Published on February 25, 2026 [Episode 445]
Introduction
During the American Civil War an estimated 194,000 Union soldiers and 214,000 Confederate soldiers became prisoners of war. No prior or subsequent American conflict has seen such numbers. During the Second World War, approximately 124,000 Americans were held captive, but the chance of being captured in that conflict was roughly one in one hundred; during the Civil War it was closer to one in five. Captivity was not a marginal experience. It was central to the war.
Indeed, the gigantic scale of prisoner-of-war camps was one of the conflict’s most consequential innovations. Every modern war since has produced successors to Andersonville, Point Lookout, Rock Island, and Florence. Yet prisoner-of-war camps remain oddly peripheral in our narratives of the Civil War, overlooked both as institutional innovations and as formative experiences for soldiers and their families. My guest, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, argues in A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War that captivity reshaped military policy, political rhetoric, racial attitudes, and postwar memory. Prison camps were not aberrations; they were integral to the modernizing logic of total war.
About the Guest
W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An eminent historian of the American South, he has written extensively on lynching, racial violence, and debates over torture in American history. He previously appeared on Historically Thinking in Episode 327 to discuss A New History of the American South, which he edited.
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Reflection Questions
Why have prisoner-of-war camps remained marginal in Civil War narratives despite their scale and significance?
In what ways did captivity reshape not only military policy but also public memory and political rhetoric?
What does the experience of mass captivity during the Civil War reveal about the emergence of modern warfare?
For Further Investigation
W. Fitzhugh Brundage, A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
“British and French Prisoners of War, 1793-1815”, Royal Museums of Greenwich
“Norman Cross Prison”, Peterborough Archaeology
Point Lookout State Park, Maryland
Related Episodes
De rebus civilibus Americanis
De memoria et bello
De humanitate in bello
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Tags
Civil War · Military History · Prisoners of War · Memory · W. Fitzhugh Brundage · American History
