Worse Than Hell: W. Fitzhugh Brundage on Prisoners of War and Prison Camps of the American Civil War

About this episode

The episode discusses the significance of prisoner-of-war camps during the American Civil War and their impact on military and societal structures.

During the American Civil War an estimated 194,000 Union soldiers and 214,000 Confederate soldiers became prisoners of war. No prior or subsequent American conflict has seen such numbers. During the Second World War, approximately 124,000 Americans were held captive, but the chance of being captured in that conflict was roughly one in one hundred; during the Civil War it was closer to one in five. Captivity was not a marginal experience. It was central to the war. Indeed, the gigantic scale of prisoner-of-war camps was one of the conflict’s most consequential innovations. Every modern war since has produced successors to Andersonville, Point Lookout, Rock Island, and Florence. Yet prisoner-of-war camps remain oddly peripheral in our narratives of the Civil War, overlooked both as institutional innovations and as formative experiences for soldiers and their families. My guest, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, argues in A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War that captivity reshaped military policy, political rhetoric, racial attitudes, and postwar memory. Prison camps were not aberrations; they were integral to the modernizing logic of total war. For more on the guest…

People in this episode

Host: Al Zambone

Guest: W. Fitzhugh Brundage

Topics covered

• prisoners of war
• Civil War
• military policy
• political rhetoric
• racial attitudes
• postwar memory

Keywords

• prison camps
• Andersonville
• Point Lookout
• Rock Island
• Florence
• total war
• captivity
• Union soldiers
• Confederate soldiers

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War

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