Episode 6: The Prisoner Experience

Transcript

John Heckman: What was it like to be taken prisoner during the American Civil War?

Evan Kutzler: Well, I think for starters, it was unexpected. Civilians becoming soldiers had a lot of expectations about what might happen to them. They might win great glory. They might have a great adventure. They might die in a heroic charge. They’re less likely thinking about dying slowly of gangrene or of some unnamed communicable disease.

And they were also not thinking that they were going to spend significant periods of time as a prisoner of war. And so, they’re often grappling with this question of, what is a prisoner of war? Is a prisoner a type of a hostage? Is it a convict? Is it a sort of an inmate? Is it a criminal? Is it connected to slavery (in the South)? So, it’s not expected. And because of that, a lot of the environmental experiences, they become amplified. They become part of how these men are trying to explain what this subset of soldiering experience is to them.

And so, it’s a consistently disorienting experience.

John Heckman: Do you think in your research you saw anything where maybe this experience—because of it being a civil war and because both sides can speak the same language—was more of an intimate experience in that you saw yourself in the other person sometimes? Or do you think because it became almost like a total war in some people’s minds, where it got worse as it went along, there was a disconnect there between the person you were capturing?

Evan Kutzler: I think it goes both ways. There might be this sense of shared humanity or past national identities. But I don’t think we should underestimate the reality that these individuals were killing each other. And the faster they killed more of the enemy, the faster the war was going to come to an end.

John Heckman: What kind of places were used as prisons?

Evan Kutzler: Pretty much whatever space will fit the bill. So, in the South, that means cotton warehouses, tobacco warehouses as intermediate term prisons for weeks or months. Buildings, railcars, these are also sites of captivity. Open fields are sites of captivity beginning in the war. In the northern states, you have training camps that that spring had been used for raising regiments now become places where you can house large numbers of incoming prisoners of war.

But in the North as well, there’s a lot of makeshift prisons: old fortifications in the harbor of New York or Boston, or the penitentiaries of Old Capital Prison or other jails or prisons. As time goes on, these become more formalized. So, you have places like Andersonville develop or Johnson’s Island, which is specifically designed as a prison camp.

Whereas places like Elmira and Camp Douglas and Camp Chase, these are all places that start off as training camps and then evolve into prisoner of war camps.

Confederate POWs are visible in this late-war photograph of the prison camp at Elmira, New York.

John Heckman: Does that change the environment of that location, in the fact that this place may not have been used previously as a training camp, and therefore it’s not as well suited for people to live in? Or do we see it as the environment is just terrible in general because everyone thinks of prisoner of war camps as just a terrible environment to be in the first place. Or was it something else?

Evan Kutzler: It depends. Johnson’s Island is about the safest place you can be in the American Civil War. You bring in all these Confederate officers, you put them on an island on Lake Erie, and sure, being a prisoner is unpleasant, but the death rate there is minuscule. Now, the emotional challenges may be very significant. But that compared to Andersonville, which also doesn’t start off as a training camp and becomes the biggest and the deadliest by sheer numbers, they have these very radically different trajectories. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily inherent about how they begin.

Now, one thing you have with these training camps that start is you have groups like the United States Sanitary Commission who are evaluating them very early on. And they’re saying, look, you have problems with drainage, you have problems with ventilation, you have problems with all sorts of things. And these will lead to health problems. And so, there are known challenges with these pre-existing camps too.

John Heckman: What were some of those prisoners’ survival strategies for these harsh conditions? Did they band together in small groups and combine their resources? Or did they do something different?

Evan Kutzler: That’s how the ration distribution was usually organized. The prison gives a large quantity of food that is going to be broken down into smaller groups. There are prisoners who survive in part by working together with comrades and surviving through sharing resources, but also keeping up morale.

Prisons also happened to be pretty violent, dangerous places. There’s a lot of theft. There’s a lot of the elevation of the individual above that of comrades. And so, there are problems of theft and violence in a lot of prisons, maybe most notably Andersonville, where they’re the famous Raiders. And that’s a difficult story to unpack, but the short of it is that there’s a series of gangs in the prison and the prisoners, with the help of the Confederate guards, overthrow these gangs and execute their leaders. And then another group—not always called a gang, sometimes called the Regulators—controls the camp beyond that, works sort of as a police force.

So, these things are really hard to generalize.

John Heckman: Are the experiences of both sides a little bit similar in that both sides are basically coming from the same mindset of what war previously was like and taking prisoners previously was like?

