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Book Reviews These are some reviews from a recent issue of
The Civil War News:
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A Perfect Picture of Hell: Eyewitness Accounts by Civil War Prisoners from the 12th Iowa.
Edited by Ted Genoways and Hugh H. Genoways.
Illustrated, maps, notes, bibliography, 356 pp., 2001. University of Iowa Press, 100 Kuhl House, Iowa City, IA 52242-1000, $42.95 plus shipping.
Edited by Ted Genoways and Hugh H. Genoways this volume presents the remarkable odyssey of the men of the 12th Iowa in their own words. Mustered in at Dubuque on Nov. 25, 1861, the regiment was captured four times and its men incarcerated at various prisons throughout the Confederacy including the infamous Andersonville camp. Their story is well told in this rich collection of diaries, letters, speeches, articles and memoirs. The volume opens and closes with excerpts from the memoirs of John H. Stiffs, Captain, Company D. It is a fit-ting beginning and ending. Stibbs had received his officer’s commission on Oct. 26, 1861, and was mustered out as a colonel on Jan. 20, 1866, thus serving with the 12th Iowa for the entire war. His first account details the surrender of the 12th at the battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862. The surrender was ac-complished with quiet dignity and mutual respect. Capt. S. R. Edgington offered his sword to Gen. Leonidas Polk who returned it, trusting the defeated captain to behave “as a soldier and a gentleman.” By the end of the war, such gallant treatment of captured prisoners had given way to barbarism and abuse by both sides. In the book’s final account, Stibbs relates his experience as the youngest member of the Military Commission that tried and executed Henry Wirz, the infamous commandant of the Anderson prison camp. He details the horror and brutality visited upon Union prisoners, including the “stopping of rations, establishment of a deadline, use of the stocks, the chain-gang, use of hounds, bucking and gagging, tying up by the thumbs, flogging on the bare back, and chaining to posts, from all of which causes deaths were shown to have resulted.” Years of bitter fighting resulted in increased animosity between prisoners and their captors. The editors rightly point out that conditions in many Union camps were little different than those at Andersonville. The Genoways’ book draws its title from another eyewitness account of Andersonville by Sgt. J. Warren Cotes, Company I. Cotes describes the final burning of Andersonville at the end of the war: “Before midnight the last of the prisoners left the stockade never to return, and as they went they burned everything within the dead-line that they could not carry along. While marching toward the station, as they looked back and saw the thick black smoke roll up from within the stockade, lit up by the red flames of the burning pitch pine beneath, it was said by many that it made a perfect picture of Hell." Yet Andersonville, while the most notorious of the Confederate prison camps, was certainly not alone in its harsh treatment of prisoners. This fact is more than adequately demonstrated by the experiences of the 12th Iowa whose soldiers were captured at Shiloh and at Corinth, on Oct. 3, 1862; Jackson, July 11, 1863; and Tupelo, July 13 and 15, 1864. The editors point out that “the men of the 12th Iowa were eyewitnesses to the steady decline of conditions in Con-federate prisons, as well as the growing animosity Southern soldiers and citizens felt toward Union soldiers.” In this way, their story is unique in Civil War history. At various times, the Iowans found themselves incarcerated within the South’s most infamous prisons including Salisbury in North Carolina and Libby, Danville, and Belle Isle in Virginia. Indeed, Belle Isle, opened in May 1863, was little more than a stockade of a featureless island in the James River. It would become the model for the most dreaded of the Confederacy’s POW camps, Cahaba and Andersonville. Belle Isle, as described by Cpl. George Irwin Comstock, Company C, as “earthworks thrown up that form a square inclosing a little less than three acres.” The area was covered with ragged tents and men “hungry enough to eat a raw dog.” Clearly, Andersonville did not happen in a vacuum. By letting the men of the 12th Iowa speak for themselves, the editors have resurrected long-silent voices from the Civil War the thousands of men who endured unspeakable suffering at the hand of their fellow men. This book illuminates the larger experience of countless soldiers, both Union and Confederate, who endured the privations and depredations of prisoner life. As such, it helps us to understand the enduring enmity that persisted between the two sides long after Appomattox.
By Ron Maggiano
Ron Maggiano teaches American History at West Springfield High School in Springfield, Va., and is a student in the Ph.D. History program at George Mason University. He writes frequently on the Civil War.
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