410,000 soldiers were held as prisoners in the Civil War, 56,000 of whom died. One-in-ten men who died in the Civil War died in captivity. David Blight wrote in Race and Reunion that “No wartime experience . . . caused deeper emotions, recriminations, and lasting invective than that of prisons.” This book discusses the development of public consciousness of the prisons, the political uses to which they were put, and the memories of the prisons after the war was over.
Americans perceived themselves as a people apart from the base cruelties of the rest of the world. Many white Protestant Americans viewed themselves as the members of an exceptional people, a providential race selected by the Almighty to do His will. While some recognized that American treatment of Blacks and Native Americans would make an inquisitor of the Middle Ages blush with shame, most saw themselves as part of an enlightened nation. The experience of Civil War prisons left several generations of “Americans, angered, dismayed, and perplexed by the treatment of Civil War prisoners of war, engaged in an ongoing search to find meaning in the tragedy experienced by those captives,” according to the author.
While the book covers the memory of Civil War prisons generally, special attention is given to Andersonville. This is often the only Civil War prison most Americans can name and it has been uppermost in people’s memory of the war since 1865. Cloyd explains that:
Several factors ensure Andersonville’s singular reputation despite the persistent misery that occurred in other prison camps. Thirteen thousand Union soldiers died there, making Andersonville the deadliest of all Civil War prisons. In 1865, the camp’s commander, Henry Wirz, was executed for war crimes against Union prisoners. During the postwar decades scores of Andersonville survivors published embellished memoirs rehashing their wartime experiences. And while most of the other prison sites disappeared into oblivion, Andersonville, due to the consistent northern fascination with the prison, has been preserved. Today at Andersonville National Historic Site, visitors will find Andersonville National Cemetery, the old prison grounds, and the National Prisoner of War Museum.
The prison atrocity issue became a serious topic of public debate in 1863 with the collapse of the prisoner exchange cartel over the failure by the Confederacy to treat captured black soldiers as prisoners of war and the perception that returning prisoners South only prolonged the war. Unfortunately, the debate was largely propaganda driven, with each side accusing the other of committing atrocities.
Even visual images conveyed a sense that evil was being committed only by the other side. Cloyd writes:
Most photographs or cartoons published during the war years depicted the toll that prison life took on the health and strength of young soldiers. In the North, the circulation of the shocking images of emaciated troops, who had been hale and hearty when they left home, often conveyed the harsh reality of prison life better than any article could. Beginning in 1863, a series of illustrations appeared in Harper’s Weekly confirming the rumors of prison evils taking place in the Confederacy. That December, one of the early drawings showed a ragged group of Union prisoners at Belle Isle, in Richmond. Most of them sat or lay prone on the ground, half naked, without the strength or desire to move. Two other prisoners stood, weakly, clutching each other for support. The gloomy scene revealed a world of brutality and deliberate cruelty as the northern soldiers helplessly awaited their fate. On the front page of the March 5, 1864, edition, a picture of tottering prison escapees, held upright only with the help of Union soldiers, suggested that even these brave, determined individuals—the strongest—barely survived the hell of prison in Dixie. More images in December 1864 and January 1865 followed, focusing northern attention on the pitiful health of the recently exchanged survivors of southern prisons.
When illustrations of Union prisons occasionally appeared, as in the April 15, 1865, issue of Harper’s Weekly, they depicted a much more benign existence. A panoramic drawing of Elmira Prison, in New York, complete with an American flag waving in the breeze, presented a stark contrast to the claustrophobic, graphic images that northern artists offered of the suffering individuals in the South. When a picture focused on Confederate prisoners, as in one rendering of Fort Lafayette, in New York, they sat peacefully inside a comfortable barracks room reading and playing games.
