Confederates in the Attic (50 page)

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.

T
HE 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!’”

L
EAVING
A
NDERSONVILLE
, 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.