Illustrations, 251 pp., 2010, Louisiana State University Press, www.lsu.edu/lsupress, $37.50.

When the guns of the Civil War finally fell silent, Americans, North and South, learned that 56,000 or more men and some women had perished behind the gates of infamous prison camps such as Elmira, N.Y., and Andersonville, Ga. It is often said that when it comes to Civil War prisons there are no winners.

Until the publication of Benjamin G. Cloyd’s penetrating Haunted By Atrocity, most Civil War prison narratives were either memoirs, site-specific studies or an overview of the sad story of these controversial camps.

 Cloyd’s work takes us beyond the rhetoric and blame to examine how the memory construct of such places has ensconced itself, like so many other aspects of American history, into the grander, somewhat self-serving scheme of American exceptionalism.

How Americans have chosen to remember these places is instructive. We are geniuses when it comes to selective memory and uses of history. It is no different with that of Civil War prisons. In the years after the Civil War, Northerners “raised the bloody shirt” as a means to solidify the Republican Party’s ascendance to power; they claimed that those who experienced places like Andersonville and Salisbury paid an unfair price for their service to the Northern cause at the hands of uncaring Southern prison camp commanders and an ineffective Confederate bureaucracy.

After the November 1865 execution of Henry Wirz, the maligned commandant of Andersonville found guilty of “war crimes” by a military tribunal, Southerners announced their views.  They pointed out that Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant in particular turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the men and boys in Union blue incarcerated in the South in a calculated effort to continue to drain the resources of the Confederacy.

Cloyd deftly argues that there was plenty of blame to go around and that morality took a back seat to Union and Confederate political and military expediencies. No matter how one looks at it, a tragic tale is all that remains.        

As the generation of Civil War veterans began to pass from the scene, the historiography of these prison camps exploded when mid-20th century historians began to study the camps and their role in the Civil War saga. Much of this history was laced with bias that served only to keep the embers of sectional discordance burning.  These efforts gave way to more objective examinations of Civil War prisons after World War II.

But what came out of the contested memory of Civil War prisons for Cloyd is more frightening: “a comfortable but ahistorical memory of the controversy.” Here he argues that myth has once again trumped history.  In doing so, Cloyd challenges not so much the fracture of memory, but the inherent moral problems of protecting the defenseless in wartime.         

Finally, Cloyd examines the 1998 dedication of the National POW Museum on the grounds of Andersonville National Historic Site. He admits that the state-of-the-art museum offers a more balanced view of the history of all American POWs and deals more objectively with the issue of Civil War prisons.  But, for him, the moral dilemma still remains for all of humanity and in particular for Americans today when the stories of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay don’t neatly fit into the “package” of American exceptionalism.

I would be remiss if I did not point out that there are some stylistic flaws with the author’s writing and approach. Cloyd’s prose is very academic and dry, and the people he mentions have no other identification beyond their names.

None of the POWs, Confederate or Union, are identified by regimental designation. Thus they feel flat, with an important part of their identity missing – more like just names in a history textbook. If readers can work beyond this flaw, they will find a powerful story that is ripe for being told precisely at this juncture of our history.

Reviewer: James A. Percoco

James A. Percoco is the author of Summers with Lincoln: Looking for the Man in the Monuments and is History Educator-in-Residence at American University.