The much cozier image fit the popular opinion in the North, fed by the press, that Confederate prisoners lived in luxury while their counterparts starved and died. The sharp contrast indicated the deepening fury of the Civil War. It also showed a stubborn refusal in the North, fueled by the influence of such propaganda, to confront the reality of the evil done in the name of its cause. The anger over the seemingly singularly brutal treatment of northern soldiers in southern prisons, fed by the constant publication of charges and images of atrocity, increased the bitterness and sense of moral outrage that fueled the destruction of the Confederacy during the latter stages of the war.
Cloyd alleges that both the Union and Confederate governments manipulated public opinion through the prisoner atrocity issue during the last two years of the war. He sees a cynicism in how both governments behaved. Rather than improve the conditions for the prisoners each side held, the respective leaderships hurled charges of inhumanity against the other side. Men in the prisons came to worry that their respective presidents had stopped caring about the welfare of the men, and saw them as more useful as objects of pity than as men to be helped. Martyrs had a propaganda value to both sides.
Cloyd describes this manipulation:
Patriotic northerners and southerners ignored their own failings and decried those of their opponents instead. But the end of the war did not mean the end of the illusion. The reality of unleashing destruction, of course, is that the bitter feelings last. The painful controversy remained raw precisely because of the frequent and remarkable employment of each section’s divisive memories of Civil War prisons in cajoling both a devotion to cause and justification for violence.
Henry Wirz may or may not have been guilty as charged at his trial, but he was also a scapegoat in the ancient sense of that term. A guilty nation extirpated its sins by assigning them to an outsider, a Swiss immigrant with a heavy German accent. His alleged malevolence could stand in for the responsibility of hundreds of men (most born in the U.S.) for the death of tens of thousands of prisoners held by both sides.
In the post-war press Wirz was not a man, he was a “devil,” “tiger,” and “fiend.” Anything but an American.
Wirz was a most useful figure, writes Cloyd. He provided the Unionist “public a demonic figure on which to focus their outrage. And the relatively innocuous official status of Wirz, as a mere captain, allowed the government to place responsibility for the prison debacle on the Confederacy without further stirring up the emotions of southerners, as a trial of Jefferson Davis might have done.”
Almost as soon as Wirz was hanged, Union prison memoirs began regularly appearing in print. In the years right after the war, former prisoners began accusing the Confederacy of trying to murder them. One author wrote that; “It is past question that the Confederate authorities did deliberately, and with thoughts of murder in their hearts, perpetuate the awful enormity of torturing to death sixty or seventy thousand helpless but brave men; slain by a refined process of cruelty.”
The Republican Party found the prison narratives useful campaign tools in the elections of 1868. Nothing outraged Northern voters more than reading of the death by starvation of their brave sons. Connecting the Democrats to Andersonville completed the circle.
Cloyd writes that a Southern white counteroffensive sought to place the blame for even Unionist deaths on the Yankees:
Their version contained several components that not only excused the Confederacy’s prison record but placed the burden of responsibility for the dead prisoners back on the Union. According to Stephens, Davis, Craven, and Schade, the Confederacy strove to fulfill its obligations to its prisoners even in the midst of total collapse. If the North had fought a more civilized war, refraining from destroying much of the Confederate heartland and preventing the import of medicine and other supplies, then tending to the needs of Union captives would have been far easier. Had the Union at any time acquiesced to the resumption of the exchange cartel the misery of the supposedly intentionally deprived Yankee soldiers would have ended. Finally, even with the concession that Confederate prisons took an incredible toll on Union prisoners, the fact remained that Union prisons killed Confederate captives at similar rates. While northerners scoffed at these arguments and dismissed them as selective, false, and conjectural, southerners clung to these rhetorical positions and began to repeat them, at first weakly, but eventually with growing confidence.
Like its northern counterpart, the Southern white memory represented a severe distortion of the truth about Civil War prisons. A clear preference for hypothetical alternatives defined the southern position. Such narratives are not surprising given the grim reality of the outcome of the conflict. As defenders of the Confederacy, through the power of hindsight, reflected on the war, the natural human tendency to revisit mistakes and to ask “what if?” crept in and influenced their arguments. The more troubling aspect of the southern deflective memory lay in its defiant mirroring of the northern stance. The denial of all responsibility for the suffering in Confederate prisons combined with the insistence that the Union instead deserved sole blame not only was untrue but indicated just how deep the wounds inflicted by the Civil War, and constantly reopened, as with the Wirz trial, during Reconstruction, really were.
