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. A...