Heroes and Cowards by Costa Dora L.;Kahn Matthew E.;

Author:Costa, Dora L.;Kahn, Matthew E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

Costs of Social Networks

Was there a “dark side” to friendship? Were the most effective groups gangs who robbed and murdered their fellow prisoners? Sneden described the Andersonville Raiders as being “all strong, as they bought food from the sutler and other dealers with stolen money, or robbed some poor prisoner of his whole stock of food.”105 “They had the great advantage . . . of being well acquainted with each other.”106 To fight the Raiders, the POWs, led by Sergeant Leroy Key, an Illinois cavalryman, organized a prison defense force. When a newcomer to the camp was robbed and severely beaten on June 28, 1864, the prison commander armed these “regulators” with clubs and, with the assistance of Confederate soldiers, the hunt for the Raiders within the stockade was on. Once captured, they were held by Confederate guards and then tried by a jury of prison newcomers. On July 11, 1864, six of the Raiders were hanged.107 Although most diaries note an improvement in crime rates after the capture of the Raiders, we do not observe any accompanying decline in deaths. (By August, men were complaining about the large rations the regulators drew and the replacement of the Westerners who founded the organization with “the rounders of New York and Brooklyn,” men cut from the same cloth as the Raiders.108

If bigger groups can steal from stronger groups, a larger group is at an advantage in fighting for a limited set of resources. But our evidence suggests that the first few friends are the most important. Men were not fighting for a limited set of resources within POW camps—there was exchange with the outside world and theft from it.

Social networks imposed costs on their members. One way to survive was to collaborate with the enemy. In the extreme case this meant joining the Confederate army. Sneden commented on one recruitment effort: “If any of us had showed any symptoms of recruiting to the Rebels, he would have been murdered at once by his comrades.”109 Samuel Murdock, in Lehman Josephson’s company, was sent to Salisbury, where he joined the Confederate army. At the end of the 1800s he returned to County Down in Ireland, where he lived until 1908. Out of more than 3,000 captives, we observe only seventeen enlistments in the Confederate army, all out of Salisbury. The men who enlisted were more likely to be foreign-born, to be wealthier, to be nonfarmers, and to have been caught with fewer comrades. We find no evidence that the number of friends affected whether an individual was one of the 140 men in our data set (out of 329) who escaped from Andersonville.

Stearns reported that some men remained POWs in order not to abandon their comrades:

One incident I remember, which occurred at the time we were signing parole papers at Goldsboro’. There were some of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts among those who went to sign, and the Rebel officer made them turn back, saying, “We don’t parole niggers!” Just behind them, but ahead of

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