From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a harrowing new history of the Civil War’s prisoner of war camps, North and South.
Join Square Books Tuesday, March 3 at 5:30 pm at Off Square Books in welcoming acclaimed historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage for his new Civil War epic, A Fate Worse Than Hell.
About the Book
“From the first prisoners of 1861 to the massive cemeteries that dot the nation’s landscape, and to the question of responsibility for such suffering and death, Brundage has brilliantly illuminated this ‘alien’ world and written a new Civil War epic.” — David W. Blight, Yale University, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
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. Against the backdrop of a brutal internecine conflict, the Civil War’s prison camps were a harrowing milestone in the history of mass dehumanization.
A Fate Worse Than Hell contemplates the roots and consequences of this mass incarceration from America’s bloodiest conflict. Based on first-person prisoner accounts, photographs, and contemporaneous journalism, historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage shows how POW camps were of far greater significance to the war than is commonly understood: a subject of stalled negotiation, escalating retaliation, and increasing political liability between the Union and the Confederacy. Brundage describes how the camps were not the products of improvisation, but the results of design and resolve, marshaling prodigious quantities of manpower, technology, and resources—with successor camps in every major war during the next century.
Brundage also shows how prisons such as Andersonville, Elmira, and Point Lookout were the catalyst for the United States’ first formal laws of war, which became a bedrock for international law. Nowhere during the Civil War was the juxtaposition between our “better angels” and our capacity for brutality starker than in the prison camps—sites of unprecedented atrocity that also served as places of selflessness and human dignity among the incarcerated. The most comprehensive work to date about the life of America’s captives during the Civil War, A Fate Worse Than Hell exposes this national violence that imprisoned more Americans during wartime than ever before or since.
About the Author
Guggenheim Fellow W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for his book Civilizing Torture, he lives in Chapel Hill.
About the Conversation Partner
A Virginia native, Robert Colby earned his BA from the University of Virginia and his MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His book, An Unholy Traffic received the John L. Nau Book Prize from the Nau Center for Civil War History at UVA, as well as the Nonfiction Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. It was also a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Institute’s Lincoln Prize, awarded annually to the best book in Civil War history. His work has previously won the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Prize and the Society of Civil War Historians’ Anne J. Bailey Prize and Anthony Kaye Memorial Essay Award, and was a finalist for the Southern Historical Association’s C. Vann Woodward Award. Before joining the University of Mississippi’s History Department in 2022, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University.
A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War
By W. Fitzhugh Brundage
$38.99
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393541090
About the Author
