III

Sensational revelations of copperhead activities in Missouri helped the Republican effort to discredit the opposition as disloyal. Democrats fought back with their tried and true weapon—racism. On this issue the party remained united and consistent. Sixty-five of sixty-eight Democratic congressmen had voted against the 13th Amendment, denying it the necessary two-thirds majority in the House. These congressmen also published a manifesto denouncing the enlistment of black soldiers as a vile Republican scheme to establish "the equality of the black and white races."²⁵Democratic opposition forced compromises in a Republican bill to equalize the pay of black and white soldiers. Under the terms of

25. CG, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., 1995; Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley, 1968), 42.

the militia act passed in July 1862, blacks enrolled in the army were regarded as laborers and paid several dollars a month less than white soldiers. A concession to prejudice, this provision was blatantly inconsistent with the combat status of 100,000 black soldiers by 1864. In response to bitter protests by abolitionists and incipient mutiny among black troops, Republicans sponsored a law for retroactive equalization of pay. But a coalition of Democrats who opposed any equalization and conservative Republicans who questioned the retroactive clause prevented passage. To satisfy the latter and enact the bill, Congress made equal pay retroactive only to January 1, 1864—except for blacks who had been free before the war, who received equal pay from date of enlistment.²⁶

Having gained votes in 1862 by tarring Republicans with the brush of racial equality, Democrats expected to do the same in 1864. The vulgarity of their tactics almost surpasses belief. An editor and a reporter for the New York World, McClellan's most powerful newspaper, coined a new word with their anonymous pamphlet Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races. Pretending to be Republicans, the authors recommended "miscegenation" as a solution of the race problem. This fusion, the pamphlet declared, would particularly "be of infinite service to the Irish." If the Republicans were re-elected they would prosecute the war to "its final fruit, to the blending of the white and the black." Although the Democratic press tried to pump up this hoax into a serious Republican program, few readers except confirmed copperheads seemed to take it seriously.

Democrats nevertheless exploited the miscegenation issue ad nauseam. The Emancipation Proclamation became the Miscegenation Proclamation. A pamphlet entitled Miscegenation Indorsed by the Republican Party circulated far and wide. Numerous cartoons showed thick-lipped, grinning, coarse black men kissing apple-cheeked girls "with snow-white bosoms" or dancing with them at the "Miscegenation Ball" to follow Lincoln's re-election. The "Benediction" of a leaflet entitled "Black Republican Prayer" invoked "the blessings of Emancipation throughout our unhappy land" so that "illustrious, sweet-scented Sambo [may] nestle in the bosom of every Abolition woman, that she may be quickened by the pure blood of the majestic African."²⁷ Campaign pamphlets and

26. Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861–1867, Series II: The Black Military Experience (Cambridge, 1982), 362–405.

27. Sidney Kaplan, "The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864," Journal of Negro History, 34 (1949), 274–343; Wood, Black Scare, 53–76, and reproductions of campaign broadsides between pp. 92 and 93.

newspapers reported that "a great many squint-eyed yellow babies" had been born in New Orleans since Benjamin Butler was there; that New England schoolmarms teaching freedpeople on the South Carolina sea islands had produced numerous mulatto children; and that five thousand mulatto babies had been born in Washington since 1861. This, declared a Democratic pamphlet, was "what the President means by 'Rising to the Occasion.' "²⁸

"Abraham Africanus the First" was of course the chief target of the tar brush. "Passing the question as to his taint of negro blood," commented a Catholic weekly, "Abe Lincoln . . . is brutal in all his habits. . . . He is obscene. . . . He is an animal. . . . Filthy black niggers, greasy, sweaty, and disgusting, now jostle white people and even ladies everywhere, even at the President's levees."²⁹ Lincoln was "Abe the Widowmaker" who had sent half a million white men to their graves in this insane war to free the slaves because he "loves his country less, and the negro more." Commenting on petitions to suspend the draft, a Pennsylvania newspaper urged citizens to "go a step further, brethren, and suspend Old Abe—by the neck if necessary to stop the accursed slaughter of our citizens."³⁰ And a copperhead editor in Wisconsin published a parody of the song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home":

The widow-maker soon must cave,
Hurrah, Hurrah,
We'll plant him in some nigger's grave,
Hurrah, Hurrah.

Torn from your farm, your ship, your raft,
Conscript. How do you like the draft,
And we'll stop that too,
When little Mac takes the helm.³¹

For all their stridency, Democrats appear to have profited little from the race issue in this election. For most undecided voters, the success

28. Arnold M. Shankman, The Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 1861–1865 (Rutherford, N.J., 1980), 165; "The Lincoln Catechism," in Frank Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets of the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 1000–1001.

29. New-York Freeman's Journal & Catholic Register, Aug. 24, April 23, 1864.

30. Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets, 983; Shankman, Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 192.

31. Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in theMid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1983), 40.

or failure of the war was more salient than the possibility of blacks marrying their sisters. Republicans were far more successful in pinning the label of traitor on Democrats than the latter were in pinning the label of miscegenationist on Republicans. If anything, racism may have boomeranged against the Democrats this time, for after Sherman's and Sheridan's victories many northern voters began to congratulate themselves on the selflessness of their sacrifices in this glorious war for Union and freedom.

On one issue tangentially linked to racial policy—the prisoners of war issue—the Democrats undoubtedly suffered a backlash, for northerners embittered by the condition of Union soldiers in southern prisons were not likely to favor a party stereotyped as pro-southern. The Democratic platform contained a plank condemning the administration's "shameful disregard" of "our fellow-citizens who now are, and long have been, prisoners of war in a suffering condition."³² When this plank was written, the overcrowding and shocking circumstances at Andersonville in particular had already become notorious. The anger evoked by this situation opens a window on one of the most emotional issues of the war.

The relatively few prisoners captured in 1861 imposed no great strain on either side. Obsolete forts, converted warehouses, county jails, and other existing buildings proved sufficient to hold prisoners while they awaited the informal exchanges that occasionally took place. Field commanders sometimes paroled captives or worked out local exchanges on the spot after a skirmish. Not wishing the burden of feeding prisoners, the Confederacy pressed for a formal exchange cartel. The Lincoln administration was reluctant to grant the official recognition that such a cartel might imply. After the fighting from Fort Donelson to the Seven Days' poured thousands of prisoners into inadequate facilities, however, the administration succumbed to growing northern pressure for regularized exchanges. Taking care to negotiate with a belligerent army, not government, the Union army accepted an exchange cartel on July 22, 1862. Specifying a rank weighting whereby a non-commissioned officer was equal to two privates, a lieutenant to four, and so on up to a commanding general who was worth sixty privates, this cartel specified a man-for-man exchange of all prisoners. The excess held by one side or another were to be released on parole (that is, they promised not to take up arms until formally exchanged). For ten months this arrangement

32. Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States during the Great Rebellion, 2nd ed. (Washington, 1865), 420.

worked well enough to empty the prisons except for captives too sick or wounded to travel.³³

But two matters brought exchanges to a halt during 1863. First was the northern response to the southern threat to reenslave or execute captured black soldiers and their officers. When the Confederate Congress in May 1863 authorized this policy, which Jefferson Davis had announced four months earlier, the Union War Department suspended the cartel in order to hold southern prisoners as hostages against fulfillment of the threat. A trickle of informal exchanges continued, but the big battles in the second half of 1863 soon filled makeshift prisons with thousands of men. Grant averted an even greater problem by paroling the 30,000 Vicksburg captives; Banks followed suit with the 7,000 captured at Port Hudson. But the South's handling of these parolees provoked a second and clinching breakdown in exchange negotiations. Alleging technical irregularities in their paroles, the Confederacy arbitrarily declared many of them exchanged (without any real exchange taking place) and returned them to duty. Grant was outraged when the Union army recaptured some of these men at Chattanooga.³⁴

Attempts to renew the cartel foundered on the southern refusal to treat freedmen soldiers as prisoners of war or to admit culpability in the case of the Vicksburg parolees. "The enlistment of our slaves is a barbarity," declared the head of the Confederate Bureau of War. "No people . . . could tolerate . . . the use of savages [against them]. . . . We cannot on any principle allow that our property can acquire adverse rights by virtue of a theft of it." By the end of 1863 the Confederacy expressed a willingness to exchange black captives whom it considered to have been legally free when they enlisted.³⁵ But the South would "die in the last ditch," said the Confederate exchange commissioner, before "giving up the right to send slaves back to slavery as property recaptured." Very well, responded Union Secretary of War Stanton. The 26,000 rebel captives in northern prisons could stay there. For the Union government to accede to Confederate conditions would be "a

