Confederates in the Attic (48 page)

The same wasn’t true now, at least in the town of Conyers, where I stopped to attend a Sons of Confederate Veterans meeting at the Masonic Hall. The session began with an SCV commander hurling firebolts at enemies of the South, most of whom seemed to reside in nearby Atlanta—or “the occupied city,” as he called it. He griped about Atlanta’s liberal newspaper, “The Journal and Constipation,” and about Georgia’s governor, who once called for changing the state flag. “We are a unique people,” he concluded to loud applause, “and others are jealous because they don’t have the heritage we have.”

The night’s main speaker, Mauriel Joslyn, was a Georgia author who had studied the wartime diaries and letters of Confederates captured in the War. A slim woman with a prim bun, octagonal glasses and a long dress topped by a frilly neckline, she looked rather like my image of Emily Dickinson. “I had twenty-five forebears who fought in the War,” Joslyn began, warming up her audience. “We always say we gave a regiment.” Then, as prelude to her talk, she performed a peculiar call-and-response. Mixing recent news stories about Bosnia with accounts of Sherman’s March, she asked the audience to guess each time if the perpetrators were Serbs or Yankees.
“Her husband was a captain in the opposing army,” Joslyn read. “She was sick in bed when two soldiers entered her room. They raped her and she later died in a mental hospital.” Joslyn paused. “Yankees or Serbs?” (Yankees).

“Drunkenness is rampant. Many soldiers are drawn by the promise of pillage and roaming at will, and are responsible for many of the atrocities committed against civilians.” Sherman’s bummers or Serbian gunners? (Serbs).

This went on for fifteen minutes. Like most in the audience I guessed wrong half the time. “So you see,” Joslyn concluded, “there isn’t much difference between what Sarajevo and Georgia suffered.”

The main subject of Joslyn’s talk was an oddly gentle contrast to the atrocities she’d just catalogued. While researching a group of captured rebels, she’d found that the prisoners kept up a lively correspondence with Northern women. Many of the men had been injured and captured at Gettysburg. Recuperating in Pennsylvania, often for months, they were nursed by young women from Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York who stayed in touch after the men were shipped to Northern prison camps.

The correspondence became quite formalized. If a prisoner was released, he’d pass on the name of his pen pal to a fellow inmate. The women also swapped their correspondents’ names. One Northern woman, jealous of her letter-writing friends, went to visit Fort Delaware (viewing rebel prisoners was a curiosity excursion for civilians) and tossed a cored apple to one of the Confederates. Inside the fruit was a $10 bill and her address. “He was cute—I have his picture,” Joslyn said of the prisoner. The two corresponded for several years and married following the War.

Intrigued by Joslyn and by her unusual research, I went to visit her home the next day in a town called Sparta. “Excuse the mess—it’s always 1860-something in this house,” she said, leading me into a kitchen cluttered with reenactors’ uniforms, Civil War calendars, and piles of books. Joslyn wrote for the local paper, and her husband worked as a soil scientist. But their true calling was the Civil War.

“Either we’re reading something or we’re getting ready for a reenactment,” she said. “It’s almost like we’ve adopted a different
code of behavior. To me, the modern South is like a curtain I’m always trying to see through to what was there before.”

Joslyn unearthed a sheaf of Confederate prisoners’ letters to Northern women that she’d gathered at various archives. Many of the letters began “Dear Cousin” or “Dear Aunt”—a way to dodge prison-camp rules against writing to nonrelatives. The letters also steered clear of politics or details about the War. This, too, was a way to avoid censorship. But Joslyn suspected the correspondents also weren’t keen to dwell on their regional differences.

“They had other things on their mind,” she said. “Literature, art, and flirting like crazy.” One suave Mississippian wrote wistfully to a Northern woman of missing “those endearing scenes, those enchanting beauties that give the youthful heart its buoyancy.” He begged his pen pal to send him “a copy of Shakespeare or Byron,” and enclosed locks of his golden hair. Joslyn sighed. “I’d like to have met him.”

