Viewing the Civil War

 by Susan Zehnder, Education Director

How did Americans experience the Civil War away from the battlefield? Earlier this spring we hosted our annual Civil War Lecture series online. This year’s talks examined how viewers participated in the war through practices of reading, mapmaking, and prison tourism, and how prisoner of war memoirs shaped public understanding after the war. The three talks are now available to watch as one or in parts, and can be found on both our Facebook page and YouTube channel. Each talk is around twenty minutes and offers a new way to view events that took place over one hundred and fifty years ago. Here’s a brief description to entice you to watch them, or watch them again and share.

Dr. Jillian S. Caddell

Our first speaker was Dr. Jillian S. Caddell. Dr. Caddell’s Civil War talk “To Follow with Eye and Pencil: Experiencing the Civil War from Home” showcased alternative ways that American citizens participated in the war by following accounts published in newspapers or telegrams. Viewers recorded the events on specially printed Marking maps.

As she mentions in her talk’s introduction, Dr. Caddell is familiar with the work we do at the Chemung County Historical Society. She also discovered a personal connection with our area, finding a Confederate relative buried in nearby Woodlawn National Cemetery. She reflects on this personal experience in a wonderful C19 podcast she did on SoundCloud titled “Monumentalizing John W. Jones.” Dr. Caddell is also one of the 2021 Mark Twain Fellows at the Center for Mark Twain Studies and scheduled to speak in Elmira in the fall.

More about Dr. Caddell's scholarship looking at 19th century literature, concurrent history, and how it affected and influenced a sense of place can be found here. 

Dr. Michael P. Gray

Our second speaker was Dr. Michael Gray, a professor at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Gray’s talk “Looking Over the Deadline: The Rise of Elmira Prison as a Dark Tourist Destination in the Chemung Valley” considered another kind of viewer participation. Rather than viewing the war through telegrams and reports, Gray’s viewers participated by gawking. They paid money to climb observatory platforms and view the prisoners. These viewers were encouraged to mock, insult, and even throw objects at the prisoners, despite military rules prohibiting this kind of behavior. While not unique to Elmira’s Civil War prison, as Dr. Gray points out, it was practiced enthusiastically and profitably here. Unlike Dr. Caddell’s sympathetic viewers who followed along, these were viewers who wanted to participate directly in the war and were frustrated by social barriers.

Dr. Gray has been series editor on Voices of the Civil War for University of Tennessee Press for over a decade and has published multiple books and writings on the Civil War, including The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison published by Kent State University Press, in 2001. His Civil War talk for us was from part of a new chapter in Carceral Footprints Left in the Civil War North: Trappings of the Camp Douglas and Elmira Prison Environs published this spring by Kansas University Press.

Dr. Angela M. Riotto

Our third speaker was Dr. Angela Riotto, a historian with the Army University Press in Kansas, Missouri. Her talk was titled "Poor Helpless Soldiers at their Mercy: Survivors of Elmira and their Memories of Captivity." Viewers in Dr. Riotto’s talk were the Confederate prisoners themselves. Using primary sources in the form of narratives and diaries, she looked at how prisoner views and recollections shapeshifted after the war. During their imprisonment, prisoners made few references of blame in their personal writings, but after the war many feared their confederate cause would be lost. Many prisoner recollections changed to blame, and the shift reinforced common tropes of intentional evil. Rewriting their own experiences affected a public understanding of prisoner experiences, and overall view of the war.

Dr. Riotto has contributed to many books on the Civil War, including The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans published by LSU Press in April, 2020, and more recently, Useful Captives: The Role of POWs in American Military Conflicts published this past February by University of Press, Kansas.

CCHS was honored to host these three speakers from very different parts of the world. Each speaker’s email is posted in the recorded talk and they encourage and welcome any questions and comments.

We do regret they can’t hear our applause.

The Smallpox Epidemic at the Elmira Prison Camp

By Gary Emerson

Speaker in 2020 CCHS Civil War Speaker Series

Schuyler County Historian

PhD candidate in American History at Binghamton University

(Mr. Emerson has recorded his Civil War talk for us to post on our video page of Facebook on 4/30, this timely blog highlights some of the topic he will cover.)

 The smallpox epidemic that struck the Elmira Prison Camp during the Civil War provides a didactic message for the present. With the proper precautions, the epidemic could have been managed with a minimal loss of life, but without the preventative steps or proper social distancing the virus spread and became the third leading killer at the prison camp. 

Elmira Prison Camp

Smallpox was a feared disease in the 19^th century. Before the rise of germ theory, medical science did not know what caused smallpox and had no cure for it. To this day, there is no cure. The only available tool was prevention. Isolation, vaccination, and inoculation were the main methods of smallpox prevention, and they were applied too late at Elmira. 

