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The time is not come for impartial history. If the truth were told just now, it would not be credited.
–ROBERT E. LEE, 1868
Heading east from Atlanta, I shadowed Sherman’s route as he rampaged toward the sea: reducing homes to charred chimneys known as “Sherman’s sentinels,” twisting railroad tracks into “Sherman’s neckties,” and sending parties of foragers, called “bummers,” to pillage the countryside.
Or so I’d always imagined. Since arriving in Georgia, I’d been doing some reading. Once again, I learned that much of what I’d absorbed of the Civil War was more mythic than factual. Sherman talked a good game, pledging to “make Georgia howl,” but the reality of his March rarely matched his words (at least in Georgia; he was harsher on the Carolinas). One Georgia geographer had painstakingly mapped the March route and found that many homes alleged to have been burned were still in fact standing. “The actual destruction of private dwellings,” he concluded, “was rare indeed.”
Nor was Sherman’s March, which caused few civilian deaths, notably cruel by historic standards. As compared to the laying waste to Europe during the Thirty Years’ War, the routine massacres of Native Americans—or the murder and mayhem caused by Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill—Sherman’s treatment of Georgia civilians was almost genteel.
His surrender terms certainly were. When Joseph Johnston yielded his forces soon after Appomattox, Sherman drafted an agreement so lenient that it provoked outrage in the North, compelling Sherman to match the terms Grant offered Lee. Sherman had lived in the South for twelve years before the War and shared many of its attitudes. All this helped to explain an odd circumstance; Sherman was much less reviled by Southerners a century ago than today. Georgians received Sherman courteously during a return visit to the state just fifteen years after his March. When he died in 1891 (having devoted his post-War years to Indian-fighting, memoir-writing and roller-skating), Sherman’s pallbearers included his wartime foe Joseph Johnston. Eighteen years later, a reporter for Harper’s magazine retraced Sherman’s March and noted “a surprising absence of bitterness” among inhabitants along the route.
The same wasn’t true now, at least in the town of Conyers, where I stopped to attend a Sons of Confederate Veterans meeting at the Masonic Hall. The session began with an SCV commander hurling firebolts at enemies of the South, most of whom seemed to reside in nearby Atlanta—or “the occupied city,” as he called it. He griped about Atlanta’s liberal newspaper, “The Journal and Constipation,” and about Georgia’s governor, who once called for changing the state flag. “We are a unique people,” he concluded to loud applause, “and others are jealous because they don’t have the heritage we have.”
The night’s main speaker, Mauriel Joslyn, was a Georgia author who had studied the wartime diaries and letters of Confederates captured in the War. A slim woman with a prim bun, octagonal glasses and a long dress topped by a frilly neckline, she looked rather like my image of Emily Dickinson. “I had twenty-five forebears who fought in the War,” Joslyn began, warming up her audience. “We always say we gave a regiment.” Then, as prelude to her talk, she performed a peculiar call-and-response. Mixing recent news stories about Bosnia with accounts of Sherman’s March, she asked the audience to guess each time if the perpetrators were Serbs or Yankees. “Her husband was a captain in the opposing army,” Joslyn read. “She was sick in bed when two soldiers entered her room. They raped her and she later died in a mental hospital.” Joslyn paused. “Yankees or Serbs?” (Yankees).
“Drunkenness is rampant. Many soldiers are drawn by the promise of pillage and roaming at will, and are responsible for many of the atrocities committed against civilians.” Sherman’s bummers or Serbian gunners? (Serbs).
This went on for fifteen minutes. Like most in the audience I guessed wrong half the time. “So you see,” Joslyn concluded, “there isn’t much difference between what Sarajevo and Georgia suffered.”
The main subject of Joslyn’s talk was an oddly gentle contrast to the atrocities she’d just catalogued. While researching a group of captured rebels, she’d found that the prisoners kept up a lively correspondence with Northern women. Many of the men had been injured and captured at Gettysburg. Recuperating in Pennsylvania, often for months, they were nursed by young women from Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York who stayed in touch after the men were shipped to Northern prison camps.
The correspondence became quite formalized. If a prisoner was released, he’d pass on the name of his pen pal to a fellow inmate. The women also swapped their correspondents’ names. One Northern woman, jealous of her letter-writing friends, went to visit Fort Delaware (viewing rebel prisoners was a curiosity excursion for civilians) and tossed a cored apple to one of the Confederates. Inside the fruit was a $10 bill and her address. “He was cute—I have his picture,” Joslyn said of the prisoner. The two corresponded for several years and married following the War.
Intrigued by Joslyn and by her unusual research, I went to visit her home the next day in a town called Sparta. “Excuse the mess—it’s always 1860-something in this house,” she said, leading me into a kitchen cluttered with reenactors’ uniforms, Civil War calendars, and piles of books. Joslyn wrote for the local paper, and her husband worked as a soil scientist. But their true calling was the Civil War.
“Either we’re reading something or we’re getting ready for a reenactment,” she said. “It’s almost like we’ve adopted a different code of behavior. To me, the modern South is like a curtain I’m always trying to see through to what was there before.”
Joslyn unearthed a sheaf of Confederate prisoners’ letters to Northern women that she’d gathered at various archives. Many of the letters began “Dear Cousin” or “Dear Aunt”—a way to dodge prison-camp rules against writing to nonrelatives. The letters also steered clear of politics or details about the War. This, too, was a way to avoid censorship. But Joslyn suspected the correspondents also weren’t keen to dwell on their regional differences.