African Americans developed their own traditions and memories of the prisoners. Soon after the war they began traditions of assembling at the old grounds of the prisons, first in solemn commemoration of men who had died to help free the slaves, and later as a civic celebration. White Southerners resented these commemorations and the white media ignored them typically, only mentioning them to mock the black assemblies.
By the late 1870s, white America’s memory of the prisons was slowly reshaped. Prisons were not longer as much of a partisan political issue as they had been and former prisoners of war worried that they would be forgotten. Many were appalled that a younger generation did not see their lingering disabilities from their prison years as “real” war wounds worthy of a hero’s reward (or a pension).
Prison memoirs, which continued to appear until the start of the 20th Century, began to stress the heroism of the former inmates. The authors particularly emphasized their role in plots to escape the camps, turning the stockade around Elmira or Andersonville into the equivalent of Gettysburg.
As the years went by, Civil War prison experiences became the fodder for adventure yarns. One volume, Famous Adventures and Prison Escapes of the Civil War, went through a number of printings. Prisons were also seen as likely tourism sites, with Libby Prison being dismantled and moved to Richmond to be opened to paying customers. Communities around Andersonville began to advertise the prison as a tourist destination. Elderly veterans held reunions at the once detested prison.
In spite of the lessening of conflict between white Northerners and Southerners, veterans on both sides continued to act as the guardians of “true history” and they rebelled against anything that they felt distorted their experiences.
The ultimate guardians of “true history” decided that merely policing the history books was not enough. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) announced four decades after his death that they would build a monument to the most notorious accused war criminal in American history up to that time, Henry Wirz. In 1909 the new statue was unveiled before as many as 4,000 people. The message was that Wirz was a martyr, not a criminal. In 1919, three American soldiers painted the monument in the colors of the German flag.
Mildred Rutherford, historian of the UDC, spoke out in defense of Wirz and the policies that he represented. She wrote a book attacking the Wirz trial entitled Facts and Figures vs. Myths and Misrepresentations: Henry Wirz and Andersonville Prison. Cloyd writes that “Rutherford hoped to dispel what seemed to her and many southerners an irrational, and at this point in time, unnecessary, prejudice in the North against Wirz. Given her obvious pro-Confederate viewpoint, however, she convinced few not already in the fold.”
The 1930s were better years for the UDC’s prison project. The novel Gone With the Wind called the Rock Island camp the Northern equivalent of Andersonville, establishing moral equivilence between the North and South. In 1937, the UDC erected a monument at the cemetery in Elmira where many of the Confederate prisoners are buried.
Annual Unionist commemorations at places like Andersonville no longer transmitted their older messages of war crimes and emancipation. With the generation of veterans almost entirely gone, the now white-dominated proceedings stressed bravery and reconciliation. Cloyd writes that “The vital questions of race, freedom, and equality raised by the Civil War and its prisons were increasingly—and comfortably—ignored.”
If the prisons had been primarily a partisan football in the 19th Century, in the 1920s they became an object of scholarly study for the first time. William Hesseltine and a handful of other academic historians evolved what became the Objectivist School of Civil War prison history. Rather than settling scores or assigning blame, these scholars typically rejected the narratives of former POWs, which were seen as incredibly biased, and instead searched the prison records of the two sides. They employed modern forms of historical analysis in trying to understand and explain the prison experience.
Historian William Hesseltine was the leading figure for three decades in this movement towards objectivity. In 1930 he published a book that would dominate the field when it was first published and that is still routinely referenced today. Civil War Prisons: A Subject in War Psychology was an overview of the prisons and offered an explanation of why, by 1864, both sides accepted the large numbers of deaths in their prisons. In his introduction to the book, Hesseltine wrote that with the passions of the Civil War finally cooled, the subject of its prison camps could finally be taken up dispassionately.
