Communication in War: How Harper's Weekly Reported on Andersonville from 1864 to 1865

The unifying theme of this thesis is human communication in war, specifically the American Civil War. History can be seen as studies of past communications and the actions that preceded and followed such communications. Scholars of the Civil War era are limited with regard to their source material compared to scholars that might be studying the twentieth century, or today. Today’s historians can tap a plethora of media that hold traces of human communication: videotape, television, tape recordings, letters, and other forms of written communication. Not all of these are available to scholars studying the Civil War. This thesis adopts a limited perspective by focusing on human communication as depicted in Harper’s Weekly, illustrated newspaper, and how it reported on atrocities perpetuated on Union soldier prisoner of war at Andersonville, Camp Sumter. Following an introductory chapter, this text proceeds with chapters on the development of Journalism in America, the chronological path to war, chapter three is the soldiers’ experience, and finally a chapter regarding Andersonville, the prisoner of war camp maintained by the Confederacy during the last fourteen months of the war. More than 30,000 union troops endured malnourishment, disease and cruel and unusual punishment at this camp. Captain Henry Wirz, the commandant of the camp was hanged for his mistreatment of the prisoners. The Andersonville chapter is based on nine articles from Harper’s Weekly published in 1864 and 1865. These articles were downloaded in a searchable digital format, from a commercial source. They were carefully cleaned of anomalies generated by the use of optical character recognition software during scanning, reviewed for major themes concerning conditions and activities at Andersonville, and finally discussed in narrative format. Many excerpts from the articles are included. These articles are presented in this thesis as historic artifacts.