The parole-and-exchange cartel that
had existed in the early part of the war
collapsed in 1863, and in April 1864,
General Grant refused to exchange any
more prisoners.
What awaited the captive now
would be a fearsome ordeal at best.
He might have had an equal, or better,
chance of survival had he remained on
the battlefield. There were more than
150 prisoner-of-war camps across thehalf lived. Out there, Belle Isle
“prison” could be glimpsed, a
rocky outcropping in the midst
of the James River rapids. This
was the other extreme, a natural
prison with few or no facilities
on which congregated perhaps
8,000 enlisted men, scrambling
for the shelter of only 3,000
tents and a handful of shacks.
Conditions at Illinois’ Rock Island,
in the middle of the Mississippi
River, were not much better.
Although they had some shelter, its
Confederate prisoners were too often
exposed to the burning summer sun
and harsh winters. In 1864, a fast-
spreading smallpox epidemic virtually
emptied the prison.
Point Lookout in Maryland was the
Belle Isle of the North. Once a resort
jutting out into the Chesapeake Bay, it
provided only enough tents for 10,000
men, but the actual number of
Southern captives rose much higher
than that. As many as 3,500 of them
may have died there, many of
exposure, during the two years the
prison was in operation.High mortality rates
Some 26,000 captured Confederates
were held at one time or another in
Camp Douglas, built originally as a
training barracks. The camp was sited
on a damp, low-lying bit of prairieW
hen captured in battle in 1862,
a Civil War soldier on either
side might expect some rough
handling, sometimes within sound and
sight of the fighting, perhaps in a
holding area in the rear. If he was
lucky, he might quickly be paroled in
exchange for an enemy soldier of the
same rank or expect to be exchanged
in the near future. By 1864, capture
meant only one thing: a prison camp.
Prisoners of War
Neither side was prepared to handle the large numbers of prisoners that, by 1864, were
being marched into makeshift stockades. Overcrowding, starvation, lack of sanitation,
and occasional cruelty stalked Northern prisons as much as they did those in the South.
GRANT, SHERMAN, AND TOTAL WAR 1864BEFORE
At the outbreak of war, neither side had
the facilities or infrastructure to handle
large numbers of prisoners.
INFORMAL ARRANGEMENTS
Lincoln opposed prisoner-of-war exchange
agreements, feeling they lent legitimacy to
the Confederacy. However, field commanders
worked out informal exchanges, based on the
parole-and-exchange system, to keep the
numbers of prisoners at manageable levels.
DIX-HILL EXCHANGE CARTEL
In July 1862, both sides agreed to an official
exchange system, called the Dix-Hill Cartel
after the Union and Confederate officers who
negotiated it. For prisoners who agreed to
refrain from military service when
released, this system allowed for the
exchange of prisoners of equal rank.
This worked well, and prisoner-of-war camps
soon began to empty.
COLLAPSE OF THE CARTEL
The system began collapsing once the Union
army began recruiting black soldiers. The
Confederacy refused to exchange them, instead
threatening to treat them as runaway slaves. In
May 1863, the Federal government suspended
the cartel. Soon the numbers of prisoners
began swelling to unmanageable levels.
Prisoner carvings
James Allen Kibler, a Confederate prisoner of war
held in Fort Delaware near Philadelphia, carved this
toothpick and decorated lanyard. Carving helped
captives while away the long hours.outside Chicago. It earned the grim
reputation of having a higher
percentage of deaths in a single month
than any other prison camp in the
war—387 out of 3,884 men in
February 1863. Altogether more than
4,000 of its captives never saw their
homes in the South again; many of
them lie buried in one mass grave in
Chicago’s Oak Woods Cemetery.
By far the highest overall mortality
rate of any Union prisoner-of-war
camp—reaching a staggering
24 percent—was recorded at
Elmira. Located in western
New York State, Elmira (or
”Hellmira,” as it was known to
its inmates) first opened on July
6, 1864, when 400 Southern
prisoners were marched into a
former barracks that might have
held 5,000. Although it was a
large camp, Elmira was nowhere
near big enough for the 9,500
men it held when the population
was at its peak. Many of them had
to sleep outdoors in New York’s
freezing winter, without blankets
or any other provision for shelter.Plan of Andersonville Prison
Memories of Andersonville lingered long, and
after the war veterans groups were prominent in
efforts to preserve the site. Today it is a National
Historic Site, with a National Cemetery and the
National Prisoner of War Museum.Record death toll
Of the 150 prison camps operating during the Civil
War, Camp Douglas in Chicago had the highest death
rate for any one-month period, with some ten percent
of its captives perishing in February 1863.United States during the conflict. Every
conceivable kind of facility had to be
pressed into service. They included
existing prisons and jails, converted
warehouses, disused barracks, old
fortifications, and stockades that were
no better than cattle pens. What they
all had in common, both in the North
and the South, was not a policy of
deliberate mistreatment, but rather
bureaucratic fecklessness and a dire
lack of resources: poor food, shelter,
hygiene, and medical attention.
Thousands of men died.Mixed fortunes
Early in the war the best-known
Confederate prisoner-of-war camp
was Richmond’s Libby Prison. Some
125,000 Union prisoners may have
passed through this grim, three-story
brick warehouse and former ship’s
chandlery, for Libby was a prisoner
processing station, from which captives
were sent on to other camps across the
South. Within its dank, fetid walls
it had room for about 1,000 inmates,
but upwards of five times that number
congregated in the rat-infested
corridors. Almost all were officers,
educated men who subsequently wrote
many accounts of their experiences as
prisoners of war. They were the lucky
ones; they had only to look out their
barred windows to see how the otherToothpickLanyard