Changing Sides: Union Prisoners of War Who Joined the Confederate Army by Patrick H. Garrow (review)

During the American Civil War, tens of thousands of men in the armed forces of the United States and Confederate States of America deserted for various reasons. Disputes over political ideology, the conflict's war aims, trouble on the home front, and good old-fashioned con artistry were among the many motivating factors that induced recruits and draftees to shirk their duties. While there are numerous studies on the problem of desertion during the Civil War, none have dealt with "Union prisoners of war who joined the Confederate Army" (p. 1). Seeking to correct this deficit, Patrick H. Garrow's Changing Sides: Union Prisoners of War Who Joined the Confederate Army argues that thousands of U.S. prisoners, many of whom were foreign-born, served in a variety of Confederate units, usually far from the battlefront. Though many of these "galvanized Confederates" ultimately deserted from the Confederacy as well, the last-minute efforts to recruit and deploy these men illustrate how the Confederacy was plagued with manpower issues, while simultaneously dealing with tens of thousands of prisoners of war. Thus, Garrow's work provides a good summary of desertion, prisons, and the breakdown of the prisoner-of-war exchange system during the American Civil War.

Garrow's first chapter highlights the long history of desertion from the United States armed forces, particularly the San Patricios Battalion during the Mexican-American War and the various bureaucratic entities charged with dealing with such issues. His second chapter provides a short overview of the various Civil War prisons in the Confederacy, and his third chapter covers how U.S. soldiers were recruited into such "galvanized" regiments. His next five chapters are case studies on the Brooks Battalion, the First and Second Foreign Born Battalion, the Tenth Tennessee Infantry, and the Fifth U.S. Volunteer Infantry. His concluding chapter follows many of these men into the aftermath of the conflict, and Garrow provides four appendixes that detail biographical information on the officers of these units.

The author uses a multitude of sources from online databases, such as Newspapers.com, fold3.com, and Ancestry.com. He utilizes archaeological excavations, pension records, census reports, and digitized copies of the Official Records. The author has consulted manuscript collections at four institutions in North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Tennessee and reviewed the secondary literature using the Google Books search engine. Garrow's strongest sources come from his mining of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., which produced regimental records and court-martial hearings that add contextualization and depth to his account.

Garrow's work suffers from some unfortunate issues. First is the subject of methodology, as the author often uses reductionist labeling of regions and people. This tendency is curious given the fact that his monograph focuses on those soldiers who switched sides and on others who were not loyal to either the United States or the Confederacy. Yet Garrow tends to label "the North" and "the South" as coherent, unified entities. Thus, Black southerners, Unionists, and other dissenters are lumped together in the "South's" war effort, when a more accurate designation would be the "Confederacy" or the "rebels." In addition, there are numerous copyediting errors and inconsistent citation formatting, all of which combine to detract from the author's work.

Despite these issues, Garrow provides a good summary in a single volume of the experiences of thousands of men who changed sides during the Civil War.