All Civil War prison camps were visited by smallpox, with most experiencing similar problems in bringing it under control, even though the means for preventing it were widely known. The spread of crowd diseases, like smallpox, became one of the unintended consequences of the decision to establish military prison camps during the war, as nature and the environment became another enemy to battle with.

The presence of smallpox in the prison camp presented the possibility that it could spread to the civilian population in Elmira. By good fortune it did not, but the city leaders took the precaution of establishing a pest house to allow for the isolation of any cases that should crop up. The Elmira pest house was maintained into the early 20^th century as a first line of defense whenever smallpox or any other contagious disease visited the area.

Today, we must defend against a new virus that threatens our well-being. Many of the lessons applicable in 1865 are still important in our current response to covid-19. Let us hope that people heed those lessons well to lessen the impact of the illness, while we wait for a vaccine to bolster our arsenal against it.

Join our Facebook page on Thursday April 30^th at 7 pm for a recorded talk by Gary Emerson.

The Great Escape

By Rachel Dworkin, Archivist

At 3:30 am on the morning of October 7, 1864, a man emerged from a hole on a side street by the northern fence of the Elmira Prison Camp. He was Washington B. Traweek, a nineteen-year-old private from Alabama who had been captured while serving with the Jeff Davis Artillery. There were Union guards on patrol across the street, but they never noticed him as he snuck along the fence before fleeing around a convenient corner.  He was soon followed by nine other men, the last emerging around 4:30 am. It was the single largest escape from the North’s most secure prisoner-of-war camp. 

The escape plot began on August 24^th when John F. Maull, John P. Putegnat, and Frank E. Saurine all swore a secret oath to dig together. Traweek joined them almost immediately. The four men started digging the tunnel from Maull and Putegnat’s tent located approximately 68 feet from the camp’s northern stockade wall. The digging was exceptionally slow going so they recruited six additional men, S. Cecrops Malone, Gilmer G. Jackson, William H. Templin, J.P. Scruggs, Glen Shelton, and James W. Crawford, to help out.  Berry Benson of South Carolina joined the team in early September after he spotted Traweek disposing of rocks from the tunnel and asked to be let in.

Berry Benson in his old uniform after the war.

The tunnel took months to dig. Two men would go down into the tunnel where one man would dig with a pocket knife while another would load the dirt into a bag made from a spare shirt. The team up top would unload the dirt into their pockets to be disposed of later around camp and then send the bag back down. Working in the tunnel was deeply unpleasant. In his memoir, Benson said it was “next to death by suffocation to go into it.” The tunnel was so narrow that the digger’s body blocked the flow of air leaving the digger sweltering hot and struggling for oxygen. Diggers came up with racking headaches, dizziness, and vomiting and needed to be relieved every 15 to 20 minutes. 

The bag used to move dirt with insets of John P. Putegnat during and after the war.

In mid-September, Traweek and Putegnat dug a second tunnel from the newly constructed hospital, this time with a spade. They made it to the wall in just two nights but, before they could gather their friends to get them out, the tunnel was discovered. Traweek was thrown in the camp’s jail and the guards conducted a camp-wide search for additional tunnels. Twenty-eight were discovered, but not the team’s tunnel which was concealed by a carefully preserved chunk of turf held in place by a plank just below the surface. 

Traweek was released from the camp jail in late September to rejoin his fellows. By this time, Saurine had been kicked off the team for refusing to dig. It turned out to be a bad decision on his part. All of the tunnel conspirators made it out and away. Maull, Jackson, and Templin made their way south together on foot, as did Traweek and Crawford. Somehow Malone and Putegnat got turned around and ended up in Ithaca. They headed still further north before taking jobs in Auburn and using their earnings to travel to Baltimore by train and boat. Benson and Scuggs both made their own ways home alone while Shelton seemingly dropped off the face of the earth.

The escape was discovered during roll call on the morning of October 7^th and threw the camp into an uproar. Guards frantically searched the camp and surrounding area for the tunnel and missing men. Wild rumors circulated among the prisoners. One prison diarist, Wilbur Grambling, wrote that 25 men had escaped, each with a stolen horse. 

Morning roll call at the Elmira Prison Camp

Although many others tried to replicate their feat, theirs was the last successful tunnel escape at the camp. Seven other men managed to make their way to freedom by various other methods. One smuggled himself out in a swill barrel. Another stole a Union sergeant’s overcoat and strolled out the front gate without being challenged. The most brazen escape was by a man named Buttons who faked his own death and jumped out of a coffin on the way to the cemetery.