“They had other things on their mind,” she said. “Literature, art, and flirting like crazy.” One suave Mississippian wrote wistfully to a Northern woman of missing “those endearing scenes, those enchanting beauties that give the youthful heart its buoyancy.” He begged his pen pal to send him “a copy of Shakespeare or Byron,” and enclosed locks of his golden hair. Joslyn sighed. “I’d like to have met him.”
James Cobb, a dashing Texan, inherited a correspondent named Cora from a fellow prisoner. The two strangers exchanged photographs and quickly fell in love, writing at the same time each Sunday while gazing at each other’s picture. “I walked in the (prison) yard until long after nightfall, with no companion save the invisible one which I felt to be near,” Cobb wrote. “But oh, how unsatisfying is all this! There is still the restless longing for her actual presence.” By late 1864, Cobb was addressing his pen pal as “my dear Cora” and telling her, “Think of all you would have me to say, & imagine it said.”
For a time, Cobb also wrote to a friend of Cora’s named Allison, a tease who enjoyed the tension her letters created on the homefront. When a suitor arrived as she was writing, Allison told the man to wait until she finished her letter—all of which she reported in delicious detail to Cobb. “If you were here and he could get hold of you, I would not answer for the consequences!” Allison’s beau became so jealous that Cobb ended their correspondence, gallantly writing, “I do not desire to be the cause of a quarrel between lovers.”
Joslyn said these letters had punctured her stereotypes about relations between the sexes in the 1860s. “There’s a frankness and flirtatiousness that isn’t what we think of as Victorian,” she said. “And the men aren’t talking down to these women at all. They write as equals.” Perhaps, too, they felt liberated by their unusual circumstances. “They’re probably much more intimate in these letters than if they’d been courting with all the formality that surrounded it in those days,” Joslyn said.
The men also were tender with each other. Letters told of prisoners who washed clothes for fellow inmates, or taught them ballroom dance. “They even had exercise classes, sort of Jack LaLanne at Point Lookout,” Joslyn said, referring to a Maryland prison. “And I’ve got letters the men later wrote to each other signed ‘best love.’ These guys obviously didn’t have the stigma we have today about men showing affection for each other.”
They’d also overcome the stigma of writing to civilians in enemy territory. If anything, the divide between North and South spiced the correspondence. “For the women, those ‘awful rebs’ were forbidden fruit,” Joslyn said. The same was true for the men; Northern women were often stereotyped in the South as trollops or Puritans—or both, in the manner of Hester Prynne. “So this was all very titillating for both sides,” Joslyn said.
The letter writing was also sustained by deprivation on the one hand and compassion on the other. One rebel thanked his pen pal for sending peaches, then asked haltingly for money. “It is something I never had to do before,” he wrote, promising to repay the loan, “if I am permitted to live.” His correspondent feared the money would be confiscated, but answered, “I pity you, being a stranger in a strange land, though you are a rebel and fighting against us.”
Even more poignant than the letters were autograph albums the women sent for prisoners to sign. Often, the men put the words “unmarried” or “nairy wife, nairy child” beside their names. “There are three things I desire with an exceeding longing,” one man wrote. “A Sword, a Wife and my Freedom.” A Virginian wrote, “I am 22 and still single, but live in hopes.” He died soon after from dysentery. Joslyn closed the album, teary-eyed. “My fellahs were always fishing,” she said.
Few succeeded in catching anything. Those who didn’t perish in prison returned to poverty-stricken homes and long-lost families. One destitute rebel waited six years after the War, scraping together money to set up a household before proposing to his pen pal. She accepted.
More typical, though, was the story of James and Cora, the couple who corresponded so passionately while gazing at each other’s photographs. “I do earnestly hope,” James wrote in December 1864, “that ere another Christmas shall have come, the longings of this one will have been displaced by full fruition!” Before the next Christmas he was indeed free and traveled to Philadelphia to meet Cora. But after a brief stay, James returned South and married a local woman. The two pen pals never saw each other again. When Cora married, she returned all James’s letters. Then James’s wife gave birth to a daughter, whom he named Cora. “I’d give my right arm,” Joslyn said, “to know the rest of that story.”
I was curious to hear more of Joslyn’s. I wondered why she and other women I’d met, beginning with Sue Curtis in North Carolina, were so obsessed with the War’s prisoners—a side of the conflict few men seemed passionate about. In fact, given that 400,000 men were captured during the War, almost twice the toll of combat dead, the fate of POWs was arguably the most neglected aspect of the conflict.
“This may sound sexist,” Joslyn said, “but my theory is that men like the Civil War because it’s an action story, they’re caught up in the battlefield drama. The prisoners are an emotional side of the War. Women are attracted to all that raw feeling, we understand it better, it brings out a mothering instinct.” She fingered the autograph album. “Remember, a lot of these soldiers were still boys, not yet twenty, starving in Northern prison camps, with no idea of when if ever they’d get home. More than anything, these guys desperately needed their mommies.”
Joslyn’s own love life had imitated her research. A tomboy who liked playing war as a child (“The boys were bullies, so they always played the Yankees”), she’d met her future husband while dating a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute. “My date said he had a roommate with a Civil War musket. That was Rick. I always say I married him for his gun.”
Actually, they’d fallen in love later, while writing letters during Rick’s air force service. There was another parallel; Rick’s family came from up North. Luckily, he discovered he had a distant forebear who might have fought for the South. “It was almost a criterion of our getting married,” Joslyn said. She’d saved all their letters, but planned to burn them someday. “I don’t want anyone studying us the way I’ve been studying my fellahs.”
