- "They Are Supposed to be Lurking About the City": Enslaved Women Runaways in Antebellum Charleston byPublication Date: 2014The South Carolina Historical Magazine. 115(3):188-212
- 'They Will Endeavor to Pass for Free': Enslaved Runaways' Performances of Freedom in Antebellum South Carolina byPublication Date: 2010Slavery & Abolition. Jun2010, Vol. 31 Issue 2, p161-180. 20p.
Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War by
Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons confronts the enduring claim that Civil War military prisons represented an apocalyptic and a historical rupture in America's otherwise linear and progressive carceral history. Instead, it places the war years in the broader context of imprisonment in 19th-century America and contends that officers in charge of military prisons drew on administrative and punitive practices that existed in antebellum and wartime civilian penitentiaries to manage the war's crisis of imprisonment. Union and Confederate officials outlined rules for military prisons, instituted punishments, implemented prison labor, and organized prisoners of war, both civilian and military, in much the same way as peacetime penitentiary officials had done, leading journalists to refer to many military prisons as "penitentiaries." Since imprisonment became directly associated with criminality in the antebellum period, military prison inmates internalized this same criminal stigma. One unknown prisoner expressed this sentiment succinctly when he penned, "I'm doomed a felon's place to fill," on the walls of Washington's Old Capitol Prison. The penitentiary program also influenced the mindset of military prison officials who hoped that the experience of imprisonment would reform enemies into loyal citizens, just as the penitentiary program was supposed to reform criminals into productive citizens. Angela Zombek examines the military prisons at Camp Chase, Johnson's Island, the Old Capitol Prison, Castle Thunder, Salisbury, and Andersonville whose prisoners and administrators were profoundly impacted by their respective penitentiaries in Ohio; Washington, D.C.; Virginia; North Carolina; and Georgia. While primarily focusing on the war years, Zombek looks back to the early 1800s to explain the establishment and function of penitentiaries, discussing how military and civil punishments continuously influenced each other throughout the Civil War era.
ISBN: 9781606353554Publication Date: 2018-05-15- Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South byPublication Date: 1998The Yale Law Journal. 108(1):109-188
Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory by
During the Civil War, approximately 56,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in enemy military prison camps. Even in the midst of the war's shocking violence, the intensity of the prisoners' suffering and the brutal manner of their deaths provoked outrage, and both the Lincoln and Davis administrations manipulated the prison controversy to serve the exigencies of war. As both sides distributed propaganda designed to convince citizens of each section of the relative virtue of their own prison system -- in contrast to the cruel inhumanity of the opponent -- they etched hardened and divisive memories of the prison controversy into the American psyche, memories that would prove difficult to uproot. In Haunted by Atrocity, Benjamin G. Cloyd deftly analyzes how Americans have remembered the military prisons of the Civil War from the war itself to the present, making a strong case for the continued importance of the great conflict in contemporary America. Throughout Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century, Cloyd shows, competing sectional memories of the prisons prolonged the process of national reconciliation. Events such as the trial and execution of CSA Captain Henry Wirz -- commander of the notorious Andersonville prison -- along with political campaigns, the publication of prison memoirs, and even the construction of monuments to the prison dead all revived the painful accusations of deliberate cruelty. As northerners, white southerners, and African Americans contested the meaning of the war, these divisive memories tore at the scars of the conflict and ensured that the subject of Civil War prisons remained controversial. By the 1920s, the death of the Civil War generation removed much of the emotional connection to the war, and the devastation of the first two world wars provided new contexts in which to reassess the meaning of atrocity. As a result, Cloyd explains, a more objective opinion of Civil War prisons emerged -- one that condemned both the Union and the Confederacy for their callous handling of captives while it deemed the mistreatment of prisoners an inevitable consequence of modern war. But, Cloyd argues, these seductive arguments also deflected a closer examination of the precise responsibility for the tragedy of Civil War prisons and allowed Americans to believe in a comforting but ahistorical memory of the controversy. Both the recasting of the town of Andersonville as a Civil War village in the 1970s and the 1998 opening of the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville National Historic Site reveal the continued American preference for myth over history -- a preference, Cloyd asserts, that inhibits a candid assessment of the evils committed during the Civil War. The first study of Civil War memory to focus exclusively on the military prison camps, Haunted by Atrocity offers a cautionary tale of how Americans, for generations, have unconsciously constructed their recollections of painful events in ways that protect cherished ideals of myth, meaning, identity, and, ultimately, a deeply rooted faith in American exceptionalism.
