While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War.While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War. By Charles W. Sanders Charles W. Sanders (born May 12, 1947) is an insurance agent, tour bus driver, and retired Ohio auto worker who has run as a Democrat for the U.S. House of Representatives four times in Ohio's heavily Republican Second Congressional District from 1998 to 2004, losing four times to Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press This article needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications. Alone, primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of this article are not sufficient for an accurate encyclopedia article. , 2005. Pp. xii, 390. $44.95, ISBN ISBN abbr. International Standard Book Number ISBN International Standard Book Number ISBN n abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m 0-8071-3061-3.) Accounts of Civil War military prisons abound with stories of privation, filth, and despair. Charles W. Sanders Jr.'s work is no exception. Sanders's study is distinctive because of his insistence that the highest Union and Confederate authorities intended to impose harsh conditions. Although North and South began the war with no preparations for dealing with prisoners, both sides soon responded to the necessities of war and created ad hoc prison systems. Lincoln initially refused to recognize southern rebels as prisoners of war prisoners of war, in international law, persons captured by a belligerent while fighting in the military. International law includes rules on the treatment of prisoners of war but extends protection only to combatants. but soon bowed to the necessity of providing for captured soldiers and negotiating with the Confederacy to arrange prisoner exchanges. When exchanges ended in 1863, prison populations on both sides swelled, and prisoners suffered from exposure, disease, and malnutrition. Northerners died in Confederate prisons at a greater rate (15.5 percent) than southerners in Union prisons (12 percent), but Sanders views North and South as equally guilty of promoting suffering and death. But differences are strikingly evident. The North entered the Civil War with a civil society capable of generating powerful volunteer agencies--notably the United States Sanitary Commission--that subjected Union prisons to a level of scrutiny that never existed in the South. While both sides agreed that prisoners of war should be treated like regular soldiers, Sanders is less explicit than he could be about what the standard of treatment should have been. Of particular interest to civilian and military inspectors in the North, for example, were the sinks or latrines. Inspectors frequently cited filthy conditions, but it is unclear what the standard of measurement should have been for the construction of military barracks and encampments. When Sanders writes that the latrines at Camp Morton in Indiana consisted simply of "open pits dug in the center of the camp," the reader has no way to judge whether or not this deviated from standard practices (pp. 91-92). Surely Camp Morton came closer to meeting standard practices than the sinks in the abandoned Richmond tobacco warehouse utilized by Confederates as a military prison after the first battle of Bull Run For other uses, see Bull Run (disambiguation). The First Battle of Bull Run, also known as the First Battle of Manassas (the name used by Confederate forces and still widely used in the South), was the first major land battle of the American Civil War, fought on July . There prisoners had no choice but to urinate urinate /uri·nate/ (u´ri-nat) to discharge urine. u·ri·nate v. To excrete urine. urinate to void urine. and defecate def·e·cate v. To void feces from the bowels. def  e·ca tion n. on the floor,
which, because it inclined in one direction, allowed the "mud"
to flow away from their sleeping area.
Regarding the North's decision to stop prisoner exchanges, Sanders's judgment is extreme. Prisoner exchanges ended, Sanders insists, because Ulysses S. Grant saw a military advantage in ending them. This decision led to overcrowding overcrowding overcrowding of animal accommodation. Many countries now publish codes of practice which define what the appropriate volumetric allowances should be for each species of animal when they are housed indoors. Breaches of these codes is overcrowding. and harsh conditions in southern prisons and to what Sanders describes as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's Radical-inspired policy of reprisals against southern prisoners. Although Lincoln tied the ending of exchanges and their resumption to Confederate treatment of "captured colored troops" (quoted on p. 244), the issue of prisoner of war PRISONER OF WAR. One who has been captured while fighting under the banner of some state. He is a prisoner, although never confined in a prison. 2. In modern times, prisoners are treated with more humanity than formerly; the individual captor has now no status for black troops was, writes Sanders. "no more than a sop thrown to the restive northern press and public" (p. 311). LOUIS S. GERTEIS University of Missouri-St. Louis |
|
||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion