MacKinlay Kantor (1904–1977)

I prophesy with all the terrible ardor I can muster: this will be a stench in the nostrils of history.

Perhaps the biggest disgrace in the entire history of the Civil War is the story of Andersonville. I wonder how MacKinlay Kantor bore to do the research and spend the time required with this material in order to tell this story. It is 766 pages of misery, sorrow, and shame.

What is somewhat amazing to me is that he was able to deal even-handedly with the civilian Southerners, who were also caught in this tragedy. There could have been an overwhelming temptation to paint everyone with the same brush, which, of course, would have been unfair but understandable in light of the egregiousness of this trespass against humanity.

Kantor said he began this project with his own experience in World War II in mind. He was among those who freed the camp at Buchenwald, and struggled with what to think of the German citizens who surrounded the camp and its horrors. He certainly did a marvelous job of separating the citizens, flawed though they certainly were, from the officers and guards at Andersonville. I felt it was clear that he believed the atrocities of Andersonville overshadowed any other aspect of leadership in the Southern ranks.

What matters a chivalrous Lee if we have a Winder? What matters the sacrifice of a Hood, if we have a Captain Wirz? What matters the competence of a Johnston or the spiritual strength of a sickly Stephens, if we have at home only the incompetence of venal surgeons, incompetence of a Seddon, frailty and futility of a sickly Seddon.

He has presented us with some very memorable and complex characters in Ira Claffey, Lucy Claffey and Harry Elkins. There is a growth of understanding in these people that one would surely hope to see in any human being bearing even the remotest witness to such a place. Ira, who has lost his three sons to the war and has sufficient reason to hate Northerners, comes full circle and performs several acts of kindness and bravery as he embraces again the idea that we are all humanity, regardless of our origins. And, he finds somewhere in the midst of all this loss and carnage a kind of hope.

But if he put mind and heart into the soil where his sons had gone, and where the human wastage of Andersonville had gone, and where that enormous blood-curdling fraction of America’s young males had gone, North and South--eventually the stalks might rise, toughen; beards would dry out, husks turn to parchment; and those hands who’d made his crop might reach in memory to carry him in salute to the crop, the fields, the earth itself.


Lucy, his daughter, and Harry Elkins, a young surgeon, who struggles with the conditions of the camp and the total lack of concern or decency from the officers, also struggle with how to keep a spark of love alive in the face of so much sorrow and hatred.

“I don’t believe he’s right. Do you? Shouldn’t love be bigger than--? And embrace more than just--? I mean, whether there were a stockade and a hospital or not? Or even a war. Seems like there’ve always been wars going on, one place or another. And boys dying in them. But people still managed to love one another.”

But, this is not primarily a Southern tale, this is to a greater extent a Northern one. Interspersed with the events that are the lives of the families Claffey and Tebbs, Kantor tells us, in detail, the lives of the true victims of this sinkhole, and he paints for us no happy endings, because those were almost unknown in Andersonville. The lives of Eben Dolliver, Edward Blamey, Nathan Dreyfoos, Eric Torrioson are imprinted on me forever, along with the disgusting likes of Willie Collins, who is among those who are hanged by the prisoners themselves for the crimes they commit against their fellows.

The carnage, the suffering, was so extreme, I had to stop often and just take refuge from the camp myself. I kept hoping for someone to escape, someone to prevail, then for someone to just survive, but over and over again, Kantor told me this is fiction that is history and I will not change the outcome for any of these men. I wept when Eric, who tried to escape by pretending to be dead and lying among the rotted bodies in the death house, a feat that was only possible because the living and the dead were almost indistinguishable, became one of their number.

I was elated to read the story of Nazareth Stricker, who is saved by a rebel soldier, Coral Tebbs, in the most unlikely but believable turn of events in the book. But, this elation was tempered by the knowledge of how many, some 14,000 men, had not been so lucky.

The cruelty of General John Winder and Captain Henry Wirz, if even remotely as chronicled, merits them a special place in hell. I feel sure Dante would place them in the seventh circle of hell and we would find them submerged in the boiling blood of human beings, right up to their eyebrows, for all eternity.

I have tried to review this book on its own merits. It is a work of fiction, but based on history. I am not sure anyone actually knows the entire truth of Andersonville. The victors write the history, and there are certainly alternative views of this one, as there are of anything part of a distant war. Noted historian Shelby Foote has said when asked about Andersonville:

“there’s no attention to Camp Chase or any of the northern camps. And that’s wrong. They were almost as bad. And less forgivable, because those prisoners in Andersonville got the rations the Confederate soldier was getting. The southern prisoners in northern camps did not get the rations northern soldiers were getting. Many of the deaths in northern camps were due to cold weather at Lake Michigan and other places where they didn’t have blankets to cover themselves with and so forth.”

Kantor clearly says that the prisoners at Andersonville did not get the same rations as Confederate soldiers, so one or the other of these men is wrong. Kantor is writing fiction, so perhaps this is a license he has taken. No such license is needed--this tragedy is sufficient without embellishment. It is also, however, immaterial whether atrocities were committed elsewhere, nothing erases what happened here. Perhaps it is the sheer numbers that overwhelm; 14,000 men died at Andersonville, 2000 men died at Camp Chase.

Nothing mitigates the horror of war. When will we ever learn?


A note beyond the scope of the book, which ends with the liberation of Andersonville: Henry Wirz was the only officer executed for war crimes in the Civil War.



… (més)

A couple sharpshooters go on a crime spree.

2.5/4 (Okay).

This is remarkably similar to "They Live by Night," which was released the previous year (and which I coincidentally watched last month). This movie has a better story, following a traditional tragedy arc rather than They Live By Night's inescapable existential doom. And the action scenes here are handled better. But They Live By Night had a better cast; it had a love story and a sort of warmth that really made you care about the characters. This movie is stock Noir characters being horny and making bad decisions.

(May 2021)… (més)