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A Fate Worse than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War
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 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.
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 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.
680 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 24, 2026
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3537 people want to read
About the author
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
34 books23 followersWilliam Fitzhugh Brundage (born 1961) is an American historian, and William B. Umstead Professor of History, at University of North Carolina. He graduated from the University of Chicago, and from Harvard University with an MA and Ph.D, in 1988. Prior to taking up his current position at the University of North Carolina, he taught at Queen's University, and University of Florida.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This book’s bibliography cites numerous examples, showing that this is far from the only modern history of Civil War prison camps and prisoners. Brundage gracefully credits many of them for informing his work.
But I’ve never come across one of these histories until now, after reading dozens of Civil War-related books over the past few years. After all, most Civil War books are about major battles and those who fought and died there. Little mention is made of those who were taken prisoner, and less if anything is said about what happened to them after they were.
Brundage gives them their due here in a very informative and readable new book, pushing the battles and the politicians to the side in order to move the prisoners and their experiences to the forefront. After all, he argues, “the fate of prisoners of war was of far greater significance to the course of the Civil War than is commonly understood.”
The book begins and ends in Andersonville, which remains the most notorious Civil War prison camp, and for good reason. While it features prominently throughout the book, though, it’s far from the only place where tens of thousands of prisoners were hastily and haphazardly housed.
Early chapters provide a brief history of prisoners of war, from ancient times when they were often enslaved or killed, to the early days of the Civil War, when a gallant system of paroles and exchanges had many prisoners living in comfort and relative freedom.
That’s a far cry from what it became as the number of soldiers captured on the battlefield swelled, and crucially, prisoner exchanges ground to a halt when the Confederacy refused to treat Black Union soldiers as prisoners of war and the Union refused further exchanges until they did. This impasse is what “hastened the creation of the largest prison camps in the nation's history,” Brundage writes.
At first, both sides improvised, housing prisoners in whatever structures could be found and retrofitted into prisons. Overcrowding led to the frequent transfer of prisoners, often over long distances and in terrible conditions. In time, camps designed specifically to house prisoners were created, but due to “unfounded confidence and managerial indifference,” these camps were often “little more than storage dumps for prisoners.”
Andersonville itself was seemingly created with the best of intentions - its location was chosen because it was close to water and timber, and because it was remote, lessening the chance of escapes or of inconveniencing local civilian populations. But corners were cut in its creation, and “through a combination of inept planning, bumbling administration, and cynical design,” it quickly became overcrowded and unsuitable for long-term use. And its indifferent administrators and the government bureaucrats who oversaw them added to the prisoners’ misery.
In time, the growing number of prisoners and the terrible conditions they endured in captivity was not a mere sideshow to the war, but began to affect the war itself. As the Confederacy’s ranks thinned, Brundage explains, their intransigent determination not to treat Black soldiers as actual prisoners of war deprived them of exchanges that could have returned many Confederate soldiers to service. And the Union’s equally unwavering insistence that Black prisoners be treated the same as whites caused divisions in the North, with some criticizing the government for sacrificing scores of white prisoners on stubborn principle.
Brundage manages to be fair and even-handed, matter-of-factly describing how and why Confederate prison camps as a whole were indeed worse than those in the North. This, he explains, was often due to a lack of existing infrastructure and not due to purposeful cruelty as some critics have claimed.
With the backstory and the creation of the camps now established, Brundage moves into a generally chronological, but largely thematic, set of chapters focusing more on the prisoners themselves, on both sides - how they lived, ate, slept, sent and received mail, formed their own communities within their camp, and came up with games and pastimes to fill their days. Obviously there was more to it than that, though - early comradery and fraternity among the prisoners often gave way to fights, and a feral every-man-for-himself atmosphere as the war went on and camps became ever more crowded. Prisoners also suffered harsh discipline, malnutrition and near-starvation, often becoming ill, with tens of thousands of them ultimately dying.
Here, too, Brundage is even-handed, acknowledging the hardships the prisoners faced without exaggerating or questioning their accounts.
Prisoner exchanges finally resumed in the waning days of the war as the Confederacy became “desperate to be relieved of the burden of feeding and guarding prisoners of war.” As they grew equally desperate for manpower, it became impossible to justify a refusal to recognize Black Union soldiers when the Confederacy was about to break down and enlist Black soldiers of their own.
As in any war, the end of the fighting and soldiers’ return home was more complicated than glorious for former prisoners of war. The last few chapters of the book consider the postwar challenges that prisoners faced in returning to society, and in telling their stories to some who would rather forget or who chose not to believe they really suffered as much as they did. This continued even after their generation faded away, as Brundage calls out several mid-20th century historians who began to minimize the prison camps as bad, but not as bad as many of the prisoners made them out to be.