Cloyd writes of the reception of the academic community to Hesseltine’s study:
According to his peers, Hesseltine succeeded in his attempt to handle the volatile subject delicately; reviewers hailed the “judicial spirit” and “cool detachment” of the “critical study.” Drawing primarily on evidence from The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies as well as the scores of published prison accounts, Hesseltine reduced the overall controversy over Civil War prisons into individual pieces, including the issue of prisoner exchange, conditions in the prison systems on both sides, and the heated emotions generated by the suffering. He then, at least to his own satisfaction, systematically and dispassionately explained the reasons behind the tragedy of the Civil War prison camps.
Hesseltine did open himself up to later criticism by discounting the importance of race in stalling the exchanges of prisoners in the last two years of the war, the deadliest time for prisoners. The exchange agreement broke down for reasons heavily disputed after the war. Cloyd writes:
Since the 1860s, northerners insisted that the Confederacy’s refusal to recognize the rights of African American prisoners prompted the Union’s principled stand of not exchanging prisoners with the Confederacy—unless black troops received the same treatment as white Union soldiers. Southerners fired back that the Union government always opposed the cartel because it returned Confederate soldiers to the front lines, obstructing Grant’s strategy of attrition, and that defending the rights of African Americans existed purely as a political smokescreen to distract northern families from the fact that Lincoln and Stanton made conscious decisions to sacrifice their sons in Confederate prisons. On the cartel issue, Hesseltine clearly sided with the southern view, claiming that the Union government waited “until the country showed signs of restlessness” with the lack of exchange to declare the South’s policy toward captured African American soldiers as “reason for the non-exchange of prisoners.” Hesseltine’s discounting of the impact of race on the prison controversy showed just how seductive the conjoined memories of reconciliation and white supremacy remained in 1930.
Hesseltine was the first scholar to examine closely the planning of both sides to cope with the new and expanding prisons. While the Confederate leadership sometimes seemed to have no plans and no structure for overseeing the welfare of the prisoners, the Union created a significant administrative capacity for the administration of the camps. Hesseltine seemed to think that much of prisoner suffering in the South was caused by bureaucratic inefficiency. The camps were so poorly run that men were bound to die by the thousands. What then explained the death toll in the camps in the North?
The Northern camps had a lower death rate than the Southern camps, and no Northern camp had a death rate equal to Andersonville. However, Hesseltine wondered, if the Union prisons were better administered and better resourced than the Southern camps, why did they still have relatively high numbers of deaths?
Hesseltine believed that as the stories of the abuse and starvation of prisoners held by the Confederacy became known in the North in 1864 and 1865, many Unionists ascribed an evil intent to the Confederate leaders all the way up to Jefferson Davis. This, Hesseltine contended, led to a “war psychosis” in the North. Atrocity stories from the South inspired in many Northerners “the fiercest antagonism toward that country’s enemies,” Hesseltine wrote. This led to Union prison policies that purposely reduced rations for captives. While more recent historians contest the claimed negative health impact of these reductions, Hesseltine offered the first evidence-based argument for the rise in prison deaths towards the end of the war.
Hesseltine “attacked the traditional belief that evil individuals bore responsibility for the tragedy and instead confirmed the modern, more scientifically nuanced perception of how the world worked,” writes Cloyd. His “revisionist combination of objective psychoanalytic theory and the impersonal dominance of large bureaucratic organizations, with their capacity for mismanagement, presented the history of Civil War prisons in a more compelling, usable form, especially compared to the outdated sectional memories of the prisons.”
