided by the Official Records published at the end of the century, which indicate that a greater percentage of Union prisoners died in captivity, not the other way around.
The distortion of history by Southern white apologists included throwing the blame for Unionist deaths on Northern leaders. Gillispie says that the Lost Cause advocates “presented the suffering and mortality that occurred in Confederate military prisons as ultimately the North’s responsibility.” The Union blockade of Southern ports and the disruptions caused by advancing Union armies cut down on Confederate food supplies and the destruction of Southern railroads by Yankee raiders sometimes made it impossible to move supplies to the prison camps.
As most of you familiar with the subject of Civil War prisons know, the main Lost Cause charge that Lincoln and the Union leaders were responsible for the deaths of their own men comes from the suspensions of the prisoner exchange cartel. The cartel had allowed for the regularized exchange of prisoners using a straightforward algorithm. Its operation meant that even if prison conditions were not particularly good in 1862, prisoners would only be in them for a brief time. The long-term impacts of incarceration on individual prisoners would be avoided as would severe overcrowding. The cartel was suspended several times beginning in 1863.
The prisoner exchange cartel was suspended by the Union in May 1863 and the number of prisoners in the camps on both sides mushroomed. Southern writers after the war depicted the suspension of the exchanges as originating purely in the malevolence of Yankees. What the post-war Lost Cause writers failed to note is that the cartel was suspended when the Confederate leadership announced that captured black soldiers and their white officers would not be accorded the same rights as other prisoners of war.
Gillispie provides examples of the invidious Lost Cause use of the breakdown of the exchange cartel. He writes:
Sometimes Southern writers of this period simply ignored the reason Federal officials gave for suspending the cartel, preferring to point out that the North halted exchanges and allow readers to infer that no justifiable basis could have existed for condemning thousands on both sides to extended periods of uncomfortable, potentially lethal, confinement in enemy prison pens. Those who did address it claimed it was not the real reason the cartel was suspended. By 1863 the North held more prisoners than the South, making it in its best interest at that point to quit exchanging prisoners. With this in mind, Union officials, one writer claimed, “invented every possible pretext” to keep from exchanging prisoners. The issue of black troops was nothing more, another informed readers, than a “subterfuge to prevent exchanges.” For the Yankees, humanitarian considerations were secondary to winning the war.
The Confederate apologists portray Jeff Davis and his underlings as shocked by the halt to exchanges. The Confederate leadership in this view did nothing wrong to precipitate the change in Union policy. Some later historians adopted this view, essentially writing Black Union troops out of the cartel story.
In attacking the suspension of the exchanges, Lost Cause writers argued that the North stopped trading men because the numbers were in the North’s favor if prisoners remained where they were. Because the Confederates had fewer soldiers overall, one returned Confederate prisoner was supposedly worth more to the Confederate cause than one returned Union soldier was to the Federals. Grant is typically blamed for taking exchange off the table. Grant did support the suspension of exchanges, but Gillispie points out problems with the argument that he was responsible for the policy.
Gillispie points out that the suspension came in the Spring of 1863. Think of who Grant was at that point. Here is what the author writes:
There are some serious flaws with this characterization and Grant’s role in the decision. One major problem with laying the issue at Grant’s feet is that the decision was made without any input from him. At the time Grant had his hands quite full with the siege of Vicksburg and it is highly unlikely that he shifted his focus at this critical and decisive moment in the war to make prisoner of war policy changes. More importantly, there is not a scrap of wartime evidence to suggest or prove that he had any direct or indirect effect on the 1863 decision. Grant may well have understood the military advantages of halting exchanges, and no doubt he did, but at that point in the war he was strictly a field officer without much, if any, influence over policy decisions.
Also, let us recall what Grant did with the big catch of prisoners that he took at Vicksburg a couple of months after the exchange halted. He paroled them. Did a massive parole fit in with Grant being strictly opposed to exchanges in mid-1863?