Joslyn gave me a signed copy of the book she’d written about rebel prisoners. It had been published with little fanfare by a small press. “Almost a collector’s item,” she joked. I asked how she felt about laboring in relative obscurity.
Joslyn pondered this for a moment, squinting through her octagonal glasses. “I take the long view,” she said. “People like me, we’re the keepers of the past, like those monks with their Latin books back in the Dark Ages. Or maybe like the folks in Eastern Europe who kept their real history and religion alive after the Russian Revolution and all the attempts to purge the past. Now that Communism’s gone, the truth is coming out of the archives.”
I wasn’t sure I caught the analogy. Leningrad seemed a long way from Point Lookout. But not to Joslyn. “To me, Civil War historians—Northern ones at least—are locking away the facts, too,” she said. “So little people like me have to keep the true story alive. That way, when the Revolution ends, and people come looking for the history, we can say, ‘Here it is. We kept it for you.’”
READING JOSLYN’S BOOK that night at a roadside motel, I better understood what she meant. Prisoners’ love letters didn’t figure much in her book, except to illustrate the horrors of Northern POW camps. This, in turn, was part of a broader mission: to redress the distorted picture most Americans had of Civil War POWs, derived from “myths” about Andersonville and its commander, Henry Wirz. In the view of Joslyn and the Southern historians she cited, rebel prisoners suffered far more than Union ones, and the North was responsible for the misery of both blue and gray inmates because of its cruel policies regarding prisoner exchange.
Most of this was news to me. Roughly 13,000 prisoners died from starvation and disease at Andersonville, and Henry Wirz went to the gallows as a war criminal, the only man so charged in American history. Refurbishing his reputation, and that of the prison camp he commanded, seemed an exceptionally quixotic mission, notwithstanding the South’s passion for lost causes.
So I abandoned Sherman’s March and headed instead for Andersonville, near Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains in Georgia’s rural southwest. Winding slowly out of upland Georgia and into the fertile prairie beyond, I felt as though I’d been here before. The crops might change, but the roadscape on small highways appeared much the same from southern Virginia to western Arkansas: single-wide trailers with satellite dishes, low brick ranches with home-based businesses (beauty parlor, blade-sharpening, fish taxidermy, towing and recovery), white-frame churches with exclamatory sermon signs (“Presenting Jesus!”), flyspeck settlements—“Welcome to Forkland. Town of Opportunities. Pop 764”—abandoned to time and kudzu vines and men in bib overalls loitering before a faded Gas and Gro (“Tank and Tummy—Fill Em Up”). Then a small town with a stone rebel on the square and a “family restaurant” serving plate lunches of chicken and dumplings, candied yams, turnip greens, pear salad and pecan pie. Then fields and woods again.
It was foolish to speak of “one South,” just as it was to speak of one North. The former states of the Confederacy encompassed dozens of subcultures, from the Hispanic enclaves of Florida and Texas, to the Cajun country of south Louisiana, to the hardscrabble hills of Appalachia. Still, the geographic kinship between far-flung stretches of the backcountry South offered some clue to the cohesion and resilience the region displayed during the Civil War, and to the South’s cherishing of Confederate memory ever since.
Nearing Andersonville, I was momentarily blinded by what looked like a snow flurry: bolls of cotton blowing across the road from a just-picked field. This, too, was a reminder of what had once bound the rural South together. Cotton was enjoying a comeback in the South and the crop always came as a small miracle to me. It seemed incredible that these perfect white blobs sprouted straight from nature, and that something so natural could at the same time seem so artificial.
My rural reverie ended abruptly at the gate to the national park at Andersonville. The entrance road ran straight into a sea of white gravestones packed so closely together that they almost touched, like piano keys. Beneath lay the 13,000 Northern soldiers who died at Andersonville, a toll that roughly equalled the combined Union combat deaths in the War’s five bloodiest battles: Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, Antietam.
I’d arrived on a quiet weekday and a ranger named Fred Sanchez agreed to show me around. Walking through the cemetery, he pointed out that the headstones marking the camp’s earliest casualties were better spaced than the graves of those who died later. Initially, he explained, prisoners were buried in simple pine coffins. Then, as the death toll mounted, bodies were buried in trenches and covered with pine planks. Before long, even this meager covering was abandoned. “The gravediggers also started burying the corpses on their sides so they could pack more in,” Sanchez said.
A few graves stood out from the huddled rows of stone. One, inscribed “12196 L.S. Tuttle, Sgt., Me.,” had a marble dove cemented on top, facing north. Tuttle’s widow, or one of his Maine comrades, was believed to have added the dove decades after the War. Six other graves lay to one side of the long tidy ranks. These belonged to the so-called Raiders, camp ruffians who preyed on weaker prisoners. Following a trial in which inmates acted as lawyers and jurors, the Raiders were hanged and buried apart from their fellow prisoners.
The actual prison site lay a quarter-mile from the graveyard, on what was now an undulating field. It was here, over the course of fourteen months in 1864 and 1865, that Confederate guards herded 41,000 Union prisoners into a log stockade unsheltered from Georgia’s harsh sun and heavy rains. The pen was designed for a third the number of men it eventually enclosed. This left prisoners in the summer of 1864 with an average of twenty square feet of living space on which to pitch their “shebangs,” A-shaped hovels fashioned from overcoats, blankets and whatever else the prisoners could scrounge.