While “Americans have typically dwelt on feats of battlefield valor,” three times as many Union soldiers died at Andersonville than at Gettysburg, Brundage points out. And yet he notes that nearly 60,000 acres of Civil War battlefields have been preserved, compared to less than 750 acres associated with Civil War prisons - and Andersonville alone accounts for most of that total. Not until more than a hundred years after the war, was a concerted effort made to turn Andersonville into the historic site it is today. But even a visit to the site, Brundage argues, doesn’t give you the full picture of what the prisoners there experienced.
His book, however, comes closer to doing so than anything I’ve read before. This is the rare Civil War book that’s not about battles and strategies and tactics, or about politics and governance and democracy. It’s a human story that’s not often told, and Brundage tells it in a compelling, engaging, fair and factual way that's well worth a read.
Thanks to NetGalley and publisher W.W. Norton & Company for providing an advance copy of this book for review, ahead of its February 24th release.
But I’ve never come across one of these histories until now, after reading dozens of Civil War-related books over the past few years. After all, most Civil War books are about major battles and those who fought and died there. Little mention is made of those who were taken prisoner, and less if anything is said about what happened to them after they were.
Brundage gives them their due here in a very informative and readable new book, pushing the battles and the politicians to the side in order to move the prisoners and their experiences to the forefront. After all, he argues, “the fate of prisoners of war was of far greater significance to the course of the Civil War than is commonly understood.”
The book begins and ends in Andersonville, which remains the most notorious Civil War prison camp, and for good reason. While it features prominently throughout the book, though, it’s far from the only place where tens of thousands of prisoners were hastily and haphazardly housed.
Early chapters provide a brief history of prisoners of war, from ancient times when they were often enslaved or killed, to the early days of the Civil War, when a gallant system of paroles and exchanges had many prisoners living in comfort and relative freedom.
That’s a far cry from what it became as the number of soldiers captured on the battlefield swelled, and crucially, prisoner exchanges ground to a halt when the Confederacy refused to treat Black Union soldiers as prisoners of war and the Union refused further exchanges until they did. This impasse is what “hastened the creation of the largest prison camps in the nation's history,” Brundage writes.
At first, both sides improvised, housing prisoners in whatever structures could be found and retrofitted into prisons. Overcrowding led to the frequent transfer of prisoners, often over long distances and in terrible conditions. In time, camps designed specifically to house prisoners were created, but due to “unfounded confidence and managerial indifference,” these camps were often “little more than storage dumps for prisoners.”
Andersonville itself was seemingly created with the best of intentions - its location was chosen because it was close to water and timber, and because it was remote, lessening the chance of escapes or of inconveniencing local civilian populations. But corners were cut in its creation, and “through a combination of inept planning, bumbling administration, and cynical design,” it quickly became overcrowded and unsuitable for long-term use. And its indifferent administrators and the government bureaucrats who oversaw them added to the prisoners’ misery.
In time, the growing number of prisoners and the terrible conditions they endured in captivity was not a mere sideshow to the war, but began to affect the war itself. As the Confederacy’s ranks thinned, Brundage explains, their intransigent determination not to treat Black soldiers as actual prisoners of war deprived them of exchanges that could have returned many Confederate soldiers to service. And the Union’s equally unwavering insistence that Black prisoners be treated the same as whites caused divisions in the North, with some criticizing the government for sacrificing scores of white prisoners on stubborn principle.
Brundage manages to be fair and even-handed, matter-of-factly describing how and why Confederate prison camps as a whole were indeed worse than those in the North. This, he explains, was often due to a lack of existing infrastructure and not due to purposeful cruelty as some critics have claimed.
With the backstory and the creation of the camps now established, Brundage moves into a generally chronological, but largely thematic, set of chapters focusing more on the prisoners themselves, on both sides - how they lived, ate, slept, sent and received mail, formed their own communities within their camp, and came up with games and pastimes to fill their days. Obviously there was more to it than that, though - early comradery and fraternity among the prisoners often gave way to fights, and a feral every-man-for-himself atmosphere as the war went on and camps became ever more crowded. Prisoners also suffered harsh discipline, malnutrition and near-starvation, often becoming ill, with tens of thousands of them ultimately dying.
Here, too, Brundage is even-handed, acknowledging the hardships the prisoners faced without exaggerating or questioning their accounts.
Prisoner exchanges finally resumed in the waning days of the war as the Confederacy became “desperate to be relieved of the burden of feeding and guarding prisoners of war.” As they grew equally desperate for manpower, it became impossible to justify a refusal to recognize Black Union soldiers when the Confederacy was about to break down and enlist Black soldiers of their own.
