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Elmira, NY Prison Camp
The Post-Standard
(Syracuse, NY)
'This Story Has to Be Told'
Sunday, May 11, 2003
By Laura T. Ryan
Michael Horigan used to be retired. Then he wrote a book about the
Civil War prison camp that operated in Elmira in 1864 and '65, and became a man in demand.
Civil War buffs lined up to hear all about the 10 years of research Horigan devoted to this dark chapter in Elmira history. He gave more than 80
presentations about his research and findings last year, and his dance card is swiftly filling up again.
This week, he speaks in Cortland, East Syracuse and Richmond, Va.
"I think it's because not much has been done on prison camps, and also because Elmira was so bad," Horigan says. "I make it very clear."
The camp, which detained 12,123 Confederate prisoners from July 6,
1864, to July 11, 1865, had a death rate of 24.3 percent - far above the overall
death rate of the nine major camps in the North (11.7), or of all the camps in the South (15.3).
"There were areas of neglect that were done, I think, by design,"
Horigan says.
In his book, Horigan claims prison staff withheld food rations and
appropriate protection against winter conditions, and was also slow to eliminate unsanitary water conditions created by a stagnant pond on the
32-acre camp. Prisoners at Camp Chemung ate two meals a day: coffee, bread and a
piece of salt pork in the morning, and soup and bread at night. Shipments of beef that prison leaders rejected as substandard for
prisoner consumption were later sold in Elmira meat markets to city residents.
"So it makes you wonder," Horigan said.
The agricultural bounty of the Finger Lakes region, just 20 miles north
of Elmira, was there for the picking. But prison officials never picked, Horigan says.
"Newspapers talked about markets here bulging with fresh vegetables and
fruits and these were purposefully withheld from the prisoners," he says.
"So this made it worse in my mind."
Unlike the Confederate-run prison camp in Andersonville, Ga. - also
known for its high death rate - Elmira had good access to public transportation and supplies.
"I say it's worse than Andersonville, because Elmira was not touched by
the war," Horigan says. "It had an excellent transportation system. It was a railroad hub. And it was worse than
Andersonville, because this was done deliberately." Horigan claims the poor conditions at Elmira were created in
retaliation for Andersonville.
Horigan developed an interest in the camp during his 28 years teaching
history at Horseheads High School outside Elmira. For 22 of those years, he also led a one-hour graduate student workshop about the camp at Elmira
College, and his file on the subject grew thicker with each passing year.
"I just couldn't use everything in (the file) in this one-hour
workshop," Horigan says. "I decided in 1987 to do something about it."
He devoted the next several summers to research, which took him from
Maine to Alabama. In 1995, he retired from teaching and devoted himself full-time
to writing. After a couple more years of publisher rejections and painful revisions,
Stackpole Books in Pennsylvania accepted the manuscript and published it in 2002.
"What kept me going was that nobody had ever written anything about
Elmira before, and it was such a tragic chapter in the Civil War," Horigan, 70, says. "And it at times made me angry, because why hasn't this story
been told? ... When my publisher accepted it for publication, I went down there
for a meeting and they said, 'This is great stuff that has never seen the light of day.'
"I kept telling myself this story has to be told."
The details
What: Retired Elmira teacher and author Michael Horigan talks about his 2002 book, "Elmira: Death Camp of the North."
When: 7 p.m. Thursday. Where: New York State United Teachers building, 4983 Brittonfield Parkway, East Syracuse.
Admission: Free.
Sponsored by: Onondaga County Civil War Round Table.
Information: 696-5531.
© 2003 The Post-Standard
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