Gillispie makes the point, in response to claims that Grant played a key role in halting the exchanges, that:
There are some serious flaws with this characterization and Grant’s role in the decision. One major problem with laying the issue at Grant’s feet is that the decision was made without any input from him. At the time Grant had his hands quite full with the siege of Vicksburg and it is highly unlikely that he shifted his focus at this critical and decisive moment in the war to make prisoner of war policy changes. More importantly, there is not a scrap of wartime evidence to suggest or prove that he had any direct or indirect effect on the 1863 decision.
Grant would not have the power to stop exchanges until 1864. It was only then, Gillispie says, that Grant began to put his stamp on the policy. In mid-1864 Grant told Ben Butler, who was heading exchanges, that he felt that the exchanges had become unfair. Union soldiers sent back north were so broken by the poor conditions of captivity that they typically were militarily worthless. Grant believed that the Confederates returned from Union prisons were in considerably better shape.
In a letter from Grant to Canby in September 1864, Grant says that Canby could carry out exchanges right after battles because the captive Unionists were unlikely to have significantly deteriorated under Confederate captivity in such a short time.
In October, 1864, Lee contacted Grant to see if the Union commander would be willing to exchange men captured in the preceding months. Grant responded that negotiations could not proceed until the issue of the equal status of prisoners of war was addressed. Grant wrote “Among those lost by the armies operating against Richmond were a number of colored troops. Before further negotiations are had upon the subject I would ask if you propose delivering these men the same as white soldiers?”
Gillispie describes Lee’s response:
Lee told Grant that he was personally willing to exchange all troops on an equal footing, but he had to abide by his government’s position that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition. If there are any such among those stated by you to have been captured around Richmond they cannot be returned.” Regrettably then, Grant informed Lee, no prisoners would be exchanged unless all were eligible. He told Lee on October 3: “I have to state that the Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due soldiers. This being denied by you in the persons of such men as have escaped from Southern masters induces me to decline making the exchanges you ask.” (p. 89)
Can any modern reader find fault with Grant’s inquiry and his response to Lee’s answer? Lost Cause history writers routinely ignore this exchange.
Gillispie acknowledges that Black soldiers were hardly treated as equals by the Union army. With a few exceptions they could not be commissioned as officers or serve in “white” regiments. They received lower pay rates for months after their recruitment was first authorized. Because the United States army discriminated against its own black soldiers did not, in Gillispie’s opinion, mean that it did not take seriously the existential threat that the Confederate leaders had issued against captured African Americans. The idea that United States Colored Troops (USCT) would be enslaved or killed by Confederates if captured was abhorrent to nearly all Americans outside of the South.
The fact is that Jefferson Davis vitiated the 1862 prisoner exchange cartel when he decided not to honor it for Blacks in Blue. The seriousness of the issue was highlighted when the Lieber Code of War, General Order 100, was issued containing a provision barring disparate treatment of captured combatants based on race.
In May of 1863, the War Department issued orders halting the exchanges “in order to be in a position to check the rebel Government and restrain the execution of its avowed purpose” of enslaving or killing USCT. In General Orders 252 the Lincoln administration explained that, “It is the duty of every Government to give protection to its citizens, of whatsoever class, color, or condition, and especially to those who are duly organized as soldiers in the public service. The law of nations and civilized powers, permit no distinction as to color in the treatment of prisoners of war as public enemies.”
In November 1863, Sec. of War Stanton told Ben Butler:
It is known that the rebels will exchange man for man and officer for officer, except blacks and officers in command of black troops. These they absolutely refuse to exchange. This is the point on which the whole matter hinges. Exchanging man for man and officer for officer, with the exception the rebels make, is a substantial abandonment of the colored troops and their officers to their fate, and would be a shameful dishonor to the Government bound to protect them. When they agree to exchange all alike there will be no difficulty.