Evan Kutzler: I think the baseline is pretty similar. Now, the physical privation is significantly different between prisons in the North and prisons in the South. The intensity of suffering is considerably worse in southern prisons. That’s not an assertion that is borne out by numbers alone.

Yeah, these prisoners, they come, I think from pretty similar backgrounds, but the experience in many of these southern prisons is much more shocking and much more chronic than those in the North.

John Heckman: Do you think that’s one of the traps that we fall into where we say, oh, this camp in the South was worse than this one in the North, and this one in the North is worse than this one in the South—because we’re looking at it from a cultural history standpoint, not the numbers?

Evan Kutzler: I do think the historical memory piece of this moves the facts. That people start off with the expectation of, this prison is the worst because that’s what you grow up hearing. That’s what you are led to believe by someone you trust.

Andersonville Prison commandant Henry Wirz

Where do you learn it? How do you learn it? For the last eight years, I lived within 10 miles of Andersonville. And other than Living by Inches, I very much stayed away from writing directly about Andersonville. In part because I was really just listening. I was trying to understand the white southern conservative historical lens, the historical memory lens of Andersonville. What is it like growing up within that shadow of that prison where, if you’re interested in history, that means you’re interested in Andersonville, that means you are going to be taught Henry Wirz was a scapegoat, that Andersonville wasn’t as bad as people say, that it wasn’t as bad as some northern prisons.

And so, how does that shape your view of the American Civil War or American history, if that’s your starting point? And so, I never fully went down that research path, but I was always listening for that.

But to get to the other part of your question, you ask about scholars. And think it’s very tempting to say, I want to write an article, or I want to write a book, or I want to give a speech explaining why this place is the worst. And that we did for 80 years. And it led us to point of just entire disagreement.

John Heckman: That’s so well said, because I think if you’re taken prisoner anywhere you are is going to be terrible. You’re not going to want to be there, obviously. And it’s going to be bad. Except for those Confederate officers. They seem to have it nice on Lake Erie.

Evan Kutzler: Except in the winter, they did not like the winter and perhaps for good reason.

John Heckman: Yes. I’m sure of that. We need to talk about a term that a lot of people have heard about being suspended in 1864 and that’s prisoner exchanges. What is a prisoner exchange and why is that important for us to understand?

Evan Kutzler: So, the prisoner exchange system in the American Civil War was a way that armies could give soldiers back to each other. And it was a way to avoid having to look after large numbers of prisoners and devote resources—including guards and supplies and food—to maintaining these prisoners.

So, there’s several phases of this. The first year or so of the war, there’s not a formal exchange system at all. The big reason here is that the U.S. government is concerned that exchanging prisoners with a Confederate government is going to legitimize the Confederacy. In 1862, it appears now to be a fairly long war, and if you’re captured, you’re not coming home until the end of the war.

So, by summer of 1862, there’s an exchange system put in. It’s not government to government, it’s army to army. It’s a trading system based on rank. So, one private is equal, one private, one major general’s worth 40 privates. There’s a sliding scale. By January 1, 1863, there’s 1,300 Confederate soldiers in U.S. prisons, and most of those are about to be exchanged. It’s actually ’63 where the exchange breaks down. So, by the time we get to 1864, we’re seeing the cumulative effects of the exchange system breaking down just as the spring campaigns are beginning. Prisons are already full. They don’t have any more room for anybody else.

But the breakdown in 1863 occurs for a bunch of reasons. The most important one is that African-American

soldiers are now fighting for the United States Army and the Confederate government will not allow their armies to exchange those prisoners.

And then to add onto this, there’s always these accounting details about how many prisoners were exchanged. Did they go through the right steps? Everyone’s trying to find, especially the Confederacy, is trying to find ways to maximize the number of soldiers you get back in turn. And so, this breaks down by the summer of 1863. So, Gettysburg and Vicksburg almost mark a perfect shift in the exchange system working.

So, Grant, partly because he can’t take tens of thousands of prisoners and hold on to them at Vicksburg, he paroles all these prisoners going off this old system. Soldiers captured at Gettysburg, they’re in it for the long haul.

So, we have 1,300 on Emancipation Day, January 1, 1863. June 30, 1863: 6,000. So, you start to see that breakdown. By May 1, 1864, there’s 33,000 prisoners in U.S. prisons. And in Andersonville, they’ve just hit the 10,000 mark. Which is more than Andersonville has room for. By June 1, 1864, the United States has 44,000 prisoners at Andersonville alone. And this is going to be the story of the summer and the fall, where the numbers are not going to go down.

