No Good Word for Cops

jaunts to Europe or Yankeedom for relief from staying always inside the mental streams (naturally dull and despairing) of the unfortunate Federal prisoners, of the also unfortunate Commandant Wirz (with his always festering, unhealing wound), or of the rather too pallid and introspective Ira Claffey, who represents Mr. Kantor’s idea of a noncombatant Georgia plantation owner—I kept expecting Ira to start quoting T. S. Eliot.

It would be easy to complain against the historical distortion that Mr. Kantor’s documentary realism enforces. Reviewers who take the Southern side can retort that the conceded horrors of the Andersonville stockade were due to the Lincoln-Grant-Sherman “total war” policy, under which exchange of prisoners was refused. The blockade cut off medical supplies and added horror. The Confederacy, in 1864-5, would gladly have exchanged its prisoners, whom it could not longer adequately house and ration, but all pleas for such a cartel were denied. Meanwhile the well-provided North took no pains to set the South a good example. By Secretary Stanton’s own 1866 report, the Confederates, who took 50,000 more prisoners than the Federals (holding from first to last 270,000), had 4,000 fewer prison deaths. Confederate tales of prison hardship in the North easily balance the Andersonville horror. Library shelves are full of such tales, on both sides, and oral tradition carries others unrecorded. More irritation arises from the scandalous fact that the vengeful North, in a sort of preview of the Nuremberg trials, tried and hanged Major Henry Wirz as a war criminal—an episode that Mr. Kantor discreetly omits, recording only his arrest.

CW

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C. Dickerman Williams

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jaunts to Europe or Yankeedom for relief from staying always inside the mental streams (naturally dull and despairing) of the unfortunate Federal prisoners, of the also unfortunate Commandant Wirz (with his always festering, unhealing wound), or of the rather too pallid and introspective Ira Claffey, who represents Mr. Kantor’s idea of a noncombatant Georgia plantation owner—I kept expecting Ira to start quoting T. S. Eliot.

It would be easy to complain against the historical distortion that Mr. Kantor’s documentary realism enforces. Reviewers who take the Southern side can retort that the conceded horrors of the Andersonville stockade were due to the Lincoln-Grant-Sherman “total war” policy, under which exchange of prisoners was refused. The blockade cut off medical supplies and added horror. The Confederacy, in 1864-5, would gladly have exchanged its prisoners, whom it could not longer adequately house and ration, but all pleas for such a cartel were denied. Meanwhile the well-provided North took no pains to set the South a good example. By Secretary Stanton’s own 1866 report, the Confederates, who took 50,000 more prisoners than the Federals (holding from first to last 270,000), had 4,000 fewer prison deaths. Confederate tales of prison hardship in the North easily balance the Andersonville horror. Library shelves are full of such tales, on both sides, and oral tradition carries others unrecorded. More irritation arises from the scandalous fact that the vengeful North, in a sort of preview of the Nuremberg trials, tried and hanged Major Henry Wirz as a war criminal—an episode that Mr. Kantor discreetly omits, recording only his arrest.