James Cobb, a dashing Texan, inherited a correspondent named Cora from a fellow prisoner. The two strangers exchanged photographs and quickly fell in love, writing at the same time each Sunday while gazing at each other’s picture. “I walked in the (prison) yard until long after nightfall, with no companion save the invisible one which I felt to be near,” Cobb wrote. “But oh, how unsatisfying is all this! There is still the restless longing for her actual presence.” By late 1864, Cobb was addressing his pen pal as “my dear Cora” and telling her, “Think of all you would have me to say, & imagine it said.”

For a time, Cobb also wrote to a friend of Cora’s named Allison, a tease who enjoyed the tension her letters created on the homefront. When a suitor arrived as she was writing, Allison told the man to wait until she finished her letter—all of which she reported in delicious detail to Cobb. “If you were here and he could get hold of you, I would not answer for the consequences!” Allison’s beau became so jealous that Cobb ended their correspondence, gallantly writing, “I do not desire to be the cause of a quarrel between lovers.”

Joslyn said these letters had punctured her stereotypes about relations between the sexes in the 1860s. “There’s a frankness and flirtatiousness that isn’t what we think of as Victorian,” she said. “And
the men aren’t talking down to these women at all. They write as equals.” Perhaps, too, they felt liberated by their unusual circumstances. “They’re probably much more intimate in these letters than if they’d been courting with all the formality that surrounded it in those days,” Joslyn said.

The men also were tender with each other. Letters told of prisoners who washed clothes for fellow inmates, or taught them ballroom dance. “They even had exercise classes, sort of Jack LaLanne at Point Lookout,” Joslyn said, referring to a Maryland prison. “And I’ve got letters the men later wrote to each other signed ‘best love.’ These guys obviously didn’t have the stigma we have today about men showing affection for each other.”

They’d also overcome the stigma of writing to civilians in enemy territory. If anything, the divide between North and South spiced the correspondence. “For the women, those ‘awful rebs’ were forbidden fruit,” Joslyn said. The same was true for the men; Northern women were often stereotyped in the South as trollops or Puritans—or both, in the manner of Hester Prynne. “So this was all very titillating for both sides,” Joslyn said.

The letter writing was also sustained by deprivation on the one hand and compassion on the other. One rebel thanked his pen pal for sending peaches, then asked haltingly for money. “It is something I never had to do before,” he wrote, promising to repay the loan, “if I am permitted to live.” His correspondent feared the money would be confiscated, but answered, “I pity you, being a stranger in a strange land, though you are a rebel and fighting against us.”

Even more poignant than the letters were autograph albums the women sent for prisoners to sign. Often, the men put the words “unmarried” or “nairy wife, nairy child” beside their names. “There are three things I desire with an exceeding longing,” one man wrote. “A Sword, a Wife and my Freedom.” A Virginian wrote, “I am 22 and still single, but live in hopes.” He died soon after from dysentery. Joslyn closed the album, teary-eyed. “My fellahs were always fishing,” she said.

Few succeeded in catching anything. Those who didn’t perish in prison returned to poverty-stricken homes and long-lost families. One destitute rebel waited six years after the War, scraping together
money to set up a household before proposing to his pen pal. She accepted.

More typical, though, was the story of James and Cora, the couple who corresponded so passionately while gazing at each other’s photographs. “I do earnestly hope,” James wrote in December 1864, “that ere another Christmas shall have come, the longings of this one will have been displaced by full fruition!” Before the next Christmas he was indeed free and traveled to Philadelphia to meet Cora. But after a brief stay, James returned South and married a local woman. The two pen pals never saw each other again. When Cora married, she returned all James’s letters. Then James’s wife gave birth to a daughter, whom he named Cora. “I’d give my right arm,” Joslyn said, “to know the rest of that story.”

I was curious to hear more of Joslyn’s. I wondered why she and other women I’d met, beginning with Sue Curtis in North Carolina, were so obsessed with the War’s prisoners—a side of the conflict few men seemed passionate about. In fact, given that 400,000 men were captured during the War, almost twice the toll of combat dead, the fate of POWs was arguably the most neglected aspect of the conflict.

“This may sound sexist,” Joslyn said, “but my theory is that men like the Civil War because it’s an action story, they’re caught up in the battlefield drama. The prisoners are an emotional side of the War. Women are attracted to all that raw feeling, we understand it better, it brings out a mothering instinct.” She fingered the autograph album. “Remember, a lot of these soldiers were still boys, not yet twenty, starving in Northern prison camps, with no idea of when if ever they’d get home. More than anything, these guys desperately needed their mommies.”