Most people, if you’re captured, you’re going to prison and you’re spending most of the rest of the war in captivity. So, by October 1, 1864, the United States has 56,000 Confederate soldiers in northern prisons. And so, you have this shift of policy in regards to who can be a soldier in the U.S. Army, who can be a prisoner among the Confederate government, the Confederate army, and then you have the cascading effects of, well, if you’re not exchanging black prisoners, we’re not exchanging any prisoner.

And that’s a really difficult position to take in an election year, having had to bow to popular will just two years earlier to exchange prisoners. And so other explanations come in about, well, this is the hard hand of war. This is trying to end the war as quickly as possible. This is a numbers game. It very well may be that, but nobody knows that 1864 is going to end as well as it does for the United States. And in the beginning of 1864, both sides have a reasonable degree of confidence that things are going not catastrophically for them.

So, the black soldier thesis makes a lot of sense for who, what, when, where, and why the prisoner exchange breaks down. And it sets up the long summer of 1864.

John Heckman: That initial move by the Confederate government, their initial desire for black prisoners of war was to send them back into slavery, was it not? And then that kind of broke down as well?

Evan Kutzler: Yeah. So, there are black soldiers who are sent back to slavery. That happens. They will be sent back to the states to be dealt with according to state law. Which is a gesture to state black codes and slavery codes. And also indicates that soldiers might be executed for participating in insurrection.

Now, there are numbers of documented massacres of surrendering black soldiers on battlefields. It becomes much more difficult for the Confederate government to actively go into the process of executing outside of the haziness of a battlefield. Because there is always the threat that if you do that to our soldiers, we will randomly draw officers from Johnson’s Island, and we will hang them too.

And so, that is what keeps that at bay. And eventually there ends up being this two-tiered system where the Confederate government will put back into slavery some of the soldiers it captures who it can be certain were enslaved people in the past and then holds as prisoners people who they believe were free.

And this is not perfect and it’s not an exact kind of demarcation of personal histories. But that’s what they are attempting to do by the summer of ’64.

John Heckman: Growing up and reading things in my youth when I was first studying the Civil War, it was a lot of blaming of the officers in 1864 for the breakdown of the exchange.

But by what you’re saying, we shouldn’t possibly be blaming people like Grant or someone else for that breakdown. It seems like it’s starting to happen in 1863 and almost a year before the period we’re talking about now with the summer of ’64, which is probably why Point Lookout is so atrocious after Gettysburg and such. We should be looking to a calendar year before the summer of ’64 to see where it’s really starting to progress. Correct?

Evan Kutzler: Absolutely. And in any of these prisons, whether it’s Elmira or Andersonville, who comes in has a huge effect on survivability. So, the first prisoners of Andersonville, they’ve had the misfortune of spending the winter on Belle Isle in the James River in Richmond mostly without tents. It’s not as cold as Johnson’s Island in December and January in Richmond, Virginia, but it’s cold enough without a tent. And so, the prisoners who are arriving in Georgia, about to experience a Georgia summer, maybe for the first time, probably for the first time, have just survived Belle Isle.

And so, the people who are dying in many of them in the spring of 1864, they’ve already been prisoners since Gettysburg or since Chickamauga. They’ve been prisoners longer than just about anybody else the entire war.

Andersonville Prison, as it appeared in August 1864.

John Heckman: Was there any kind of information on how the public perceived prisoners at this time? Usually, they’re kept very separate out on different locations than what the public can view, although there were viewing platforms at Andersonville and possibly other places. Did you ever come across anything about the public perception of being taken prisoner or having prisoners in their area?

Evan Kutzler: Well, civilians and civilian officials are split on prisons. They may not mind—well, I think they do probably still mind—having soldiers under any circumstances near their towns. Andersonville is supposed to be in a couple different locations, but the locals push back against it so badly that it ends up being in this certain place. The proposed site bounces around southwest Georgia and ends up at Andersonville. And yeah, there are some people going to observe Andersonville. I think Johnson’s Island has an excursion boat that goes out there. There is a kind of a cultural fascination with prisoners that can become monetized, can become a recreational activity. Robert Bingham, he’s a North Carolinian, writes about this in his diary at, it’s either Point Lookout or it’s Fort Delaware, but there’s an excursion of Union ladies—who he wouldn’t call them ladies—and they’re watching the men bathe. And he is just horrified that women would be watching him bathe in the river and gawking at him.

