"“We Were Surrendered”: Civil War Prisoners and ..." Topic

…the Trauma of Capture

"During the American Civil War, more than 409,000 Union and Confederate soldiers surrendered to the enemy and spent time in captivity as prisoners of war. Including soldiers who surrendered and were paroled in short order by their captors on the field of battle, the number rises to nearly 675,000. Given the number of soldiers who experienced captivity, scholars have done comparatively little historical analysis on this important aspect of the war. This fact is highlighted by the seminal work of William B. Hesseltine, which formed the basis of analysis of Civil War prisoners until the 1990s.[2] Hesseltine's core arguments center on the belligerents' political motivations regarding the prisoner-of-war issue and the inseparable interrelation between the psychology of warfare and prisoners' treatment. More recently, Lonnie R. Speer and Charles W. Sanders have published important studies of the prisons and the prison system.[3] While these authors draw heavily from prisoners' writings and examples of the hardships prisoners experienced, they are intrinsically more concerned with prisoner-of-war institutions and policies during the war. In addition, other historians have published monographs and articles on individual prisons or discrete categories of prisoners since then, including the treatment of captured black soldiers and women, among others.[4] My article, by contrast, seeks to bring attention directly on the prisoners themselves and to one of the key factors in "becoming" a prisoner: the loss of identity, self, and agency from the moment of captivity.

My focus on the prisoners and the prisoners' experience brings direct attention to the prisoner condition, to what it meant to Civil War soldiers to surrender to their enemy, and to some of the trials they faced as they endured captivity. With the prisoners' perspectives at the heart of this article, I argue that captured soldiers during the American Civil War endured distinct feelings of shock, loss, and disorientation as they suddenly found themselves transformed from active agents engaged in fighting a battle to effectively passive actors with little agency left them. From free and active soldiers, they became, almost in an instant, prisoners whose entire fate lay in the hands of their enemy. Further, relentless hardships compounded their loss of freedom as they were transported to prison and experienced a keen sense of culture shock as they encountered their enemy, soldiers and civilians alike, away from the battlefield. As hundreds of thousands of soldiers discovered, being a prisoner meant far more than a respite from the rigors of combat. Captivity meant the loss of freedom in a way few had imagined and fewer had considered as a possibility. Death or injury on the battlefield were accepted hazards of combat. For many, however, the prisoners' fate proved as hard to endure as did any other. In the first part of this article, I explore the personal state of prisoners at the moment of captivity, as described by them in the hours and days following their capture. I then shift my focus to examine how captors treated their prisoners and, finally, I explore prisoners' impressions of their enemy, whom many encountered personally only after their surrender…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Good artical. I have a original book from 1870s by a Union prisoner at Andersonville and read another. Both were strikingly similar it was almost reading one twice. The Andersonville movie is the same that if it was from one of the books I wouldn't know which.
Confederate prisoners were not much different in treatment and if the added hazard of weather in winter was a hardship maybe worse.

Glad you like it my friend! (smile)

Amicalement
Armand