Do We Ignore Prisoners of War When We Study the Civil War?

When developing public programs on the captivity experience, which I’ve done at Chickamauga as well as at Andersonville, I try to focus on individuals. There’s an old cliché, which is often attributed to Josef Stalin: “A thousand deaths is a statistic, but a single death is a tragedy.” This was always my interpretive foundation for talking about captivity in most of my programs. When we talk about 400,000 prisoners in the Civil War, or 56,000 deaths in captivity, it is far too easy to see little more than numbers on a ledger. This is especially true at Andersonville, where the scale is simply mindboggling: 45,000 prisoners over fourteen months, with 12,920 deaths. That makes Andersonville the deadliest single site in the entire Civil War, something not lost on survivors. I’ve read several accounts from survivors discussing how many battle death counts must be combined to reach Andersonville’s death toll.

I had long been familiar with the 56,000 deaths figure, but I don’t think I had realized that 400,000 Americans had been prisoners at one time or the other during the war.

Part of the problem might be the absence of sites and interpretation. My dad and I went to the site of Elmira prison camp fifty years ago. It was a residential area with a highway marker and a small monument. Locals we talked to seemed to know little about the site. Since then, a local history group has increased awareness and improved the historical interpretation. I also visited Shahola, the scene of a rail disaster involving Confederates bound for Elmira, and saw decent interpretation there.

Fort Lafayette, the American Bastille in Southern propaganda, was right off of Brooklyn under the eastern support of the Verrazano Bridge, but few locals know anything about it. Governor’s Island, only recently opened to the public, does offer some interpretation of its role as prison for Confederate captives. Perhaps its relatively low death rate makes this an easier task than at Elmira where a quarter of the prisoners died.

More from Chris Barr on how historic sites interpret, or don’t interpret, captivity:

Unfortunately, most of our public history sites don’t really address captivity as well as they could. Recently, I visited a Civil War battlefield on which as many as seventeen thousand men were taken prisoner. I entered its museum hopeful that prisoners would at least be addressed, given that one out of every ten soldiers who marched onto the field was captured and left with the enemy army. Greeting visitors when they entered the exhibit space was a floor-to-ceiling–size 1865 photo of the headboards at Andersonville, paired with a photo of an emaciated prisoner, so I was optimistic. Unfortunately, I didn’t see a single exhibit or panel on the prisoners from that battle; perhaps it was there, and I just missed it. Rather, all I saw was a single exhibit panel on prisoners of war in general. I was disappointed but hardly surprised. At least they had a panel on prisons. At most battlefields, typically the only reference to prisoners is a mention of Andersonville and usually one northern camp to provide some sort of balance. Captivity is rarely incorporated into the narrative of the battle…

Barr has interesting things to say about how public historians can incorporate captivity into their public presentations. He also discusses the problems involved with telling the Confederate prisoner’s story:

Because I worked at Andersonville and grew up near the prison site, I naturally focus on stories of Union soldiers there. I sometimes have to make a conscious effort to include other prison camps. That has been easier to do with Union prisoners, because there is this natural connection among camps, as the Confederates frequently moved prisoners around. So one Andersonville prisoner may have also been held at Belle Isle, Danville, Camp Lawton, Blackshear, and Thomasville. Expanding this prisoner’s story requires simply reading the rest of his memoir or diary. Confederate prisoners can be difficult to study sometimes, as many enlisted men did not publish full-scale memoirs or diaries, at least not in the same numbers as their Federal counterparts. Many Confederate prisoner accounts come from postwar magazines like Confederate Veteran, and with these, the line between actual experience and postwar challenges to memory can be blurry. So I think memory studies are a great place for scholars to begin to tackle captivity….

Here at Chickamauga, I’ve been working to add stories of captivity to my programs at the battlefield. I’ve recently finished reading Rags and Hope, a memoir by Val Giles of the 4th Texas Infantry…, who was captured at Wauhatchie outside of Chattanooga in October 1863 and held at Camp Morton. His memoir includes both stories of Union prisoners in the Texans’ ranks during the Battle of Chickamauga as well his own captivity and prison experience. I’ve been working to include Giles’s story in my battlefield programming. And I think that is how most Civil War scholars and public historians can incorporate captivity into their work—by simply including it in the narrative. In some battles, more people were taken prisoner than were killed on the field, but our books and museum exhibits don’t usually address that. These mediums are filled with images of bloated bodies and horrifying descriptions of death and carnage at places like Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. They offer little insight, however, into the experience of the men of the 69th Pennsylvania who were captured during that charge and taken all the way back across that field by the retreating Confederates or the men of the 54th Massachusetts who were captured on Morris Island in July 1863. Around 13 percent of all Civil War soldiers—around one in seven—were taken prisoner at some point. This is not an insignificant number or just a footnote to the story; this is a core part of the Civil War experience that needs to be addressed just as much as deaths or injuries on the battlefield.

Barr says that some sites are making an effort to incorporate prisoners and captivity into their presentations:

Some sites are doing great work in incorporating captivity into their stories. For example, at Fort Pulaski National Monument, there are a variety of exhibits about the experiences of the men captured there when the fort fell in 1862, as well as the Confederates held prisoner in the fort during the final months of the war. Since 2013, they have held a variety of public programs on their prisoner story, including the dedication of a monument to the prisoners who died there and an entire prisoner themed weekend of programs. Even a park ranger at the Statue of Liberty occasionally gives presentations on the Confederates held at Fort Wood, which today forms the base of the Statue of Liberty. In August 2016, I did a tour of Chickamauga Battlefield focusing on the stories of men captured at the battle, and some battlefield sites have begun to include a prison tour at least once a year.

What have your experiences with the interpretation of Civil War prisoners of war been like at museums and historic sites?

[Feature Illustration is of Camp Douglas in Chicago.]

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