ISBN: 0807137383Publication Date: 2010-05-24
Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project by
From 1936 to 1939, the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project collected life stories from more than 2,300 former African American slaves. These narratives are now widely used as a source to understand the lived experience of those who made the transition from slavery to freedom. But in this examination of the project and its legacy, Catherine A. Stewart shows it was the product of competing visions of the past, as ex-slaves' memories of bondage, emancipation, and life as freedpeople were used to craft arguments for and against full inclusion of African Americans in society. Stewart demonstrates how project administrators, such as the folklorist John Lomax; white and black interviewers, including Zora Neale Hurston; and the ex-slaves themselves fought to shape understandings of black identity. She reveals that some influential project employees were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, intent on memorializing the Old South. Stewart places ex-slaves at the center of debates over black citizenship to illuminate African Americans' struggle to redefine their past as well as their future in the face of formidable opposition. By shedding new light on a critically important episode in the history of race, remembrance, and the legacy of slavery in the United States, Stewart compels readers to rethink a prominent archive used to construct that history.
ISBN: 9781469626260Publication Date: 2016-04-25
Images from the Storm: 300 Civil War Images by the Author of Eye of the Storm by
The Civil War legacy of Robert Knox Sneden is an unparalleled treasure trove of words and pictures. The publication of the bestsellingEye of the Stormin the fall of 2000 first brought his memoir to light, accompanied by a sample of his artwork. In all, however, he crafted some 900 watercolors and sketches. Now, with the 300 watercolors, sketches, maps, and diagrams inImages from the Storm,his artistic legacy can be appreciated on its own terms -- an achievement equal in magnitude to his writings, and unsurpassed by any other Civil War soldier-artist.Images from the Stormpresents the best of Sneden's art throughout his odyssey of combat, capture, imprisonment, and deliverance, a pictorial record of the war that puts the viewer in the shoes of a Union soldier as nothing else can.Sneden aimed for vivid detail and documentary accuracy in his maps, landscapes, battles, and scenes of camp life. He sketched the camps and surroundings of the Union army, the siege of Yorktown, the battle of Williamsburg, the approach of the army to within sight of the church spires of Richmond, and the tumultuous fighting retreat of the Seven Days' battles as the Union army shrank before a relentless Confederate offensive. He drew dozens of maps and sketched daily life around Washington, D.C., before his capture in autumn 1863.For the next thirteen months, Sneden was a prisoner of the Confederacy. In a drafty tobacco warehouse in Richmond, he sketched prison life and Confederate scenes before being packed with others aboard cattle cars for a jolting train ride south. In a remote corner of rural Georgia, he survived the outdoor prison at Andersonville and drew some of his most astonishing images of camp life and its suffering. When Andersonville was evacuated, he continued to make secret pencil sketches of Confederate prisons in Savannah and Millen, Georgia, and in Florence and Charleston, South Carolina.Finally freed in a massive prisoner exchange in Charleston harbor, he returned home to New York at Christmas 1864. He made little use of his architectural training thereafter, but devoted himself to compiling his memoir of the war and converting his pencil sketches into watercolors. A solitary man who never married, Sneden died at an old soldiers' home in Bath, New York, in 1918. His watercolors and his story were forgotten for nearly a century. Images from the Storm reproduces the best of Sneden's art in sharp colors, so we can appreciate fully the mastery of a miniaturist who saw it all, and sketched whenever and wherever he could.
ISBN: 0743223608Publication Date: 2001-09-25
The Way It Was in the South by
The Way It Was in the South is the only book-length treatment of the African American presence in a single state. From the legalization of slavery in the Georgia Colony in 1751 through debates that preceded the Confederate emblem's removal from the state's now defunct flag, it chronicles the stunning record of black Georgians' innovation, persistence, and triumph in the face of adversity and oppression.
