Prisoners of the Civil War

In his previous book, Civilizing Torture, a history of torture in the United States, W. Fitzhugh Brundage included a chapter on the American Civil War. As a historian of the nineteenth century, Brundage, like many Americans, had some vague notion of the prison camps of the war, above all Andersonville, which is a byword for cruelty and suffering. As he learned more, he realized that the prison camps of the era were a remarkable innovation—a product of modern technology and administrative capacity. But equally important, their existence required audacious imagination and the hubris to contemplate the mass confinement of tens of thousands of prisoners as both practical and conscionable. The prison camps of the Civil War proved to be the harbingers of future prison camps, and indirectly, the eventual treatment of civilians.Prisoners of the Civil War foregrounds the voices of the captives. Such prisoners underwent an experience that no previous Americans (and probably no previous humans) had endured. As the war unfolded, prisoners of war endured, for the first time, long-term incarceration in massive purpose-built camps. The experiences of these detainees were so far outside those of their contemporaries that prisoners labored to find appropriate language, metaphors, and analogies to describe their ordeal. In subsequent wars, war captives could tap an extensive catalog of increasingly familiar tropes—barbed-wire enclosures, guard towers, snarling dogs, and sadistic guards—to portray their internment. Civil War prisoners had no comparable stock of imagery at their disposal. During and after the war they, and their contemporaries who had not been in the camps, struggled to make sense of their unprecedented ordeal. Like the prisoners themselves, this book continues the search for the meaning and legacy of the prison camps.