Gillispie argues that “With all the correspondence demonstrating that Richmond’s policy was at the center of the controversy, it is difficult, if not irresponsible, to blithely dismiss that policy because Northern whites were racists and could not have really meant what they repeatedly said.” (p. 94) Gillispie says that he is not claiming that the Union high command was uniquely racially egalitarian. He understands the racism embedded in the Union leadership. However, even if the moral views of people like Lincoln are set aside, purely practical reasons would suffice to explain Unionist demands that Black soldiers be treated as prisoners of war.
If the Federal government hoped to recruit tens of thousands of black soldiers, it had to demonstrate that it would protect their interests if they were captured. Black recruits already knew that they were likely to receive severe treatment if captured. If the Federal government did not stand up for them, how many fewer blacks would have joined the army?
Although Confederate leaders viewed the Union’s use of black soldiers as an abomination, the laws of war did not prohibit the recruitment of a multiracial army. In fact, in 1865 the Confederate Congress itself authorized limited recruitment of blacks. Just because the white South opposed the use of blacks as Union soldiers did not mean that it was illegal for the Union to use those troops and to accord them the ordinary protections accorded to a nation’s troops. While the Confederates decried black men in blue uniforms as insurrectionaries, the USCT were regularly enrolled troops of the United States under the command of commissioned officers and subject to the laws of war.
Gillispie’s point here should be obvious, though even some modern historians disregard Confederate behavior in the discussion of the suspension of exchanges.
Gillispie next deals with the charge that Northern authorities purposely starved Confederates.
Until 1864, Confederate prisoners were supposed to receive the same rations as the Union soldiers who guarded them. This amounted to 4,000 calories per day. The food was not great and the fare was monotonous and lacking nutritional completeness. As public reaction to reports of the poor treatment of Union soldiers held by the Confederacy heightened, calls came to reduce the amount of food provided to Confederates in Northern camps.
Gillispie is on shakier ground in his discussion of the impact of ration reductions on the health of Confederates held captive. As the poor treatment of Union prisoners at Andersonville was revealed, the Union reduced its previously adequate rations for Confederate prisoners.
Higher death rates after the ration reductions are explained by Gillispie as the effect of the poor condition of Confederates at the time of capture. It is true that the Confederate soldier in the field in 1864 was significantly worse nourished than he was two years earlier. Gillispie asserts that many of those prisoners who died of scurvy in the last year of the war had arrived with scurvy when they were captured.
Gillispie acknowledges the reductions caused a hardship, but he says that purchases from sutlers and food sent in to prisoners from friends in the North supplemented the men’s diets. I wondered in reading that, how many ordinary privates had friends in the North to send them food or money to purchase supplies from sutlers.
Another charge made against Northern prisons involves the quality of housing for prisoners. In most cases, prisoners were housed in wooden barracks, but in Point Lookout they were in tents year round and in Elmira many were in tents for half a year before wooden barracks were constructed. Union officials defended the use of tents as an expedient and pointed out that Confederates in the field lived in tents as well. While that precedent may have been appropriate for Point Lookout in Maryland, it was hardly appropriate for freezing Elmira. Elmira has one of the harshest climates in New York State and living in a tent there in the cold weather must have been miserable.
Elmira had been a Union depot for new recruits and its buildings could accommodate about 5,000 men. These buildings were put up in warm weather and were not designed to house men for long periods of time. Within months of Elmira prison opening in the late-spring of 1864 it had twice as many men as its buildings could hold. This meant that thousands of men slept in tents. Prison authorities were actively building new barracks in the Fall of 1864 and by January 1, 1865 all Confederates were in the new buildings. However, October, November, and December 1864 had been very cold and men had suffered as a result.