Running through the stockade yard was a stream, Andersonville’s only water supply and also the site of the camp’s latrines, called “sinks.” The stream, a branch of the inaptly named Sweetwater Creek, quickly backed up in 1864 and flooded much of the camp. “You can see from wartime photographs that it was basically a swamp crusted with human waste,” Sanchez said. On windy days, the stench carried all the way to Americus, ten miles away. During storms, shebangs toppled and the stockade yard became a slurry of mud, feces and vermin. One survivor wrote: “We had to strain the water through our teeth to keep the maggots out.”
Nothing remained of the original stockade, though a few log walls had been reconstructed by the Park Service. There were also posts delineating the “deadline,” a perimeter inside the stockade that no prisoner could cross without risking gunfire from the guard towers (this was also the origin of the modern newspaper phrase). Other markers showed where prisoners dug molelike holes in a frantic search for clean water, shade, and, in some instances, escape tunnels.
At its peak squalor, Andersonville claimed the lives of 127 men in a single day. Many died from typhoid or gangrene, others from malnutrition. Vitamin deficiencies caused scurvy and scorbutus, painful diseases that rotted gums, loosened teeth, and ulcerated flesh. A small number of men were shot at the deadline or buried alive when their crude burrows caved in. Seven severely depressed prisoners were listed as having died of “nostalgia.” Sanchez said some despairing prisoners intentionally crossed the deadline, or drank from the toxic swamp surrounding the sinks.
But the biggest killers by far were diarrhea and dysentery. This was due not only to the camp’s lack of sanitation, but also to rations of rotted meat and coarse grain filled with shredded corncob, which irritated men’s already weak intestines. There was a cruel irony to this. Pointing to several belching smokestacks in the distance, Sanchez said the surrounding landscape was now mined for kaolin, a chalky mineral used to make Kaopectate. “You had thousands of men dying of the runs right on top of one of the world’s richest lodes of anti-diarrhea medicine,” he said.
Sanchez’s description of the handling of the dead evoked images of a plague-ridden medieval village. Each morning, prisoners hauled comrades who had died in the night to the camp’s South Gate, where lumber wagons collected the corpses, twenty per load. Prisoners paid for the privilege of bringing out the dead, which gave them a few moments to forage for firewood. Prisoners also stripped the dead of clothes to use as patching for their shebangs.
Near the South Gate, signs now marked the location of vanished prison buildings, including the “Deadhouse” and “Dissecting House.” The camp’s commander, Henry Wirz, ordered doctors to examine corpses to determine what killed them—and to prevent any men from escaping by feigning death. The rebels also assigned most of the burial details and other labor outside the stockade to black prisoners, whose skin color made them more conspicuous in the event of escape. Ironically, this meant that black POWs fared much better than whites. Spending more time outside the fetid prison confines, blacks were able to forage, and also to get exercise and fresh air denied other prisoners.
As Sanchez grimly detailed all this, we strolled across the stockade yard, now a lush field blooming with goldenrod. Butterflies fluttered in the tall grass. On Civil War battlefields, there were always a few cannons and trenches to summon images of combat and bloodshed. Here, nothing. The only affliction that remained at all palpable was Andersonville’s stifling climate. Even in autumn, the air felt suffocatingly humid, and mushrooms blanketed the boggy earth. The stream running through the camp was a brackish rivulet brimming with mosquitoes and gnats.
Andersonville differed from battlefields in another essential way. The suffering here was slow, undramatic, inglorious. For Sanchez, who had worked at the park for eighteen years, it was precisely this lack of drama that made Andersonville’s horror so insidious. “We like to focus on the escapes, the shootings at the deadline, the extraordinary moments here,” he said. “But in a way, the Andersonville story is very boring. It’s a personal story of survival. Where will my next meal come from? Where can I find shade? Will my bowels hold out another day?”
This degrading struggle must have seemed doubly cruel to the battle veterans incarcerated at Andersonville. “Imagine surviving Gettysburg,” Sanchez said, “only to end up here, wasting away from diarrhea.”
Sanchez left me there to wander around for a while and also to visit a small building just beside the camp site, labeled Prisoner of War Museum. Inside, there was almost nothing of what Sanchez had just told me. Instead, a few items from Andersonville were displayed as part of a broad exhibit on American POWs from the Revolution to the Gulf War.
A larger museum, at the park entrance, offered videos of former World War II prisoners telling about their wretched treatment by the Germans and Japanese. A short, introductory video on Andersonville—with flabby reenactors farbishly cast as starving prisoners—explained that the South was unprepared for so many POWs, due to the North’s refusal to exchange prisoners midway through the War. A wall exhibit gave the Andersonville tragedy a similar spin, noting that the North “realized it was to their advantage” to end exchanges because the South needed manpower more than the Union. Cited as evidence was a quote from Grant: “It is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them, but it is humanity to those left in our ranks to fight our battles.”
This was, at best, a selective and misleading version of events. No mention was made of another reason the North halted exchanges: to protest the South’s refusal to trade the growing number of black soldiers in Union ranks. In May 1863, the Confederate Congress declared that the South would re-enslave captured blacks and execute their white officers. Grant, a grim purveyor of war by attrition, no doubt meant what he said. But he made his infamous statement more than a year after prisoner exchanges had already ended.
This Southernized presentation seemed odd at a park administered by the U.S. government. Nor did the inclusion of POW stories from other wars strike me as altogether benign. Its impact was to dilute the Andersonville tragedy, and also to sugar-coat its message for Americans; after all, the Confederates hadn’t tortured their prisoners like the Japanese and the Viet Cong had. Unmentioned at either museum was what seemed a crucial distinction: Andersonville lay on American soil and saw the death of 13,000 Americans in American custody.
