Den of Misery: Indiana's Civil War Prison (review)

James Hall, a retired newspaperman, takes up the large subject of Civil War prisons in Den of Misery: Indiana's Civil War Prison. The many problems of health and disease faced by prisoners and their keepers should make this an important subject for medical historians of the Civil War. The literature about the more than 150 prisons, North and South, has grown steadily. Beginning with William Hesseltine's classic work of 1930, the horrendous story of these prisons is becoming increasingly known. As the title of Michael Horrigan's Elmira, Death Camp of the North (2002) and Hall's Den of Misery indicate, it is no longer sufficient to point fingers at the notorious Andersonville Prison in Georgia. The North, too, had prisons with unspeakable conditions of starvation, misery, and high mortality. Lonnie Spear, in his Portals to Hell (1997), a broad history of Civil War prisons, went so far as to call some of them concentration camps.

Some of the 150 prisons were huge, such as the one at Point Lookout in Maryland that held up to twenty thousand prisoners at one time. In mid-1863, General U. S. Grant, with the approval of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, stopped all prisoner exchanges with the Confederates, hoping to wear them down by attrition. The Union forces had a far greater population from which to draw their soldiers. Later came a deadly policy of retaliation when prisoner rations were reduced.

The prison camp just outside of Indianapolis, named for popular Indiana governor Oliver Morton, is the subject of Hall's slim volume. Most of the evidence for the abuses that occurred at Camp Morton is based on a sensational exposé by a renowned New York surgeon, Dr. John A. Wyeth, that was published in The Century Magazine in 1891. As a teenage soldier in the Confederate army, Wyeth was unlucky enough to be captured by Union forces in Tennessee in October 1863 shortly after the prisoner exchanges were discontinued. The young soldier, sick from measles and pneumonia for many months, had to endure the terrible cold of an Indiana winter and a total of sixteen months in prison.

Local Indianans believed they had run a humane prison. A quarter century after the last prisoner left, when a highly respected surgeon published an article damning the conditions in the prison in a popular journal, all hell broke loose in Indiana. The Century Magazine published a counter piece that specifically denied that prisoners had been on starvation rations or that cruel guards murdered and otherwise mistreated prisoners. But the magazine allowed Wyeth to publish a rejoinder to the critics. With still more witnesses and evidence, he made his case even stronger for the terrible treatment of the Confederate soldiers held in Camp Morton in the harsh winter of 1864–65.

In barely one hundred pages of text, Hall presents a chilling picture and thus corroborates the work of Speer and others that Northern prisons were every bit as terrible as those in the South. A forty-page list of all those who died at Camp Morton concludes the book.