Mr. Pickenpaugh’s engaging narrative style acquaints the reader with the many activities prisoners used to while away the long hours of captivity, the daily routines of their often inadequately trained guards, the constant lethargy of the prison bureaucracy to provide barely sufficient food and medical treatment, and the often ingenious attempts to escape. He puts the mortality rate among the 214,865 Confederates confined in Union prisons at a little more than 12 percent.
Mr. Pickenpaugh is at work on a companion volume about Confederate prisons, and, taken together, these should enable scholars to fairly compare the treatment received by these unwilling guests of the two nations.
• Gordon Berg is past president of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia.
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