Heading over to the park office, I shared my reservations with Sanchez and two other rangers. The men shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. “You’re not the first to come out of there pissed off,” Sanchez said. “I’ve had to break up fights in that museum between Northerners and Southerners.”
Controversy had dogged Andersonville ever since Clara Barton tried to establish it as a shrine to the dead immediately after the War. Southerners fiercely resisted any effort to memorialize the camp, fearing it would be used to demonize the region (or “wave the bloody shirt,” as efforts to exploit sectional passions were known in the late nineteenth century). It wasn’t until 1970 that a compromise was reached; Andersonville would become a national memorial, but only if it commemorated POWs from all American wars.
Even so, when the park set up its first museum, “we took a lot of flak,” Sanchez said. “Southerners felt we were blaming them for what happened.” The park softened its presentation, and later added the small POW museum I’d visited by the stockade. This had caused a different sort of controversy. One exhibit, which mentioned the large number of American POWs who collaborated with the North Koreans, had to be rewritten after complaints by Korean War veterans.
A new, much bigger POW museum was about to be built, and this had sparked yet another round of lobbying. An Alabama woman who headed a group called the Confederate POW Society demanded that half the new exhibits be devoted to Northern prison camps. “She came in here and started ranting about ‘you-all’s government,’ as if the South wasn’t yet part of the nation,” one of the rangers said. The woman had since set up her own Confederate POW museum in the nearby hamlet of Andersonville. She and other diehards also gathered in Andersonville each year on the anniversary of Wirz’s hanging, a week hence, to honor the captain’s memory with song, speeches and prayer.
When I asked what the ceremony was like, one of the rangers chuckled uneasily. “Very weird,” he said. “I have to live in this community so I shouldn’t say any more.”
As soon as I left the park and drove across the highway to the small community of Andersonville, I saw why the rangers remained so reticent. Andersonville had become a village-sized apologia for the prison camp that bore its name. The counteroffensive began with a roadside historical marker honoring Wirz, erected by the state of Georgia in 1956. It stated: “Had he been an angel from heaven he could not have changed the pitiful tale of privation and hunger unless he had possessed the power to repeat the miracle of the loaves and fishes.”
Just beside the railroad tracks, where Union prisoners had disembarked, stood another marker, erected just a year before my arrival. Andersonville, it said, “honors both the memory of the Union soldiers who suffered and Confederate soldiers who did their duty while experiencing illness and death in numbers comparable to their unfortunate prisoners.” This too, I’d later learn, was very misleading.
A rebuilt train depot beside the tracks had become a museum devoted to local history, and to Wirz, including pictures of the medal of honor awarded him by the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 1981 for “uncommon valor and bravery involving risk of life above and beyond the call of duty in defense of his homeland and its noble ideals.” The SCV had also passed a resolution designating Wirz’s hanging on November 10, 1865, at 10:32 A.M., “the moment of martyrdom,” an occasion for annual remembrance of the “Confederate Hero-Martyr.”
The rest of Andersonville’s business district consisted of antique shops and a vegetable plant where many of the town’s 247 inhabitants worked waxing and packing cucumbers and peppers. Towering over the main street was a granite shaft, inscribed WIRZ. Erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909, its inscription said, “To rescue his name from the stigma attached to it by embittered prejudice.” The obelisk also bore Grant’s quote on prisoner exchanges, praise for Wirz’s “humanity,” and a line from Jeff Davis: “When time shall have softened passion and prejudice, when reason shall have stripped the mask of misrepresentation, then justice, holding even her scales, will require much of past censure and praise to change places.”
I later learned that the UDC had originally composed an even more inflammatory message for the monument. It stated that the U.S. government, not Wirz, “is chargeable with the suffering at Andersonville” and listed doctored casualty rates at Civil War prisons. But outraged Northern veterans prevailed on Georgia officials to tone down the monument’s language.
Still, local feelings about the camp and its memory remained fierce well into this century. At the town’s bed-and-breakfast, I was escorted to my room by a New York native named Peggy Sheppard who had married a Georgian and lived here for fifty years. On her first visit, she said, her husband’s friends took her for a drive through the prison camp. “They said, ‘Here’s where all the good Yankees are—under the ground.’”
That bothered her at the time, but not anymore. An amateur historian, she’d authored a small book sympathetic to Wirz. “The more I learned, the more I realized Northerners have been brainwashed about what really happened here,” she said.
WONDERING IF I’D BEEN brainwashed, too, I decided to stay until the Wirz anniversary and spent the intervening days reading books, diaries and other records gleaned from the library and archives at the ranger’s station. It was certainly true, as James McPherson observed in Battle Cry of Freedom, that “the victors wrote the history” of Andersonville, beginning with luridly embroidered diaries published by survivors who claimed that Wirz personally tortured and killed prisoners. This Wirz-as-Monster school culminated in MacKinlay Kantor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1955 novel, Andersonville, and the movie based on it, starring William Shatner as the army prosecutor.
Recent scholarship painted a much grayer picture. By the time Andersonville opened in 1864, the Confederacy could barely feed and supply its own men, much less the flood of prisoners pouring into Andersonville during Grant’s bloody campaign in Virginia. At its peak, Andersonville held a population larger than all but four Southern cities.
Most historians also judged Henry Wirz a bumbler rather than a brute. A Swiss-born émigré and homeopathic physician, he was ill equipped to deal with the Confederate bureaucracy or the South’s collapsing infrastructure. He tried, for instance, to build a damming system that would flush the unsanitary sinks, but he never received the lumber and tools necessary to carry out his plan.
