A Fate Worse than Hell
American Prisoners of the Civil War
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a harrowing new history of the Civil War’s prisoner of war camps, North and South.
It is newly estimated that 750,000 soldiers died in the American Civil War. But less well-known than the war’s death toll are the roughly 400,000 Union and Confederate troops who were captured and imprisoned. Many POWs died from starvation, dysentery, and exposure, and at the worst of the prison pens, more than 30,000 soldiers were caged in the equivalent of ten city blocks. Against the backdrop of a brutal internecine conflict, the Civil War’s prison camps were a harrowing milestone in the history of mass dehumanization.
A Fate Worse Than Hell contemplates the roots and consequences of this mass incarceration from America’s bloodiest conflict. Based on first-person prisoner accounts, photographs, and contemporaneous journalism, historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage shows how POW camps were of far greater significance to the war than is commonly understood: a subject of stalled negotiation, escalating retaliation, and increasing political liability between the Union and the Confederacy. Brundage describes how the camps were not the products of improvisation, but the results of design and resolve, marshaling prodigious quantities of manpower, technology, and resources—with successor camps in every major war during the next century.
Brundage also shows how prisons such as Andersonville, Elmira, and Point Lookout were the catalyst for the United States’ first formal laws of war, which became a bedrock for international law. Nowhere during the Civil War was the juxtaposition between our “better angels” and our capacity for brutality starker than in the prison camps—sites of unprecedented atrocity that also served as places of selflessness and human dignity among the incarcerated. The most comprehensive work to date about the life of America’s captives during the Civil War, A Fate Worse Than Hell exposes this national violence that imprisoned more Americans during wartime than ever before or since.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer finalist Brundage (Civilizing Torture) chronicles the excruciating suffering of the Civil War's hundreds of thousands of POWs, as well as the political and legal ramifications of this unprecedented mass incarceration of Americans on U.S. soil. Drawing on voluminous first-person accounts, Brundage tells a story of human misery and political incompetence drifting toward indifference. The worst of the era's detainment facilities were the "prison pens," reminiscent of concentration camps, such as Maryland's Point Lookout and Georgia's Andersonville. Over the course of the war, conditions worsened steadily for POWs; Brundage argues against the common notion that this was the result of mere expediency. Rather, he claims, the horrors were a product of design and resolve: "Men, not events, made Andersonville." While the early years of the war saw frequent prisoner exchanges that reduced prison populations, a failure in negotiations and the halting of such exchanges brought about "experiments in custodial imprisonment" that were "beyond anyone's worst prewar premonitions," including the use of retaliation—i.e., hurting captive POWs in recompense for how the other side treated POWs. The camps, he explains, prompted new international codes of warfare, including those deeming "just following orders" an inadequate excuse. Captivity in the Civil War camps, Brundage perceptively concludes, "marked a generation of Americans in ways that we have barely recognized." It's a benchmark study in a harrowing yet oft-overlooked episode in America's past.
