Crossing the Deadlines

Civil War Prisons Reconsidered

Michael P. Gray

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781631013638
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The "deadlines" were boundaries prisoners had to stay within or risk being shot. Just as a prisoner would take the daring challenge in "crossing the deadline" to attempt escape, Crossing the Deadlines crosses those boundaries of old scholarship by taking on bold initiatives with new methodologies, filling a void in the current scholarship of Civil War prison historiography, which usually does not go beyond discussing policy, prison history and environmental and social themes. Due to its eclectic mix of contributors-from academic and public historians to anthropologists currently excavating at specific stockade sites-the collection appeals to a variety of scholarly and popular audiences. Readers will discover how the Civil War incarceration narrative has advanced to include environmental, cultural, social, religious, retaliatory, racial, archaeological, and memory approaches.

As the historiography of Civil War captivity continues to evolve, readers of Crossing the Deadlines will discover elaboration on themes that emerged in William Hesseltine's classic collection, Civil War Prisons, as well as inter- connections with more recent interdisciplinary scholar- ship. Rather than being dominated by policy analysis, this collection examines the latest trends, methodologies, and multidisciplinary approaches in Civil War carceral studies. Unlike its predecessor, which took a micro approach on individual prisons and personal accounts, Crossing the Deadlines is a compilation of important themes that are interwoven on broader scale by investigating many prisons North and South.

Although race played a major role in the war, its study has not been widely integrated into the prison narrative; a portion of this collection is dedicated to the role of African Americans as both prisoners and guards and to the slave culture and perceptions of race that perpetuated in prisons. Trends in environmental, societal, and cultural implications related to prisons are investigated as well as the latest finds at prison excavation sites, including the challenges and triumphs in awakening Civil War prisons' memory at historical sites.

PART I

New Encounters

Sensing Nature, Society, and Culture
in and out of Prison

CHAPTER 1

Nature and Prisons

Toward an Environmental History of Captivity

Evan A. Kutzler

It does not take long for today’s summer visitors at Andersonville National Historic Site to realize that nature was a powerful force at that historic site. The open field, cut out of the remote Georgia pine barrens, is an immediate reminder of the natural resources that made the place appealing to Confederate officials. Careful observers of the landscape will see that, while Andersonville came to be a human and natural disaster, environmental determinism was not the cause of the suffering. The natural landscape combines high ground with multiple water sources. Far from inherently fatal, the place is suitable, though not overly hospitable, to adaptive human habitation. Taking an even closer look between patches of grass, visitors should see (but not touch!) microflakes produced when Native Americans knapped stone tools on the slopes of the same hills where prisoners suffered. People lived at Andersonville hundreds and probably thousands of years before the prisoners arrived in February 1864.

The natural advantages of the locale aside, ranger-led walking tours at Andersonville are a tough sell to visitors in the summer. The sun makes the air-conditioned museum or driving tour an obvious choice over a walking tour for all but the most adventurous. Swarms of insects relentlessly welcome those who brave the heat and step outside. When a visitor asks a park ranger at the front desk what biblical plague has befallen this place, the standing reply is that those insects are gnats, they are prevalent from late spring until mid-fall, and guests are welcome to take home as many as can fit in their cars. The gnats make up one of the most powerful collective forces upon the visitor experience, but park signs warn of additional natural dangers. One sign in the visitor center cautions that the small red mounds shelter fire ants, which are relative newcomers and were not part of the wartime experience. Likewise, colorful signs reading “Venomous Snakes” warn visitors of the many rattlesnakes alongside the creek that bisects the prison. It is important not to underestimate the power of nature at Andersonville.

Inspiration for this essay began on a research trip in August 2013, when I sifted through the park’s library collections for insight into how prisoners used the five senses to mediate, debate, and understand captivity. Living for five days in a guest cottage and being immersed in the sights and sounds of 2013 Andersonville offered an opportunity to think about the interconnections between sensory history and the larger field of environmental history. In contrast to the blistering heat, it almost never stopped raining in late-summer 2013, substantiating prisoners’ claims that they were kept in a tropical climate. The clouds hanging above the pine trees contrasted with the openness of the field. Although the resulting work nodded to environmental history, the senses framed and drove the interpretation.

