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CONCLUSION THIS STUDY DOES NOT CLAIM TO BE THE LAST WORD on Federal policies or living conditions in Yankee prisons during the Civil War. Neither has it sought to portray Union prisons as pleasant places to have been confined . Rather, this study has sought to demonstrate why the predominately negative impression of Union authorities’ policies and actions towards Confederate prisoners as neglectful, apathetic, and deliberately cruel is in need of serious reevaluation. The evidence supporting the prevailing stereotype of the cruel and negligent Yankee comes almost exclusively from the postwar writing of Southerners who, like their Northern counterparts, exploited the prisoner of war issue to achieve a number of goals. Rarely was one of those goals the objective accounting of life in Federal prisons during the war. This study has shown why researchers should heed the advice James Ford Rhodes gave nearly a century ago and treat postwar memoirs by ex-prisoners with extreme skepticism and rarely (if ever) as reliable primary source material. Perhaps the most important misconception I have sought to clear up is the one surrounding the North’s decision to suspend the prisoner exchange cartel in mid-1863. This decision has been held up for generations as the ultimate proof of Yankee callousness and calculation. The Union government did not, as has been so often claimed, suspend the agreement because doing so would weaken the Southern war effort by increasing the manpower disparity between North and South. The evidence suggests strongly that the decision was prompted by the Davis administration’s policy to enslave or kill black soldiers and execute the white leaders of African American soldiers. From 1863 through 1865 Northern officials responded to Southern pleas to resume exchanges by telling them consistently that all 244 prisoners held at that point would stay incarcerated until the Confederacy rescinded its inequitable policies regarding black prisoners and allowed them to be exchanged under the 1862 cartel on the same basis as whites. That Confederate officials viewed black soldiers as illegitimate was their right, of course, but Washington was not obliged to fight the war on its enemy’s terms. Ultimately the Federals had the right to use black soldiers to save the country and Confederate authorities even decided, too late, to do the very same thing. It is also very difficult to argue that Northern authorities did not have a duty to protect their soldiers from being enslaved or killed if they were captured in battle. They did that the only way they could, by imposing a meaningful sanction (suspension of the exchange cartel ) on the Confederacy to persuade the enemy to alter a particular policy. Northern officials were far from perfect. They certainly made their fair share of mistakes in this area. At a number of the prisons, officers were placed in charge who were grossly incompetent or even lazy, making conditions worse than they should have been. The most glaring and consistent problem with Northerners’ management of their prisoner of war facilities, though, was their failure to anticipate potential problems and deal with them as effectively as possible before they became serious. After the cartel broke down, for example, and the South was showing a fierce determination to cling to their right to treat blacks any way they saw fit, Union authorities should have realized that they would be responsible for increasing numbers of prisoners for an extended period of time. They did not do that, however. Rather than prepare for increasing numbers by, say, expanding barracks at existing facilities and scouting out new sites, they reacted to problems such as crowded living quarters on the fly. The same was the case with scurvy cases. Officials knew that fruit and vegetables were effective preventatives but increased amounts were rarely, if ever, provided until scurvy was actually reported as a problem. As a final example of failing to take what we would today call a pro-active approach was the way Foster’s Pond at Elmira was handled. True, landholders in the area were part of the problem cleaning up that stagnant body of water, but by that late stage of the war Union officials did not need to be told by inspectors that the pond was an environmental hazard at the camp. They ought to have realized that ahead of time and begun work to mitigate its unhealthy effects months earlier than they actually did. Such examples of inefficiency and poor planning have tended to become trees obscuring researchers’ view of the forest here. Taken...

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