ISBN: 0820323292Publication Date: 2001-09-30- Slaveholding in Antebellum Augusta and Richmond County, Georgia byPublication Date: 1987Phylon (1960-). 48(2):165-177
They Have Left Us Here to Die by
The chronicle of a Union soldier's seven months in captivity Besides the risks of death or wounding in combat, the average Civil War soldier faced the constant threat of being captured by the enemy. It is estimated that one out of every seven soldiers was taken captive--more than 194,000 of them from Union regiments--and held in prison camps infamous for breeding disease and death. Sgt. Lyle G. Adair of the 111th United States Colored Troops joined the thousands of Union prisoners when part of his regiment tasked with guarding the rail lines between Tennessee and northern Alabama was captured by Confederate cavalrymen. Adair, who had first enlisted in the 81st Ohio Volunteer Infantry at the age of seventeen and later became a recruiting agent in the 111th, spent the remainder of the war being shuffled from camp to camp as a prisoner of war. By the war's end, he had been incarcerated in five different Confederate camps: Cahaba, Camp Lawton, Blackshear, Thomasville, and Andersonville. "They Have Left Us Here to Die" is an edited and annotated version of the diary Sergeant Adair kept of his seven months as a prisoner of war. The diary provides vivid descriptions of each of the five camps as well as insightful observations about the culture of captivity. Adair notes with disdain the decision of some Union prisoners to take the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy in exchange for their freedom and covers the mock presidential election of 1864 held at Camp Lawton, where he and his fellow inmates were forced to cast votes for either Lincoln or McClellan. But most significantly, Adair reflects on the breakdown of the prisoner exchange system between the North and South, especially the roles played by the Lincoln administration and the Northern home front. As a white soldier serving with African Americans, Adair also makes revealing observations about the influence of race on the experience of captivity. Complete with numerous annotations comparing Adair's accounts with other diaries, memoirs, and official reports, "They Have Left Us Here to Die" provides a platform for delving deeper into the culture of captivity and the Civil War soldier experience. "'They Have Left Us Here to Die' touches on the important themes of combat motivation, race, the end of slavery, the experience of captivity, and the competing stories of how the war was remembered. And it does so in the hands of an able storyteller who brings Lyle Adair's story to life." - Scott Reynolds Nelson, Legum Professor of History, College of William & Mary
ISBN: 9781612779874Publication Date: 2013-01-20- Burke County Folks, 1851-1900 : The Events in their Lives as Published in Early Newspapers Covering Burke and Neighboring Counties in Georgia byPublication Date: 2004
The World's Largest Prison by
When it opened in October 1864, Camp Lawton was called "the world's largest prison." Operational only six weeks, this stockade near Millen, Georgia, was evacuated in the face of advancing Federal troops under General Sherman. In that brief span of time, the prison served as headquarters for the Confederate military prison system, witnessed hundreds of deaths, held a mock election for president, was involved in a sick exchange, hosted attempts to recruit Union POWs for Confederate service, and withstood escape attempts. Burned by Sherman's troops following its evacuation in late November 1864, the prison was never reoccupied. Over the next one hundred fifty years, the memory of Camp Lawton almost disappeared. In 2010, the Confederate military prison was resurrected--a result of the media event publically showcasing the findings of recent archeological investigations. This book not only summarises these initial archeological findings, but is also the first full-length, documented history of Camp Lawton. Drawing from material in the National Archives, other repositories, and libraries, the author reveals published and unpublished accounts of ex-POWs, family stories, as well as relevant narrative that examines the experience of prison administrators, guards, POWs, and the local populace placing the history of the prison in the broader context of the Civil War. Camp Lawton's history illuminates the treatment of Union POWs, the strengths and weaknesses of the Confederacy in the last stages of the war, the impact of Sherman's March, divisions among the Confederate populace and leadership, and the significant human toll of the conflict.
