In 2017, Earl Hess had an interesting article in the Journal Civil War History. It focuses on the use of the Early Indicators database for exploring the lives of Civil War soldiers. This section on the lives of prisoners of war was particularly interesting:
The experience of being held by the enemy and enduring the stress of living in the often squalid, life-threatening confines of a prison pen is a fit subject for analysis in the Early Indicators project. Dora Costa sampled 3,175 Union prisoners of war, using the census data of 1900 as a base, and concluded that age had a strong effect on how they fared in later life. If the soldier had been a prisoner while younger than thirty years of age, he had a higher chance of earlier mortality and morbidity when held by the enemy than a man of a more advanced age. The effect of prisoner age was also seen on aspects other than health and mortality. For example, the younger prisoner experienced lower socioeconomic circumstances after the war.
Hess writes further:
Using the same sample of 3,175 men, Costa and Kahn found that being captured with a significantly large number of comrades helped a great deal in the survival rate of Union prisoners. If a Federal soldier went to prison accompanied by a large number of comrades, he had a higher chance of living through the experience. At Andersonville, for example, a Union prisoner needed fifteen comrades by his side to keep the death rate from rising to above-average levels. The longer he stayed in prison, the more important comrades became. For the first two months of imprisonment there was no real difference, but after four months it began to tell. Of the men who were captured with fewer than ten comrades, 25 percent died four months after they became prisoners, while only 10 percent of the men captured with more than ten comrades perished in the same time period. Prison mortality rates for noncommissioned officers were significantly lower than for other enlisted men, suggesting that they were more adept at managing their environment because of their role as, in effect, mid-level managers within army ranks. Costa and Kahn also found that prison mortality rates were higher for taller [End Page 384] men and for those born in America and in Germany than for those born outside the United States and the German states. It is not clear why height and place of birth should have had much effect on the issue. However, it is likely that height was confounded with some other variable. For example, studies discussed below (under Health) found that rural boys tended to be taller than urban boys and that they had a harder time adjusting to the army. So, height may in effect have been a surrogate for the likelihood of having a rural background.
The study Hess references can be found here: The citation Hess gives for that paragraph is:
Dora L. Costa, and Matthew E. Kahn, “Surviving Andersonville: The Benefits of Social Networks in POW Camps,” American Economic Review 97 (Sept. 2007): 1471–72, 1475–76; Costa and Kahn, Heroes and Cowards, 144–45, 150.
You can access the Early Indicators data here: http://uadata.org/
Here is the citation for Hess’s article: The Early Indicators Project: Using Massive Data and Statistical Analysis to Understand the Life Cycle of Civil War Soldiers by Earl J. Hess Civil War History Dec. 2017
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