Ghosts and Shadows of Andersonville: Essays on the Secret Social Histories of America's Deadliest Prison

By Robert S. Davis
Illustrated, notes, bibliography, appendices, index, 310 pp., 2006. Mercer University Press, 1400 Coleman Ave., Macon, GA 31207, $35 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Maj. Charles R. Bowery Jr.
Maj. Charles R. Bowery Jr. is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. After serving in command and staff positions as an AH-64 Apache pilot from 1992-1999, he taught military history at the U.S. Military Academy and attended graduate school at North Carolina State. Major Bowery Jr., is a U. S. Army Aviator stationed in Iraq with the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade.

Review:
Camp Sumter, more commonly known as Andersonville Prison, was the most infamous of all Civil War prisons, North or South. Home to more than 40,000 Union prisoners of war at various times, one-third of whom perished in captivity, Andersonville has been the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (MacKinlay Cantor's Anderson-ville), numerous works of nonfiction, and one television movie.

In this book, Robert S. Davis, a specialist in regional history and genealogy at Wallace State College in Hanceville, Ala., brings together a variety of firsthand accounts of the prison in an effort to tell the story of Andersonville as social history, or the history of various groups and their interactions with one another.

Chapter One is an excellent survey of the history of the camp, which existed only from early 1864 to the end of the war, and has since become a National Cemetery, National Historical Park, and museum dedicated to American prisoners of war.

Davis portrays Andersonville as a failure of Confederate logistics and administration, not as a "death camp" whose sole aim was to kill or deliberately mistreat prisoners.

Everything about the camp's history, from the selection of the site, to the officers chosen to run it, to its failure to provide adequate shelter, medical care or food for the prisoners, was a result of the Confederate government's increasing inability to perform basic functions as the war went on.

By mid-1864, as Union offensives squeezed the Confederacy from virtually every direction, everyone who lived in the South went without, including prisoners of war. Davis is careful to remind the reader that some of these difficulties existed in Northern POW camps, but that the federal government's wealth of resources prevented these conditions from becoming widespread.

Davis has clearly done his homework in this area, and has backed up his analysis with the appropriate primary and secondary sources.

Beginning with Chapter Two, Davis explores life at Andersonville through an examination of different social groups, the first of which, those Union prisoners who managed to escape, formed the author's original interest in the camp.

It has proven impossible over time to determine exactly how many prisoners successfully escaped, but the total appears to be in the hundreds. Davis originally published this chapter in a 2003 edition of The Journal of Military History.

The author moves on to examine the experience of the camp's Confederate staff and guards, one of whom was an ancestor of his. He then examines the strong criminal element in the prison population, personified by the character of "Limber Jim," a confidence man and frequent prison informant who played both sides of the camp to guarantee his own well-being.

Davis enhances the text of these chapters with an excellent selection of contemporary drawings and postwar photographs of the camp, many of the former from the collection of Robert Knox Sneden, the subject of two well-received books of drawings.

Of particular note is Chapter Six, which describes the story of Andrew J. Riddle, a Macon, Ga., photographer who recorded scenes of the prison in August 1864. This priceless, haunting photographic evidence adds to the impact of the various accounts used to construct the narrative.

Other chapters include the story of a Catholic priest who ministered to the prison population, the collected experiences of women who lived among the prisoners, and an indictment of William Tecumseh Sherman for failing to locate and liberate the camp during his March to the Sea, a sin of omission for which the author blames more of the prisoners' suffering than the camp's guards and staff.

This book covers the topic in only a few pages; a more detailed examination would be an interesting contribution to the literature on Sherman.

Davis deals with the most famous of Andersonville personalities, Stockade Commandant Capt. Henry Wirz, in a chapter detailing his trial and execution. Over time, Wirz has rightly or wrongly become a popular scapegoat for all of the ills and failures of Camp Sumter.

From this book's opening pages, the author takes a sympathetic position on Wirz, blaming his many superiors and the Confederate government for the situation. The balance of recent scholarship on Andersonville bears out this position.

Ghosts and Shadows of Andersonville is an excellent addition to the literature on Civil War prisons. Its collection of firsthand accounts, illustrations and photographs will give the book a wide appeal. Robert S. Davis has given us another example of the continuing vitality of many areas of Civil War scholarship.