Hesseltine helped establish a research paradigm that critically examined the old prisoner memoirs that had been so central to the memory of Civil War prisons. Much academic research in the ensuing years operated within this paradigm. Cloyd writes that “Inspired by Hesseltine’s example, professional and amateur historians alike rejected the old selective memories of Civil War prisons and instead approached this particular example of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ with the objective goal of more faithfully chronicling and explaining the horrors of Civil War prison camps in terms of scientific theory.”
The horrors of World War II, particularly the Nazi concentration camps and the Bataan Death March led historians to compare the atrocities of the mid-20th Century to the Civil War prisoners’ experiences. The Nuremburg Trails led to comparisons with Wirz’s trial. The notion that Americans could not commit the same sorts of atrocities as the Germans was called into question by had happened in America 80 years earlier.
Cloyd writes that Bruce Catton popularized this post-war view:
In a 1959 American Heritage article, Catton enthusiastically reminded his readers that “the passage of the years has at last brought a new perspective.” Andersonville remained “the worst of a large number of war prisons,” but all prisons, North and South, “were almost unbelievably bad.” “The real culprit” for the suffering, Catton declared, was not “Wirz, the luckless scapegoat,” but “war itself.” Catton’s focus on the inherent evil of modern war reflected a sense of weariness with the tragic development of world events. By 1959, the experience of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War convinced Catton and many Americans that, starting with the Civil War, in each and every instance war meant the infliction of unspeakable cruelty, no matter when or where it took place.
The 1955 publication of MacKinlay Kantor’s novel Andersonville both popularized the study of the prison’s history and implanted distortions of that history inside people’s minds. Although the book is much criticized now, at the time several important historians praised its objectivity. Hesseltine hated the novel and he mobilized a group of younger historians to respond to it in the journal Civil War History.
In December 1959 The Andersonville Trial made its Broadway debut. The play focus on the Wirz trial and used it to draw lessons on the Nuremberg trials. The play was a big hit and was seen by tens of thousands over its run. In 1970, PBS televised it. The cast of the TV production included William Shatner as Lt. Col. Norton P. Chipman, Cameron Mitchell as Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace, Richard Basehart as Capt. Henry Wirz, Jack Cassidy as Otis Baker, Martin Sheen as Capt. Williams, and Buddy Ebsen. The play was hardly good history, but it made Americans even more aware of Andersonville as a major Civil War site.
Tourism to the old camp increased and efforts were made to restore the Wirz monument. With the Centennial celebration, Andersonville became another place to vacation, buy tchotchkes, and soak up history. So by the 1960s, Andersonville was a subject of serious study, a literary metaphor and part of a Civil War vacation, all at the same time, though not always to the same people.
Georgia’s tourism board heavily promoted Andersonville as part of its Centennial Civil War tourist trail. It was ranked as the fourth most important site after those associated with the fall of Atlanta. The town of Andersonville embraced their disreputable past in pursuit of tourism dollars. Boosters cobbled together tours of the area hoping to make it a stop for interstate tourists.
With revived interest in Andersonville, came an attempt by die-hard Lost Cause devotees to rehabilitate the memory of Henry Wirz. In the 1970s, the UDC and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) began cosponsoring annual memorial services in November to commemorate his execution.
The Wirz cult reached its apogee in the 1980s. In 1981, the SCV awarded Wirz the Confederate Medal of Honor. In 1984, former governor Lester Maddox gave the annual Wirz memorial speech. Maddox, a hard-line and notorious racist and segregationist reminded many African Americans, if they needed reminding, of the racialized meanings of Andersonville.
According to Cloyd:
The opportunity to confirm southernness by celebrating Wirz attracted white southerners who sought to assert the legitimacy of their heritage in a difficult era of turbulent race relations and political transition. The ritual celebration of Confederate mythology offered a reconfirmation of the traditional racial identities of the past. It was not coincidence that in the same speech in which Maddox, never one to shy away from controversy, portrayed Wirz as a symbol of southern virtue, he also took a thinly veiled shot at African Americans, criticizing welfare recipients as “bums and parasites.”