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ISBN: 9780881464153Publication Date: 2012-12-30
Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies by ISBN: 0807102733Publication Date: 1977-06-01- A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863-1865 by The first black military unit authorized by the Secretary of War, led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the 54th performed valiantly as soldiers during the Civil War. In return the Government tried to cheat them out of fair pay & officer status. This is the official history of the Regiment.ISBN: 9780881431155Publication Date: 1969-03-01
White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-century South by
This is a history of a powerful category of illicit sex in America's past: liaisons between southern white women and black men. Martha Hodes explores the complex ways in which white southerners tolerated these relationships, and shows how and why these responses changed with emancipation.
ISBN: 0300069707Publication Date: 1997-10-20- "As White as Most White Women": Racial Passing in Advertisements for Runaway Slaves and the Origins of a Multivalent Term byPublication Date: 2016American Studies 54(4):73-97
Freedom: a Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 by
Land and Labor, 1866-1867 examines the remaking of the South's labor system in the tumultuous aftermath of emancipation. Using documents selected from the National Archives, this volume of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation depicts the struggle of unenfranchised and impoverished ex-slaves to control their own labor, establish their families as viable economic units, and secure independent possession of land. Among the topics addressed are the dispossession of settlers in the Sherman reserve, the reordering of labor on plantation and farm, nonagricultural labor, new relations of credit and debt, long-distance labor migration, and the efforts of former slaves to rent, purchase, and homestead land. The documents--many of them in the freedpeople's own words--speak eloquently for themselves, while the editors' interpretive essays provide context and illuminate major themes.
ISBN: 9781469607429Publication Date: 2013-08-19
Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey by
An autobiography written by a Union mapmaker who witnessed the worst of the Civil War firsthand, including an account of his experiences during a two-year stay at the notorious Andersonville prison.
ISBN: 0684863650Publication Date: 2000-10-06
Captives in Blue: Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy by
A study of Union prisoners in Confederate prisons In Captives in Blue, Roger Pickenpaugh examines the ways the Confederate army contended with the growing prison population, the variations in the policies and practices of different Confederate prison camps, the effects these policies and practices had on Union prisoners, and the logistics of prisoner exchanges. He explores conditions that arose from conscious government policy decisions and conditions that were the product of local officials or unique local situations. He also considers how Confederate prisons and policies dealt with African American Union soldiers. Black soldiers held captive in Confederate prisons faced uncertain fates; many former slaves were returned to their former owners, while others faced harsh treatment in the camps. Drawing on prisoner diaries, Pickenpaugh provides compelling first-person accounts of life in prison camps often overlooked by scholars in the field. This study of Union captives in Confederate prisons is a companion to Roger Pickenpaugh's earlier groundbreaking book Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union and extends his examination of Civil War prisoner-of-war facilities into the Confederacy.
ISBN: 0817386513Publication Date: 2013-02-04- Early Undocumented Workers: Runaway Slaves and African Americans in the Urban South, c. 1830-1860 byPublication Date: 2020Labor History. Apr2020, Vol. 61 Issue 2, p90-106. 17p.
Andersonville: The Last Depot by
Between February 1864 and April 1865, 41,000 Union prisoners of war were taken to the stockade at Anderson Station, Georgia, where nearly 13,000 of them died. Most contemporary accounts placed the blame for the tragedy squarely on the shoulders of the Confederates who administered the prison or on a conspiracy of higher-ranking officials. According to William Marvel, virulent disease and severe shortages of vegetables, medical supplies, and other necessities combined to create a crisis beyond the captors' control. He also argues that the tragedy was aggravated by the Union decision to suspend prisoner exchanges, which meant that many men who might have returned home were instead left to sicken and die in captivity.
ISBN: 0807866911Publication Date: 2000-11-09
Theses on Camp Lawton
- A Comparison of Field Methods at Camp Lawton (9JS1) byPublication Date: 2016
- XRF and the Corrosion Environment at Camp Lawton : A Comprehensive Study of the Archeological Microenvironment of a Civil War Prison Camp byPublication Date: 2012
- Comparison of Archeological Survey Techniques at Camp Lawton, A Civil War Prison Stockade byPublication Date: 2012
- Constructing the World's Largest Prison : Understanding Identity by Examining Labor byPublication Date: 2015