Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered ed. by Michael P. Gray (review)

Over the past twenty or so years, the long-neglected topic of Civil War prisons has finally gotten something approaching the scholarly attention it needed. Part of the reason for the relative neglect is that it remains a volatile topic and writing about it requires a particularly thick skin. Another part of the reason is, as Benjamin Cloyd discusses in his fine concluding essay, Civil War prisons just do not fit the era's narrative as it has been written about for well over a century. The death and suffering of so many in each side's pens do not fit the "familiar (and comfortable) narrative ground of decisive battlefield moments" making them difficult to understand (207). As Cloyd further points out, in the mid-1960s as plans were moving forward to create a national park at Andersonville, the National Park Service's director for the region was very much against dredging up such a "controversial past" fraught with "complex problems of interpretation" (215).

While there is not space in one review to discuss all of the essays in detail, there should be a brief mention of what one will find. Michael Gray discusses the unusual, unexpected, experiences of prisoners being curiosities for local tourists while Angela Zombek contributes a very interesting and well-researched essay about Catholic priests' roles in the prisons. Evan Kutzler's essay provides an environmental approach to understanding how prisoners experienced their captivity. Taking an archeological approach, David Bush and John Derden examine the material culture of Johnson's Island and Camp Lawton. Recent writing on the war has focused on the fact that the Civil War was far more vicious and grim than it is often portrayed in popular culture and memory. Perhaps no other activity can illustrate that better than how, as Lorien Foote vividly describes, both sides deliberately put prisoners in harm's way.

Two essays, one by Christopher Barr and the other by Kelly Mezurek, illustrate especially well how the subject of prisons can do much to highlight the role of race in the war. Prisoners on both sides suffered and died because as the war expanded to embrace emancipation and, for the Northern side, the use of African American soldiers, the Lincoln administration halted the exchange cartel until the Confederacy agreed to exchange prisoners regardless of race. The South, of course, refused to do that, and many Confederate prisoners wrote that they would rather remain prisoners than for their government to give in on the idea of white supremacy. Using African American soldiers as prison guards further reinforced Confederates' perceptions of black people. At the same time, many Northern prisoners' racial views, at least during the war, shifted significantly. Seeing slavery firsthand and experiencing the help of local slaves in a variety of ways caused prisoners to be more dedicated to the effort to end slavery and to see African Americans in a much more humanitarian light. Lamentably, those instances were often forgotten in the postwar era.

Ultimately, these essays, each well written and well researched, examine Civil War prisons from multiple, in some cases entirely original, perspectives. Some readers may complain that the "big questions" that continue to surround this topic are not directly engaged. That is true. Outside of the essays about the role of race in the cartel's breakdown, these pieces are not intended to take on or settle such questions, if they ever can be. Rather, they are meant as fresh interpretations of the prisoner of war experience that, refreshingly, bypass the more volatile arguments to show new ways to understand Civil War prisons and how the prisoners experienced the ordeal. The result is an excellent book suitable for academics as well as those with a more casual interest in the era.