While the Wirz commemorations of the 1970s and 1980s drew respectable sized crowds of up to 200 people, they began to peter out in the 1990s. Tony Horwitz described one in the mid-1990s in his book Confederates in the Attic which only drew about forty people.
Local boosters of the economics of Civil War tourism see the Neo-Confederate visitation as miniscule, while the more than 100,000 tourists from all over the country who visit the prison site have become a vital part of the area’s economy. They hope to attract tourism dollars to Andersonville and surrounding communities by emphasizing the historical significance of the area and the homey amenities of Andersonville. An annual historical fair has become a well-attended draw.
Cloyd says:
The persistence of the small band of Wirz supporters—and the complex meaning(s) of heritage at Andersonville—reveals the ongoing paradox that many contemporary white southerners face as new generations, each more divorced from the actual events, come to terms with the embedded memories of the Civil War and its prisons. Although Andersonville residents like Sheppard continue to defend Wirz’s innocence, the financial interest of the town depends on a muted portrayal of the prison controversy. The resulting presentation of the town’s history is artificial, but understandably so. Today’s Andersonville residents have little or no personal connection to the horrors of 1864 except to recognize that that history represents a viable commercial asset. The community benefits far more from the yearly visits of the tens of thousands of casually interested tourists, many of whom know nothing about what happened at Andersonville Prison and have little personal stake in dwelling on the old wounds, than from the gatherings of the pro-Confederate diehards. For most participants in the Historic Fair, enjoyment of the rustic Civil War town’s appearance is all that matters. While the reputation of Andersonville sparks interest, the design of the town and its annual celebrations acknowledges the controversy but refuses to risk alienating potential visitors. Andersonville thus offers its history on two levels—the general ambiance of the Civil War era, intended to charm the crowds of infrequent tourists, and the opportunity to learn of Wirz’s unjust execution, targeted at southerners more deeply interested in the subject of Civil War prisons. Andersonville introduces many visitors to the controversy over Civil War prisons but, upon arrival, those same tourists encounter an idealized rather than actual history. As the emphasis on general ambiance continues, the influence and numbers of Wirz supporters correspondingly decline. Although a few white southerners cling to the heritage of their Confederate ancestors and make their token appearance to honor Wirz every November, the waning intensity of the devotion suggests that memories of Civil War prisons now provoke mere curiosity instead of inspiring cause.
For more serious visitors to Andersonville, the message of Hesseltine’s objectivist school of interpretation has gained the upper hand. They were less interested in assigning sectional blame and more likely to view the deaths at Andersonville and Elmira as two manifestations of the brutality of modern war. They want to understand the suffering and are less interested in who, personally, caused it.
In 1966, State Senator Jimmy Carter of nearby Plains, Ga. led the effort to have Andersonville become a National Park. Cloyd writes of Carter’s delegation meeting with the Sec. of the Interior during which he advocated for:
a proposed “national historical memorial on the site of the Confederate prison near Andersonville, Ga.” Carter took pains to assure Udall that Georgians had no intent “to reconstruct a one-sided version of what took place at Andersonville” but rather preferred to focus on the “national significance” of Andersonville “as part of the nation’s history.” Udall, although noncommittal, indicated that the concept intrigued him. “I like the idea,” Udall declared, because “that is the story of life.” “History,” he stated, “contains many things that are pleasant and unpleasant.” The meeting of these officials marked the beginning of the campaign to transform Andersonville into a national park. If properly presented, the history of Andersonville promised not only financial benefits but a chance to further defuse the sectional animosities of the past and, unfortunately, present. In the recent climate of the Civil Rights Movement, which once again pitted the South against the rest of the nation, the opportunity to recast a symbol of sectional bitterness as a healing memorial to all prisoners of war (one that, not coincidentally, avoided the peculiar and potentially inflammatory racial dimensions of Civil War prisons) made both business and political sense.