33. William B. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (Columbus, Ohio, 1930), chaps. 1–5.

34. Ibid., 99–113; O.R., Ser. II, Vols. 5 and 6.

35. Edward Younger, ed., Inside the Confederate Government: The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean (New York, 1957), 92–93; Benjamin F. Butler to Kellogg Carter, Nov. 29, 1863, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library; Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–186; (New York, 1956), 171.

shameful dishonor. . . . When [the rebels] agree to exchange all alike there will be no difficulty."³⁶ After becoming general in chief, Grant confirmed this hard line. "No distinction whatever will be made in the exchange between white and colored prisoners," he ordered on April 17, 1864. And there must be "released to us a sufficient number of officers and men as were captured and paroled at Vicksburg and Port Hudson. . . . Non-acquiescence by the Confederate authorities in both or either of these propositions will be regarded as a refusal on their part to agree to the further exchange of prisoners."³⁷ Confederate authorities did not acquiesce.

The South's actual treatment of black prisoners is hard to ascertain. Even the number of Negro captives is unknown, for in refusing to acknowledge them as legitimate prisoners the Confederates kept few records. Many black captives never made it to prison camp. In the spirit of Secretary of War Seddon's early directive that "we ought never to be inconvenienced with such prisoners . . . summary execution must therefore be inflicted on those taken," hundreds were massacred at Fort Pillow, Poison Spring, the Crater, and elsewhere.³⁸ An affidavit by a Union sergeant described what happened after Confederates recaptured Plymouth on the North Carolina coast in April 1864:

All the negroes found in blue uniform or with any outward marks of a Union soldier upon him was killed—I saw some taken into the woods and hung—Others I saw stripped of all their clothing, and they stood upon the bank of the river with their faces riverwards and then they were shot—Still others were killed by having their brains beaten out by the butt end of the muskets in the hands of the Rebels—

All were not killed the day of the capture—Those that were not, were placed in a room with their officers, they (the Officers) having previously been dragged through the town with ropes around their necks, where they were kept confined until the following morning when the remainder of the black soldiers were killed.'³⁹

36. O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 6, pp. 441–42, 647–49, 226.

37. Ibid., Vol. 7, pp. 62–63.

38. Ibid., Vol. 4, p. 954, Vol. 7, p. 204.

39. Benjamin Butler to Ulysses S. Grant, July 12, 1864, enclosing affidavit of Samuel Johnson, Letters Received by General Grant, Records of the Headquarters of the Army, RG 108, National Archives, printed in Berlin, ed., The Black Military Experience, 588–89; also published with standard punctuation in O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 7, pp. 459–60.

Black prisoners who survived the initial rage of their captors sometimes found themselves returned as slaves to their old masters or, occasionally, sold to a new one. While awaiting this fate they were often placed at hard labor on Confederate fortifications. The Mobile Advertiser and Register of October 15, 1864, published a list of 575 black prisoners in that city working as laborers until owners claimed them.⁴⁰

What to do about the murder or enslavement of black captives presented the Union government with a dilemma. At first Lincoln threatened an eye-for-an-eye retaliation. "For every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war," he ordered on July 30, 1863, "a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works." But this was easier said than done; as Lincoln himself put it, "the difficulty is not in stating the principle, but in practically applying it."⁴¹After the Fort Pillow massacre the cabinet spent two meetings trying to determine a response. To execute an equal number of rebel prisoners would punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. The government must not undertake such a "barbarous . . . inhuman policy," declared Secretary of the Navy Welles. Lincoln agreed that "blood can not restore blood, and government should not act for revenge." The cabinet decided to retaliate against actual offenders from Forrest's command, if any were captured, and to warn Richmond that a certain number of southern officers in northern prisons would be set apart as hostages against such occurrences in the future.⁴²