When I returned to Andersonville in summer 2015 to work as a seasonal park ranger, my interactions with visitors helped spark a greater interest in the intersection between the environment and the senses. Ranger-led tours made use of the shade wherever possible, but visitors spent at least ten to fifteen minutes in direct sunlight. When the tour moved from the grass to a bare section of ground near reconstructed prison tents, visitors felt the full impact of the sun. The grass, it turned out, had been absorbing heat, and the step onto red clay precipitated a noticeable affront to modern comfort. Those rays provided a useful interjection of nature into a story about human captivity. The potency of the environment in the present offered a compelling justification to reconsider the interaction between humans and nature in the past.

Environmental approaches to the Civil War have only recently begun to attract attention. Part of this delay has been attributed to the seemingly obvious fact that much of the Civil War occurred outdoors.¹ Nature was almost too pervasive a factor in the conflict to be isolated as a field of discrete study. For this reason, environmental considerations have long been a secondary factor for scholars who study the operational or social experiences of prisons. While present in many works, nature often appears as background to a more important human drama. In his 1968 history of Andersonville, Ovid Futch, for example, describes Andersonville’s landscape as it appeared at the time, but largely ignores the Civil War–era environment. Although analytical blindness to nature is common even in some of the best works on prisons, there are important trailblazers. Roger Pickenpaugh aptly points out that Union prisoners complained about environmental problems more often than about specific Confederate actions. Furthermore, Pickenpaugh argues that one of the tragedies of Confederate prisons was that many of the prisoners spent the winter of 1863 on a cold, barren island in the James River and the summer of 1864 in an open field in southwestern Georgia. Similarly, Benton McAdams, Michael Gray, and others consider the climatological effects of northern winters on prisoners from Southern states.² Although nature is not the object of analysis in these works, it clearly is a force in the experiences of captivity.

Pickenpaugh, Gray, and others have built a foundation for deeper analysis of nature and the environment in Civil War prisons. Building on this work, this essay analyzes prison environments, bringing in the field of sensory history when it provides additional analytical insight.³ Applying the lessons of environmental history to Civil War prisons yields two interpretive dividends. The first is about causality. Framing decisions within the context of nineteenth-century ideas about the environment, disease, and sanitation helps to identify the concerns and priorities of prison officials. The second section contends that landscape, topography, and environmental improvements mattered to officials who attempted—often without success—to engineer drained, ventilated, and deodorized prison spaces. Perhaps most importantly, focusing on nature also restores something that mattered to prisoners. The later section of this essay focuses on what environmental historians term “hybridity”—or the interaction between people and nature—in this case listening to birds or “skirmishing” with lice. In these moments, prisoners not only wrote about the environment, they also framed their experience in the interactions between the human and nonhuman world. To reap these interpretive dividends, it is necessary to bring nature from the background to the foreground of Civil War prison history.

Americans living through the Civil War constantly engaged with the natural world in which they lived, whether at home, camp, hospital, or prison. These exchanges were responsible for the sicknesses that accounted for at least two-thirds of all deaths during the Civil War.⁴ For this reason, assumptions and theories about managing nature mattered to officials who designed, developed, and maintained Civil War prisons. These spaces took many shapes and forms, but the most iconic spatial layout modeled a walled camp or city. Whether designed specifically for the purpose or mostly improvised, prisons were often patchworks of vernacular structures.⁵ The gridded, urban layout of Northern prison camps and the more rudimentary parallels in the South have much in common with nineteenth-century notions of sanitation, but little in common with later internment or concentration camps. In short, prison officials thought about humans and the environment when they constructed and managed prison landscapes.

Prisons were not built with the intention of killing occupants. One of the tragedies of Civil War prisons was that those landscapes of death were modeled on sanitarian principles. The language of “sanitation” covered a broader range of meanings in the nineteenth-century world of gangrene and miasmas than it did after germ theory became the predominate paradigm for medical knowledge and public health. The international sanitarian movement had its intellectual underpinnings in Western thought that ascribed a set of beliefs about how human bodies interacted with the environment. Immanuel Kant, among others, linked the human nose and environmental dangers to health, arguing that the nose “warns us not to breathe noxious air (such as vapor from a stove, or the stench from a swamp or from dead animals),” bestowing upon the nose the ability to detect unhealthy landscapes.⁶ By the 1840s and 1850s, European and American sanitarians as well as nurses reforming healthcare, urban residents complaining of public nuisances, and westward-moving settlers shared similar perceptions of sanitation that combined drainage, ventilation, visual cleanliness, and deodorization. Furthermore, military commanders and sanitarians believed they could design healthy landscapes with the right spatial layout and regulation of humans and nature.⁷

