Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union Angela M. Zombek (bio) Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union. By Roger Pickenpaugh. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 400 pp. Cloth $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-1652-5.) Conditions that inmates faced in Civil War military prisons have generated controversy for the past century and a half. Historians such as William B. Hesseltine and Charles W. Sanders Jr. have sought to explain the prisoner-of-war crisis and inmates’ consequent suffering. Hesseltine cites Union officials’ responses to rumored atrocities in Southern camps to explain poor conditions, while Sanders contends that both Northern and Southern captives suffered intentional maltreatment at the hands of Union and Confederate officials who viewed prisoners as pawns in a political game. Pickenpaugh’s [End Page 131] Captives in Gray accepts these interpretations of prisoners’ suffering, holding federal officials culpable for harsh conditions due to the implementation of a retaliatory policy (188, 209). Pickenpaugh’s work builds on existing interpretations and significantly adds to the scholarly understanding not merely of administrative decisions but of how such decisions impacted inmates behind bars. Captives in Gray provides a survey of how prison establishment, the Dix-Hill Exchange Cartel, the breakdown of prisoner exchanges, and the consequent spike in prison population affected Northern camps such as Johnson’s Island, Camp Chase, Camp Douglas, Elmira, Fort Delaware, and Point Lookout, among many others. The book is based on solid research. Pickenpaugh readily acknowledges and carefully avoids relying on the bias of veterans’ memories of the prison experience that were recorded in the late nineteenth century. Instead, he weaves a narrative from countless manuscript sources that illuminates the boredom and loneliness of prison life, prisoners’ hopes for exchange, their attempts at escape, their suffering from disease and malnutrition, and death behind bars. Pickenpaugh’s work begins in 1861 with the establishment of the war’s earliest prisons, the capture of political prisoners, and an overview of William Hoffman’s role as commissary general of prisoners. The book concludes by detailing the unfortunate spike in the prison population during the war’s final months and the high death rate apparent in early 1865. The author’s main contribution to prison scholarship is his description of how top-down dynamics—such as the federal government’s unpreparedness in meeting the prisoner-of-war crisis, the operation and cessation of the exchange cartel, the inexperience and inconsistency of prison guards, Hoffman’s reluctance to address sanitary conditions, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s “policy of harsh retaliation”—affected inmates behind bars (220). These dynamics forced inmates into crowded camps where improvised activities, such as talking politics, forming prison bands, writing letters home despite censorship, or participating in work details, either as punishment or for physical activity, helped inmates pass long hours of confinement. After the exchange cartel collapsed, inmates relinquished hope for release, unless they decided to attempt escape. This option, Pickenpaugh asserts, was hardly promising, as escapees faced enormous odds when they ventured over or under prison walls into enemy territory on their journeys south. Northern prison camps were indeed tragic, as Pickenpaugh’s work demonstrates. He starkly notes that 25,967 of the total 214,865 Southern captives held—a figure that totals just over 12 percent—died in Union camps (202). The suffering of Confederate captives is a relatively well-known fact, but Pickenpaugh’s work highlights a number of aspects not typically discussed in prison scholarship. He calls attention to the fact that political prisoners [End Page 132] represented a “wide variety of social classes,” that prison guards suffered from the same monotony that plagued inmates, that prisoners frequently engaged in work details outside of prison walls, and that many Southern prisoners became “galvanized Yankees,” choosing Union military service over imprisonment (6, 171, 199). Both scholars and the general public can gain much knowledge about the prison experience from Pickenpaugh’s work, as it encourages thought about war and the consequent crisis of imprisonment. Angela M. Zombek University of Florida Angela M. Zombek Angela M. Zombek is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Florida. Her dissertation...