America Aflame (55 page)

The death rate was so high that summer—one man every eleven minutes on some days—sixteen thousand overall—that Rebel guards relaxed discipline as long as the prisoners avoided the dead line. Frank Bailey of the 6th Pennsylvania Reserves saw comrades dying “like dogs.” Another confided to his diary, “It is plain to me that all will die.” Some soldiers deliberately stepped over the dead line as a quick dispatch from their misery. Rumors circulated that Captain Henry Wirz, the Swiss immigrant who commanded the facility, shot inmates near death to expedite the process and make room for newcomers. Occasionally, the men would catch a glimpse of a wagon parked outside the prison's main entrance, weighed down with stripped Yankee corpses stacked on top of each other, rigid as logs, and covered with black flies. The wagons carried the bodies to a ditch some distance from the camp, where they were tumbled out and covered with a thin layer of dirt.
17

The prison shocked visitors, but they rationalized what they saw as the fault of federal authorities. Kate Cumming visited Andersonville during that fatal summer of 1864. She admitted, “My heart sank within me at seeing so many human beings crowded so closely together.” As for culpability, she had no doubts: “O how I thought of him who is the cause of all this woe on his fellow-countrymen—Abraham Lincoln. What kind of a heart can he have, to leave these poor wretches here?… To think of how often we have begged for exchange; but this unfeeling man knows what a terrible punishment it is for our men to be in northern prisons, and how valuable every one of them is to us.… May Heaven help us all! But war is terrible.”
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The absence of an exchange agreement provided a good cover for both sides to disavow deliberate mistreatment. The situation of prisoners, even prior to the breakdown of exchanges, however, was scarcely better. Neither side was equipped to absorb and maintain the volume of prisoners that the war generated. Franklin Dick, in charge of a Union prison in St. Louis, wrote to his commander in Illinois in November 1862, pleading for relief. “The military prisons here are overcrowded and sickness prevailing amongst the prisoners and is rapidly increasing.” Dick reported that large numbers of sick and dying men lay on the prison floor. He appealed unsuccessfully to the commander to remove a group of prisoners across the river to Illinois.
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Everyone in the Andersonville stockade knew of Dr. White, the chief surgeon. The smallest wound, a splinter or even a scratched mosquito bite, could lead to gangrene, at which point Dr. White would perform an amputation, sawing off limbs without anesthesia or a shot of whiskey. The lack of fruit and vegetables meant that few prisoners avoided scurvy, a disease that, among other symptoms, resulted in the loss of feeling in the extremities, therefore leaving the sufferer exposed to the threat of gangrene and a visit to Dr. White.

Captain Wirz either relished torturing the prisoners by withholding food and water or was a victim of ungenerous officers up the line who would not or could not provision the facility properly. The Confederacy could barely feed its own soldiers, let alone a burgeoning prison population. Union authorities believed the worst version of events, and after the war Captain Wirz became the only Rebel officer or official hanged for war crimes. The local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a statue to Captain Wirz in the town of Anderson. The inscription quotes Jefferson Davis: “When time shall have softened passion and prejudice, when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation, then Justice, holding evenly her scales, will require much of past censure and praise to change places.”
20

The prisoners blamed Wirz and the guards for their plight, though often as part of a longer list of guilty parties. Union prisoner Amos Stearns wondered, “Day after day passes, and nothing is done about taking us out of this bull pen. Can it be that our government does not care for men who have served it faithfully for most three years?” Private William Tritt blamed “Old Abe and the niggers” for his plight, as did many other inmates in Confederate prisons who understood that were it not for the impasse over black prisoner exchanges, they would be free. Another captive, Sergeant William Stevens from Vermont, claimed he harbored “
abolition principles
” prior to his imprisonment, but he knew “that the only reason our Government has for leaving us in such a condition was a miserable quibble, about the ‘
exchange
' Negroes.” In truth, there were not many blacks to exchange. Confederates sent relatively few African Americans to prison. Rebel forces typically executed captured black troops or remanded them into slavery. The comments of the Union captives, though, indicated that the emancipationist sentiment even among sympathetic federal troops was fragile.
21

