A FATE WORSE THAN HELL

Comprehensive history of prisoners of war, Confederate and Union, and the terrors they endured.

Brundage, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, opens his narrative at the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, where Union soldiers were dying at the rate of a thousand every week or so and with “a population density many times greater than that of the worst slums in any twenty-first-­century city.” Andersonville was the worst of a bad lot, as one post–Civil War inquest put it, but it was surely horrific. As Brundage observes in this long and sometimes plodding history, at the beginning of the war both North and South attempted to observe the niceties of military etiquette, exchanging prisoners and allowing officers a fairly free range in the cities and towns in which they were quartered. That attention to chivalric custom ended, Brundage adds, when Black troops entered the picture: The Confederates enslaved Black prisoners and refused to return them, ending the exchange. A South strapped for money and matériel found itself having to feed many thousands of unwanted Union soldiers, and the appalling mortality rate to starvation and disease spoke not just to the inability to care for those wards but also, as one Virginia doctor explained, to the fact that “the refusal of proper accommodations to sick Federal prisoners was one of state policy.” At war’s end, Southern apologists would claim that things were no better in prison camps in the North, but the fact was that the 214,000 Confederate soldiers held there had a higher survival rate than their 194,000 Union counterparts in the South. Brundage examines the largely forgotten story of these prisoners from many perspectives—diplomatic, military, and medical—showing how, when they were remembered at all, it was usually in the South, and as victims of “the policy of the [Union] foe.”

A welcome addition to the historical literature of the Civil War.