One factor in park discussions in the late-1960s was the Vietnam War. POWs and MIAs were in the national consciousness in a way that Americans who came of age in the last thirty years cannot even imagine. The suffering of Americans captured by the Vietnamese, and the national desire to free and account for all of the captured as a huge preoccupation, and would remain so for a decade after the war ended. Supporters of the park broadened its message to be about more than the Civil War prison experience. A report said that the proposed park would be a memorial for “all Americans who have served their country, at home and abroad, and suffered the loneliness and anguish of captivity. It is the undaunted spirit of men such as these that keeps America the Nation that it is.”
As you might expect, the United Daughters of the Confederacy opposed the creation of an Andersonville National Park. J.G. Mandry of the UDC’s Andersonville committee led the charge. Cloyd writes that:
Motivated by the desire to protect southern memories of Civil War prisons, and as part of the larger struggle to preserve the Confederate heritage of the white South, the UDC actively campaigned to repeal the legislation designating Andersonville as a national park. Madry and the UDC resented that “this prison is being singled out,” when “we feel that what happened to our Confederate soldiers in Northern prisons is as bad as what happened to Union soldiers at Andersonville.” “Most tourists aren’t historians,” she exclaimed, and therefore, no matter how objective the presentation of history or strong the emphasis on the universal story of prisoner of war suffering, Madry feared that the site would only reconfirm the “malicious and libelous, insulting and injurious myth” of Andersonville’s singular reputation for cruelty.
On Memorial Day 1976 a statue honoring American Prisoners of War from “all wars” was unveiled. It symbolized Andersonville’s new role, as a stand-in for all of the places Americans have been imprisoned in during wars. From the British prison ships in New York City to the Hanoi Hilton of Vietnam, this one site would bear the burden for all of them. It was a transformation from a place of sectional division to one of national unity.
At the same time that a universalist interpretation of the park was being developed, the particular space, the land itself, had to be marked and explained to visitors as a site that for a year had been a place of intense suffering for thousands of men. Replicas of shelters and of stockade walls were necessary to give visitors the sense of being at a special place where “history happened.”
In the early 1990s plans were developed to open a National POW Museum at Andersonville. Appropriations were rushed so that the dying generations of World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War prisoners could be present at the museum’s opening. Cloyd describes the museum:
As visitors passed through the museum, the audiovisual presentation of prisoner interviews and footage of reunions, along with the introductory film, “Echoes of Captivity,” narrated by General Colin Powell, drove home the point that while the uniforms and technology changed from war to war, the emotional and physical challenges that prisoners of war faced maintained an unfortunate consistency. The juxtaposition of artifacts from the various wars also reinforced the overall interpretation. In the “Living Conditions” exhibit, canteens and utensils from Andersonville prisoners rested alongside the canteens and utensils of World War II and Korea POWs.35 Lying side by side, these relics poignantly reminded viewers that the mutual suffering of all prisoners of war crossed historical boundaries. No matter when or where imprisonment occurred, deprivation invariably followed.
Cloyd is critical of the approach taken by the museum. By taking a “long view” of POWs across America’s wars, it stresses patriotic loyalty of prisoners and their suffering rather than questions of who was to blame for that suffering. This, he writes, leaves out the fact that the suffering of Civil War prisoners was caused by other Americans. “By conflating all modern wars,” Cloyd argues, “the NPS again excuses, or at least distracts attention from, the tortured morality of the deliberate nature of the policy choices made by, and thus the responsibility shared for, the Union and Confederacy in the tragedy of Civil War prisons.”
Cloyd also wonders about the impact over the coming years of the decline in the number of veterans with POW experiences. Almost no United States military personnel have been held as prisoners of war since 1973. Once the steadily declining number of prison survivors dies out, will that impact visitation to the museum and to Andersonville?
This is not a good “first book” for someone to read on Civil War prisons. It will, however, be appreciated by those who have read up on Elmira or Andersonville and who have asked themselves why the prisoner of war historiography seems so different from the trajectory of other aspects of the study of the Civil War. It will also be a book appreciated by students of Civil War memory studies.
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