A Fate Worse than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War [Hardcover]

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a harrowing new history of the Civil Wars prisoner of war camps, North and South. Gripping& An?essential contribution to this rethinking [of the Civil War]. Groundbreaking& Deeply researched and well written& A sensitive and important study of a strangely neglected topic, whose implications reach far beyond the Civil War battlefields of a century and a half ago. A benchmark study in a harrowing yet oft-overlooked episode in America's past. Comprehensive& A welcome addition to the historical literature of the Civil War. Americans generally prefer to forget the horror of Civil War prisons. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, one of our greatest historians in the archive and on the page, has written a masterpiece that will go a long way toward changing such amnesia. As Brundage demonstrates in a heroic achievement of research, including in photography, Civil War prisons were milestones in dehumanization, but they were also an unprecedented story of law, policy, political retaliation, military design and resolve, even a modern innovation that brought the very concept of slavery into focus. Every chapter delves deeply into the gruesome experience of real people we get to know in what is simply a beautiful narrative about an enormously ugly subject. From the first prisoners of 1861 to the massive cemeteries that dot the nations landscape, and to the question of responsibility for such suffering and death, Brundage has brilliantly illuminated this alien world and written a new Civil War epic. Fitzhugh Brundage has taken on the fraught subject of Civil War prisons and has come out a winner. His mastery of sources, critical and balanced evaluations of Union and Confederate policies and governance of prisons and prisoners, clear and lucid writing, and empathetic treatment of prisoners traumatic experiences lift this book head and shoulders above other works on the topic. Walt Whitman famously observed that the real Civil War would never l0