As in any war, the end of the fighting and soldiers’ return home was more complicated than glorious for former prisoners of war. The last few chapters of the book consider the postwar challenges that prisoners faced in returning to society, and in telling their stories to some who would rather forget or who chose not to believe they really suffered as much as they did. This continued even after their generation faded away, as Brundage calls out several mid-20th century historians who began to minimize the prison camps as bad, but not as bad as many of the prisoners made them out to be.
While “Americans have typically dwelt on feats of battlefield valor,” three times as many Union soldiers died at Andersonville than at Gettysburg, Brundage points out. And yet he notes that nearly 60,000 acres of Civil War battlefields have been preserved, compared to less than 750 acres associated with Civil War prisons - and Andersonville alone accounts for most of that total. Not until more than a hundred years after the war, was a concerted effort made to turn Andersonville into the historic site it is today. But even a visit to the site, Brundage argues, doesn’t give you the full picture of what the prisoners there experienced.
His book, however, comes closer to doing so than anything I’ve read before. This is the rare Civil War book that’s not about battles and strategies and tactics, or about politics and governance and democracy. It’s a human story that’s not often told, and Brundage tells it in a compelling, engaging, fair and factual way that's well worth a read.
Thanks to NetGalley and publisher W.W. Norton & Company for providing an advance copy of this book for review, ahead of its February 24th release.
March 3, 2026
A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War by W. Fitzhugh Brundage looks at the less glamorous side of the American Civil War. The glory is found in thumping battles and rousing last stands—people don’t enjoy reading about men who die from diarrhoea and dysentery. But that was the fate for thousands and thousands of men unknowingly sentenced to death in prison camps, where disease festered and soldiers suffered in torment before finally expiring.
That is what this book covers, and it is thorough on the subject. It goes into the beginnings of the prison camps and how there was a “civility” applied to those taken, as well as an expectation of agreements seen through due to sense of honour, into the Confederate and Union soldiers squabbling over excess captives to be paroled, to black soldiers not being treated as equals and prompting shows of protection from the Union. It also explores how the awful conditions of Andersonville formed from the Confederacy’s intransigence in exchanging black soldiers.
I learned a great deal, like how in the early years of the war, the prison camps often put on plays and played baseball. Probably my favourite section was “Alleviation?” which was about the medical treatment (or really lack thereof) that took place in the prison camps. Thousands dying (on both sides!) from diarrhoea-related illnesses that could have easily been prevented in some instances by attempting more rigorous draining and disposal of waste and water that collected said waste.
Another favourite was “Can These Be Men?” because it detailed the suffering endured and often put a face to the pain. It also showed that the men were touched by their time in the camps, like William H. Lightcamp picking through his food for bugs even decades after the war ended, or Henry Clay Mettam struggling to sleep on a feather pillow and preferring pillows with straw that reminded him of his captivity. Poor Waitstill Hastings had dug a tunnel and escaped and was so tormented by fears ever after of bloodhounds and strangers that he killed himself years after.
The quotes and excerpts from diaries are great and make it even easier to feel what the soldiers felt, especially when the author noted here and there that they expired shortly after they wrote the quoted passaged. Brundage is great at laying everything out, showing that there was suffering in the Union and Confederate camps, even if the pain endured was due to different circumstances.
I think this book is accessible even for people who may not know a lot about the Civil War because many of the people within are just everyday folks who went off and—in many cases—never made it home again.
I received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
That is what this book covers, and it is thorough on the subject. It goes into the beginnings of the prison camps and how there was a “civility” applied to those taken, as well as an expectation of agreements seen through due to sense of honour, into the Confederate and Union soldiers squabbling over excess captives to be paroled, to black soldiers not being treated as equals and prompting shows of protection from the Union. It also explores how the awful conditions of Andersonville formed from the Confederacy’s intransigence in exchanging black soldiers.
I learned a great deal, like how in the early years of the war, the prison camps often put on plays and played baseball. Probably my favourite section was “Alleviation?” which was about the medical treatment (or really lack thereof) that took place in the prison camps. Thousands dying (on both sides!) from diarrhoea-related illnesses that could have easily been prevented in some instances by attempting more rigorous draining and disposal of waste and water that collected said waste.
Another favourite was “Can These Be Men?” because it detailed the suffering endured and often put a face to the pain. It also showed that the men were touched by their time in the camps, like William H. Lightcamp picking through his food for bugs even decades after the war ended, or Henry Clay Mettam struggling to sleep on a feather pillow and preferring pillows with straw that reminded him of his captivity. Poor Waitstill Hastings had dug a tunnel and escaped and was so tormented by fears ever after of bloodhounds and strangers that he killed himself years after.