Wirz, an irascible and self-pitying man who spoke heavily accented English, also became an easy scapegoat at War’s end. His trial was a sham. Wirz went to the gallows refusing to finger his superiors—one reason he was viewed as a hero-martyr by many Southerners—and none were ever prosecuted. Nor did anyone probe the horrors of prison camps in the North, where supplies of food and medicine were ample. At Elmira, regarded as the worst Union camp, a quarter of inmates died, a rate only slightly lower than at Andersonville. Had the South won the War, the commander of Elmira might well have hanged in Wirz’s stead.
Yet if the traditional, Northern-slanted history of Andersonville was filled with exaggerations and omissions, so too was the version offered by Southern apologists. Wirz may have been a scapegoat but he was hardly a war hero. He lied about his military record, claiming to have been wounded at Seven Pines when he wasn’t even present at the battle—or, apparently, in any combat during the War.
Nor could the management of Andersonville be termed humane. The prisoners lacked not only shelter and sanitation but also simple utensils with which to collect and cook their rations. The clerk responsible for the cookhouse and other key duties was a corrupt profiteer who stole food and sold it on the black market. And when sympathetic Georgians arrived at the camp with a wagon full of food and clothing for the prisoners, they were turned away. The supplies were given to rebel troops instead.
Bizarrely, one generous Georgian did later make it inside: a woman named Ann Williams who stayed for one day and had sex with seven inmates. After questioning her, Wirz reported that “on every occasion (she had) refused to take money, saying to them that she was a friend of theirs and had come for the purpose of seeing how she could help them.”
As for the Confederate guards, the notion that they suffered to the same degree as prisoners was absurd. They could supplement their rations by foraging and trading outside the camp, and also with supplies from home (most guards were teenagers and older men from the surrounding countryside). They lived in tents upstream from the unsheltered, latrine-flooded stockade. Over 200 guards died, about 10 percent of the total who served during the course of the camp’s existence. But this was hardly comparable to the 30-35 percent death rate among prisoners.
Nor did the tragedy of Andersonville end with the camp’s closing in the spring of 1865. Almost three weeks after Appomattox, an overloaded steamship called the Sultana blew its boilers on the Mississippi River, drowning or burning alive an estimated 2,000 passengers in the worst maritime disaster in American history. Most of the casualties were freed prisoners from Andersonville, on their way home at last.
THE ANNIVERSARY OF Wirz’s hanging dawned gray and wet, so the ceremony in his honor was moved from the Wirz monument to a cramped log church on the main street. Forty people crowded inside, including several descendants of Andersonville guards, a dozen reenactors, and women in nineteenth-century mourning garb. I squeezed into a pew beside a man who introduced himself as Karl Hagmann, a representative of the Swiss consulate in Atlanta. “Each year someone comes to mark the Swiss presence, but this is my first time,” he said. “Usually I go to commercial and cultural events in Atlanta.” I asked what he thought of the Wirz controversy. “We, too, have a long history and are very patriotic,” he said, adding diplomatically, “but I do not know so much about it. So I have no real opinion.”
He was the only one in the room who didn’t. “Almighty God, we remember before you this day, Henry Wirz,” a minister intoned at the start of the ceremony. “Grant to us to be so faithful to the teachings of our Christian faith and our Southern cause that we will bring only honor to you, Holy Father, and to the memory of Henry Wirz and to all who suffered and died for the Confederacy. Amen.”
He was followed by two medal-bedecked SCV officers who recapped efforts to rehabilitate Wirz’s name. Their ultimate mission: a congressional pardon, like the one accorded Robert E. Lee in 1975. “We’ve got our guns loaded,” one of the commanders shouted. “The South shall rise again. So hang in there!”
The keynote speaker was a publisher and editor of neo-Confederate books, including one called Andersonville: The Southern Perspective. “Some might say ours was, and is, a lost cause,” Hank Segars said. “But it is only lost if we forget.” He urged the audience to remember Wirz, then made what seemed a curious complaint for a book publisher. “MacKinlay Kantor’s novel is still a best-seller at the Andersonville bookstore and many other places,” he said, to loud groans from the audience. Decrying this and other Northern-biased accounts, Segars ended with a call to arms. Just as the rebels of old set off with guns and flags to fight the Yankees, Southerners today must do battle with the MacKinlay Kantors, the Ken Burnses, and all other propagandists defiling memory of the Confederacy and of hero-martyrs like Henry Wirz. “If our true history were known, we’d have four thousand people here today instead of forty!”
The service ended with a woman in a purple hoop skirt singing what I at first mistook for the “Star-Spangled Banner.” The tune was the same and so were the first words, “Oh say, can you see.” But the banner still waving in the dawn’s early light wasn’t the Stars and Stripes. “’Tis the Cross of the South, which shall ever remain, to light us to freedom and glory again.” After several verses about defiance to tyrants and Spartans on shields, the song rousingly concluded: “As the Cross of the South shall triumphantly wave, the flag of the free or the pall of the brave.”
Leaving the church, we followed a Confederate honor guard down the street to the Wirz memorial. The obelisk was now ringed by Confederate banners, as well as the Swiss flag. This seemed a bit strange, given the country’s renowned neutrality. The Swiss diplomat I’d sat beside also looked rather bewildered as he helped lay a wreath by the monument. Then a band struck up “Dixie” and the crowd lustily sang “Look away! Look away!” with the Swiss consul lip-synching the words. Reenactors fired an honorary barrage into the drizzly sky and the ceremony ended.
