Upon the Altar of the Nation (53 page)

“Sergeant” Henry Wirz in Richmond’s Belle Isle was transferred to command the interior of the prison in Andersonville as “Captain” Wirz (the exterior guard force was commanded by Colonel A. W. Persons). Of Wirz, one prisoner would write: “The half-mocking respect which the [Union] officers in the Richmond prisons had for the bustling efficiency of Sergeant Wirz ... was changed in the new prison to bitter hatred. The fact that he was a foreigner and spoke with [a German] accent militated against his making a good impression.” Rumors abounded that Wirz personally shot soldiers and that guards were given furlough time for each Yankee they killed. Had Union officers been present at Andersonville, some marginal improvement might have been achieved, but officers were confined at Macon, Georgia.

In a state of complete demoralization, prisoners fought with each other. By August the prison designed to hold only ten thousand reached a population of nearly thirty-three thousand men, making Andersonville the fifth largest “city” in the Confederacy. The prisoners defecated in a swamp, which in turn bred maggots. One prisoner recalled: “The largest crawled out in the hot sand, shed their tail-like appendages; wings would unfold, and an attempt be made to fly; and thousands were clumsily dropping all over the camp. They tumbled into our mush, bedding places, and on the faces of the sick and dying.” Wirz permitted aid from the Sanitary Commission, but it arrived irregularly and did nothing to prevent the spread of disease.

 

One remarkable account of prison life in Andersonville appears in the diary of Sergeant John L. Ransom, the brigade quartermaster of the Ninth Michigan Calvary
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On November 6, 1863, Ransom was captured in east Tennessee and taken to Belle Isle Prison just as prisoner exchanges were being discontinued. From there he was transported to Camp Sumter, Andersonville. On March 14 Ransom arrived at the camp, where the prisoners were left out in the open air, surrounded by a wooden stockade and the ubiquitous deadline of boards running around the inside of the stockade. The lack of cover led Ransom to the immediate understanding that “it is going to be an awful place during the summer months here, and thousands will die no doubt.”

He was right. Invariably, the prisoners’ despair turned to rage against their captors. Their rage also focused inward in self-destructive patterns generated by depression. Worse yet, furies were directed at one another in shameful displays of theft, brutality, and even murder. As spring moved into “the summer that killed thirteen thousand men,” the prisoners escalated the fighting among themselves, responding with violence to trivial arguments or interservice brawls between soldiers, sailors, and marines. There were no officers to intervene. Morale reached so low a pitch that prisoners often refused to take care of themselves, making a bad situation worse: “Many have long hair, which, being never combed, is matted together and full of vermin. With sunken eyes, blackened countenances from pitch pine smoke, rags and disease, the men look sickening. The air reeks with nastiness, and it is wonder that we live at all. When will relief come to us?”

With thousands of new prisoners swelling the already putrid and overcrowded camp, spirits plummeted still further: “New men are perfectly thunderstruck at the hole they have got into. A great many give right up and die in a few weeks, and some in a week.” But Ransom was not one of them: “Could give up and die in a short time but won’t. Have got living reduced to a science.
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Where soldiers could maintain their morale and love of Union, prisoners could not. The fault, Ransom concluded, was not only with the Confederates who were too poor to properly feed and clothe their own soldiers but more with the Union leaders who canceled the exchange cartel. By March 30 Ransom was willing to concede that “our government is at fault in not providing some way to get us out of here. The hot weather months must kill us all outright.”
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Outside of Andersonville, Union officers urged the government to act as Ransom requested. In a letter written on August 14, 1864, by Federal officers in Charleston Prison to President Lincoln, on behalf of enlisted prisoners in Andersonville, the officers pleaded with the president “to use every honorable effort to secure a general exchange of prisoners, thereby relieving thousands of our comrades from the horrors now surrounding them.”

Chief of the horrors was starvation: “Nothing more demoralizes soldiers and develops the evil passions of man than starvation ... the terrible condition of Union prisoners at Andersonville can be readily imagined. They are fast losing hope and becoming utterly reckless of life. Numbers crazed by their sufferings wander about in a state of idiocy; others deliberately cross the dead-line and are remorselessly shot down. In behalf of these men, we most earnestly appeal to the President of the United States.”
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If the exchange of slaves was the only issue preventing the cartel, the officers continued, “we beg to suggest some facts bearing upon the question.” In a calculated willingness to betray black prisoners for the sake of whites, the officers proceeded to suggest that blacks were actually better off: “It is true they are again made slaves, but their slavery is freedom and happiness compared with the cruel existence imposed upon our gallant [white] men. They are not bereft of hope, as are the Union soldiers dying by inches. Their chances of escape are tenfold greater than those of the white soldiers, and their condition, viewed in all its lights, is tolerable in comparison with that of the prisoners.”
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While sympathetic, Lincoln remained unmoved, citing the moral obligation incurred by promises to black soldiers. By this point, Lincoln was playing all sides of the moral card, while bearing a large portion of the responsibility for unimaginable suffering and death.

In contrast to soldiers embracing religion, many of the prisoners around Ransom lost their faith. While some continued to pray, “very many too who have been heretofore religiously inclined, throw off all restraint and are about the worst.” God did not deliver them or grant them laurels from the battlefield when they died. God must have died or deserted the cause.
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By June, fellow prisoners—“raiders”—were robbing and killing weaker mates at alarming rates: “Raiders kill some one now every day. No restraint in the least. Men who were no doubt respectable at home, are now the worst villains in the world.” Only after the prisoners threatened Wirz with a full-scale riot did he consent to allow them to organize a police force of “Regulators” and supply them with clubs to apprehend the leading raiders. Soon “arrests” were made: “The raiders fight for their very life, and are only taken after being thoroughly whipped.” Once rounded up, fellow prisoners trained in law established criminal trials on charges ranging from theft to murder. Six gang leaders were sentenced to be hanged for murder, and another eighty-six sentenced to “run the gauntlet” inside the stockade. Although too weak to join in the gauntlet, Ransom could scarce contain his excitement at the prospect of hangings.

On July 11 the convicted murderers were led to the hastily constructed gallows and allowed last words. Most blamed starvation or “bad company” for their actions. One “spoke of his mother and sisters in New York, that he cared nothing as far as he himself was concerned, but the news that would be carried home to his people made him want to curse God he had ever been born.” The hangings themselves were received by the prisoners as long overdue justice. As the condemned prisoners (now doubly so) made their confessions, others shouted and interrupted them, eager to see justice—or revenge—executed. Ransom wrote:

The hangings did diminish the killing but not the theft. With order restored “the men have settled right down to the business of dying, with no interruption.” Each day as many as 220 died in the stockade and the camp hospital. By the end of July, Ransom could not walk and “am trouble with poor sight together with scurvy and dropsy. My teeth are all loose and it is with difficulty I can eat.” The daily presence of death and dying inured all to the decencies of life:

On July 30 Ransom could write “hang on well, and no worse.” Finally, at death’s door, he was transferred to the Marine Hospital in Savannah.

Ransom’s experience reveals the degradations of war wrought on soldiers who would never die heroically in battle. Contained in their experiences is the story of a living hell in which neither side was morally “right” or morally “wrong,” but rather both sides, without evil intent, inadvertently created a horror pit whose losses were horrendous, yet without glory or pride. It is revealing that in recounting the horrors of Andersonville, Ransom never perceived or described systemic evil or extermination. Even Wirz, though he emerged as despicable and the hated authority figure, never was portrayed as demonic or criminal. When he was later tried for war crimes, nobody could provide the name of a single prisoner that Wirz supposedly murdered in cold blood.

For many prisoners, heroism died in the prisons, as did religion, camaraderie, patriotism, and a young man’s will to live. But not for all. In order to earn some extra bread, Ransom was aided by a prisoner named Battese, “the Minnesota Indian.” As Ransom’s conditions worsened, Battese stayed at his side, and when Ransom was too weak to move, Battese nursed him. “Battese is an angel,” wrote Ransom, “[and] takes better care of me than of himself.”

In September the glorious word spread that prisoners would be transferred. But “all who cannot walk must stay behind.” Ransom confessed, “Am worried fearful that I cannot go, but Battese says I shall.” True to his word, Battese saved Ransom’s life at risk to himself: “Battese picked me up and carried me to the gate.” Once at the gate, Battese and a sergeant propped Ransom up, but not before he was spotted by one of the guards. The guard “tried to stop us, but my noble Indian friend kept straight ahead, hallooing: ‘He is all right, he well, he go!”

If nothing else, the record of prisoner-of-war abuse on both sides confirms that bad things did indeed “just happen.” They were, in fact, part of an overall pattern of moral avoidance and, for the most part, unexamined prejudices erasing all the “right” side’s faults and exaggerating the evil of the “enemy.” In the South, no one protested accounts of Northern atrocities and Southern honor. In the North, some Democratic voices protested the dehumanization of the Confederacy only as something that would make peace (with white brothers and sisters) even more difficult to attain. And Lincoln himself would affirm “malice towards none” in his Second Inaugural Address. But these voices were drowned out in a roar of self-righteous denunciation of a perfidious foe.

A
s war measures, the Second Confiscation Act and the Emancipation Proclamation carried the further practical benefit of making black soldiers available to Union armies. The first five regiments were authorized to be raised by General Rufus Saxton, the military governor of the South Carolina Sea Islands. The First South Carolina Volunteers were officially mustered by November 7, 1862, under the command of Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

The advantage would prove immense. Abolitionists and most religious presses enthusiastically supported black mobilization as a far superior alternative to colonization. In a column titled “Don’t Colonize, But Arm!” a writer for the Banner of the Covenant urged the North to “cease our colloquies on the subject of colonizing people that may be made so useful in its defense; let us openly and everywhere summon them to arms.”
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A writer for the
American Presbyterian
saw beyond the practical benefits of enlisting blacks a strong moral opportunity. The effect of black mobilization “would be to recognize his brotherhood and to sacrifice the wicked prejudices against mere color of which the Northerners are so guilty. It would be acceptable to a just God, and, so far, a new ground of hope for success in a cause which loudly vaunts its justice.”
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Black mobilization was also good news for Northern soldiers, including many who had little sympathy for abolitionism, let alone black equality. One letter from Iowa governor Samuel J. Kirkwood to General in Chief Henry W. Halleck clearly articulated the pragmatic (and racist) views on blacks in the Federal army: