Ghosts and Shadows of Andersonville

In Ghosts and Shadows of Andersonville, Robert Scott Davis, director of the Family and Regional History Program at Wallace State Community College, has written the latest in a long line of studies by numerous scholars on the Confederate stockade at Anderson Station, Georgia. Of all Civil War prisons, Andersonville has received the most attention, and no wonder: The camp had the highest mortality rate of any Civil War prison (around 33 percent) and was viewed as a hell on earth. Shrouded in myth and subjected to conflicting interpretations, Andersonville has become a symbol of the horrors of captivity, leading the National Park Service to establish the National Prisoner of War Museum at the prison site in 1998. For decades, Civil War military prisons were woefully neglected by historians. Nineteenth-century sources were so biased and sentimental they were almost worthless as factual records. Until the 1990s, arguably the most accessible sources were William Best Hesseltine's Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (1930), a classic overview of the prison system (albeit the “war psychology” theme was never well developed), MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville, a Pulitzer Prize—winning novel that was enjoyable to read but filled with historical inaccuracies, and Ovid L. Futch's History of Andersonville Prison, a 1968 study that was the gold standard, although many of the book's sources have been assailed. In the 1990s, works by William Marvel, John W. Lynn, Edward F. Roberts, and others ably augmented those works

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