HISTORY
PRISONERS OF MEMORY: CAMP MORTON, INDIANA, 1862 - 1865
A CREATIVE PROJECT
SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE
MASTER OF ARTS
BY
SADIE JEAN RITCHIE
DR. DOUGLAS SEEFELDT - ADVISOR
BALL STATE UNIVERSITY
MUNCIE, INDIANA
MAY 2015
This project is current available at: http://sjritchie.iweb.bsu.edu/pom/prisonersofmemory/
This project started initially in the Fall of 2013 with Dr. Douglas Seefeldt’s Digital
History graduate seminar. My original project, “Confederate Prisoners in Enemy Memory,”
started very small, and I did very little research, mostly relying on what was easily available as I
focused on mastering new digital research tools. That project focused on the movement of 1,616
POW bodies in Indianapolis, Indiana who had died while prisoners of war at Camp Morton
during the American Civil War. After that project my interest in my topic grew, and the majority
of my research came to focus around memory theory, monuments, public memory, as well as the
primary sources that come from events and places such as the American Civil War and Camp
Morton. The more research I did the more I felt that my work was not only viable, but also very
important. Camp Morton has been mostly forgotten, not only in the state of Indiana and the city
of Indianapolis, but also in the wider world of Civil War history. However, it is hard to believe
that a place where such accused atrocities occurred could be so easily forgotten. Because of this I
decided to focus my research and work on Camp Morton, and attempting to understand why
Camp Morton and the 1,616 POWs that now lay at rest in Indianapolis have been largely
forgotten.
Up to this point my research had taken many different routes. The first was the actual
movement of bodies, the second attempt was to understand the role that monuments play in
remembering the past, present, and future, and also the role of public memory in commemorating
past events. All of these areas of study are deeply connected, especially when they are all
focused on one event and place in time. With this in mind I set out looking for relevant primary
source material. I have stacks of secondary source material that my research has uncovered;
however, there was a very serious lack of primary source material, and to some extent there still
2 is. I felt that primary sources would allow me to better understand why Camp Morton and the
deceased POWs were forgotten. I looked for diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and correspondence.
All four of these primary source types fell into one of four categories that related to my work.
This was not easy. As my project states, there is a serious lack of primary sources, especially
diaries and correspondence coming from Camp Morton. To compound this problem, the majority
of the sources that do exist are held out of state since most Confederate POWs returned to their
southern home states after their release. Once many of these sources were obtained, the
information that was held within them was not always satisfactory. In order for a primary source
to be useful in understanding Camp Morton the source must have information about the prison.
Many prisoners did not write about their daily life beyond the weather being “pleasant” or “bad,”
and often commenting quickly on rations. At first, this lack of information within the sources is
maddening; however, it quickly became apparent that this contributed to the lack of memory of
Camp Morton.
Once I had a significant amount of sources in hand I began to work with them. Reading,
transcribing, and also using text analysis to allow a better understanding of the sources was the
second major step. As I read, transcribed, and worked with my sources the answers to my
questions became clear. Camp Morton had been a significant prison during the Civil War. It
started initially as a temporary prison for the overflow of Camp Douglas; it soon became a
permanent prison that was over capacity for most of its use. The primary sources also made it
clear why Camp Morton had been so easily forgotten. There were few diaries that survived
Camp Morton and the time since, those that are left give little insight into the world of a POW –
be it from lack of education or lack of want to write, these diaries give little information to help
better understand what the conditions were like. Correspondence are also difficult to find – they
3 too give little insight into prison life. However, the primary sources that fall into the category of
memoirs play an entirely different role. Memoirs have their own special category because they
are the memories of an individual who experienced the event first hand, but often the memories
are put to paper much later in time, so they must be scrutinized carefully before being deemed
true or trustworthy. Memoirs are not that hard to find. Some come in the long form of books and
autobiographies, others are much shorter, appearing as magazine articles or a single chapter of a
book. All of these works were not only read and studied, but almost all of them were run through
the text analysis tool Voyant. Voyant allowed me to easily search and compare different texts.
Also, I was able to isolate specific words to see how they were used, and how individuals with
different intents could use them differently.
With my research complete and my questions answered I needed a way to display my
work. I knew that my initial digital project format would work, but that it would need serious
updating so that it could allow my work to be displayed properly. While my first project was
created fairly easily with software that did most of the work for me, this time I decided to find a
CSS template that would be better suited to my needs and then made further changes to it myself.
