I am reading Manhunt By James L. Swanson about the search for Lincoln’s assassin. What is striking to me (about 75% of the way through the book) is that the Feds would arrest, question, and hold suspicious folks. The Army & Feds were enraged and emotional about the crime. Yet the suspects were treated like it was an episode of NYPD – they were ‘sweated’ and threatened with Hanging if they aided Booth’s conspiracy and withheld the information after the fact – but there was apparently no rough stuff…
I know once the actual conspirators were arrested and the problem largely solved they were kept in inhuman isolation conditions – but it wasn’t (really) to extract information as in Where is Booth
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That made me wonder if torture was ever routinely used during the Civil War to extract information – was it?**
I don’t know about torture, but one of the worst tragedies of the war was the Union’s Elmira, NY prison camp, where nearly 3000 prisoners died of malnutrition and disease.
AFAIK, there was little or no direct torture of prisoners. There was still a feeling of chivalry about what was going on, and the idea that you treated your prisoners honorable.
Indeed, for much of the war, prisoners were exchanged: there was an official exchange rate: if the prisoners were all the same rank, they were exchanged one for one, and you’d have to exchange a certain numbers of privates for an officer. The soliders were supposed to stop fighting, but that was impossible to enforce. Grant eliminated the prisoner exchanges when he took command in the East, feeling it only kept the rebels fighting longer.
Elmira in the North and Andersonville in the South were both horrible conditions for the prisoners once the exchanges stopped, but this was due to a lack of supplies more than by any attempt to torture people.
I’d guess there wasn’t a lot of need for torture. Both sides started with a pretty complete knowledge of what the other side had. And both sides had an open press that reported on the conduct of the war. The logistics of the day prevented either side from moving any significant amount of troops without it becoming readily apparent. And information about strategic planning didn’t get discussed with officers in the field. So what information was there to torture a captured enemy for? The only thing I can think of was torturing suspected spies and saboteurs caught working behind the lines to confirm that they were enemy agents. But I don’t think either side developed a big enough spy network for the other side to feel the need to cross the moral line of torture to break it up.
Eighty Acres of Hell was recently shown on the History Channel. Until then I had been under the impression that the Confederacy’s Andersonville was the only place of its kind. If you have a chance to see this program, and if the issue of torture is something you’re truly curious about, it will answer your questions.