The two medal-draped officers from the SCV, Jim Reynolds and Charlie Clements, lingered by the monument, exhorting a few remaining comrades to carry on the fight. Despite their martial bearing, neither man had a military background; Reynolds ran a legal research firm, Clements worked as a schoolteacher. As the crowd dispersed, I posed the question that had gnawed at me throughout my stay. Rather than proclaim Wirz a hero and blame Andersonville on the North, wouldn’t it be more fruitful—and historically factual—to present Civil War prison camps as a dark chapter of our history that neither side should be proud of?
“That dog just won’t hunt,” Reynolds said. “Yankees started all this and we’ve got to resist with all available force, even if it seems one-sided.”
“We don’t want forgiveness,” Clements added. “We want people to come over to our side.”
“But why polarize the story?” I asked. “Aren’t you swinging the pendulum to the opposite extreme?”
“Perhaps,” Reynolds said. “But if we swing the pendulum all the way over to our side, maybe we’ll nudge the accepted view over a bit closer to where it belongs.”
This was history as Middle East rug barter. The seller names his price and the buyer makes an offer as low as the seller’s is high. After a lot of haggling and cups of tea, they agree on a price. This was an entertaining if time-consuming way to shop. But it hardly seemed like a model for understanding our common history.
“Imagine a train running down a track,” Reynolds went on. “A man from the North stands on one side and he says the train is moving left to right. A Southerner stands on the other and says it’s moving right to left. They’re looking at the same train and the same track and from where they’re standing they’re both correct. That’s the way it is with Andersonville. We have a viewpoint that is just as valid, we would say more valid, but it’s not being heard.”
I suggested that he might be heard better if he offered a more balanced view.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But we’ve been forced into an extreme position. It reflects our frustration over being blamed for every danged thing. We’re tired of being put down and kicked around. We can point fingers, too, and in the case of Andersonville, we’re pointing it right back at the North—at Grant, at Elmira, at all the other camps.”
This frustration also bred fierce solidarity. As Clements put it, “When you’re in a fight like this, you have to hang together. There’s no room for dissent, even if we disagreed, which we don’t. Wirz didn’t compromise, he didn’t betray his fellow Confederates. That’s why he’s a hero. We have to act the same.”
Like so many neo-Confederates I’d met, the two men had walled themselves inside a stockade of their own creation and erected around it an ideological deadline. Anyone who made so much as a feint toward the opposite side had to be gunned down as a traitor to the Cause. As an outsider, I had even less hope of breaking through.
As the rain began pelting down in earnest, Reynolds clapped me on the back and urged me to return next year. “Maybe by then Wirz will have been exonerated,” he said, “and we can hold hands and sing, ‘Free at Last! Free at Last!’”
LEAVING ANDERSONVILLE, I felt ready to free myself from Georgia and head for Alabama, the one Confederate state east of the Mississippi that I hadn’t yet explored. But thumbing through a Georgia tourist guide one last time, a brief entry caught my eye. “GEORGIA’S YANK-REB CITY: The small town of Fitzgerald is a living memorial to the nation’s post-Civil War reconciliation.”
Reconciliation? After Andersonville, the notion sounded refreshing. I checked my map. Fitzgerald lay an hour’s drive southeast of Andersonville. Only a small detour.
At first glance, Fitzgerald resembled other Georgia towns I’d visited: a flat grid of wide streets girdled by small factories and franchise restaurants. Then I noticed the street signs: Grant Street, Sherman Street, Sheridan Street, and so on through the Union ranks. After that came a parade of Confederate generals: Lee, Johnston, Jackson, Longstreet, Gordon, Bragg.
Near the center of the grid stood a building labeled Blue & Gray Museum. Inside, I found the curator, an eighty-six-year-old named Beth Davis, tidying an exhibit of rebel slouch hats and Union kepis. “I try to make sure there’s things from both sides in each display case,” she said. Though I’d visited dozens of museums over the past year, this was the first where I’d seen any Union gear displayed, apart from items captured by the Confederacy or belonging to Northern prisoners like those at Andersonville.
The museum’s evenhandedness mirrored Fitzgerald’s extraordinary history. The town’s namesake, Philander Fitzgerald, was a Civil War drummer who later became a pension attorney and publisher of a veterans’ newspaper in Indiana. When a severe drought hit the Midwest in the early 1890s, Fitzgerald concocted a novel idea. “Why not start a soldiers’ colony in the Southland and get all those old boys away from the bitter winters and drought?” Beth Davis explained.
As the farm crisis deepened, calls went out for help. The first to respond was the state of Georgia, which sent a trainload of food for both farmers and their livestock. Fitzgerald sensed an opening and wrote to Georgia’s governor about his dream of a Southern colony. Though a rebel veteran, the governor wanted to develop his own state’s underpopulated farmland. So he invited Fitzgerald for a visit. The two men settled on a turpentine camp in the virgin pine forests of south-central Georgia.
Fitzgerald promoted the colony in his newspaper, sold shares in the venture, and bought several thousand acres in Georgia. Then, in the summer of 1895, 2,700 Northern veterans and their families trekked South, many of them in wagon trains. At first, the pine barren to which they’d decamped seemed as bleak as the dustbowl farms they’d left behind. Nor were the natives uniformly friendly. One foe of the project blasted the colony as “a blot on the fair state of Georgia,” and several landowners refused to sell the newcomers property. “Folks used to say there wasn’t nothing of value down there, just pines, wiregrass, and Yankees,” Davis said.
