The Civil War Comes Home

Kasey Cox

When I was eight or nine, my family took a Civil War summer vacation: we visited Gettysburg, Antietam, Harper’s Ferry, Manassas. We toured battlefields. We went to museums that showed artifacts – minie balls and cannon balls, examples of uniforms and swords, flags of various regiments, photos and paintings showing scenes from the critical days. We saw films, wax museums, displays. It was fascinating, and brought history to life for me. I’ve always been thankful to have traveled to these places when I was so young.

What I didn’t realize is how much Civil War history there was to learn about right here in the Twin Tiers.

Because of my father’s ongoing interest in history, and my own interest in books, I knew of MacKinlay Kantor’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Andersonville”, an intricate novel detailing life in and around the infamous prison camp in the South. I learned that the Andersonville Prison was a place of horror, where Union soldiers were taken to die by neglect and appalling conditions. Many of us learn of this, at least in passing, because the North won, and winners get to focus on their perspective of the events, people, and places that make up the stories that become history. And then there are books written – several excellent books have been researched and published on Andersonville – and movies made. Eventually, though, enough time passes and people become interested in their local history without feeling indicted by the shame in it. And so, as Michael Horigan explains in the introduction to his book, “Elmira: Death Camp of the North”, in 1974 he was asked to teach a graduate workshop on the history of the Civil War prison camp in our backyard.

Over the years of teaching this class for Elmira College, Michael Horigan’s file on the prison camp and the history of Elmira leading up to the Civil War grew, as did his interest. After a year-long sabbatical for research, as well as weekends and summers for many years after, Stackpole Books finally published the definitive, authoritative work on the camp where over 12,000 Confederate soldiers were brought to “Helmira”. Horigan’s book is a wonderful testament to the years of work that went in to researching and writing it. Each page, each paragraph, is loaded with details, footnotes, and facts, but the sentences flow smoothly, and the reading never feels weighed down. This is a history which explains and evokes the era, fascinates, elucidates, saddens, cautions, differentiates. Though the Elmira Prison Camp had a death rate almost as high as that of Andersonville, Horigan is careful to explain the differences in the reasons behind those statistics. Ultimately, “Elmira: Death Camp of the North” is a compelling read, because it’s much more than a collection of facts: it’s the story of America cementing its identity as the United States, shown through the microcosm of a town we know.

At the same time that Michael Horigan was preparing his book on the logistics of building a prison camp during the Civil War, another area man was researching how a neighboring town could handle a similar but much happier enterprise – building and maintaining a Soldiers’ Home, where homeless, sick, and/or indigent Civil War veterans of New York State could be cared for with respect and dignity. Robert Yott, himself a Civil War re-enactor, labored to create a book detailing the 125-year history of the Bath Soldiers’ Home. Yott’s book is all the more interesting for its focus on the genesis of the project, how the citizens of Bath organized to bid to be the location of the prestigious Home, how they won the bid over several other locations including Elmira, how they coordinated fundraising efforts with the famous orator Henry Ward Beecher, how the design was cutting edge technology for the time. Thus, this history of the Bath Hospital becomes, like Horigan’s book, a window into life in the Twin Tiers of the time. I encourage you to take a look.

Searching for where the flowers have gone, or just whistlin’ Dixie? Write Hobo with any local Civil War history you know, at from_my_shelf@yahoo.com. Follow the drinking gourd to Hobo’s archived articles at http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com.