A Fate Worse than Hell

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a harrowing new history of the Civil War’s prisoner of war camps, North and South.

It is newly estimated that 750,000 soldiers died in the American Civil War. But less well-known than the war’s death toll are the roughly 400,000 Union and Confederate troops who were captured and imprisoned. Many POWs died from starvation, dysentery, and exposure, and at the worst of the prison pens, more than 30,000 soldiers were caged in the equivalent of ten city blocks. Against the backdrop of a brutal internecine conflict, the Civil War’s prison camps were a harrowing milestone in the history of mass dehumanization.

A Fate Worse Than Hell contemplates the roots and consequences of this mass incarceration from America’s bloodiest conflict. Based on first-person prisoner accounts, photographs, and contemporaneous journalism, historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage shows how POW camps were of far greater significance to the war than is commonly understood: a subject of stalled negotiation, escalating retaliation, and increasing political liability between the Union and the Confederacy. Brundage describes how the camps were not the products of improvisation, but the results of design and resolve, marshaling prodigious quantities of manpower, technology, and resources—with successor camps in every major war during the next century.

Brundage also shows how prisons such as Andersonville, Elmira, and Point Lookout were the catalyst for the United States’ first formal laws of war, which became a bedrock for international law. Nowhere during the Civil War was the juxtaposition between our “better angels” and our capacity for brutality starker than in the prison camps—sites of unprecedented atrocity that also served as places of selflessness and human dignity among the incarcerated. The most comprehensive work to date about the life of America’s captives during the Civil War, A Fate Worse Than Hell exposes this national violence that imprisoned more Americans during wartime than ever before or since.