Joslyn’s own love life had imitated her research. A tomboy who liked playing war as a child (“The boys were bullies, so they always played the Yankees”), she’d met her future husband while dating a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute. “My date said he had a roommate with a Civil War musket. That was Rick. I always say I married him for his gun.”

Actually, they’d fallen in love later, while writing letters during Rick’s air force service. There was another parallel; Rick’s family came from up North. Luckily, he discovered he had a distant forebear
who might have fought for the South. “It was almost a criterion of our getting married,” Joslyn said. She’d saved all their letters, but planned to burn them someday. “I don’t want anyone studying us the way I’ve been studying my fellahs.”

Joslyn gave me a signed copy of the book she’d written about rebel prisoners. It had been published with little fanfare by a small press. “Almost a collector’s item,” she joked. I asked how she felt about laboring in relative obscurity.

Joslyn pondered this for a moment, squinting through her octagonal glasses. “I take the long view,” she said. “People like me, we’re the keepers of the past, like those monks with their Latin books back in the Dark Ages. Or maybe like the folks in Eastern Europe who kept their real history and religion alive after the Russian Revolution and all the attempts to purge the past. Now that Communism’s gone, the truth is coming out of the archives.”

I wasn’t sure I caught the analogy. Leningrad seemed a long way from Point Lookout. But not to Joslyn. “To me, Civil War historians—Northern ones at least—are locking away the facts, too,” she said. “So little people like me have to keep the true story alive. That way, when the Revolution ends, and people come looking for the history, we can say, ‘Here it is. We kept it for you.’”

R
EADING
J
OSLYN’S BOOK
that night at a roadside motel, I better understood what she meant. Prisoners’ love letters didn’t figure much in her book, except to illustrate the horrors of Northern POW camps. This, in turn, was part of a broader mission: to redress the distorted picture most Americans had of Civil War POWs, derived from “myths” about Andersonville and its commander, Henry Wirz. In the view of Joslyn and the Southern historians she cited, rebel prisoners suffered far more than Union ones, and the North was responsible for the misery of both blue and gray inmates because of its cruel policies regarding prisoner exchange.

Most of this was news to me. Roughly 13,000 prisoners died from starvation and disease at Andersonville, and Henry Wirz went to the gallows as a war criminal, the only man so charged in American history. Refurbishing his reputation, and that of the prison camp
he commanded, seemed an exceptionally quixotic mission, notwithstanding the South’s passion for lost causes.

So I abandoned Sherman’s March and headed instead for Andersonville, near Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains in Georgia’s rural southwest. Winding slowly out of upland Georgia and into the fertile prairie beyond, I felt as though I’d been here before. The crops might change, but the roadscape on small highways appeared much the same from southern Virginia to western Arkansas: single-wide trailers with satellite dishes, low brick ranches with home-based businesses (beauty parlor, blade-sharpening, fish taxidermy, towing and recovery), white-frame churches with exclamatory sermon signs (“Presenting Jesus!”), flyspeck settlements—“Welcome to Forkland. Town of Opportunities. Pop 764”—abandoned to time and kudzu vines and men in bib overalls loitering before a faded Gas and Gro (“Tank and Tummy—Fill Em Up”). Then a small town with a stone rebel on the square and a “family restaurant” serving plate lunches of chicken and dumplings, candied yams, turnip greens, pear salad and pecan pie. Then fields and woods again.

It was foolish to speak of “one South,” just as it was to speak of one North. The former states of the Confederacy encompassed dozens of subcultures, from the Hispanic enclaves of Florida and Texas, to the Cajun country of south Louisiana, to the hardscrabble hills of Appalachia. Still, the geographic kinship between far-flung stretches of the backcountry South offered some clue to the cohesion and resilience the region displayed during the Civil War, and to the South’s cherishing of Confederate memory ever since.

Nearing Andersonville, I was momentarily blinded by what looked like a snow flurry: bolls of cotton blowing across the road from a just-picked field. This, too, was a reminder of what had once bound the rural South together. Cotton was enjoying a comeback in the South and the crop always came as a small miracle to me. It seemed incredible that these perfect white blobs sprouted straight from nature, and that something so natural could at the same time seem so artificial.