About This Book

A Fresh Analysis of the First Large-Scale Imprisonment of Soldiers in Wartime and Its Failures

Over the course of the American Civil War, more than four hundred thousand prisoners were taken by the North and South combined—the largest number in any conflict up to that time, and nearly fifty-eight thousand of these men died while incarcerated or soon after being released. Neither side expected to take so many prisoners in the wake of battles and neither had any experience on how to deal with such large numbers. Prison camps were quickly established, and as the war progressed, reports of sickness, starvation, mistreatment by guards, and other horrors circulated in the press. After the war, recriminations were leveled on both sides, and much of the immediate ill-will between the North and South dealt with prisoners and their treatment.

In Military Prisons of the Civil War: A Comparative Analysis historic preservationist David L. Keller consulted official records, newspaper reports, first-person accounts from prisoners, and other primary source material in order to understand why imprisonment during the Civil War failed on both sides. His research identifies five factors shared among both Union and Confederate prisons that led to so many deaths, including the lack of a strategic plan on either side for handling prisoners, inadequate plans for holding prisoners for long periods of time, and poor selection and training of camp command and guards.

DAVID L. KELLER is managing director of the Camp Douglas Restoration Foundation. He has published two studies on Civil War prison camps for the National Park Service and is author of The Story of Camp Douglas: Chicago’s Forgotten Civil War Prison, Command at Antietam: Lincoln, McClellan and Lee at the Turning Point of the Civil War, and editor of Robert Anderson Bagby: Civil War Diary 1863-1865.

Praise for Military Prisons of the Civil War:

“Rather than contributing anew to the mostly unproductive debates regarding whose American Civil War POW camps were worse given the attitudes and priorities adopted and the relative resources available, David Keller’s Military Prisons of the Civil War: A Comparative Study instead frames itself around the larger truth that the camps of both sides were all too often terrible places to be confined within. A product of research in both primary and secondary sources that was sponsored by grants from the Andersonville National Site POW Research Program, Keller’s lean study identifies and illuminates what the author’s investigation has determined to have been the five most significant problems that both sides commonly addressed poorly. . . . Military Prisons of the Civil War certainly does identify and critically assess in a useful manner key failings common to the military prison systems of both belligerents.”—Civil War Books and Authors

“A well-researched and useful compilation of information on all of the military prisons that existed during the Civil War. Readers who are fascinated by the topic of POWs will find much of interest in this book.”—Journal of America’s Military Past

“This is a wonderful addition to the research that goes far beyond what happened in the Civil War to begin to explain why things happened the way they did.”—S. Waite Rawls III, President, American Civil War Museum Foundation