Was Rock Island the “Andersonville of the North”? Um, No.
Over at The Historic Struggle, Rob Baker notes that today is the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Camp Sumter, better known today as Andersonville. Camp Sumter is the most infamous of all prisoner of war camps on either side during the Civil War.
One thing that is sometimes heard is that Rock Island was “the Andersonville of the North.” That assertion is something that interested me personally, since once of my relatives spent almost eighteen months there in 1864-65, a period that includes almost all of Rock Island’s time as a PoW camp. It was a terrible experience, made worse by the vindictiveness of Union authorities who ordered a reduction in rations in retaliation for the treatment of Union PoWs in the Confederacy, specifically at Camp Sumter.
But was Rock Island objectively as bad as Andersonville? I recently watched a documentary, The Rock Island Civil War Prison: Andersonville of the North? (available for purchase here, or streaming here), that laid out some of the data. The documentary is pretty good, although it has an “unfinished” or “almost there” feel to it; there were several subjects barely touched upon that would justify its expansion to a full hour, instead of just 30 minutes. Nevertheless, it’s worth your time if you have an interest in CW prisons.
The documentary specifically challenges the claim that Rock Island was the “Andersonville of the North.” Taking a lead from that, I looked up some detailed numbers, broken out by month, that show the actual rate of deaths among the prisoners at the two camps, by month. Numbers for Rock Island are available for its entire existence from its opening in late 1863; Andersonville opened a few months later, and most of the prisoners were evacuated from the site in the fall of 1864. Although Andersonville remained in operation until May 1865, the vast majority of deaths among its prisoners occurred between February and November 1864. Death rates are calculated by comparing the number of fatalities with the prisoner population for each month:
Click the little one to get a big one. You can download a spreadsheet of the numbers here. Rock Island data is from the Appendix of Otis Bryan England’s A Short History of the Rock Island Prison Barracks (Revised Edition) (Rock Island, Illinois: Historical Office, U.S. Army Armament, Munitions and Chemical Command, 1985). Andersonville data is from p. 321 of John McElroy’s Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons (Toledo: D. R. Locke, 1879).
Of course, there’s a simpler way to look at this: more men died at Andersonville than were imprisoned at Rock Island during its entire time as a Civil War prison camp.
So where did this “Andersonville of the North” nonsense come from? The phrase doesn’t show up until the 1940s, and I suspect that, like so many other cherished themes about the war, it originated with Margaret Mitchell, who had Ashley Wilkes survive imprisonment at Rock Island. In Gone with the Wind, Chapter 16, she wrote:
No question, Rock Island was a bad place to be, with much unnecessary suffering. But it was not the horrific place Andersonville was, by any objective measure. Mitchell’s plot also underscores her shoddy research in this area: Rock Island was a camp for enlisted men only, and Ashley Wilkes was an officer.
__________
Frankly, my dear. . . .
The scene, driving into school Friday:
[Kid digs around for loose change in the console]
Me: What are you looking for?
Kid: I need 75 cents for popcorn.
Me: Popcorn?
Kid: Yeah, Ms. _____ lets us get popcorn, we’re watching a movie in her history class.
Me: What movie?
Kid: Gone with the Wind. It’s awful, and we all get popcorn ’cause it’s sooooo booooring.
Turns out they’d spent the entire week, since Monday, watching Gone with the Wind in class. The good news, I suppose, is that (according to the Kid) none of it registers with the the other middle school students. They’re not following the plot, they can’t keep the characters straight, and the dialogue is mostly incomprehensible. They’re distracted that one of the leading male characters “has a girl’s name.” The clothing looks ridiculous. They have only the vaguest sense of the course of the war, which is the mostly-off-screen event that drives the entire plot of the picture. Interaction between characters like the one pictured above just don’t register. Gone with the Wind, it seems, is a waste in the classroom when presented in this way; it might as well be a Bollywood musical, with all the dialogue and lyrics in Hindi, for all the effect it’s having. The only thing it’s teaching this class is to remember to bring their three quarters every day for popcorn. (Kevin, teaching at the high school level, has used segments from GwtW, but that’s an entirely different approach to classroom use of the film.)
There’s no question that Gone with the Wind is one of the classic films of all time. And it should be remembered in that context. But it’s portrayal of the Antebellum South and its depiction of slavery is atrocious, Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar notwithstanding. It’s not a history lesson.
I feel like I know Ms. _____ reasonably well, and I’m surprised, to say the least. No idea what’s going on here, or why GwtW would be the film of choice, even if one does choose to coast the rest of the year. (State-mandated standardized testing, which seems to be the tail that wags the dog, wrapped up last week.) There are much better, more historically accurate films out there, although they may not be do-able for the classroom. Glory, for example, is rated R; although the violence in it is probably not more gruesome than what’s seen on prime-time broadcast teevee, an R-rated film is a non-starter in the classroom. Gettysburg came out just four years later, and it’s only PG.
What’s done is done for this year, but I think I’ll drop a note to Ms. _____. I really hate to be one of those parents who’s always getting up in the teacher’s face, and the plain truth of the matter is that we’ve rarely had reason to complain. But there’s got to be something better than this.
__________________
Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
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