In a roundtable found in the September 2017 issue of Civil War History, Professor Kelly D. Mezurek brings up an important point left out of many studies of Civil War prisons: What do we know about the guards, particularly those who were Black?
Despite the continued growth of scholarship on the United States Colored Troops (USCT), the role of African Americans and race, both as guards in Union prisons and as prisoners of war in Confederate facilities, is for the most part missing from our studies on Civil War prisons and incarceration. Too few of the prison histories delve into the experiences of the men, white or black, during their time as guards or later, for those who returned to service. Most studies reiterate William B. Hesseltine’s claim that the soldiers assigned to duty were only the second-rate or those not viewed as the strongest or most capable. Lonnie R. Speers goes further, concluding that officials chose the “ineffective, the incompetent, the undisciplined, the dishonest, the lazy, and those on disability,” in his 1997 Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War. Fred Pelka, in his introduction to The Civil War Letters of Colonel Charles F. Johnson, Invalid Corps, provides the best assessment of how and why the Veterans Reserve Corps filled many of the positions in Union prisons. But not all guards came from the “invalid corps.” The USCT provided guards for at least six prisons or camps, and, like David Bush recognizes, each prison site had unique circumstances that affected both how each operated and the makeup of its captives. While officials had various reasons for placing black men as guards, most of the dozen regiments selected had service records that provide evidence refuting Speers’s assessment. In addition to the potential contributions Chris Barr mentions, memory and commemoration studies can both contribute to and benefit from a closer look at Civil War prison guards. Building on Keith Harris’s excellent study Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans (2014), more research into how former prisoners remembered and shaped their reminiscences about their captors—especially black men, portrayed either as brutes or as victims of the northern administration—will further our understanding of how veterans’ memories, writings, and speeches affected the postwar biases and popular culture that Michael Gray refers to. Unfortunately, little evidence has so far been uncovered about the memories or postwar discussions shared by black veterans who endured time as captives in Confederate prisons or elsewhere.
Feature illustration is a sketch from a Confederate prisoner, John Jacob Omenhausser, at Point Lookout prison camp. More of his sketches can be found here.
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