A Fate Worse than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War by W. Fitzhugh Brundage published by
W. W. Norton & Company (2026)
When people ask me what books I recommend on the Civil War and Reconstruction, apart from some classic works, I always ask if they have read any studies of Civil War Prisoner of War camps. A lot of times they say that they see arguments in social media all the time about the camps in which one side or they other claims that “the other side was worse,” but they have not read any serious scholarly work written in the last half century. Instead, they often read two or three dozen books on Gettysburg, a few books on Antietam and Vicksburg, and a scattering of books on other battles, leaders, or peculiar specialty subjects. I respond by telling them that twice as many people died at Andersonville as at Gettysburg, making Andersonville the piece of ground where the largest deaths occurred. I also ask why, if they study the big battles, they don’t know what happened to the 12,000 men taken prisoner at the Battle of Gettysburg.
A Fate Worse than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War is a good place to start if you want to learn about the prisoners of war whose “fate was worse than hell.” The serious study of these camps did not emerge until 1930 with the publication William B. Hesseltne’s book Civil War Prisons. For a long time there was not a lot of follow-up studies on Hesseltne’s work. For nearly forty years, historians left the field to be dominated by Civil War Prisons. During the 1980s there were some publications on individual prisons and in the last half century there have been a multitude of books on special subjects greatly expanding our knowledge of these terrible places. What has been missing is a book aimed at a general, educated audience containing a lot of the latest findings of scholars. A Fate Worse than Hell is a good start down that road.
The author is well positioned to tell that story. W. Fitzhugh Brundage is a Harvard PhD teaching at the University of North Carolina. He has been teaching Southern history and the Civil War throughout his career, with books published going back to 1994.
I am particularly interested in Civil War POWs because in my career as a human rights lawyer I have represented numerous former prisoners. POWs are often the people in a conflict that are the most persecuted. Civil wars, in particular, lead to the most horrific abuses.
The book opens with a look at the laws of war relating to captured soldiers. Before the 18th Century there few rules and common soldiers were often put to death or enslaved. Officers were treated as brothers by their captors and would be held for ransom. Okay, I don’t usually hold my actual bother for ransom.
The development of protections for captured soldiers began to develop in the 1700s. By the end of the century, European armies viewed prisoners as human beings with certain protections. Of course, these protections often only applied if the other side returned the courtesy. During the Civil War, the Federal government codified the rules relating to prisoners in the Lieber Code, also known as General Order 100. It became the framework for the Geneva Conventions.
For the first year and a half of the Civil War neither side seemed to have considered that they would have any large number of men surrendering to their armies. When Confederate Col. John Pegram was at Rich Mountain in western Virginia he surrendered his whole regiment to George McClellan on July 11, 1861. He became the first former U.S. officer captured. McClellan welcomed the young colonel and invited him to dinner. When the wounded Michael Corcoran, the colonel of the Irish 69th New York Militia was captured just ten days later at the First Bull Run, he was badly treated and not given medical attention. Later the Confederate government used Corcoran as a pawn in negotiations with the Federal government. Two very different experiences that did not follow any regulations largely because there were none.
For most common soldiers, those captured during the first year of the war began to follow an evolving pattern. Many were detained at informal prison camps and then either exchanged or parole back the opposite army. Typically, Prisoners of War did not stay in detention for more than a few months. They might not have been treated generously by their their captors, but they would soon be home.
Professor Brundage than says that this modicum of sanity went out the window early in 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation did not just free the slaves, it allowed for the enlistment of Black soldiers. The Confederate government threatened to treat Black soldiers and the officers leading them as engaged in a slave insurrection, which could be dealt with by summary execution. Those Blacks who were allowed to live would be reduced to slavery for the rest of their lives. Lincoln said this broke the cartel allowing for the exchange of prisoners. He insisted that Black soldiers be treated equally with white or else the trade in men’s lives would be stopped. The Confederate government refused. This began the long captivity for both sides Prisoners of War.
Were there exceptions to this rule? Sure. One well known example was General Ulysses S. Grant granting of parole to thousands of Confederate soldiers captured at Vicksburg on July 4, 1863.
The holding of large numbers of men who would not be released worsened the situation of of the prisoners and deepened the logistical problems for the two governments. Before the suspension of exchanges, the volume of men being held in which new prisoners replaced prisoners released in exchanges or through parole meant that overall a camp’s number of prisoners stayed relatively equal. Now, camps that might have held a few thousand in 1861 and 1862 were being flooded to such an extent that camps tripled in size, without an equivalent increase in resources or housing. Food and water were stretched thin and the captives were the victims of malnutrition. As the calory count declined, other forms of disease carried off more and more men.
Those who got sick received less care. Doctors who volunteered to care for their own soldiers resisted being assigned to nurse the enemy back to health. Those small number of doctors who did go to the camps were oftentimes the least qualified.
Brundage also looks at the physical structures of the camps. In the South, the government rented barns and tobacco warehouses and any other large structure where men could be stored. After 1862 as numbers increased, the capacity of the camps remained the same. Thousands of men were sleeping on top of one another which contributed to the spreading of disease and limited time of physical exercise. There was also an abominable lack of provision for heat.
Union prisons tended to be better made, but as word came of the deplorable conditions at Andersonville, Secretary of War Stanton downsized improvements that the commandants of the camps wanted to make as well as reducing the food allowances to something that approached the diet of imprisoned Union soldiers held in the South. Elmira, which had some innovations in care for the prisoners, basically became the Hellmira of the North.
The book also gives a rare look at Black prisoners that fell into the hands of the Confederates. Confederate guards mocked, beat, and threatened to execute these men. Some were placed back into slavery and many of them were still performing slave duties long after the war had ended.
Henry Wirz was the commandant of Andersonville and he was charged with war crimes and was executed after the war ended. Although most of the 13,000 who died at Andersonville did so through lack of nutrition, horrible living conditions, and lack of medical care, the public was attracted by tales of the “dead line,” a line which if a prisoner crossed he might be killed by a guard.
Wirz was not the only commandant who was guilty of war crimes, but he was the only one hung. Just over 5.6% of the captives in Northern prisons died, compared to 14.29% for Unionists held in Southern prisons. Most of these men died in the last 12 months of the war.
The last section of the book looks at the postwar life of freed prisoners. Several of the men had lecture tours where they would address the general public, including veterans. The prisoners were honored as the soldiers who suffered the most by their fellow veterans. Today we see things differently. On the subject of John McCain who was captured during the Vietnam War, a prominent leader said “He’s not a war hero…He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” That would have been viewed as ending the career of the person making the statement in the 1860s.
Brundage finishes with a look at the organizations formed by former prisoners of war. They used this both for advocacy and comradeship. Men could discuss their trauma better with people who had lived through the same hell as they had. They could come together to make sure that pensions, which were originally only set aside for men who received war wounds certified by the doctor who treated them in the service, were not cut off from POW veterans. Most POWs had not been shot by the guards, but they had endured lasting injuries from the lack of food, water, and cleanliness which left them weak and in pain for the rest of their lives. The men had not been under their old officers or cared for by the regimental surgeon while they suffered at Andersonville which meant they could not receive a pension. Their organizations worked very hard to change how the Federal bureaucracy viewed the former prisoners.
The book gives an up-to-date restatement of the latest scholarship on the prisoners of war with many engaging stories. However more research is being done every day and hopefully in twenty years there will be another look at the terror that was imposed on more than 400,000 Union and Confederate soldiers, marines, and sailors.
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