The housing problem appears to be an issue of poor planning rather than the intentional killing of prisoners through cold. Evidence Gilispie provides indicates that as Union officials recognized the housing problem in the Fall of 1864 they took pains to alleviate it. If the intent was to freeze prisoners, why incur the heavy expense of building new barracks? Wood stoves provided to heat the barracks proved inadequate to warm the chilly Upstate air, and the prison spent large amounts of money on new coal-burning stoves. Again, if the intent was to kill, why the expenditures?
I think that the performance of Union officials concerning Elmira was negligent, however. There were plenty of indications even before Elmira opened that the prison would soon hold more prisoners than it had housing for. Delaying three months to start building new barracks meant that men would be exposed in tents to terrible cold for several months. While Union officials argued that many of the guards were also housed in tents at the time, the guards had other warming opportunities unavailable to prisoners.
In this section Gillispie provides adequate evidence that Union commanders did not use the freezing of Confederates as part of a policy to kill them, but the incompetence and delay in putting up new housing is hardly excusable.
Gillispie’s glib characterization of the barracks at Elmira is questionable. He says that “nobody would book a vacation to such quarters,” as though that is the heart of the criticism of that prison. Gillispie goes on to write “Union officials would point out that they provided four walls and a roof with stoves in the winter and bunks with straw to sleep in. Such quarters were at least as good as troops in the field lived in…” This second statement is meaningful, the first, about vacationing, is not. I wish the author had not trivialized housing conditions which contributed to the deaths of some of the Confederates there.
The next section of the book examines conditions in all of the major prison camps in the North. The most interesting aspect of the survey are the many times inspectors wrote to inform their superiors of shortcomings at the camp they were inspecting. The reports on problems at the camp can be used against the Union’s position, but Gillispie says that the reports themselves show significant interest by central authorities in the well-being of the prisoners. He also says that after negative reports were made, changes in conditions often occurred.
The sheer number of ameliorative measures taken at Union prisons argue against the idea that there was an official intent to harm the Confederates. For example, if you are trying to kill them off, why did camps administer smallpox vaccines to the men? Why did the Union spend so much effort in constructing barracks at Elmira in November and December of 1864 if it was using cold to destroy its prisoners?
The final section of this book looks at the impact of disease on men in the camps. The author writes that many Confederates arrived in the prisons exhausted from campaigning, wounded, sick, or emaciated. The warders did not cause these conditions. He says that if the health of the men was the result of bad treatment from Union doctors we would expect the sick among prisoners to have a lower survival rate than at the Confederacy’s leading hospital. They did not. In fact, it may have been better to be sick in most Union prisons than at Chimborazo near Richmond.
Gillispie concludes “This study does not claim to be the last word on Federal policies or living conditions in Yankee prisons during the Civil War. Neither has it sought to portray Union prisons as pleasant places to have been confined. Rather, this study has sought to demonstrate why the predominately negative impression of Union authorities’ policies and actions towards Confederate prisoners as neglectful, apathetic, and deliberately cruel is in need of serious reevaluation. The evidence supporting the prevailing stereotype of the cruel and negligent Yankee comes almost exclusively from the postwar writing of Southerners who, like their Northern counterparts, exploited the prisoner of war issue to achieve a number of goals.”
While Gillispie argues his points strongly, the book is flawed because of its exculpatory tone.
Andersonvilles of the North relies heavily on the notion that most published Confederate prisoner accounts of treatment at the hands of Union captors should not be taken at face value. According to the author, the post-war books were published for audiences that would only pay for atrocity stories. POWs exaggerated their suffering to conform to market demand. There is nothing wrong with viewing Union and Confederate prisoner memoirs with some suspicion. There were so many prisoner memoirs published that they form a subgenre of Civil War literature. They were written to be sold, and smart publishers knew what the book buying public wanted to read. My problem is that James M. Gillispie sometimes disregards them entirely and relies almost exclusively on the Official Records (ORs). The ORs are filled with self-serving distortions as well. This can make the book feel a little one-sided. I also felt that in some chapters, Confederate prisoners were rendered voiceless by the author’s editorial choices.