After adding my text, visualization, and other tools that I know make my work easier to
understand and more hands on, I had a completed project. I have included the files of my project
along with this essay as part of my CRPRJ 698 submission.
4 Sources and Data
Sources
Camp Morton Primary Sources
Burke, Curtis R. Diary: 219–228. Indiana Historical Society Archives, M0903, Box 1, Folder 3.
Cunningham, S. A. Confederate Veteran XIV, no. 9 (September 1906): 394.
Dundas, W. S. “Life in Camp Morton.” Confederate Veteran XIII, no. 6 (June 1905): 265-266.
Graham, W. M. “Twenty-Sixth Mississippi Regiment.” Confederate Veteran XV, no. 4 (April
1907): 169.
Hickman, Col. John P. “Confederate Soldiers’ Experience.” Confederate Veteran XX, no. 3
(March 1912): 113.
Montgomery, J. J. “Daring Deeds of a Confederate Soldier.” Confederate Veteran VII no. 1
(January 1898): 11-12.
Shepard, Evander “Pluck.” “Recollections of Camp Morton.” Confederate Veteran VII, no. 5
(May 1900): 211.
Wyeth, John Allen. With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon. New
York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1914.
Camp Morton Secondary Sources
Hall, James R. Den of Misery: Indiana’s Civil War Prison. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing
Company, 2006.
Speer, Lonnie R. Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War. Lincoln, Nebraska:
University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Winslow, Hattie Lou, and Joseph R. H. Moore. Camp Morton 1861-1865: Indianapolis Prison
Camp. Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana Historical Society, 1995.
5 Civil War Memory Studies
Blight, David W. Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory & the American Civil War. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
Brown, Thomas J. The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with
Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004.
Cloyd, Benjamin G. Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory. Baton Rouge,
Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2010.
Desjardin, Thomas A. These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American
Memory. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003.
Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York:
Vintage Civil War Library, 2008.
Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the
New South 1865-1913. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Gallagher, Gary W. “Shaping Public Memory of the Civil War: Robert E. Lee, Jubal A. Early,
and Douglas Southall Freeman,” The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture. Eds.
Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Grant, Susan-Mary. “Patriot Graves: American National Identity and the Civil War Dead,”
American Nineteenth Century History 5, no.3 (Fall 2004): 74-100.
Janney, Caroline E. Burying The Dead But Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Association & the
Lost Cause. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
McCurry, Stephanie. “Why do we love our CIVIL WAR?.” Civil War Times Vol. 51, No. 5. Pp.
60-65.
Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in NineteenthCentury America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Shackel, Paul. Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post-Bellum
Landscape. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003.
6 Silber, Nina. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Wiener, Jon. “Civil War, Cold War, Civil Rights: The Civil War Centennial in Context, 19601965,” The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture. Eds. Alice Fahs and Joan
Waugh. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
History and Memory
Blustein, Jeffrey. The Moral Demands of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008.
Bodnar, John. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the
Twentieth Century. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Cubitt, Geoffrey. History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.
Dickinson, Greg, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott, eds. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of
Museums and Memorials. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010.
Doss, Erika. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2010.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012.
Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1991.
Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the
Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Le Goff, Jacques. History and Memory. Translated by Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Linenthal, Edward T., and Tom Engelhardt, eds. History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles
for the American Past. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996.
Linenthal, Edward T. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust
Museum. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
7 Linenthal, Edward T. Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields. 2d ed. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Loewen, James W. Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. New York: Simon
& Schuster, Inc., 1999.
Lowenthal, David. Possessed by The Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New
York: Free Press, 1996.
Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985.
Mayo, James M. “War Memorials as Political Memory.” Geographical Review, Vol. 78, No. 1
(January, 1988), pp. 62-75.
Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993.
Data
Visualization and Text Analysis: While my project only exhibits a hand full of visualizations,
many sources (both shown and not) had text analysis performed on them for research purposes.
Voyant Text Analysis of Curtis R. Burke Diary and the word “pleasant”
Voyant Text Analysis of Confederate Veteran Magazine articles and the word “rations”
Voyant Text Analysis of “Cold Cheer at Camp Morton” and “Reply to Cold Cheer at Camp
Morton” and the word “rations”
Google Ngram Viewer Visualizations of words related to Confederate POWs used from 19252000
Timeglider – timeline located on “Camp Morton” page
Google Map Engline Lite – map located on “Public Memory” page
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