Collections of soldiers’ letters home are fairly common. Books with fairly complete sets of letters by husband and wife are rarer. Most rare is a scholar’s explanation of the subjects of the letters that makes full use of archeological digs. David Bush’s book on a Confederate held prisoner at Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie off shore from Sandusky Ohio is in this rarified realm.
Wesley Makely was a prisoner on Johnson’s Island, closer to Canada than to Richmond, but his mind often strayed to his Virginia home where his wife Catherine and their little daughter Lillie lived. An officer of the 18th Virginia Cavalry, he had been captured near Hancock, Md. on July 8, 1863. He and his men of Company D were captured when they could not cross the swollen Potomac after the Battle of Gettysburg. He and 600 other officers taken by the Union during the fight at Gettysburg and the retreat were imprisoned at Johnson’s Island.
Johnson’s Island would prove to be among the healthiest places, North or South, to be kept as a prisoner of war. It is also the place with the best-preserved artifacts surviving 150 years and uncovered through the work of modern archeologists. Unlike Elmira or Camp Douglas (Chicago), Johnson’s Island was a fairly remote area that was not covered over with urban development in the 20th Century. It was also a relatively prosperous prison, with inmates who left many objects behind.
Wesley and Kate wrote back and forth to each other twice a week for almost two years. Their letters had to be short to meet the prison’s requirements for mail. Their letters were written with the knowledge that Union guards might read them. They likely kept information out of the letters that might have caused worry for one another. Yet they form a remarkable record of a relationship kept alive through the mail.
David Bush lets the couple speak through their letters, but he adds historical details and archeological evidence to flesh out their writings. Bush is careful to note that Wesley, called “Nessa” by his wife, was one of thousands of officers at the prison and that there was not a “typical” prisoner. Bush lays out the history of Johnson’s Island through the two years Wesley spent there.
The preoccupations of the couple were also the concerns of thousands of other families on both sides. They hoped for, and Cate worked for, Wesley to be exchanged. They worried about one another’s health and about the impact of a father’s absence on their child’s development. The letters are also preoccupied with the production of “gutta-percha” jewelry. This was a surprise to me.
Prisoners became craftsmen making rings and other jewelry out of hardened rubber called “gutta-percha.” The rings became prized objects that prisoners would purchase from the best makers and send home. The market expanded when “the people at home” began to give the jewelry as gifts or sell to neighbors. Some of the objects sold for over a hundred dollars in 2019 dollars. Both the craftsman and the middleman could make money from this trade, which could be used to purchase supplies from the prison sutler. While none of the jewelry Wesley and Kate wrote about survives, Bush displays a number of examples from the digs on the island and from private collections.
The mails also brought the delivery to Wesley of substantial gifts of food. For more than a year the prison authorities allowed many different kinds of foods to be delivered to prisoners be mail from close family members. Here is an inventory Kate sent of one shipment of food from December 1863: “Things sent to you this day in a box. 1 fruite cake, 1 plain cake 3 pies, 2 beef tongue’s 2 bolonies 1 can peaches 1 can pickled oysters, 1 pair sock, almonds, 8 lemons, candy.” Such shipments took place pretty regularly and were a welcome change from the bread and beef that made up most of the prisoner’s diet. They also added vitamins and minerals no found in the prison issued rations.
Prison food was generally adequate in calories during Wesley’s first year and a half on Johnson’s Island, even if it was not nutritionally complete. It was only in the Fall of 1864 when the Union authorities interrupted food shipments from home and reduced rations in retaliation for the poor treatment of Union soldiers held by the Confederacy that the prisoners began to suffer from hunger.
While Wesley and his fellow officers supplemented their diets with food from home, prisoners in other camps across the North were not as lucky. In some camps many items were confiscated as contraband. Also, many enlisted men did not have the sort of prosperous families that could afford to ship items to them in camp. The Johnson Island prisoners benefitted from both their own resources and from a liberal prison administration.
The letters themselves are interesting beyond their status as historical artifacts. Wesley could be quite clever. For example, after his wife related a pleasant walk to him saying that she wished he was with her, he wrote back:
I have some long walks myself, or at least what we call long walks, though I cannot say much for the plesantness of them. Nor I cannot say that I ever wished you to be heare to enjoy them with me, in fact I don’t think there is any enjoyment in prison. And then you know when they get any one inside of this pen they generaly keep them, or at least that has been my experience. (p. 53)
The two talk of love and of yearnings. Wesley has a flash of jealousy over a visit his wife had with a Federal officer. The danger of Confederate guerrillas to Kate if she travels alone comes up, as does the loss of friends killed in the war.
But we are reading these letters not because these two were husband and wife, but because Wesley was going through an historical experience, and his personal notes to his wife illuminate that history.
The letters offer clues into conditions at Johnson’s Island. Wesley never gives his wife a detailed assessment of life on the island, but we can glean conditions from what he says. For example, in April 1864 he writes in response to a missive from Cate:
You say you want to send me a box, and wanted to know what I wanted. I am not in want of any clothing, except some good coton socks, and a few shirt collars, and also send me those gloves I spoke to you about… (p. 54)
We can also see the changing psychology of Wesley the soldier. Early in his captivity he expressed a desire to return to his regiment to serve out the war. By May of 1864, with the Overland Campaign underway, we hear him express a preferment for captivity. He wrote in response to her expression of hope that he had been released from prison that “but am glad that I will not be in the fight.” (p, 76) This is the first presentiment that things are not going well for the Confederacy and that death may come in service of a losing cause.
By October of 1864 things were downright depressing on Johnson’s Island. Washington had ordered the cutting of rations in retaliation for starvation conditions at Andersonville. The cold was coming on and there was less and less hope of being exchanged anymore. We catch a note of despair in this letter when he writes “I fear I will have to spend another winter here.” He has now not seen his wife or child for a year and a half, and he sounds like he is not convinced he will ever see them again. He wrote:
Oh! Would it not be delitefull to have the pleasure of rambling about togeather as we used to. How often has the flight of some bird passing by inspired me with the desire of being transported to you, that I might there enjoy the pleasures of life, if but for a moment. When I think of of [sic] all the pleasures; all that mortal could desire, and then think of this wretched life, it seams as a darkness was before me. It makes my eyes fill, and my heart sicken when I think of it. Kate you may say I ought not to let any thing trouble me, that I ought to take every thing easy, and make myself contented but you might as well say of some one who died, a fool he died, why did he not wait untill he recovered his strength, till his blood was calm, then all would have been well, and he might have been alive now. I know we are apt to complain that we have but few happy days. But human nature has certain limits...(p. 146). At the end of the note, he wrote “May God bless you and make you happy.”
I think that part of the reason to finish this book is to see how things turned out for the couple, so I won’t go into what happens in 1865. It is a mark of the quality of the book that I really did want to find out, and that I was filled with dread as conditions deteriorated at the end of 1864. Kate and Wesley are hardly famous figures from the 1860s, but their ordinariness and the recognizability of their relationship makes them people we can relate to.
I really enjoyed this book and I think most readers here will like it too. The book is short enough to read in a week, yet you will feel like you learned a lot about the experiences of prisoners and their families. The two letter writers are candid enough to provide real insights into their lives lived apart. Bush’s paragraphs explain a lot of what Wesley leaves out, and he supplements what is missing from the correspondence between this husband and wife with telling excerpts from other prisoners’ letters.
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Outstanding summary; made me want to read the book.
Thanks. I liked the book a lot.