While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War)
Four hundred thousand soldiers were taken prisoner during the Civil War. Over 50,000 of them died while in custody. Conventional scholarship nevertheless accepts the position that neither the Union nor the Confederacy mistreated captives as a matter of policy. In this volume, however, Sanders, a professor of history at Kansas State University, argues that incompetence, inexperience and lack of resources affected prisoners' fates far less than did deliberate decisions made by both the Union and Confederate governments. In the war's early stages, both sides followed a system of parole and exchange. But the Union, in particular, came to regard this process as self-defeating since it provided a stream of replacements for the armies in the field;and the Confederacy responded in kind. By the fall of 1863, not only were prisoners being retained by both sides, their treatment grew steadily worse as a matter of high-level policy that violated both official regulations and common humanity. Even Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were well aware of what was happening;and refused to intervene. By documenting these conditions, Sanders offers fresh understanding of an important aspect of the war, even if he fails to contextualize the transformation as only one part of the hard war mentality that developed as the national conflict endured and expanded.(Oct.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.