Captives in Gray

Captives in Gray is Civil War prison camp authority Roger Pickenpaugh’s acclaimed and definitive account of the Union’s POW camps. Combining his own extensive research into official records and a rich variety of letters and diaries with the best contemporary scholarship, Pickenpaugh covers every major northern camp.

Because the Union won few victories in 1861 and took few prisoners, the North had time to plan and build prison camps, an opportunity it largely squandered. Pickenpaugh gives illuminating accounts of the role and leadership of thrifty Lieutenant Colonel William Hoffman, the commissary general of prisoners for most of the conflict, and President Abraham Lincoln's secretaries of war, the incompetent Simon Cameron and the malignant Edwin M. Stanton.

Death came in many ways. Soldiers from the Deep South had no experience with extreme cold, and they died by the hundreds each winter. In one memorable freeze, Rock Island, Illinois, saw temperatures between twenty-eight and thirty-one degrees below zero. With insufficient fuel and inadequate shelter, clothing, and blankets, prisoners there and in other camps froze to death. Food rations varied widely. A few Confederates enjoyed better rations than they had in the CSA armies, but the majority supplemented their meager rations by eating rats, dogs, cats, and seagulls.

Poor medical care added to the death toll. Treatment was bad even by the standards of Civil War medicine, often due to Hoffman's reluctance to spend. Prisoners suffered from lice and scurvy, as well as pneumonia, measles, and a variety of fevers. As in both armies, diarrhea and dysentery were chronic. Smallpox epidemics killed many. Poor sanitation and drainage caused 385 deaths at Elmira, New York, in September 1864 alone.

During the war, over 12 percent of rebel prisoners, or 25,976 of the 214,865, died in captivity. Together with his Captives in Blue, Captives in Gray gives the fullest account of the experiences of prisoners of war in the American Civil War.