Part 3:
The prison atrocity issue became a serious topic of public debate in 1863 with the collapse of the prisoner exchange cartel over the failure by the Confederacy to treat captured black soldiers as prisoners of war and the perception that returning prisoners South only prolonged the war. Unfortunately, the debate was largely propaganda driven, with each side accusing the other of committing atrocities.
Even visual images conveyed a sense that evil was being committed only by the other side. Cloyd writes:
Most photographs or cartoons published during the war years depicted the toll that prison life took on the health and strength of young soldiers. In the North, the circulation of the shocking images of emaciated troops, who had been hale and hearty when they left home, often conveyed the harsh reality of prison life better than any article could. Beginning in 1863, a series of illustrations appeared in Harper’s Weekly confirming the rumors of prison evils taking place in the Confederacy. That December, one of the early drawings showed a ragged group of Union prisoners at Belle Isle, in Richmond. Most of them sat or lay prone on the ground, half naked, without the strength or desire to move. Two other prisoners stood, weakly, clutching each other for support. The gloomy scene revealed a world of brutality and deliberate cruelty as the northern soldiers helplessly awaited their fate. On the front page of the March 5, 1864, edition, a picture of tottering prison escapees, held upright only with the help of Union soldiers, suggested that even these brave, determined individuals—the strongest—barely survived the hell of prison in Dixie. More images in December 1864 and January 1865 followed, focusing northern attention on the pitiful health of the recently exchanged survivors of southern prisons.
When illustrations of Union prisons occasionally appeared, as in the April 15, 1865, issue of Harper’s Weekly, they depicted a much more benign existence. A panoramic drawing of Elmira Prison, in New York, complete with an American flag waving in the breeze, presented a stark contrast to the claustrophobic, graphic images that northern artists offered of the suffering individuals in the South. When a picture focused on Confederate prisoners, as in one rendering of Fort Lafayette, in New York, they sat peacefully inside a comfortable barracks room reading and playing games.
The much cozier image fit the popular opinion in the North, fed by the press, that Confederate prisoners lived in luxury while their counterparts starved and died.75 The sharp contrast indicated the deepening fury of the Civil War. It also showed a stubborn refusal in the North, fueled by the influence of such propaganda, to confront the reality of the evil done in the name of its cause. The anger over the seemingly singularly brutal treatment of northern soldiers in southern prisons, fed by the constant publication of charges and images of atrocity, increased the bitterness and sense of moral outrage that fueled the destruction of the Confederacy during the latter stages of the war.