But also, civilians didn’t want big prisons around. I mean, they’re stinky. They’re potentially a security risk. There’s vectors of disease. And so, prisons are not places that localities are scrambling to try to get in their backyard.

John Heckman: What kind of psychological impact is it for these troops being taken prisoner? We’re talking about how the locals don’t want this camp. What’s it like for those inside the camp psychologically to be dealing with the fact that if you’re captured in late ’63 or the summer of ’64, you’re not going home anytime soon because the war seemingly is just dragging on.

Evan Kutzler: Prisoners believe correctly that their own comrades—and certainly people at home—view prisoners of war as being not just casualties, but perhaps dishonorable, perhaps not fighting to the end, and not giving it their all. That Americans liking their heroes not captured. And historians have followed through on this focusing on the heroic deeds of soldiers for most of the time Civil War historians have been studying the common soldier.

So, there’s this stigma of being a prisoner of war that is part of this. There’s also a great deal of anger. And this is going to be focused almost exclusively at the United States government, because by 1864 the Confederate government will exchange prisoners on its own terms. But at this point it’s the U.S. government who’s saying, no, until all of our demands are met, we’re not exchanging anyone. I’m thinking of a diary entry from Samuel Gibson, who’s from just northeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was captured. He’s at Andersonville and this is what he writes on July 16, 1864. And I think it really speaks to your question here. It says, “I love my country and my government, and I believe I am as loyal a man as can be. But I will put it upon record that I do not like the policy of the present administration. I do not like an administration that will not protect its citizen soldiers when prisoners of war.”

So, here’s a soldier who gets it, who basically gets the modern interpretation of what’s going on with prisons by 1864 and is horribly offended by it. And this is the same sort of soldier who would say there’s nothing dishonorable about it—you fight back against the stigma too—but also feels victimized, not just by the Confederacy, but by the United States government as well.

John Heckman: What do you think we can learn as modern scholars of this period from their experiences? What do you think we can push back against or shed light more on than we have in the past?

Evan Kutzler: I think it helps to ring out the romanticization of the Civil War that still happens. It’s hard to paint a pretty picture of a prisoner of war camp, especially if you are going through the words and the writings of prisoners. And, there’s a range. There are prisoner writings that are funny, that are intensely intellectual, or just crushingly depressing.

And it gets at this full range of human experience. And at a level of recorded detail that’s very unusual, let’s say for the 19th century. So, like hunger, for instance, is not something that is unusual in the 19th century. But detailed descriptions of hunger is. Because most of the people who are suffering outside of a Civil War prison camp from hunger aren’t writing their experiences.

And so, you have a degree of the spectrum of human experience that you don’t get everywhere, that you might certainly wish you had among an enslaved population or among the poorest of an antebellum or postbellum city. This is where you have sources about people who fit into those categories, and so, prisons are an exception in that regard.

I want to read you another, perhaps a better, diary entry from Samuel Gibson. This is what he’s writing about his dreams that he’s having in prison. He writes this two weeks after what I read to you about his thoughts on the government. He said, “I’m not a believer in dreams, but I had a singular one last night, which has oft been repeated. It may mean something, or it may mean nothing. I thought I was in a steamboat in a deep and muddy river. The water ran wildly. I thought the boat I was on was sinking, and I sprang from the hurricane deck upon the hurricane deck of another boat, which to my horror I found was also sinking. Springing from this upon some pieces of broken wreck, I got safely to shore, dry shod, while many of my comrades went under.”

That’s a pretty profound thing to write about when you’re waking up at Andersonville. And he knows it’s a metaphor for what he’s experiencing in Andersonville. He goes back to this idea a couple of weeks later, he says, “My head’s still above water. But I’m seeing the effects on others.” And so, try to unpack what does it mean to call Andersonville a deep and muddy river? What does it mean to feel like you’re on a sinking ship? And how does that relate to soldiering or Civil War prison experience? Or the 19th century American experience?

About the Guest

Evan Kutzler is associate professor of history at Western Michigan University and author of Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons (2019).

Additional Resources

National Park Service history of Andersonville Prison
Johnson’s Island Prison
Confederate Journal: The Prison Diary or Captain Robert Bingham, 44th North Carolina Regiment
For more on our host, John Heckman, visit him on Linktree