Sanitarian ideals influenced Civil War camps and prisons as well as how military officials evaluated those spaces. Northern military officials and the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) took environmental factors into consideration when both designing and inspecting Civil War prisons. First at long-term camps and later at prisons, USSC officials calculated environmental endowments and liabilities concerning a number of issues: topography, natural and manmade drainage, soil and subsoil, spacing of tents, cleanliness of the streets, the habit of bathing, the presence or absence of “odors of decay,” and the location and maintenance of privy systems.⁸ The USSC then used these criteria to measure the healthfulness of prison sites. Henry W. Bellows, president of the USSC, was appalled when he described his visit to Camp Douglas, Chicago, in June 1862. He wrote, “The amount of standing water, of unpoliced grounds, of foul sinks, of unventilated and crowded barracks, of general disorder, of soil reeking with miasmic accretions, of rotten bones and the emptying of camp-kettles is enough to drive a sanitarian to despair.” According to Bellows, only God or abnormally strong winds from Lake Michigan could avert pestilence in late summer. The only sure way to purify Camp Douglas would be to set this prison on fire.⁹

While Bellows seemed to think reform impossible, the USSC continued its work under the conviction that managing the environmental strains on large, concentrated populations was possible; Union prison officials did the same. Beginning with the deluge of Confederate prisoners in 1862, Commissary General of Prisoners William Hoffman converted training camps in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York, and other states into open-air prison camps. Hoffman sent Capt. Henry M. Lazelle to tour prisons and report on the conditions. “The air of the camp, and more particularly the prison,” Lazelle wrote of Camp Chase, Ohio, “is polluted and the stench is horrible.” The irregular clusters of small buildings inhibited proper flow of air, prisoners had no brooms, and no one had whitewashed the buildings in months. Heat from the stoves, in addition to overheating interiors, also begrimed prisoners with smoke, grease, and cooking debris. Outside the buildings the streets, drains, gutters, and spaces between buildings contained “the vilest accumulations of filth.”¹⁰ Lazelle especially condemned improper drainage and insufficient sinks. Lack of effective drainage left the ground wet and soft. Water entered the barracks through defects in the boarding and holes made by prisoners for ventilation. But the most revolting environmental dangers came from the sinks, which were little more than earthen holes with single rails placed over them. “A terrible stench everywhere prevails,” Lazelle wrote, “overpowering the nostrils and stomach of those not impermeated with it.” When the main drain of the prison overflowed, it emptied into this trench. The resulting dampness created “rapid decomposition” that permeated “the air of the prison with the most nauseating and disgusting stench,” he wrote.¹¹

Lazelle suggested improvements that reflected contemporary sanitarian belief that drainage, ventilation, and deodorization could prevent environmental and human disaster. He criticized the prison administration rather than the prisoners, whom he described as quiet, well behaved, and invested in improving their living conditions.¹² Thus, Lazelle recommended better sinks, and ordered officials to excavate earthen vaults to a depth of at least ten feet, line them with planks, and surround them with sloped ground to keep surface water from entering the sewage cistern. On top of these vaults, Lazelle ordered “substantial privies with air chimney and bench seats.” In conjunction with the liberal use of lime, the structural improvements would diminish the noxious stench penetrating the camp. This renovation complemented the general sanitation of the camp environment, particularly the barracks. To deodorize the barracks, Lazelle called for “lime and whitewash brushes in sufficient abundance for rapidly whitewashing all the quarters in all the prisons.” He further suggested that every twenty prisoners should have a twenty-gallon tub of whitewash. Lime-fortified whitewash checked the decomposition of wood, minimized the damp odor of decay, and projected a clean reassuring layer of whiteness. Lazelle ordered the barracks raised one foot above the ground and the side covering of the building removed below the floor to solve the moisture problem and allow for increased air circulation. Lastly, he had drains constructed to channel water away from the barracks, curved streets with side drains, and graded open areas to prevent standing water.¹³

Hoffman carefully considered reports like these from the USSC and Lazelle. When USSC president Bellows hyperbolically suggested purifying Camp Douglas with fire, Hoffman proposed building an underground sewer that would push human filth from the sinks into Lake Michigan. The suggestion again exhibited the marks of the progressive sanitarians. He wrote, “The sinks should be connected with the sewers so that during the summer the camp and neighborhood would be relieved from the stench which now pollutes the air.”¹⁴ Hoffman’s suggestion paralleled the latest proposals in...