Before 1861, Americans had never had to face the problem of internment of large numbers of captured enemy soldiers. British and Hessian soldiers had been exchanged or sent to farms on the frontier. The Civil War abruptly changed that situation. In four years of fighting, over 409,000 men became prisoners of war. That figure is at least four times more American soldiers captured than in all of the nation's other wars combined.
Neither side knew how to address the problem; neither made a concerted effort to do so. In place of badly needed attention and compassion were inexperience, clumsiness, and indifference. Suffering and the neglect of prisoners of war were present in both Union and Confederacy. Prison camp administrations were patchwork systems usually manned by second‐rate officials. Lack of resources was an impairment; so were inadequate facilities, overcrowded conditions, and general mismanagement. The few efforts at prisoner exchange during the war were bungled and short‐lived.
Of the 150 compounds established in the North and South, 25 could be termed major prisons or prison camps. Each had the same characteristics: poor food, lack of sanitation, often callous guards, and inadequate protection from the elements. Such ills produced epidemic outbreaks of sickness, malnutrition, mental depression, and—for thousands of helpless men—slow but certain death.
Totally divorced from the outside world, Civil War prisoners endured an unchanging routine. They arose from whatever bedding they had at dawn, answered roll call, and received something to eat. The rest of the day passed in boredom. A second meal came in late afternoon, along with another roll call. Then the men waited for some degree of sleep to blot out reality. Each succeeding day was the same.
No prison had sufficient medicines. Physicians were in short supply and not always attentive to enemy soldiers. Since many of the men had been captured because they were too wounded or sick to escape, and since prison life offered no curatives for recovery, death was a daily occurrence in every Civil War prison. In all, 56,000 cap‐tured soldiers perished in the crude compounds of the North and the South.
The two most infamous Civil War compounds went into operation in 1864, when prison authorities should have learned from mistakes and omissions earlier in the war. The South's Andersonville prison (officially known as Camp Sumter, Georgia) was the largest of all. It began receiving inmates before construction was completed. Some 52,300 Federal enlisted men were sent there; more than 13,200 perished from disease, exposure, and lack of medicines.
In the North, at a prison camp for Confederates at Elmira, New York, such scourges as diarrhea and pneumonia killed almost one‐fourth of the captured soldiers (of 12,123 inmates, 2,963 died) over the course of the prison's twelve‐month existence.
During and especially after the Civil War, each side pointed fingers of guilt at the other. Subsequently, hundreds of “memoirs of prison life” flowed from printing presses as soldiers (many seeking disability pensions) vied in converting questionable facts into dramatic fiction. As a consequence, no aspect of the bitter Civil War has triggered more accusations, more violent passions, and more unresolved controversy than the mistreatment of captured Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs.
[See also Civil War: Domestic Course.]
Bibliography
- Clayton W. Holmes, The Elmira Prison Camp, 1912.
- William B. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology, 1930; rep. 1962.
- James I. Robertson, Jr., The Scourge of Elmira,
Civil War History ,VIII (1962), pp. 184–201. - Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War, 1997