The quotes and excerpts from diaries are great and make it even easier to feel what the soldiers felt, especially when the author noted here and there that they expired shortly after they wrote the quoted passaged. Brundage is great at laying everything out, showing that there was suffering in the Union and Confederate camps, even if the pain endured was due to different circumstances.
I think this book is accessible even for people who may not know a lot about the Civil War because many of the people within are just everyday folks who went off and—in many cases—never made it home again.
I received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
March 4, 2026
Excellent and thoroughly researched history of Civil War prisons, a largely overlooked aspect of Civil War history. This is not a glorious or inspiring history, but rather one of inhumanity and bureaucratic callousness. Brundage argues that the horrors of CW prisons were not accidental results of the chaos of war, but conscious and predictable policy decisions. Andersonville, for example, was set up with basically no infrastructure for housing, feeding, and providing medical treatment to soldiers. Camp administrators were callous at the top down, setting the tone that prisons would receive minimal support and accept massive death from disease and starvation as a matter of course. Captain Henry Wirz of Andersonville was of course callous, but his callousness reflected larger policy, for which he paid the ultimate price when he was executed after the war.
A few interesting themes stand out in this book. For example, Civil War POW practices marked a significant break in the history of warfare because of the collapse of parole and exchange systems that had defined most of warfare to this date. Most pre-modern or even early modern states had little desire or capacity to take and hold prisoners; they either killed, enslaved, paroled, or ransomed them. But in the Civil War, the initial system of paroling prisoners collapsed when the Confederacy decided to refuse to treat black soldiers as legitimate POWs, instead either killing them or enslaving them. Lincoln made the noble and politically costly decision that US soldiers would all be treated alike. This gummed up the transfer/parole system and led to the construction of massive camps on both sides. The U.S. camps were more well-administered but still deadly; the Confederacy's camps quickly became hellholes where tens of thousands died.
Brundage vividly shows what life was like in these camps, which became important precedents for the surge of concentration-type camps around the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These prisons approached teh status of "total institutions," which simultaneous controlled and deprived their inmates. This was a major growth in the power of the state, one with terrifying consequences.
The Civil War camps, however, fell rapidly out of American memory. They are in no way heroic, in contrast to campaigns and battles. They were also the sites of the most gratuitous harms that Americans did to each other in this conflict. As national memory moved toward reconciliationism and the denial that the war was about slavery, the desire to memorialize the suffering of POWs or highlight the crimes of people like Wirz or Winder faded. As a result, many prison sites were neglected or even razed, and the prisons took up little space in public education about the war. It wasn't until a surge in interest in POWs after the Vietnam War that more attention was paid to Andersonville and other camps, leading to the building of the National POW Museum in the 1990s (which still paid little attention to the Civil War and focused instead on Vietnam and WWI.
Anyways, great book for people interested in the Civil War or the general topic of carcerality.
A few interesting themes stand out in this book. For example, Civil War POW practices marked a significant break in the history of warfare because of the collapse of parole and exchange systems that had defined most of warfare to this date. Most pre-modern or even early modern states had little desire or capacity to take and hold prisoners; they either killed, enslaved, paroled, or ransomed them. But in the Civil War, the initial system of paroling prisoners collapsed when the Confederacy decided to refuse to treat black soldiers as legitimate POWs, instead either killing them or enslaving them. Lincoln made the noble and politically costly decision that US soldiers would all be treated alike. This gummed up the transfer/parole system and led to the construction of massive camps on both sides. The U.S. camps were more well-administered but still deadly; the Confederacy's camps quickly became hellholes where tens of thousands died.
Brundage vividly shows what life was like in these camps, which became important precedents for the surge of concentration-type camps around the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These prisons approached teh status of "total institutions," which simultaneous controlled and deprived their inmates. This was a major growth in the power of the state, one with terrifying consequences.
The Civil War camps, however, fell rapidly out of American memory. They are in no way heroic, in contrast to campaigns and battles. They were also the sites of the most gratuitous harms that Americans did to each other in this conflict. As national memory moved toward reconciliationism and the denial that the war was about slavery, the desire to memorialize the suffering of POWs or highlight the crimes of people like Wirz or Winder faded. As a result, many prison sites were neglected or even razed, and the prisons took up little space in public education about the war. It wasn't until a surge in interest in POWs after the Vietnam War that more attention was paid to Andersonville and other camps, leading to the building of the National POW Museum in the 1990s (which still paid little attention to the Civil War and focused instead on Vietnam and WWI.
Anyways, great book for people interested in the Civil War or the general topic of carcerality.
March 22, 2026
Review coming soon
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