Glenn Robins - They Have Left Us Here to Die: The Civil War Prison Diary of Sgt. Lyle G. Adair, 111th U.S. Colored Infantry

Series Editor, Lesley J. Gordon, University of Akron

ADVISORY BOARD

William Blair, Pennsylvania State University

Peter S. Carmichael, Gettysburg College

Stephen D. Engle, Florida Atlantic University

J. Matthew Gallman, University of Florida

Elizabeth Leonard, Colby College

Elizabeth Varon, University of Virginia

Joan Waugh, University of California Los Angeles

LYLE G. ADAIR, LIKE SO MANY Civil War soldiers, was a largely unknown figure. A few details about the onetime sergeant of Company B of the 111th United States Colored Infantry can be derived from the fragmentary evidence of the federal census records and his military personnel records. An exception to the lack of primary source material is Adairs self-titled diary Seven Months in Prison, which recounts in vivid detail his experiences as a prisoner of war in the Confederate prison camps of the Deep South.

There were a combined 409,608 prisoners of war; the North held 214,865 and the South held 194,743. From September 1864 to April 1865, Sgt. Lyle Adair was held in five of these prisons: Cahaba, Millen, Blackshear, Thomasville, and Andersonville. In many of these camps, Union war prisoners encountered great hardships as they faced incarceration without adequate food, clothing, shelter, or medical treatment. Those who survived held to the possibility of being paroled or exchanged. But for most, including Sergeant Adair, that dream only came to fruition after months of captivity and toward the literal end of the war.

A relatively small number of Civil War prisoners published accounts of their captivity experience. Although twenty-six accounts appeared in 1865 and 1866, production slowed in the 1870s, and while former prisoners continued to offer their stories to the reading public, the yearly average of the decade of the 1880s and 1890s was less than two published accounts per year. A variety of motives inspired the former prisoners to construct written records of their plights. Some were driven by a desire to document the patriotism of captured soldiers, others hoped to bear witness to deliberate mistreatment at the hands of brutal captors, and many sought to establish testimony necessary for securing a government pension. Because of the legitimate concerns over the credibility of postwar narratives, the Adair diary offers a less distorted and more reliable interpretation of the prisoner-of-war experience.

This book is not a biography of Lyle Adair. The primary purpose of They Have Left Us Here to Die was to transcribe Adairs diary, add contextual annotations, and provide an analytical paradigm for interpreting the Civil War prisoner-of-war experience. In

In most instances, I have reproduced the diarys original formatting. At the start of the diary, Adair employed a narrative style, and not until November 4, 1864, did he begin the process of the more traditional daily diary entries. Therefore, I provided artificial breaks for ease of reading. I also inserted the chapter divisions and chapter titles, but all other headings were written by Adair. Aside from some necessary punctuation, I have made no corrections to the text of the diary. Rather than riddle the diary with the corrective [sic], I preserved the misspellings of such words and places as forrest, Johnston Island, Fort Sumpter, and, most notably, Henry Wirtz. I have also omitted three poems that Adair composed after his release, in January and February of 1867: Dedicated to a Friend on Their 18th Birthday, The Old Bachelors Life, and Musings at Sea.

. Lyle G. Adair Diary, ANDE accession number 484, ANDE catalog number 3686, Andersonville National Historic Site, Andersonville, Georgia (hereafter ANHS).

. A total of 56,194 prisoners died in captivity, 30,218 Union soldiers and 25,976 Confederate soldiers. Charles W. Sanders Jr., While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2005), 1.

. Ibid.

. The Georgia camps were Americus, Andersonville (Camp Sumter), Atlanta, Augusta, Blackshear, Millen (Camp Lawton), Macon (Camp Oglethorpe), Marietta, and Savannah. The Alabama camps were Cahaba, Mobile, Montgomery, and Tuscaloosa. U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington D.C.: GPO, 18801901), ser. II, vol. 8:1004 (hereafter OR).

. Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000), 121, 226.

. William Marvel, Johnny Ransomes Imagination, Civil War History 41 (Sept.1995): 188. See also William B. Hesseltine, The Propaganda Literature of Confederate Prisons, Journal of Southern History 1 (Feb. 1935): 5666.

. Jesse Hawes, Cahaba: A Story of Captive Boys in Blue (New York: Burr, 1888), 461.

. Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1994), 85.

I AM INDEBTED TO MANY for the completion of this book, but, perhaps above all, I am indebted to place. I live a mere fourteen miles from the Andersonville National Historic Site (ANHS). Most do not realize that the ANHS, a component of the National Park Service, is not only the site of the Civil Wars most infamous prison, but it is also the site of an active national cemetery and the National Prisoner of War Museum. To live in southwest Georgia, one must actually strive to ignore the story of Americas prisoners of war. As a Virginian, I am unable to ignore place.