Soon after the close of military operations in the American Civil War, 
another war began over how it would be remembered by future 
generations. The prisoner-of-war issue has figured prominently in 
Northern and Southern writing about the conflict. Northerners used 
tales of Andersonville to demonize the Confederacy, while 
Southerners vilified Northern prison policies to show the depths to 
which Yankees had sunk to attain victory.

    Over the years the postwar Northern portrayal of Andersonville as 
fiendishly designed to kill prisoners in mass quantities has largely 
been dismissed. The "Lost Cause" characterization of Union prison 
policies as criminally negligent and inhumane, however, has shown 
remarkable durability. Northern officials have been portrayed as 
turning their military prisons into concentration camps where 
Southern prisoners were poorly fed, clothed, and sheltered, resulting 
in inexcusably high numbers of deaths.

    Andersonvilles of the North, by James M. Gillispie, represents 
the first broad study to argue that the image of Union prison officials 
as negligent and cruel to Confederate prisoners is severely flawed. 
This study is not an attempt to "whitewash" Union prison policies or 
make light of Confederate prisoner mortality. But once the careful 
reader disregards unreliable postwar polemics, and focuses 
exclusively on the more reliable wartime records and documents 
from both Northern and Southern sources, then a much different, 
less negative, picture of Northern prison life emerges. While life in 
Northern prisons was difficult and potentially deadly, no evidence 
exists of a conspiracy to neglect or mistreat Southern captives. 
Confederate prisoners' suffering and death were due to a number of 
factors, but it would seem that Yankee apathy and malice were 
rarely among them.

    In fact, likely the most significant single factor in Confederate 
(and all) prisoner mortality during the Civil War was the halting of the 
prisoner exchange cartel in the late spring of 1863. Though Northern 
officials have long been condemned for coldly calculating that doing 
so aided their war effort, the evidence convincingly suggests that the 
South's staunch refusal to exchange black Union prisoners was 
actually the key sticking point in negotiations to resume exchanges 
from mid-1863 to 1865.

    Ultimately Gillispie concludes that Northern prisoner-of-war 
policies were far more humane and reasonable than generally 
depicted. His careful analysis will be welcomed by historians of the 
Civil War, the South, and of American history.

_________________________________________________________

JAMES M. GILLISPIE earned a Ph.D. in American History from the 
University of Mississippi. He has published articles and numerous 
reviews on Civil War prison scholarship and has spoken at the 
Museum of the Confederacy on the era's military prisons. Since 1999 
he has taught history at Sampson Community College in Clinton, 
North Carolina, and has won several teaching awards. Residing with 
him are his wife Julie and daughter Lauren.



What people are saying about this book

"This is one of the few studies to look at conditions in Northern 
prisons through the lens of the most objective perspective possible 
for this emotionally charged subject. Gillispie provides an important 
revision and clarification of our knowledge about Civil War 
prisons."—James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom