Living by Inches

In the middle of the Civil War, the system of prisoner exchange broke down. Inaugurated in 1861 and formalized by the Dix-Hill Cartel, the first official system for exchanging war prisoners facilitated Union and Confederate armies' trade of captured troops so that they could return home and, although prohibited from reenlisting, still reenter civilian life. That system ended in 1863 for two reasons. In line with its racist ideology, the Confederacy did not consider African American troops equivalent to white soldiers or sailors and refused to exchange them. Second, as the Union began to implement its policy of total war, imprisonment of able-bodied Confederates sapped the South of a work force that could help supply its forces. More than four hundred thousand soldiers were captured and perhaps fifty-six thousand died in captivity, accounting for somewhere between 8 and 10 percent of Civil War casualties. In Living by Inches, Evan A. Kutzler explores the sights, sounds, smells, and material deprivations that confronted men in captivity. Placed in hastily constructed stockades or in commandeered training camps, factories, or on surplus military property, they were housed in barracks, camp tents, or in the open. Like the field hospitals erected by sanitary commissions, these institutions were improvisational and temporary. While the conditions were never ideal (and Kutzler avoids the old debate over whether the North's or the South's prisons were more wretched), inmates shared certain sensory experiences that could alienate them from society during and after the war

Archaeology · Captivity · Commonwealth · Economic history · Imprisonment · Political science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · American History and Culture · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society