The Great Escapes of the American Civil War

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Free Download The Great Escapes of the American Civil War: The History of the Most Daring Prisoner Breakouts during America's Deadliest Conflict by Charles River Editors
English | July 15, 2024 | ISBN: N/A | ASIN: B0D9KWC68N | 95 pages | EPUB | 6.75 Mb
In many ways, the story of Camp Douglas outside of Chicago is the story of the Civil War itself. The camp got its start as a brand new facility filled with men ready to fight a war that most on both sides believed would last only a few months. However, as the war went on, the facilities were overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the damage and the massive numbers of people involved. In the first few years of the war, the kind of total war practiced by Grant and Sherman in 1864 was unthinkable, and the two sides liberally conducted prisoner exchanges and paroled prisoners based solely on their word. As time passed, however, bitterness hardened between the two sides, and the war aims changed as the North looked for new strategies to finally subdue the South. The resulting chain of events led to the horrors of Civil War prison camps.

During the Civil War, armies took many soldiers captive, but they also captured some civilians as well, such as sutlers, nurses, teamsters, and other service personnel. In addition, both the Union and the Confederacy imprisoned deserters, sympathizers with the enemy, traitors, and draft dodgers. The numbers cited vary somewhat, and often, precise numbers should be regarded with caution because the official numbers do not account for everyone. One somewhat authoritative total is that Confederates confined 7,092 Union officers and 179,091 enlisted men in prison camps, along with 1,962 civilians, for a total of 188,145 (Stack 3). By comparison, the Union captured 35,782 officers, 426,852 enlisted men, and 13,535 Confederate civilians, but this total is misleading because it includes the troops that surrendered when the war ended, including the commands of Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, Richard Taylor, and Edmund Kirby Smith. Almost all the troops who surrendered at the end of the war were immediately paroled and allowed to go home. A commonly cited estimate is that 215,000 Confederate and 195,000 Union soldiers were prisoners of war in one of the various prison camp facilities. There were 32 sizable Confederate camps during the war, half of them in South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama.
Of the Union prisoners, 2,696 escaped from prison, and 3,170 others joined the Confederate armies. Of the Confederates, 2,098 escaped, and 5,432 joined the Union forces. 94,000 Union troops were paroled, and 248,599 Confederates were also released on parole (Stack 4).That said, the number of escapees cited are best regarded as estimates rather than exact totals - record-keeping was accurate in some places and inaccurate in others, and as the Confederacy was in its last months, chaotic conditions prevailed. Some prisoners were simply left unguarded, and the guards went home. Meanwhile, the troops who joined the enemy army were not used to fighting against the side they left because if they were captured, they could face the firing squad for treason. For example, the Confederates who joined the Union forces were sent west to provide security against Native Americans.
Parole was an alternative to imprisonment and was common until around the late stages of 1863 and early 1864. It typically took place after a battle by agreement between opposing commanders, by which prisoners signed an agreement not to fight again until they were officially exchanged. They sometimes went home or to training camps where they waited out an exchange. The exchange was sometimes a literal exchange of captives and was sometimes a paper transaction, with privates as the medium of exchange: a colonel was worth 15 privates, a captain was worth 10 privates, and so on. The agreements meant that the exchanged men had fulfilled the conditions of parole and could rejoin their units and resume fighting.

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