Busting Myths About Treatment of Civil War Prisons

Before the Civil War was even over, people from both sides began to justify their own treatment of prisoners and leveled accusations of intentional negligence at the opposing prison system. People on both sides sought to find simple answers as to why prisons on both sides were bad, and these basic arguments emerged: Southerners believed that they did the best they could under the circumstances and that northerners had been intentionally negligent in retaliation. Northerners believed they had held captives humanely and that Confederate prisons were being run as death camps. Both sides oversimplified what was happening in the Civil War prisons, and the causes of suffering were far more complicated than simple vengeance or short supplies. Although both sides managed prisons very differently, they each suffered from the same core deficiency: a reliance on non-governmental sources for supplies. This can be illustrated by examining the two prisons with the highest death rates: Elmira & Andersonville.