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

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 who were captured and imprisoned—a milestone in the history of mass dehumanization. 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. 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 politicized by stalled negotiations and escalating retaliation between the Union and the Confederacy. Brundage also shows how prisons such as Andersonville, Elmira, and Point Lookout were the catalyst for the country’s first formal laws of war, which became a bedrock for international law. A Fate Worse Than Hell exposes this national violence that imprisoned more Americans during wartime than ever before or since.