But the “pioneers” planted crops, established a settlement, and invited Georgians from the surrounding countryside to a festival celebrating the colony’s first Southern harvest. “The organizers were worried about hotheads on both sides,” Davis said, “so they planned two parades, one for Union veterans, the other for Confederates.” But when the band began playing, veterans of the two armies spontaneously joined and marched through the town together. Thereafter, they merged to form Battalion One of the Blue and Gray and celebrated their reconciliation annually.
The timing of this embrace was remarkable. Two months before the town’s first festival in 1896, Southerners met in Richmond to form the Sons of Confederate Veterans; the Daughters of the Confederacy had been founded in 1894. The last decade of the nineteenth century and first of the twentieth marked the high tide of Confederate remembrance, with communities across the South erecting monuments that defiantly proclaimed the righteousness of the Cause.
In Fitzgerald, though, Confederate veterans began settling beside their former foes. And reconciliation became etched on the town as indelibly as the sectional enmity chiseled on the stone warriors of other Southern communities. Fitzgerald built a huge wooden inn for tourists and prospective settlers. Pioneers planned to call it the Grant-Lee Hotel, but eager to placate their new neighbors, they reversed the generals’ names. All streets east of the main street were named for Union generals, those to the west for their antagonists. One street bore the name of the Union ironclad, the Monitor, while another honored its rebel foe, the Merrimack. Lincoln Avenue and Appomattox Road skirted town.
By the time Beth Davis moved to Fitzgerald from Atlanta in 1942, soon after marrying a native of the town, the last of the veterans had died and blue and gray had become hard to distinguish. Even churches had merged, bringing together Southern Methodists with a group known originally to natives as “the Yankee Methodist Church.”
Davis said her first inkling of the town’s unusual lineage was the odd accent of elderly residents she met. “A lot of them didn’t talk like we did,” she said. Davis, whose grandfathers had fought for the Confederacy, also didn’t know what to make of her husband’s early-morning singing, which included the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “He had a strong baritone and I was worried we were going to get evicted by our neighbors.” Stranger still, her husband’s family didn’t celebrate Confederate Memorial Day on April 26, which remained an important holiday in Georgia. Instead, in late May, her husband announced that he was headed to the graveyard to play Taps on his cornet. She went along.
“There were men whose graves said ‘He marched with Robert E. Lee’ right next to a lot of dead Yankees,” she recalled. “That’s when my husband had to explain all about Yankee Memorial Day, that his father had fought for the Union, that half the town had fathers who did. I said to him, ‘Martin Davis, you knew all this and didn’t tell me? You think I wouldn’t have come down here to live if you had?’” She laughed. “He said no, it was just that it had been drilled into him as a child not to discuss the Civil War with Southerners, including me.” She smiled, adding, “That was the first I’d heard of Yankees with manners.”
At first, Davis said, she found it discomfiting that her own grandfathers once fought against her father-in-law. But gradually she became intrigued by Fitzgerald’s history and wrote a play about the town’s early settlers, called Our Friends, the Enemy. The play presented a casting problem, though. When it was staged locally during the Civil War centennial, the director couldn’t find anyone left with a Northern accent. “I had to tell him we’d made Southerners of all of them,” Davis said.
In a few ways, Fitzgerald had also turned the natives into Northerners. The United Daughters of the Confederacy still commemorated Confederate Memorial Day, but the group also showed up at the other Memorial Day, at which Davis herself laid a wreath honoring both blue and gray. The town’s emblem bore an image of a Union and a Confederate soldier shaking hands across a map of Georgia, above the words: “Blood that mingled in bitter conflict was here united in brotherhood.” When Davis opened the Blue & Gray Museum at the Lee-Grant Hotel, the offspring of soldiers from both sides donated heirlooms. Some residents—mutts descended from both Southern and Northern stock, or what Davis called “Yankee Rebels”—gave items from both armies.
The Lee-Grant hotel was gone now, and there was little apart from the town’s street signs and Davis’s small museum to recall Fitzgerald’s remarkable history. “Folks joke about the fire department being on Sherman Street,” Davis said. “But otherwise you don’t hear much talk about the War.”
In one sense, this seemed healthy. Though I’d often lamented the neglect of history in Atlanta and other places, I’d also seen how poisonous and polarized memory of the past could become. Still, it seemed sad that the story Davis had just told me wasn’t widely known. However anomalous Fitzgerald might have been, it offered a glimpse of an alternative strain of post-War Southern history, akin to the many instances of racial progress and cooperation in the late nineteenth century that had been erased from modern memory by Southerners’ demonization of Reconstruction, or by Northerners’ smug stereotypes of a Klan-driven, Jim Crow South.
“History is lived forward but it is written in retrospect,” the English historian C. V. Wedgwood observed. “We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.” Fitzgerald, for me, was a small reminder that the South’s post-War history wasn’t predestined to lead toward the strife and anger over the past I’d witnessed in so many other places across the South.
For Davis, Fitzgerald’s story carried another, broader message for Americans. “If veterans could come together so soon after the War and forgive and forget, then surely we can overcome our differences,” she said. “Old wounds were healed here, old barriers overcome. Seems like we should be able to do the same.”
She shut off the museum lights and I offered to give her a ride home. Davis lived in one of the original frame houses built by the pioneers, on a cross street between two avenues named for Southern generals. “When we moved to this house, I said to my Yankee husband, bless his heart, ‘Martin, if we’ve got to live in this nest of Yankees, I’m glad we’re between Gordon and Bragg. I don’t think I’d sleep as well between Sherman and Grant.’” She smiled, pausing at the door. “Funny, given all I know now, but sometimes I still feel that way.”