Haunted by Atrocity
Civil War Prisons in American Memory
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5706177 |
|---|---|
| Authors | J Michael Martinez (0009-0006-7011-5657, Kennesaw State University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 98 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 206-207 |
| Publication date | 2011-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jar020 |
| OpenAlex | W2328874582 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
Approximately 56,000 Union and Confederate soldiers perished in Civil War military prisons, yet for decades most historians, with a few notable exceptions, ignored the subject, owing to a dearth of reliable research material. Diaries, memoirs, sermons, journal articles, newspaper stories, and congressional reports of the period were so patently biased they were almost worthless as credible sources of factual information. In recent years, many fine studies of Civil War prisons have been published, but contemporaneous source material remains suspect except as a window into propagandistic struggles over memorializing the prison experience. In Haunted by Atrocity Benjamin G. Cloyd seeks to understand those struggles. Postwar polemicists on both sides blamed their opponents for the suffering inflicted on prisoners. Northerners “waved the bloody shirt,” often figuratively and sometimes literally, to excoriate Confederate wretches who operated prisons presumably designed to extirpate Yankee captives. Determined to match Northern demagoguery, Southerners claimed that Union political and military leaders triggered the suffering in Confederate prisons by suspending the Dix-Hill prisoner exchange cartel and refusing to negotiate general prisoner releases. When Gen. Ulysses S. Grant realized that a war of attrition would benefit the North, for example, he abandoned Union soldiers to die in captivity rather than authorize a new prisoner exchange program
Criminology · Memoir · Newspaper · Political science · Prison · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society · Torture, Ethics, and Law
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |