Shine a Light into the Darkness: Illuminating the Battles Fought by Civil War Prisoners of War

Four hundred thousand Union and Confederate soldiers found themselves imprisoned by the enemy during the American Civil War. Of that number, over fifty-six thousand captives died in the prison camps while their comrades endured unspeakable conditions. The amount of misery and suffering inside these prisons is undeniable, and the history of Civil War prisons encompasses a dark chapter in American history. Much scholarship exists on the prisons and the conditions of the prisons; however, this work focuses on the prisoners’ experiences in their own words. Prisoners continued fighting battles, and most of all, they battled to find light in the darkness, as told in their letters, journals, and memoirs written after the war. Experiences of Civil War captives go beyond the suffering and excessively high death rates as this work explains how they lived: from captivity, through daily living where some worked, others enrolled in classes, to their battles to maintain their faith, and how they struggled after the cessation of the Dix-Hill Cartel exchanges, battling disease and the environmental conditions, and fighting to stay alive. The final chapter reveals how prisoners learned to heal and the symbolism of healing as former POWs and their healing within a once-fractured nation.