Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union (review)

Ohio educator Roger Pickenpaugh, author of a study on the Buckeye state's Camp Chase in Columbus, has taken on the challenging task of writing a general history of northern prisons. The author sets out to look at various confines in their "entirety," examine "variations" in compounds, as well as "overall prison policy." The dust jacket also contains accolades from Jimmy Carter, who grew up near Andersonville in Plains, Georgia, and William Marvel, who had a history of that infamous prison published in 1994. In fact, Marvel claims, "it is an ambitious examination of almost all Union military prisons, [which] … addresses a specific historical category that has, to my knowledge, not been treated." To the contrary, however, Captives in Gray is only somewhat ambitious, since it neglects certain Union prisons while it limits coverage of others due to its relatively short length. The topic, moreover, has been "treated" with James Gillispie's Andersonvilles of the North: The Myths and Realities of Northern Treatment of Civil War Confederate Prisoners. Pickenpaugh is much less analytical than Gillispie or, for that matter, Charles Sanders in his 2005 While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War, both of which have provocative, yet highly questionable, theses. Pickenpaugh plans to add a companion to his book with an investigation of southern prisons, but one might wonder if it will, when complete, be a significant contribution to the field of Civil War prisons; if it follows the same pattern of Captives in Gray, it will be perhaps more comparable to Lonnie Speer's 1997 single-volume narrative history Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War than a study that breaks new ground.

Captives in Gray indeed has some strengths. Pickenpaugh's early observations in setting the stage for prison policy from the commissary general to the secretary of war are detailed, as well as distinguishing early treatment among captives. If there is any new insight, it comes with the author's Camp Chase expertise when he examines the exchange system, which reduced prisoner numbers, but, as he convincingly writes, failed for a variety of reasons: "There is one other aspect of the [exchange] question that must be considered. That is the Union's frustrating experience with paroled prisoners" (67). From the War Department "designed to make parole less of an incentive, the orders declared that no furloughs would be granted to paroled prisoners" (67). Troops, thinking they would be perhaps on their way home on furlough, were instead sent to the parole stations, like Camp Chase; unhappy with their situation, they became mutinous. Benton Barracks, Camp Parole, and Camp Douglas had similar problems, to the point where rioting occurred at the latter Chicago depot. This argument might be debatable, considering long-standing and recent scholarship about propaganda, politics, and military necessity playing into the system's failure, but it is interpretive and may be more persuasive if further developed. Pickenpaugh's other thematic chapters investigate the preparations for inmates in 1861, their arrival in 1862, the aforementioned exchange system and collapse from 1862 to 1863, and the resultant expansion of more compounds in 1864 until the war's end. The author also threads into the journey the stockades, prison and guard life, escapes, provisions, the Union's 1864 retaliation policy (which he believes existed), and finally health, hospital care, and release.

Captives in Gray generally falls short in thought-provoking interpretation or persuasive argument, which may leave some professional historians disappointed. The author's research is commendable, and his prose will hold the attention of an academic and general audience, but the book lacks in-depth perspective on local personnel, information on host communities, and varying social conditions inside stockades, all of which played into inmate lifestyle. For example, like other prison camp macro-monograph writers before him, Pickenpaugh makes generalizations; he notes that Johnson Island diarists "reflect elements of life that...