Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (160 page)

49
. Based on a count of the 250 prisoner memoirs listed in the bibliography of Hesseltine,
Civil War Prisons
.

50
.
New York Times
, Mar. 31, April 22, 1864, quoted in Hesseltine,
Civil War Prisons
, 194, 195.

Andersonville. We thank Heaven for such blessings." This was the sort of thing that convinced otherwise sensible northerners that "Jefferson Davis's policy is to starve and freeze and kill off by inches all the prisoners he dares not butcher outright. . . . We
cannot
retaliate, it is said; but why can we not?"
⁵¹

The Union War Department did institute a limited retaliation. In May 1864, Stanton reduced prisoner rations to the same level that the Confederate army issued to its own soldiers. In theory this placed rebel prisoners on the same footing as Yankee prisoners in the South, who in theory received the same rations as Confederate soldiers. But in practice few southern soldiers ever got the official ration by 1864—and Union prisoners inevitably got even less—so most rebel captives in the North probably ate better than they had in their own army. Nevertheless, the reduction of prisoner rations was indicative of a hardening northern attitude. Combined with the huge increase in the number of prisoners during 1864, this produced a deterioration of conditions in northern prisons until the suffering, sickness, and death in some of them rivaled that in southern prisons—except Andersonville, which was in a class by itself.
⁵²

This state of affairs produced enormous pressures for a renewal of exchanges. Many inmates at Andersonville and other southern prisons signed petitions to Lincoln asking for renewal, and the Confederates allowed delegations of prisoners to bear these petitions to Washington. Nothing came of them. Entries in prison diaries at Andersonville became increasingly bitter as the summer wore on: "What can the Government be thinking of to let soldiers die in this filthy place?" "Can a government exist and let their men die inch by inch here?" "I do not think that our rulers can be so base to their men." "We are losing all trust in old Abe."
⁵³
A spokesman for a group of clergymen and physicians implored Lincoln in September 1864: "For God's sake, interpose! . . . We know you can have them exchanged if you give your attention to it. It is simple murder to neglect it longer." From local Republican leaders came warnings that many good Union men "will work and vote

51
.
O.R.
, Ser. II, Vol. 7, p. 110;
Atlanta Intelligencer
(published at Macon), Aug. 19,1864, quoted in A. A. Hoehling, ed.,
Last Train from Atlanta
(New York, 1958),330; and in Samuel Carter III,
The Siege of Atlanta, 1864
(New York, 1973), 296;Strong,
Diary
, 494.

52
.
O.R.
, Ser. II, Vol. 7, pp. 150–51; Hesseltine,
Civil War Prisons
, 172–209.

53
. Futch,
Andersonville Prison
, 43.

against the President, because they think sympathy with a few negroes, also captured, is the cause of a refusal" to exchange.
⁵⁴

Lincoln could indeed have renewed the exchange if he had been willing to forget about ex-slave soldiers. But he no more wanted to concede this principle than to renounce emancipation as a condition of peace. On August 27, Benjamin Butler, who had been appointed a special exchange agent, made the administration's position clear in a long letter to the Confederate exchange commissioner—a letter that was published widely in the newspapers. The United States government would renew exchanges, said Butler, whenever the Confederacy was ready to exchange
all
classes of prisoners. "The wrongs, indignities, and privations suffered by our soldiers," wrote Butler who was a master of rhetoric, "would move me to consent to anything to procure their exchange, except to barter away the honor and the faith of the Government of the United States, which has been so solemnly pledged to the colored soldiers in its ranks. Consistently with national faith and justice we cannot relinquish that position."
⁵⁵

General Grant had privately enunciated another argument against exchange: it would strengthen enemy armies more than Union armies. "It is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them," Grant said in August 1864, "but it is humanity to those left in our ranks to fight our battles." Most exchanged rebels—"hale, hearty, and well-fed" as northerners believed them to be—would "become active soldier[s] against us at once" while "the half-starved, sick, emaciated" Union prisoners could never fight again. "We have got to fight until the military power of the South is exhausted, and if we release or exchange prisoners captured it simply becomes a war of extermination."
⁵⁶

A good many historians—especially those of southern birth—have pointed to Grant's remarks as the real reason for the North's refusal to exchange. Concern for the rights of black soldiers, in this view, was just for show. The northern strategy of a war of attrition, therefore, was responsible for the horrors of Andersonville and the suffering of prisoners

54
. D. C. Anderson and J. H. Brown to Lincoln, Sept. 4, 1864, H. Brewster to Stanton, Sept. 8, 1864, in
O.R.
, Ser. II, Vol. 7, pp. 767–68, 787. See also Samuel White to Lincoln, Sept. 12,
ibid.
, 816.

55
. Butler to Robert Ould, Aug. 27, 1864, in
O.R.
, Ser. II, Vol. 7, pp. 687–91; quotation from p. 691. The letter was published in the
New York Times
, Sept. 6, 1864, and printed as a leaflet by the government for general circulation.