But no record exists that either recommendation was carried out. As Lincoln sadly told Frederick Douglass, "if once begun, there was no telling where [retaliation] would end." Execution of innocent southern prisoners—or even guilty ones—would produce Confederate retaliation against northern prisoners in a never-ending vicious cycle. In the final analysis, concluded the Union exchange commissioner, these cases "can

40. Walter L. Williams, "Again in Chains: Black Soldiers Suffering in Captivity," Civil War Times Illustrated, 20 (May 1981), 40–43; Cornish, Sable Arm, 177–78. For two directives from Secretary of War Seddon concerning the return of captured blacks to slavery, dated June 3, 1863, and Aug. 31, 1864, see O.R., Ser. II, Vol.5, pp. 966–67, Vol. 7, 703–4.

41. CWL, VI, 357, VII, 382.

42. Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York, 1960), II, 24;CWL, VII, 329, 345–46; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), VI, 478–84.

only be effectually reached by a successful prosecution of the war." After all, "the rebellion exists on a question connected with the right or power of the South to hold the colored race in slavery; and the South will only yield this right under military compulsion." Thus "the loyal people of the United States [must] prosecute this war with all the energy that God has given them."⁴³

Union field commanders in South Carolina and Virginia carried out the only official retaliation for southern treatment of black prisoners. When Confederates at Charleston and near Richmond put captured Negroes to work on fortifications under enemy fire in 1864, northern generals promptly placed an equal number of rebel prisoners at work on Union facilities under fire. This ended the Confederate practice. Some black soldiers did their own retaliating. After Fort Pillow several Negro units vowed to take no prisoners and yelled "Remember Fort Pillow" when they went into action. "The darkies fought ferociously," wrote Captain Charles Francis Adams, Jr., of an attack by a black division against the Petersburg defenses on June 15, 1864. "If they murder prisoners, as I hear they did . . . they can hardly be blamed."⁴⁴

Although Union threats of retaliation did little to help ex-slaves captured by Confederates, they appear to have forced southern officials to make a distinction between former slaves and free blacks. "The serious consequences," wrote Secretary of War Seddon to South Carolina's governor, "which might ensue from a rigid enforcement of the act of Congress" (which required all captured blacks to be turned over to states for punishment as insurrectionists) compel us "to make a distinction between negroes so taken who can be recognized or identified as slaves and those who were free inhabitants of the Federal States."⁴⁵ The South generally treated the latter—along with white officers of black regiments—as prisoners of war. This did not necessarily mean equal treatment. Prison guards singled out black captives for latrine and burial details or other onerous labor. At Libby Prison in Richmond ten white officers and four enlisted men of a black regiment were confined to a small cell next to the kitchen where they subsisted on bread and water

43. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, rev. ed. (1892; Collier Books reprint, 1962),348–49; O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 6, p. 171.

44. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Charles Francis Adams, June 19, 1864, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), II, 154.

45. O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 7, pp. 703–4. See also Howard C. Westwood, "Captive Black Union Soldiers in Charleston—What to Do?" CWH, 28 (1982), 30–31, 38, 41.

and almost suffocated from cooking smoke. "An open tub," wrote anther prisoner, "was placed in the room for the reception of their excrement, where it was permitted to remain for days before removal." In South Carolina captured black soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts and other northern units were kept in the Charleston jail rather than in a POW camp.⁴⁶

They probably fared as well in jail—if not better—as their white fellows in war prisons. The principal issue that aroused northern emotions was not the treatment of black prisoners but of all Union prisoners. As the heavy fighting of 1864 piled up captives in jerry-built prisons, grim stories of disease, starvation, and brutality began to filter northward. The camp at Andersonville in southwest Georgia became representative in northern eyes of southern barbarity. Andersonville prison was built in early 1864 to accommodate captives previously held at Belle Isle on the James River near Richmond, because the proximity of Union forces threatened liberation of these prisoners and the overworked transport system of Virginia could barely feed southern citizens and soldiers, let alone Yankees. A stockade camp of sixteen acres designed for 10,000 prisoners, Andersonville soon became overcrowded with captives from Sherman's army as well from the eastern theater. It was enlarged to twenty-six acres, in which 33,000 men were packed by August 1864—an average of thirty-four square feet per man—without shade in a Deep South summer and with no shelter except what they could rig from sticks, tent flies, blankets, and odd bits of cloth. (By way of comparison, the Union prison camp at Elmira, New York, generally considered the worst northern prison, provided barracks for the maximum of 9,600 captives living inside a forty-acre enclosure—an average of 180 square feet per man.) During some weeks in the summer of 1864 more than a hundred prisoners died every day in Andersonville. Altogether 13,000 of the 45,000 men imprisoned there died of disease, exposure, or malnutrition.⁴⁷