The press on both sides used the prison atrocities as rallying points to continue the war. The southern press, low on newsprint by 1864, and dwindling in circulation as Union forces advanced, could not win this propaganda contest. Northern papers and magazines published shocking pictures of emaciated former inmates with accompanying stories of the horrors of their captivity.
Harper's
chronicled the story of Private Jackson Broshers, a twenty-year-old soldier from Indiana incarcerated at Belle Isle until he escaped in March 1864. Broshers stood six feet and one inch tall and weighed 185 pounds upon his capture. After a little over three months at Belle Isle, his weight had dropped to 108 pounds. The writer instructed, “It is not the effect of disease that we see in these pictures; it is the consequence of starvation.… There is no civilized nation in the world with which we could be at war which would suffer the prisoners in its hands to receive such treatment … and the reason is, that none of them are slaveholding nations, for nowhere are human life and human nature so cheap as among those who treat human beings like cattle.”
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As Sherman's army prepared to march through Georgia in the fall of 1864, the Confederates disbanded most of Andersonville. They exchanged the remaining prisoners when Sherman took Savannah in December. The following month, the Davis administration agreed to parole black prisoners, and the exchanges accelerated. As the prisoners trickled out from liberated camps or were exchanged, their condition provoked horror and demands for retribution. “Now sir,” an Indiana Republican railed, “if this is to be a war of extermination, let not the extermination be all upon one side.” Walt Whitman, who had seen almost every form of human deformity imaginable, was shaken to his core by the sight of emaciated Union prisoners. “The sight is worse than any sight of battlefields, or any collection of wounded, even the bloodiest.… Can these be
men
—these little, livid brown, ash-streaked, monkey-looking dwarfs? Are they really not mummied, dwindled corpses?… Probably no more appalling sight was ever seen on this earth.”
23

The prisoners' fate shocked civilian sensibilities on both sides in a war that had already produced shocking casualties and cruelty. The prisons were an atrocity because war was an atrocity. And the war was not yet finished. The grim rhythm of death continued in the hospitals and prisons. On the battlefield, the slaughter quickened, and this time with no respite. With the approaching spring, the Civil War would become a war for all seasons.

Ulysses S. Grant became an advocate of relentless war. The conflict had gone on too long with too many casualties and too many of the enemy's soldiers still in the field. Grant understood that the Union successes in the second half of 1863 would not sustain northern support if the Federals continued to prosecute the war at the leisurely pace that had characterized the first three years of the struggle. War-weariness and peace movements sprouted like wildflowers on both sides as winter turned to spring. Grant believed that a massive, sustained, and coordinated campaign could end the war, save the Union, and preserve freedom for the slaves. Peace through victory.

President Lincoln promoted Grant to commander of all Union armies in March 1864. Grant deduced that Confederate strength by this time was “far inferior” to the federal forces. Seasonal campaigning and the lack of coordination between the eastern and western theaters enabled the Confederacy to shift troops between the regions and maintain the integrity of its two armies, the Army of Northern Virginia in the East under Lee, and the Army of Tennessee in the West, now under the command of Joseph Johnston. As long as these two armies lived, the Confederacy would not die.

To change this equation required a comprehensive plan. As Grant explained, “I therefore determined, first, to use the greatest number of troops practicable against the armed force of the enemy, preventing him from using the same force at different seasons [and] … second, to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition … there should be nothing left to him but submission.” Lincoln had advocated this strategy almost since the outset of the war but lacked the right general to implement it. Grant was the right general.
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Northerners enthusiastically supported Grant's appointment. Walt Whitman learned of the general's presence in Washington and wrote excitedly that Grant “is determined to bend everything to take Richmond and break up the banditti of scoundrels that have stuck themselves up there as a ‘government.' He is in earnest about it; his whole soul and all his thoughts night and day are upon it.” Yet both sides had heard the “On to Richmond” cry before. Grant had built a credible reputation in the West, but he had never faced an army commanded by Robert E. Lee.
25