56
.
O.R.
, Ser. II, Vol. 7, pp. 607, 615, 691.

on both sides.
⁵⁷
This position is untenable. Grant expressed his opinion more than a year after the exchange cartel had broken down over the Negro prisoner question. And an opinion was precisely what it was; Grant did not
order
exchanges prohibited for purposes of attrition, and the evidence indicates that if the Confederates had conceded on the issue of ex-slaves the exchanges would have resumed. In October 1864, General Lee proposed an informal exchange of prisoners captured in recent fighting on the Richmond-Petersburg front. Grant agreed, on condition that blacks be exchanged "the same as white soldiers." If this had been done, it might have provided a precedent to break the impasse that had by then penned up more than a hundred thousand men in POW camps. But Lee replied that "negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition." Grant thereupon closed the correspondence with the words that because his "Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers," Lee's refusal to grant such rights to former slaves "induces me to decline making the exchanges you ask."
⁵⁸

In January 1865 the rebels finally gave in and offered to exchange "all" prisoners. Hoping soon to begin recruiting black soldiers for their own armies, Davis and Lee suddenly found the Yankee policy less barbaric. The cartel began functioning again and several thousand captives a week were exchanged over the next three months, until Appomattox liberated everyone.
⁵⁹

Few if any historians would now contend that the Confederacy deliberately mistreated prisoners. Rather, they would concur with contemporary opinions—held by some northerners as well as southerners—that a deficiency of resources and the deterioration of the southern economy were mainly responsible for the sufferings of Union prisoners. The South could not feed its own soldiers and civilians; how could it feed enemy prisoners? The Confederacy could not supply its own troops with enough tents; how could it provide tents for captives? A certain makeshift quality in southern prison administration, a lack of planning and efficiency,

57
. See especially Hesseltine,
Civil War Prisons
, and Foote,
Civil War
, III, 131. This view was not confined to southerners; James Ford Rhodes, for example, shared it. See Rhodes,
History of the United States from the Compromise of
1850 . . . 7 vols.(New York, 1920), V, 499.

58
.
O.R.
, Ser. II, Vol. 7, pp. 906—7, 909, 914.

59
.
Ibid.
, Vol. 8, pp. 98, 123, 504; Hesseltine,
Civil War Prisons
, 229–32.

also contributed to the plight of prisoners. Because Confederates kept expecting exchanges to be resumed, they made no long-range plans. The matter of shelter at Andersonville affords an example of shortages and lack of foresight. Although the South had plenty of cotton, it did not have the industrial capacity to turn enough of that cotton into tent canvas. The South had plenty of wood to build barracks, but there was a shortage of nails at Andersonville and no one thought to order them far enough in advance. Not enough sawmills existed in that part of Georgia to make boards, and the sawmills that did exist were working day and night for railroads whose ties and rolling stock the Yankees kept burning. Prisoners could have hewn log huts from the pine forests that surrounded Andersonville, but no one thought to supply axes, and the young boys and old men who guarded the prisoners were too inexperienced to prevent escapes from work details outside the stockade.

So the prisoners broiled in the sun and shivered in the rain. Union captives at other enlisted men's prison camps endured a similar lack of shelter—in contrast to northern prisons, all of which provided barracks except Point Lookout in Maryland, where prisoners lived in tents. During the war numerous southerners criticized their own prisons. After describing conditions at the Florence camp, a South Carolina woman told the governor: "If such things are allowed to continue they will most surely draw down some awful judgment upon our country. . . . Don't think that I have any liking for the Yankee; I have none. . . . But I have not yet become quite brute enough to know of such suffering without trying to do something, even for a Yankee." A young Georgia woman expressed similar sentiments after a visit to Andersonville. "I am afraid God will suffer some terrible retribution to fall upon us for letting such things happen. If the Yankees ever should come to South-West Georgia . . . and see the graves there, God have mercy on the land!"
⁶⁰

"And yet, what can we do?" she asked herself. "The Yankees themselves are really more to blame than we, for they won't exchange these prisoners, and our poor, hard-pressed Confederacy has not the means to provide for them, when our own soldiers are starving in the field." This defensive tone became dominant in southern rhetoric after the war. "Whose fault was it that there was no exchange of prisoners?" asked a former Andersonville guard. In any case, he continued, "Andersonville

60
.
O.R.
, Ser. II, Vol. 7, p. 976; Eliza Frances Andrews,
The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl
, 1864–1865; (New York, 1908), 78–79.

was no worse than northern prisons. There was suffering at Andersonville; there was also suffering at Johnson's Island; there were hardships in all prisons." In their memoirs Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens maintained that the death rate at southern prisons was actually lower than at northern prisons. And the responsibility for "all this sacrifice of human life," asserted Stephens, "rests
entirely
on the Authorities at Washington" who refused to exchange prisoners.
⁶¹
The state of Georgia has placed two historical markers near Andersonville declaring that wartime shortages caused the suffering there, which thus cannot be blamed on anybody, and that "deaths among the prison guards were as high as among the prisoners." In 1909 the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument to Henry Wirz (which still stands in the village of Andersonville) proclaiming that this "hero-martyr" was "judicially murdered" by Yankees whose general in chief prevented the exchange of prisoners.

These defenders of the South doth protest too much. Readers of this book will form their own conclusions about responsibility for the breakdown in prisoner exchanges. As for the comparison of Andersonville with Johnson's Island, the mortality of southern prisoners at the latter was 2 percent—and at Andersonville, 29 percent. This percentage of deaths among inmates at Andersonville was in fact five or six times higher than among guards.
⁶²
Davis and Stephens were also wide of the mark. Because of the loss or destruction of many Confederate records, the actual number of Union dead in all southern prisons can never be known. The best estimate based on existing records finds that 30,218 (15.5 percent) of the 194,743 northern inmates of southern prisons died there, compared with 25,976 (12 percent) of 214,865 southerners who died in northern prisons. The figure for Union prisoners is undoubtedly too low.
⁶³
In any event, the treatment of prisoners during the Civil War was something that neither side could be proud of.