Andersonville was the most extreme example of what many northerners regarded as a fiendish plot to murder Yankee prisoners.⁴⁸ After the

46. Frank L. Byrne, ed., "A General Behind Bars: Neal Dow in Libby Prison," in William B. Hesseltine, ed., Civil War Prisons (Kent, Ohio, 1962), 77; Williams, "Again in Chains," loc. cit., 41; Westwood, "Captive Black Union Soldiers," loc.cit., 39

47. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, chap. 7; Ovid L. Futch, History of Andersonville Prison (Gainesville, Fla., 1968); Andersonville (Eastern Acorn Press, n.p., 1983).

48. No other southern prison ever held more than one-quarter as many men as Andersonville

war a Union military commission tried and executed its commandant, Henry Wirz, for war crimes—the only such trial to result from the Civil War. Whether Wirz was actually guilty of anything worse than bad temper and inefficiency remains controversial today. In any case, he served as a scapegoat for the purported sins of the South. The large genre of prisoner memoirs, which lost nothing in melodramatics with passage of time, kept alive the bitterness for decades after the war. On this matter, at least, the victors wrote the history, for at least five-sixths of the memoirs were written by northerners.⁴⁹

During 1864 a crescendo rose in the northern press demanding retribution against rebel prisoners to coerce better treatment of Union captives. "Retaliation is a terrible thing," conceded the New York Times,"but the miseries and pains and the slowly wasting life of our brethren and friends in those horrible prisons is a worse thing. No people or government ought to allow its soldiers to be treated for one day as our men have been treated for the last three years." When a special exchange of sick prisoners in April returned to the North several living skeletons, woodcut copies of their photographs appeared in illustrated papers and produced a tidal wave of rage. What else could one expect of slaveholders "born to tyranny and reared to cruelty?" asked the normally moderate Times.⁵⁰ The Committee on the Conduct of the War and the U.S. Sanitary Commission each published an account of Confederate prison conditions based on intelligence reports and on interviews with exchanged or escaped prisoners. "The enormity of the crime committed by the rebels," commented Secretary of War Stanton, "cannot but fill with horror the civilized world. . . . There appears to have been a deliberate system of savage and barbarous treatment." An editorial in an Atlanta newspaper during August made its way across the lines and was picked up by the northern press: "During one of the intensely hot days of last week more than 300 sick and wounded Yankees died at's maximum of 33,000 in August 1864. The largest northern prison was at Point Lookout in southern Maryland, which held 20,000 men at one time. Measured by mortality statistics, Andersonville was not the worst southern prison. That dubious distinction belonged to Salisbury, North Carolina, where 34 percent (compared with Andersonville's 29 percent) of the total of 10,321 men incarcerated there died. The highest death rate in a northern prison was 24 percent at Elmira.

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.

61. James Dunwoody Jones, "Recollections of a Young Confederate Officer," in Andersonville, p. 1; Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government,2 vols. (New York, 1881), II, 607; Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional Viewof the Late War Between the States, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1868—70), II, 507–9.

62. Edward T. Downer, "Johnson's Island," in Hesseltine, ed., Civil War Prisons, 105;Futch, Andersonville Prison, 106–7.

63. General F. C. Ainsworth, Chief of the Record and Pension Office, to James Ford Rhodes, June 29, 1903, in Rhodes, History, V, 507–8. In April and again in the fall of 1864 the Confederates exchanged several thousand sick prisoners in excess of the number of ill prisoners received from the North in return. Several hundred of these Union prisoners died soon after they were exchanged, but their deaths have not been included in the mortality toll of prisoners.