On May 4, 1864, the Army of the Potomac, 118,000 strong, following the dubious footsteps of Fighting Joe Hooker a year earlier, crossed the Rapidan River to confront the 62,000-man Army of Northern Virginia in the Wilderness, near the site of the Confederates' last great victory at Chancellorsville. Grant's immediate objective was Lee's army, not Richmond. If he could destroy the Army of Northern Virginia, Richmond would fall. Setting the western phase of his grand plan in motion, Grant directed General William T. Sherman, the new commander of the Army of the Cumberland, to attack Joseph Johnston's Army of Tennessee, “break it up and get into the interior of the enemy's country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.” These coordinated offensives, pursued without surcease, would strain Rebel resources to the breaking point, prohibit the shifting of troops, and bring an end to the war, Grant believed.
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A private in Lee's army awoke on May 5 and pronounced it “a beautiful spring day.” Parts of the two armies joined battle that day in fierce fighting that ended inconclusively. The area's tangled undergrowth negated Grant's troop advantage and rendered artillery ineffective. Soldiers aimed by ear more than sight. The armies spent the night entrenching and waiting for the onslaught at sunrise. The Federals attacked part of the Rebel line, and the Confederates launched an assault of their own, both to little advantage but much carnage. Dry weather had turned the Wilderness into tinder for gunfire. Forest fires killed many of the wounded, sometimes horribly by exploding the cartridge belts around their waists. Wounded soldiers committed suicide to avoid being consumed by the flames. A North Carolina soldier reduced the battle to its basic element: “a butchery pure and simple.” Colonel Horace Porter, Grant's aide-de-camp, agreed. “It seemed as though Christian men had turned to fiends, and hell itself had usurped the place of earth.” The battle ended in a tactical draw, though at a frightful toll to both armies. The Federals suffered nearly 18,000 casualties and the Confederates 7,800.
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Despite the casualties, Grant had raised Lincoln's hopes. “The great thing about Grant,” the president offered, “is his perfect coolness and persistency of purpose.… [H]e is not easily excited … and he has the
grit
of a bull-dog! Once let him get his ‘teeth'
in
, and nothing can shake him off.” Indeed, after a particularly bloody day on the battlefield, Grant could be found in his tent, puffing on a cigar and calmly planning the next day's assault.
28

Rather than withdrawing across the Rapidan in the face of his losses as Hooker had done the previous year, Grant pressed on, to the cheers of his men. He attacked Lee's right flank at nearby Spotsylvania Court House on May 8. The Confederates met the challenge and halted the Union advance. Lee entrenched now whenever he fought, making Union assaults particularly costly. Grant's charge on the trenches produced no significant gains and considerable casualties. In nearly two weeks of fighting at Spotsylvania, the Union casualties stood at nearly eighteen thousand, and the Confederates lost twelve thousand men. Grant wired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” Grant believed ultimate victory was in his grasp. In a dispatch to General Meade at the conclusion of the Spotsylvania battles, he asserted, “Lee's army is really whipped. The prisoners we now take show it.… Our men feel that they have gained the
morale
over the enemy, and attack him with confidence. I may be mistaken, but I feel that our success over Lee's army is already assured.”
29

This was a new kind of war, and while it initially exhilarated some, it soon exhausted all. A week into the offensive, a Union officer wrote home, “Dust is sweeping over me like smoke; my face is black with dirt and perspiration, clothes soiled and torn almost to pieces. I am too tired to sleep, too tired to stand.” Confederate private Marion Fitzpatrick expressed what most soldiers on both sides already knew, that they were experiencing a dramatic change in the war: “Never has such fighting been known before.… It is useless to talk about how tired and sore I am. I have not changed clothes or shaved since the fighting commenced. Now it is nothing but fight, fight, and we are in danger more or less all the time and God alone knows when it will end.” Two weeks into the fighting, and a growing disgust at the cost joined the feeling of exhaustion. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote home to his parents, “Before you get this you will know how immense the butchers bill has been— … [N]early every Regimental off[icer] I knew or cared for is dead or wounded—I have made up my mind to stay on the staff if possible till the end of the campaign & then if I am alive, I shall resign—I have felt for sometime that I didn't any longer believe in this being a duty.” Holmes left the army later that summer, admitting, “I am not the same man” as when he enlisted.
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